4
PARTISAN REVIEW
and the prospect of his fiftieth birthday?-it determined him to
write his autobiography. "I shall soon be fifty," he writes in
The
Journal of Henri Brulard,
"it is high time that I got to know
myself. What I have been, what I am, I should really find it hard
to say." This autobiography would be composed "without lying
... but with pleasure, like a letter to a friend," for its purpose was
to be no less than to discover
"what manner of man I have been.''
As to his hero Lucien Leuwen, the occasion had finally come for
the secret and heart-rending interrogation, "Who am I?"
Like Beyle himself, nearly all the good critics in his own
language have focussed his problem quite squarely, and rightly so,
on the metaphysical problem of identity. To the excellent studies
of Fernandez, Valery, and Seilliere there is perhaps not a great
deal to be added along this line. But today we are so much im–
pressed by the manner in which metaphysical are bound up with
psychological considerations and both with the general cultural
situation that the time is appropriate for the sort of comprehensive
stocktaking that Beyle himself seems to have had in mind. For
example, a little further on in
Henri Brulard,
the memory projects
the following very interesting little
spontanee:
It was two months ago ... while I was musing upon writing
these memoirs ... that I wrote in the dust, like Zadig, these
initials:
a
d
i 1
ine
pg
de
r
V. A. A. M. M. A. A. A. M. C. G. A.
1
2
3
4 5 6
The initials turn out to be those of the various women that he has
loved in the course of his life. What the whole incident reveals is
some sort of mysterious identification in Beyle's mind between the
impulse to discover the truth about himself and the delight in set–
ting down this cryptogram of his amours. It illustrates the manner
in which everything in his life and work-his writings, his theor–
etical speculations, his political attitudes-takes on a complex and
imponderable character. More particularly, it provides us with the
clue that somehow involved in his case is some disturbance or at
least malaise of the emotions. And for such a condition it is pretty
inevitable for us nowadays to look for an explanation in the genetic
history of the individual.
Behind the boldest and most annihilating protestations of the
M
oi
in Stendhal (to distinguish now between the man and the
