To the Happy Few: Letters

"The wonderful thing about Stendhal is that his romance as a writer was eternally with himself. There is a book about Stendhal in French called Monsieur Moi Même – Mr Me. There is no writer like him, at all, anywhere. He is an utterly unique personality, not that you can qualify uniqueness. His letters are a kind of log of the self, and they’re very cleverly calibrated in this way to the correspondent. Of all the letter writers that I’m talking about, he is most conscious of whom he is writing to and what will interest them. But always, in a subtle way, he comes back to the ego of the self. Stendhal wrote wonderful letters to his sister, which we might perhaps find patronising – she was younger than him and had less experience of the world – but you constantly get a sense of the value he puts on the presence of the other person. And correspondingly (if one can use that word) there is the sense that this other person might betray him, might not rise to the challenge of the value that he sets on them. And that so often happened. Many of Stendhal’s friends disappointed him. They weren’t Stendhalian enough, at crucial moments when he needed them to be. So you have this constant sense of “how are you going to respond to what I’m telling you?” Not asked directly, but a subtext throughout the letters. “There is no writer like him, at all, anywhere.” His letters were written from all over the place and are crammed with all sorts of different subjects, because he led a very interesting life. He went all over Europe . He visited England several times, and went to places we wouldn’t associate him with. For example, Stendhal in the Black Country, or in the Midlands. Good heavens, one doesn’t think of him in places like Birmingham and Dudley, but there he was. It was sort of black and messy and full of factories. “Les usines de Birmingham.” He had amazing adventures at a brothel in the area we now call Waterloo, in Lambeth [in south London]. He went to Russia, and was in the retreat from Moscow [in 1812]. He arrived in Italy with the French army [during the Napoleonic wars] and discovered Milan – which became, for him, the great city of the heart. He was, in a kind of adopted way, more Italian than French. And all this international experience becomes the prism through which this fascinating correspondence is filtered. Yes! Absolutely, it very much comes across. It was the posture of the lover, rather than the reality, which was important to him. I think the great influence for him in childhood was his uncle, Romain Gagnon, who was a late 18th century libertine figure who would have appeared in Les Liaisons Dangereuses – a typical ancien régime womaniser. In a way, he was the role model. Stendhal always had to have an attachment or an object of desire. But what we find in the correspondence with these women is that he didn’t just want them for physical satisfaction, he really loved and was interested in these women as intellectual, speaking, breathing human beings. In this respect we can compare him with another great late 18th century figure – whom I happen to deeply admire personally – and that’s Casanova. Both of them were fascinated by the feelings of women. They were fascinated by women as individuals. And they needed the presence of the feminine in their lives. This is what is so marvellous about Stendhal. He gives you, in his letters, the sense that these women are much more than mere machines for the satisfaction of the male. And that is so unusual in that day and age. Maybe it’s unusual in our own day and age. Certainly there are plenty of men today who would take the same view."