Exact Chemistry

AlThance. By Stendhal. Translated by Gilbert and Suzanne Sale. (The Merlin Press, 16s.)

‘ider. By Stendhal. Translated by H. R. L. Edwards. (The Merlin Press, 12s. 6d.)

Sir,„ Sir,„

--DuAL delighted in all forms of camouflage.

Kit Was Dominique, Rombouctou, Brulard. He wits quite capable of favourably reviewing his °I,Wtt works under other names. His first novel 44 archly ascribed to 'a woman of intelligence.' These subterfuges (along with the English phrases "1 his private diaries) explain themselves when 6e comes to experience the honest intensity of

admissions. They were the necessary Birnam

wood for his self-assaults. 'Character of this work exact chemistry,' he wrote of Lucien :'`inven; 'I describe with exactness what others !itl,dicate with a vague and eloquent phrase.'

e material for most of these experiments was,

and was to remain, himself. We should be grate- ful. then, for that first novel, Armance, now be- ere us in a new translation, even if we are IlnlikelY to concur in Gide's lavish, equivocal ettimate : 'de tons les livres de Stendhal . . . le :114s delicat et le plus joliment &Ht.' Stendhal :5 forty-three when he wrote it and it seems I,. have emancipated him from those crippling, comic years when he was struggling to write "ilk plays.

He found the seed in a M. Hyacinthe la

T°ache's anonymous study of impotence, Olivier, Which had been based in turn on an unpublished w ;rk by a scribbling duchess. Olivier his hero remained for a while and then he changed his ii`

;Me to Octave and the key was lost. No one's

1,ieasure in this odd book, I think, will be spoiled (? the knowledge, derived from these sources, of withdrawals—Mme terrible secret. His advances and Armance de Bonnivet's companion ''rntance is the pure and penniless object of these "Ikons—are inexplicable without such help. 11(1 the cunning analyses of hesitant, grow- ng love (the novelist's reaping of the ground town in the psychological theories and anecdotes %, l'Amour five years earlier) tend to be de- valued by a central reticence: the freakish cause °I so much painful soul-searching is never con- essed'. But even in this somehow tainted work, rre are unexpected, creative interpolations. For 2ttahee, the heady purity of Armance is often whichever will forsake the world: 'I'll choose ,ischever order allows the most solitude, some vn" p;fiVent lying among high mountains, with a eteturesque view.'

reder is a much later work and irritates only in that it is a fragment, perhaps a third of an entkehded novel. In general, Stendhal might have bn"°ed Forster, one feels; oh, yes, there has to 11,- a Plot—alas. There were always unfinished vels, and complaints. 'I can't give depth or wit in' dialogue while inventing every word of it. ,,ence the advantage of working on a ready- i,",ae taw, like Julien Sorel.' Invention ran out in aVer, ich begins, though, with terse assur- ii„ce. The hero is better born than Sorel but is it,"111 on his wits as a fashionable, mediocre por- 2;t"Painter. There is the pure, convent-reared

• Married to a nouveau-riche provincial, with

i„.u°111 he reluctantly falls in love. But it's quite ing'Possible to do justice to these ninety-odd pages and many words. The husband, M. Boissaux, pP. his. ttempts to be socially acceptable under utc9er's ironic guidance, move one away from the ilyht, scrupulously annotated reciprocities of the 7 ers into the 'political' complexities of Lucien geulven when the book abruptly breaks off.

.1011N COLEMAN