Stendhal: ‘Vie de Henry Brulard’ (review)

In this introduction to Vie de Henry Brulard, refreshingly traditional in that there is no reference to Freudian complexes of any description, Sheila Bell concentrates on the portrait it paints of the man in his various incarnations (child as monster, victim, revolutionary and reader-escapist, mature man as embittered administrator and passionate lover of women and art) and situations (family and friends, literary history and market, political history). The guide is divided into six chapters, whose subheadings generally take the form of quotations from Brulard. The first, devoted to the origins of Brulard, provides an overview of the author’s life and career after the age of 17, when the autobiography breaks off, before examining Stendhal’s longstanding quest for self-knowledge, his belief in the truth-value of memoirs, the popularity of memoirs as a genre and the influence and counter-influence of other authors, particularly Rousseau, on his approach. The second chapter, which benefits from Bell’s study of the manuscript itself, deals with the history and status of the text, evoking, for example, its unfinished character and the editorial dif-ficulties posed by drawings and marginal notes. It briefly discusses the editorial history of the text, but gives the bulk of its attention to the history of its writing, using the variations between manuscript title pages as a window through which to view Stendhalian practices of secrecy and irony, much as the view from Henri Gagnon’s Grenoble flat is used, in a later chapter, as a means of bringing to life French political history as the young Beyle/Brulard would have experienced it. The third chapter treats the problems confronted and strategies adopted by the autobiographer, taking in the particular roles of sincerity, memory, the projected reader, digressions and sketches in Stendhal’s approach to his text. The fourth divides the author’s representation of his early life into five thematic and broadly chronological parts: the difficult relationship with father, aunt and tutor and the aftermath of the mother’s death provide the thematic focus of the first, while the second turns to more felicitous relations with the grandfather and other aunt; the third section discusses the role of reading in the author’s early life; the fourth discusses his discovery of amabilité and volupté via his uncle Romain and the fifth deals with the author’s escape from Grenoble to Paris and then Milan, concluding with a reflection on why the manuscript ends at this point. The fifth chapter discusses the centrality of politics, lived history and petits détails to Brulard, while the sixth listens more specifically to the voice of the mature man in the text: his activities in the present, his judgements on his earlier self, his passions and hatreds, and his habitual ways of seeking happiness. The style is clear, with references to historical events and individuals being usually briefly explained as they are introduced. Key critical texts are invoked at appropriate points in the study. This guide offers a concise, thoroughly well-informed and wonderfully engaging accompaniment to the student of Vie de Henry Brulard.