the sea is one hydra

The blind men come up to the elephant and one of them finds a tail, "The elephant is like a rope," this person says; and another finds a fat leg, "The elephant is like a tree," and a third finds the trunk, "The elephant is a hose," but if they hadn't already experienced a rope, a tree, and a hose, then what would they find? A Ponge from another planet might recognise other qualities in bread. Christina Stead starts The Man Who Loved Children on a specific street, with a specific house, "Tohoga House, their home," and everything she finds from there onwards, is the book. Perhaps each book is a long search. Mervyn Peake goes to a building of his own, larger than Stead's, almost blank at first, a wall and houses outside the wall, and he discovers everything in that one focussed area of land, not walking through it with the personal and monodirected tone of Ponge, but sensing it multipronged through characters, using them to feel the castle as if they were several tentacles. Mr Flay enters the Kitchens to watch Swelter and the author witnesses the Kitchens; one of the Twins walks through a room and he follows her and voila, the room is exposed to him, here are its details. His voice reaches around like a curious octopus, touching here and there. How many rooms does the reader never see because no character visits them?

Peake was grabbed by an octopus once off the island of Sark, or this is what he told his friend Gordon (or Goaty) Smith in a letter, and he had to beat it to death; in Hugo's Toilers of the Sea the hero in similar straits slices the animal's head off. "He had plunged the blade of his knife into the flat slimy substance, and by a rapid movement, like the flourish of a whip in the air, describing a circle round the two eyes, he wrenched the head off as a man would draw a tooth." Parts of Hugo could make prose poems if you picked them out of his novels, for instance, this description of the sea, also from Toilers:

The indivisible cannot be broken up into compartments. There is no intervening wall between one wave and another. The Channel Islands feel impulses coming from the Cape of Good Hope. Shipping throughout the world is confronting a single monster. The whole of the sea is one hydra. The waves cover the sea with a kind of fish's skin. The Ocean is Ceto. On this unity swoops down the innumerable.

This stolen poem works in strong declarations, certain things are so, and other things cannot be treated in that way, but a word like "indivisible" is precisely ineffable and "Ceto" and "hydra" are mythical -- he is declaring the unprovable, he is declaring the air. Then there is a closing mystery and a new idea. What is "the innumerable"?* Then silence after the mystery. There is a tussle between the power of the language to say and its power to mean. It says what it says very directly, but it means what it means very obliquely. And the same goes for Peake's Groan which is not in favour of the aristocracy but not against it either, which is Dickensian but not, which reflects the England of his day but doesn't, and Steerpike is Hitler but he isn't, and the Rituals are army regulations but they're not, and the author, using passionate and heightened language, posits a dry static society that damages its inhabitants, yet places the book's only egalitarian statement between the lips of a selfish arsonist. The book ends with the baby Titus "enter[ing] his stronghold" after an act of symbolic rebellion (it can't be anything other than symbolic, the baby is a baby, we recognise the rebellion, he can't) which the author regards as a kind of mystic heroism, but the stronghold, to which he comes surrounded by triumphant language, is a prison, antithetical to his humanity. It will not, like a stronghold, protect him from harm. It will do the harm. It will warp him. He comes to his triumphant mutilation.

There is another tension in the books. The readers, if they love Peake, love the castle and the society of the castle, and depend on this society to produce and to frame the characters that they also love. These characters are different expressions of isolation. Fuchsia isolates herself in her attic, Swelter isolates himself eminently above a crowd, Gertrude can remove herself from any conversation by addressing a raven, Prunesquallor separates himself from his sister by chattering, and so on, and so on, or to a cat, and so on. Each one of them is a machine that manipulates isolation (and an experiment in isolation management), and they reveal themselves to us by their methods; by their methods we know them. Castle society makes isolation essential; it also makes it possible. If we love the books then the castle is the heart of everything we love. And the hero wants to take us away from it. The hero, the person we're supposed to be supporting, if we support anybody -- he is our enemy, and we are his.







* It's not a mystery in the book. He means "the wind." James Hogarth translated. Malcolm Yorke mentions Peake's letter to Gordon Smith in his Peake biography, Mine Eyes Mint Gold.

it gives you an itch to look into the nests of spectres

The father in Bruno Schulz has his cosmology of mannequins, Ponge has his cosmology of bread, and so there is this idea of starting in one place and swelling out, stepping from one point to another (and once you've reached that one you can see the next, so that the more you step, the further you can go, although each step is still a step), until you've reached a point on your single path where you can look back and observe that bread is the universe, or mannequins are humanity and "To see a world in a grain of sand" -- writes Blake -- is a great thing -- "Hold infinity in the palm of your hand." Here in Las Vegas the casinos try to provide us with the sights of the world in a street but we are not fooled, this is not infinity; the street ends, and a grain of sand ends too, but you are considering the grain and it is your consideration that is understood to be infinite, not the object, which is your trigger; and maybe it helps if the trigger is roundish, unique, and so tiny that you struggle to make it out, like a grain, and not, like a roadway, a clear cluttered straightish line that comes to a halt.*

(The Las Vegas Strip is so fulsome, no wonder people feel free to knock it, and call it tacky and undignified. "No dignity is perfect which at some point does not ally itself with the mysterious," writes Thomas de Quincey. The grain, self-contained, focussed, and delicate, is more obviously mysterious than the Strip. Submerged historical processes created the Strip, as they created everything, but the street would rather not have you think about them. "Look," it says, "at this big clean Eiffel Tower. You can make out every single rivet!" Away goes the mystery of the rivets, which might even be decoration and not functional. Possibly there are other forces, more modern forces, keeping the structure together.)

In Ponge, one thing, bread, discovers its equivalents everywhere -- one type of object shows the potential to summarise all objects -- Walt Whitman's persona in the person of a loaf -- and this discovery is the essence, is the poem -- not the thing itself but the discovery, the step-step-step, the taking of steps -- which is thought, or one way of illustrating it.

"When you are hunting something," wrote Victor Hugo in Toilers of the Sea, "you are undergoing a course of training; when you are seeking to discover something, you are caught up in a chain of action. If you have been in the habit of looking into birds' nests, it gives you an itch to look into the nests of spectres."

So, following on from this, say that Ponge, looking at fire, is training himself to look at bread, or vice versa, whichever came first in his life. Lucretius, once he starts thinking about atoms, starts to believe that every natural effect can be explained if you introduce the idea of tiny particles to the equation. He is wrong, so singular concentration is not always fruitful. But go back: this might be the opposite of Ponge. On one hand you take a single starting point and colour the universe diversely (Ponge), on the other hand you take the diverse universe and colour it with one quality (Lucretius). I think I'm just fooling myself with language but the point I'm trying to get to is this: with a system you re-author the universe, you have the appearance of being correct. A barber in George Eliot's Romola says that narrowness is dangerous:

"Besides, your druggist, who herborises and decocts, is a man of prejudices: he has poisoned people according to a system, and is obliged to stand up for his system to justify the consequences. Now a barber can be dispassionate; the only thing he necessarily stands by is the razor, always providing he is not an author. That was the flaw in my great predecessor Burchiello [also a barber]: he was a poet, and had consequently a prejudice about his own poetry. I have escaped that; I saw very early that authorship is a narrowing business, in conflict with the liberal art of the razor, which demands an impartial affection for all men’s chins."

The physical activity of the razor (constantly in contact with the world) opens you out; the mental activity of poetry and druggist-systems closes you in and gives you something to defend; the outward-directed person should have nothing to defend, suggests the barber, and if changing one's mind, as Ruskin says somewhere in Modern Painters,** is an essential part of thinking and being fruitfully thoughtful, then the poet and the druggist are not as alive as the barber who shaves chins. "Much time is wasted in general on the establishment of systems," Ruskin says too, "and it often takes more time to master the intricacies of an artificial connection, than to remember the separate facts which are so carefully connected."

And yet the barber is not completely freethinking, he has his standards, his world is coloured, he measures and assesses, as the reader finds out a few paragraphs later when he goes on talking to his customer, a handsome stranger. "Ecco!" says the barber, "your curls are now of the right proportion to neck and shoulders; rise, Messer, and I will free you from the encumbrance of this cloth. Gnaffè! I almost advise you to retain the faded jerkin and hose a little longer; they give you the air of a fallen prince."

Maybe say that the difference between this barber and his druggist, is that the barber thinks of the result, the druggist thinks of the structure you climb through to get there. The barber sees a man in tatty clothes and intuits, quickly, that the best advice he can give to this man is the opposite of normal advice -- he must not buy clean new clothes, he must keep the old ones -- inventing a new process on the spot, this barber. The new process is unconventional but he trusts in his own prescience -- "almost " -- almost he believes it will work -- and also he likes to tickle people with his opinions.







* Or it seems to. The street itself (going purely north and ignoring the other direction) turns from South Las Vegas Boulevard into North Fifth Street and then ends near a freeway, if you follow it directly, but if you resist directness and turn right around a circle then the street that used to be North Main Street sacrifices its name and becomes the rest of the Boulevard. Now North Las Vegas Boulevard, it heads through the city, going and going for miles, past fast food places and houses, shedding its lanes, getting thinner and more anaemic and less important, and eventually running away into the open desert. Wasting down almost to nothing it walks parallel to the Great Basin Highway for a while, dies away into a dirt road, recovers itself, wriggles, crosses the Basin, and perishes finally at an insignificant T-intersection.

** I can't see it but I know it's in there somewhere. Volume three or four or five. Somewhere near the beginning.

The Hugo was translated by James Hogarth.

in them an immense reservoir of facilities

I am about to give away the ending to Victor Hugo's book, The Man Who Laughs.







The Occupy Wall Street protests have come to Las Vegas, but Las Vegas doesn't have a Wall Street, Wall is a street in New York, so the protesters started their march outside the New York New York casino and moved on from there. We are an ingenious species. Our habit of drawing parallels may be unparallelled. (If we could read the minds of other animals, we would know.*) On September eleventh, people were laying flowers in front of the same casino. These things have their own logic. "Words give to the one who writes them the impression of being dictated to him by usage, and he receives them with the uneasiness of finding in them an immense reservoir of facilities and effects already assembled -- ready without his powers having any role in it," wrote Maurice Blanchot -- the phrases of the world coming into us invisibly, selecting themselves with a force of habit that might as well be their own, and going out on paper or on screen, one sentence not seeming right in the mind of its creator unless it ends itself with after all, and another wanting to include thing in place of a more exact word (a principle that must apply to Blanchot's sentence too, so that, as we read him, we witness the machine of language telling us about itself).

And the protests, the impulse coming in, entering, fed by various streams, and then it comes out, and a group of people walk along the Strip from Tropicana Avenue northwards, up the map where the Boulevard lies straight as a pipe all the way to the Bellagio, the indigenous habits of protest sitting evidently upon them, "an immense reservoir of facilities and effects already assembled," a protest as a kind of writing implement, and the casino standing there in a representative way, offering itself up for the role of a focus, and screaming at them as they march, screaming wildly and insanely at us all, this casino, through the throats of the tourists who have decided to ride the roller coaster on the roof.

When Victor Hugo introduces a rich woman to The Man Who Laughs he is moderate at first, filling in factual blanks, "Lady Josiana had her own fortune. She possessed great wealth, much of which was derived from the gifts of Madame sans queue to the Duke of York. Madame sans queue is short for Madame," but the blanks fill and then they overflow, and the author seems excited by his invention; and he heaps her up. "She wore great dresses of velvet, satin, or moire, some composed of fifteen or sixteen yards of material, with embroideries of gold and silver; and round her waist many knots of pearls, alternating with other precious stones. She was extravagant in gold lace. Sometimes she wore an embroidered cloth jacket like a bachelor. She rode on a man's saddle." Josiana is a "prude," he says, and she is also the most luscious and perverse soul in the book. She is one of the author's fantasy figures, she is full of sex but doesn't care for it, she is full of money and doesn't care for it, she compels awe and jealousy and barely bothers to notice, she is a Zenith!

The Zenith goes to the theatre and eclipses the stage. The audience stares at her.

The woman watched them, and they watched her.

At the distance at which they were placed, and in that luminous mist which is the half-light of a theatre, details were lost and it was like a hallucination. Of course it was a woman, but was it not a chimera as well? The penetration of her light into their obscurity stupefied them. It was like the appearance of an unknown planet. It came from a world of the happy. Her irradiation amplified her figure. The lady was covered with nocturnal glitterings, like a milky way. Her precious stones were stars. The diamond brooch was perhaps a pleiad. The splendid beauty of her bosom seemed supernatural. They felt, as they looked upon the star-like creature, the momentary but thrilling approach of the regions of felicity. It was out of the heights of a Paradise that she leant towards their mean-looking Green Box, and revealed to the gaze of its wretched audience her expression of inexorable serenity. As she satisfied her unbounded curiosity, she fed at the same time the curiosity of the public.

It was the Zenith permitting the Abyss to look at it.

One piece of footage from Wall Street shows the crowd walking underneath a balcony on which, for whatever reason, a group of people in formal clothes are drinking champagne and chuckling. Some websites assume that they were deliberately mocking the protesters, others say that the building was a restaurant just by chance; the people from the balcony don't seem to have said anything. The sources that have picked mocking are outraged; the sight of rich people laughing on balconies has a history, and so the shot seems perfect -- the Abyss below, the Chimeras above. But no one on the balcony is starlike, no one has a bosom you'd call splendid, and the light that falls on them is the same light that falls on the protesters and on the greyness of the brickwork; they have no special illumination, they look ordinary and it's not hard to imagine that no matter how much champagne was flying around, any party with these people would be uninteresting, and you'd wish you were somewhere else, possibly in the street below with a placard, protesting your own adherence to a stereotypical roundabout of balconies and champagne flutes, while, in another place, a police officer was filmed swearing that he was going to beat the protesters with his nightstick; see, we all have our expressive tools: there are placards for one occasion, champagne flutes for another, and flowers in front of casinos when we're mourning.

The zenith and the abyss look at one another in Hugo's book again, but this time Josiana is not present and the abyss is occupied by her diametric opposite, a poor blind humble young woman named Dea. Dea is in the book because she loves the hero, Gwynplaine. He rescued her from a snowstorm when she was a baby. They grew up together. Gwynplaine is deformed, but Dea can't see the deformity. She sees his good qualities, "Gwynplaine sympathetic, helpful, and sweet-tempered." This makes their love perfect. "Dea quivered with certainty and gratitude, her anxiety changed into ecstasy, and with her shadowy eyes she contemplated on the zenith from the depth of her abyss the rich light of his goodness. In the ideal, kindness is the sun; and Gwynplaine dazzled Dea." Gwynplaine adores her. "One nest and two birds -- that was their story."

This pair is so closely associated that when one half seems to have vanished, the other half wills itself to death. Gwynplaine goes missing, Dea falls into a delirium. "Father," she says weakly to the misanthrope who adopted them both, "look here; when two beings have always been together from infancy, their state should not be disturbed, or death must come, and it cannot be otherwise. I love you all the same, but I feel that I am no longer altogether with you, although I am as yet not altogether with him." There is a vacuum between these two matching halves and she is rushing into it.

Gwynplaine returns from his adventure and and finds her at the brink of death. He begs her to live but she is too far gone. "You will hardly believe that I have just explored the whole of life in a few hours!" he says. "I have found out one thing -- that there is nothing in it! You exist! if you did not, the universe would have no meaning. Stay with me! Have pity on me! Since you love me, live on!" She does not. "She folded her thumbs within her fingers -- a sign that her last moments were approaching." "Come to me as soon as you can," she says, "I shall be very unhappy without you, even in heaven." Then "she expired. She fell back rigid and motionless on the mattress." Gwynplaine cries "I come" and walks off the desk of a ship into the water, where he drowns: "the void was before him; he strode into it." Everything is voids and meetings with Hugo, plurals and singulars, either two words or ideas clashing together -- "His head lived, his face was dead" -- or one grand solid declaration of unity: "Gwynplaine was the religion of Dea." He goes from a pair of cymbals to a drum.

It was the upper classes who abducted Gwynplaine, doing it for their own purposes, without knowing that Dea was in love with him, or caring, or even suspecting that this love existed. They kill her, with her collusion. All the suctioning force of her love, which drags her into her death, has no power over the disproportionate strength of the aristocracy, which can carry a character away whenever it likes. The void in this book is not only between Gwynplaine and Dea when he leaves, it is also the gap between the poor and the rich, the untitled and the aristocrats, those who have houses and those who travel in a caravan, and the author isolates this gap, describes this gap, with his abysses and zeniths (or whatever French words the translator is translating; I'm taking it for granted that the meaning is intact) and occupying the gap is what? -- is him, Victor Hugo -- he is the filling in this sandwich, staring at both sides, he holds it together. He grapples it with the hooks of his prose. He talks about the power of a "will." (Ruskin in his autobiography grumbles about those French who can't get their minds off "gloire.") And the inequality being reported here in the US is the reporting of a vacuum -- a vacuum is an imbalance, too much over here, too little over there, that's a vacuum -- which nature abhors, and not only nature in its atomic, vegetable, and animal aspect, but human nature. Any move to fill that vacuum has the character of a necessary force.







* I wanted to branch off and start talking about alien species here, but the digression was getting unwieldy.

The person who translated Hugo is anonymous. The Blanchot quote comes from his his book of essays, Faux Pas, translated by Charlotte Mandell.

Here is someone else's footage of the New York New York roller coaster ride. The screaming that starts at about .50 is audible from the road. This is the video of the people on the balcony.

"Upper classes" in the last paragraph refers to certain aristocrat-characters and their immediate friend-underlings who are not aristocratic but still powerful.

like the thawing of a glacier

"In 1813," writes Mérimée (translated by Leys), "Beyle unwittingly witnessed the rout of an entire brigade, which had been suddenly attacked by a charge of five hundred Cossacks.

Beyle saw some two thousand men -- including five generals with their embroidered hats -- all running for their lives. He ran too, though clumsily, for he was wearing only one boot and carried the other in his hand. On the French side, only two heroes stood their ground against the Cossacks: a gendarme named Menneval, and a conscript, who, trying to shoot at the Cossacks, succeeded only in killing the gendarme's horse. Beyle had to report this episode of panic to the Emperor, who listened in mute fury ..."

Masterful bit of deadpan detail, that "embroidered hats," the embroidery making the hats a little too decorated, the moment of precision -- the conscript, with all the world to fire a gun in and five hundred Cossacks to hit, manages to get his bullet precisely into the gendarme's horse -- against the flood of rout. In The Charterhouse of Parma, which I'd quote from if it hadn't gone back to the library months ago, Stendhal, working from the kind of biographical experience that, years later, gave his friend the material for that part of his memorial tribute, writes a battle that makes other battles in literature seem ridiculous. From memory then: his idealistic hero, hoping to serve under Napoleon, stumbles into the Battle of Waterloo and wanders around the battlefield, filled with innocent hope and a desire to help out in some way, searching for some solid encounter that he can identify as the battle itself. Instead he finds a weird confusion, lone men in uniform running to and fro, shooting coming from somewhere-or-another, horses going who-knows-where, and unexpected light copses of trees that get in the way. The battle, as an object, does not exist.

Other authors describe armies meeting, clashing -- Stendhal makes those descriptions seem simplistic. Victor Hugo tries to describe this degenerating aspect of Waterloo in Les Misérables (as translated by Norman Denny), "A disintegrating army is like the thawing of a glacier, a mindless, jostling commotion, total disruption," but he can't resist the urge to tidy things up: "One who is Unanswerable had taken the matter in hand, and thus the panic of so many heroes is explained." This compulsive tidying turns the rout into a monument. It becomes the work of the Unanswerable, deliberate and huge. In Stendhal's book it is something incongruous, multiple, and slippery, confetti, or jelly.

Hugo goes on to explain that morally the French won the battle, and that the only reason they didn't win it in any other way was that God ("One who is Unanswerable") didn't want them to. This piece of face-saving chutzpah seems unlikely to convince anyone who is not already French, although he's able to turn it into a capstone for his theme, the majesty of insignificant people, by sticking General Cambronne's "Merde!" on top of it all like an angel on a Christmas tree. Le mot de Cambronne was an event so memorable that Proust's characters were able to allude to it in conversation six decades after the general died in 1842 and everyone still knew what they meant.*

Simon Leys won several awards in the early 1990s for his Death of Napoleon, a book that Peter Craven praised during an Age review of the Mérimée/Stendhal translation. If Misérables elevates the ordinary human being then Napoleon de-elevates the exceptional one. Napoleon, in this book, escapes from Saint Helena, leaving a double in his place, and spends the rest of the story trying to regain his position -- trying to become Napoleon. He visits the Waterloo battlesite (the one where Cambronne shouted, or didn't shout, merde!, and where Stendhal's Fabrice received his single wound at the hand of the army he had come to help) only to find that it has been turned into an entertainment for English tourists. A sign on a farmhouse invites him to VISIT NAPOLEON'S BEDROOM explaining that THE EMPEROR SLEPT HERE THE NIGHT BEFORE THE BATTLE. He goes in, hoping to reinvigorate his memories.

Suddenly he feels faint. The vague malaise that has been upon him all morning ... abruptly gives way to an overwhelming certainty: he realizes with horror that HE HAS NEVER BEEN IN THIS PLACE BEFORE!

A little while later he sees another venue advertising the same experience. His past has been appropriated, pulled apart, and packaged by tour guides. (And reading this you might go on to wonder about the effects of Disneylandification elsewhere: the Ballarat goldfield experience, the Mito Komon TV show.) Thwarted everywhere by accidents, half-saved then lost, afflicted with ulcers, he, like Nigel Hawthorne in Alan Bennet's Madness of King George, has lost the ability to seem. (Ian Holm, who plays the doctor who restores the king's seeming in George, takes the role of Napoleon in the movie based on Leys' book.) Waterloo evades these people: it evades Stendhal's Fabrice, it evades Leys' Napoleon, it slides around Hugo's grip as he fight to pin it down, define it, have the final word. "To form a clear idea of the Battle of Waterloo we only have to draw a capital A."

Long after the fact, Edmond Goncourt decided that none of it mattered.

Monday 6 May 1889
... I thought about the fine article there would have been to write on the greatness of present-day France, if only there had not been that revolution in '89 and Napoleon I's victories and Napoleon III's revolutionary policy. True, France would probably be under the rule of an imbecile Bourbon ... but would that rule be very different from that of a Carnot, chosen as everyone knows for his nonexistent personality?

(A few years later President Carnot was stabbed to death in public by an anarchist.)







* In a joke.

"But surely these Cambremers have a rather startling name. It ends just in time, but it ends badly!" she said with a laugh.

"Yes; that double abbreviation!"

The footnotes to the Kilmartin translation explain: "This rather forced joke on the name Cambremer conceives of it being made up of abbreviations of Cambronne and merde." Lydia Davis' footnote says the same in slightly different words. It comes up again in The Guermantes Way when a character delivers her opinion of Zola: "His is the epic dungheap. He is the Homer of the sewers! He has not enough capitals to print Cambronne’s word."

The merde is probably apocryphal. A reader named Richard Edgecombe wrote to the Times in 1932:

In 1850, when I was about seven years of age, I was taken by my father to visit General Hugh Halkett, who then commanded the King's Army at Hanover. The old general seemed to have taken a fancy to me, and often allowed me to accompany him on his morning walks through the groves and avenues of Kingly Herrenhausen. As I knew that this fine old gentleman had served in the German Legion at Waterloo, that great subject often cropped up, and he told me many things which I have long forgotten. But I well remember his telling me that he alone took Cambronne prisoner. He said that this gallant French officer, who was reconnoitering on foot at some distance from and ahead of his troops, was taken completely by surprise when Halkett, who was mounted on a spirited Irish horse, galloped close up to the French lines, seized him by his aiguillette, and dragged him breathless into the British lines. "If you are an officer," said the unfortunate commander when he had recovered a little from the exertions he had undergone, "if you are an officer, here is my sword." Cambronne was taken to England as a prisoner of war, and there died; but he certainly did not ride off triumphant with one of the immortal slogans of history.

the true face of Mount Lu

An urge, yesterday, to find out what Victor Hugo thought of Stendhal. Why? Simon Leys compares them, or their effect, in an introduction to his translation of Prosper Mérimée's Stendhal tribute, Henri Beyle. The critic Albert Thibaudet, says Leys,

drew an interesting distinction between writers who "have a position" (think of Victor Hugo, for instance) and writers who "have a presence" (here the example of Stendhal immediately comes to mind).

He goes on.

We feel captivated, inspired, overwhelmed when we read Les Misérables, without necessarily experiencing a particular urge to explore Hugo's life; or, should we do this, the exercise would probably not significantly increase our appreciation of his masterpiece ... With Stendhal, the reverse is true.

He points out as an aside that Stendhal's admirers call themselves Beylists while "admirers of Hugo do not call themselves Hugolians;" he could also have pointed out how happy it is that the followers of a man who spent his life finding new pseudonyms for himself (Mérimée lists two of them, César Bombet, Cotonet -- Leys adds more: Cornichon, Pardessus, Tonneau, Le Chinois, the last of which must have been of special interest to the translator, who was a professional Sinologist until his retirement) now hide in plain sight by calling themselves after his real name. Leys himself uses a nom de plume: his name is Pierre Ryckmans. As for Hugo, he thought Stendhal's The Red and the Black was a "misformed thing." I found that in Graham Robb's Hugo biography.

They played cards until ten o'clock, while Hugo aired his views ... Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir was a "misformed thing" written in dialect. "The only works which have a chance of traversing centuries are those which are properly written," which was why "Balzac's hour to sink into oblivion will come much sooner than he thought."*

Balzac liked Beyle, and the critic Sainte-Beuve took him to task for it: "It is obvious how far I am from sharing M. de Balzac's enthusiasm about Beyle's Le Chartreuse." George Sand decided that Beyle's "style was original and true but he wrote badly." (Beyle on Sand: "If the Charterhouse [of Parma] were translated into French by Mme Sand, it would be a success, but would require two or three volumes to express what it now does in two.") The devout literary gossip Edmond Goncourt mentioned him only to wonder at his "strange preoccupation with women." Mérimée seems not to have thought very much of his friend's books, although he praises him for taking criticism well. "I never met any man who could accept criticism of his literary works with more equanimity. His friends always used the bluntest language with him: quite often, he sent me manuscripts that he had previously submitted to Victor Jacquemont: they would contain scribbled comments such as: "Detestable -- written by a concierge!" and so on. When he published his book De l'Amour, they all laughed." Sylvia Townsend Warner, translating Sainte-Beuve's remarks on Beyle, comes up with the same word that Leys' translation gives to Jacquemont: "I have been re-reading, or trying to re-read Stendhal's novels; frankly, they are detestable."

Proust records Sainte-Beuve's boast, that he arrived at his opinion of Beyle's writing only after talking to the dead man's friends (Mérimée was one of those friends), and makes an angry response, which could also be also be a riposte to the Beylist admirers Leys talks about at the start of his introduction, the ones who feel "a particular urge" to explore the author's private life. "In what way does being a friend of Stendhal's make one better fitted to judge him? For those friends, the self which produced the novels was eclipsed by the other, which may have been inferior to the outer selves of many other people."

And this passage from Within a Budding Grove chastens both Saint-Beuve and Hugo.

The reason for which a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It was Beethoven’s Quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth) that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and enlarging a public for Beethoven’s Quartets, marking in this way, like every great work of art, an advance if not in artistic merit at least in intellectual society, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of enjoying it. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work (leaving out of account, for brevity’s sake, the contingency that several men of genius may at the same time be working along parallel lines to create a more instructed public in the future, a public from which other men of genius shall reap the benefit) shall create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work, would be not posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half-a-century later in time. And so it is essential that the artist ... if he wishes his work to be free to follow its own course, shall launch it, wherever he may find sufficient depth, confidently outward bound towards the future.

Beyle critiqued his works, writes Mérimée, "as if discussing the works of an author who had died many centuries ago."

Shortly before the passage about genius that I've quoted there, Proust writes:

So that the man of genius, to shelter himself from the ignorant contempt of the world, may say to himself that, since one’s contemporaries are incapable of the necessary detachment, works written for posterity should be read by posterity alone, like certain pictures which one cannot appreciate when one stands too close to them.

Which Leys echoes, apparently unconsciously, at the end of his introduction to Henri Beyle:

[Mérimée] only missed the essential thing: Stendhal's genius. But it would be naïve and unfair to blame him for such a failure, which probably reflects a sort of natural law. A thousand years ago, a great Chinese poet had an intuition of this, as he was passing through the mountain range that surrounds the sublime Mount Lu:

I never saw the true face of Mount Lu
For the simple reason that I was in the very midst of it.

*"Nothing odd will do long," etc.

The Henri Beyle translation takes up more than half of Leys' little brown and black With Stendhal -- lent to me through the mail by Lisa at ANZLitLovers. (Her review here.) George Sand was also translated by Leys. Goncourt was translated by Robert Baldick. Stendhal-on-Sand was translated by Francis Steegmuller. Budding Grove is Moncrieff.