Henri Beyle, better known to us by his pseudonym, Stendhal, was called by the French un homme singulier, or what we might call, with an inevitable loss of nuance, a character. And he was, indeed, the most singular of all the great nineteenth-century French novelists, and also perhaps the most contradictory. Unlike Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, his peers in the pantheon of fiction, he had an amateur’s approach to literature, and except for some youthful dreams, never strove to be a professional writer. His detractors would say that it showed. Not a few of his readers would become fed up with his desultory style, lack of narrative drive, overindulgence in asides, and his affectation of unsentimental detachment from the fate of his characters. A pretty fair judge of the art, Henry James pronounced Le Rouge et le noir to be unreadable, yet he was enthralled by La Chartreuse de Parme, showing the strange mix of emotions that can be evoked even within the same reader by this great figure of French letters.

It marks some of his distinction that Stendhal should elicit wildly varying and even troubled reactions, as did Beyle in person, at the salons, as he expatiated on every subject under the sun, blithely ignoring his own ignorance. None of which is to say that his work was without craft, or to deny that he was, in fact, extraordinarily learned. But it is noteworthy that his singular spirit and idiosyncrasy animated both man and work so completely that it is almost inconceivable to think of one without thinking of the other.

It is certainly in the hope of showing the rich veins of this idiosyncrasy and the pleasures of being reacquainted with such a lively character that Jonathan Keates, a British man of letters, has undertaken this brilliant biography. This is the first life of Stendhal in English in a quarter-century (the most comprehensive treatments are French, the most recent being published in 1990), and it is hard to imagine one being written to eclipse the sensitivity and acuteness of Keates’s work, or one that would give greater pleasure to the reader, with its combination of lovely magisterial prose and piquant, earthy wit—not unlike that of Beyle himself. The greatest tribute, I think, is to note that in Keates’s portrait Beyle lives and breathes as a credible person posed against a richly textured historical background that also comes to life.

Like all of the other truly great writers of that century, Beyle was the product of bourgeois ambition deflected from its original aim. He was born Marie-Henri Beyle in 1783 in the provincial city of Grenoble, a place he came to detest and mock as the very type of philistine commercialism and mean-spirited provinciality (surely touches of this feeling make their way into Le Rouge et le noir’s ugly portrayal of Julien Sorel’s birthplace). To put it simply, as simply and candidly as he himself would later put it, he loved his mother and hated his father. His mother died in childbirth when Henri was merely seven, and he would never forgive his father, aside from his other demerits, for failing to provide any substitute for his beloved, comforting maman. His father was a lawyer with ambitions in municipal politics and an outlook fixed on commercial advantage. Unfortunately, his rigidity and charmlessness, apparently cultivated in part to mold himself into a great striver, left only a chill of isolation on his sensitive son, while his monetary ambitions, owing possibly to acute incompetence, never panned out.

Henri felt tortured by his father’s lectures, early intimations of that total dousing of inner spirit that the later writer would come to associate with the cult of business enterprise and the reactionary legitimism of post-Napoleonic Europe. Henri wept with joy twice in his childhood, once at the premature death of his hated, repressive maiden aunt, who tried to take over the motherly duties, and at the execution of the King—both moments obviously symbols of liberation. But as Keates is surely right to observe, these little glimpses of the monster within young Beyle, though portents of his later outrageousness, did not coincide with a revolutionary temperament. Beyle shed no tears for the proletariat, as he found the Jacobins he met to be just a bunch of scruffy, self-important fools and lowlifes.

Like young Julien Sorel, young Beyle did well in school and looked to scholastic achievement as a means of escape from other, more onerous, bourgeois duties. Adept at mathematics, he passed the entrance exam for the Parisian Ecole Polytechnique, where he could advance to a scientific or engineering career; but after being sent off to Paris he unaccountably failed to enroll. Instead, residing under the patronage of his well-connected cousin, Pierre Daru, one of Napoleon’s ablest administrators, Henri was given a commission to the Grand Armée. Daru saw to it that Henri would see little or no real action, but his largely clerical duties paved the way for further advancement, as he would become a commissary, or provisions officer, to Napoleon’s army—in which role he earned distinction, particularly during the disastrous Russian campaign, when he helped his unit survive the horrendous winter.

More than any other experiences, his travels with the army were to enlarge his sensibility and decisively shape the kind of intellectual and writer he would become. It was on his first trip to the Lombard region of Italy, and his encounter with the great city of Milan, that he fell in love with Italy, the warmth of its people and landscape so different from grubby Grenoble. He also became enchanted by the opera buffa or comic opera he attended at La Scala. This experience launched his first literary ambitions, as he tried without success—like many another great prose writer of the century, including Henry James—to be a librettist and dramatist.

Waterloo and the Bourbon restoration did their part, by removing any immediate prospects of government advancement, to form Beyle into the freelance intellectual, Baron de Stendhal, as he would sometimes style himself—partly from the practical need to hide his true identity from royalist Ultras offended at the promiscuous irreverence of his writing (despite his precautions, the Austrian authorities, suspicious of his liberal sympathies, kicked him out of Italy in 1821), but also to will into being a fanciful new identity through which he was free to explore his creative imagination. This new Beyle would become a critic and salonnier extraordinaire, discoursing about all the arts, writing for various magazines, and frequenting the most sophisticated houses in Paris and Milan. He would always prefer the Milanese crowd because of their playful spirit of passionate inquiry, rather than the often spiteful gamesmanship of high Parisian culture. Yet he was no mean game player himself, and would expound his unorthodox opinions in the face of all comers, no matter how impolitic; this won him, understandably, a number of enemies as well as some fascinated admirers and a handful of loyal friends. The frankly admiring Keates does not hide from us Stendhal’s petulance or his unbecoming tendency to badmouth his friends, at least in his journals, where he would record every weakness he saw in others—though no less so his own.

Aside from his occasional journalism, Stendhal also managed to compose several more substantial pieces that drew attention: in particular, a survey of Italian painting, and a life of Rossini—both works larded generously with his own odd judgments and effusions of sensibility refracted through whatever the ostensible subject happened to be; it was not for nothing that even Stendhal could refer to himself as Monsieur Moi-même—no writer of the century would be as candid and as candidly self-involved. But surely the works by which he will still be known into the next century are his extraordinary novels, even if he only finished two. We have already mentioned their defects in the eyes of some—and, to be sure, during his life the novels were to be received at best with polite interest.

It is safe to say that in his obsessive attention to detail, encapsulated nonetheless in a deliberately flat, unrhetorical and unpoetic prose, Stendhal was ahead of his time—for better or worse. Whatever one thinks of the style there are a couple of salient features of his fiction that are undeniable: an acute intelligence shown in his fascination with ideas, even those he despised, and the creation of some of the most magnificent women characters in fiction, who combine passion and sensuality with wit and learning rarely accorded to his men. The latter were in part drawn from life: the frustrated, lifelong bachelor Beyle may never have achieved the felicity of prolonged union with a true soul mate, but he had many fascinating affairs and long intimate friendships with powerful and brilliant women. Such figures as Mathilde, Mademoiselle de la Mole, from Le Rouge et le noir, and the Duchess Sanseverina and Clelia from La Chartreuse de Parme would not have been possible without Beyle’s amorous friendships, but with their thrilling intelligence and unpredictable natures—the frisson created by their air of moral improvisation—they glow on the page unquestionably through Stendhal’s genius.

With the accession of the July Monarchy in 1830, and a new tolerance for liberalism, Beyle’s hopes for comfortable circumstances were once again to be rewarded, again through family connections, and he was given a consulship to his beloved Italy; but owing to continued Hapsburg suspicions he was ultimately posted to the safe yet hopelessly dull, uncultivated Civitavecchia, old capital of the Papal States. He did not exactly thrive there, but it was a productive time for his literary work, as he composed much of the very promising though unfinished Lucien Leuwen, a couple of autobiographical sketches, and then, in a white heat of mad scribbling for six weeks late in 1838, La Chartreuse de Parme. Then his health began to fail, but as he was able to exercise his restless intelligence almost to the very end, Keates avers, and it is a comforting thought one would like to believe, that he found a new kind of peace with himself. He was felled by a second stroke and died in March 1842. Cynical to the end, he thought it unlikely he would be much missed. Happily, he was wrong.