Waiting for the Barbarians (29 page)

Fabrice is hardly the only vivid and oddly contemporary character here; you could easily argue—many have—that the real heroes are his aunt and her lover. Master political and social puppeteers, they are far more complicated and interesting than the young man they spend so much time trying, in vain, to establish in an adult life—even as, with Laclos-like sangfroid, they try to stage-manage some contentment of their own. (Mosca to Gina: “We might find a new and not unaccommodating husband. But first of all, he would have to be extremely advanced in years, for why should you deny me the hope of eventually replacing him?”) This is one reason why
Charterhouse
tends to appeal to our maturity, whereas Stendhal’s 1830 masterpiece,
The Red and the Black
, with its endlessly striving, morally casual young antihero, appeals to our youth.

Gina, in particular, is one of the great creations of the nineteenth-century novelistic imagination: brilliant, flirtatious, cunning, vulnerable, passionate, extraordinarily self-aware, and yet helplessly the prey of a forbidden passion for her beautiful nephew. We first meet her at the age of thirteen, trying to stifle a giggle at the ragged appearance of a Napoleonic officer who’s been billeted in her brother’s opulent palace (the Frenchman, Stendhal hints, is Fabrice’s natural father), and from that moment we’re never quite able to take our eyes off this woman who, despite her exalted social position and the Racinian dilemma she finds herself in, is never less than fully, sometimes comically, human. (“Will you for once behave like a man with a brain?” she writes to an admirer.) Mosca, too, who in the perfect, inevitable geometry of unrequited love hopelessly adores Gina in a way he knows will never be reciprocated, is an intricate creation, complex and conflicted in his public as well as his private life (we’re
told that this leader of the ultraconservative party started out, like his creator, as a Bonapartist) and the victim of erotic passions that grip him, in Stendhal’s vivid locution, “like a cramp.”

The novel’s headlong narrative momentum, and the refreshingly real emotions of its acutely self-conscious characters, are clearly the work of a man who, like his young hero, rebelled in his youth against his stultifyingly conventional family, a man who wanted to be known as an artist and lover of women. (Stendhal’s epitaph, in Italian, which he composed while still in his thirties, reads: “He lived. He wrote. He loved.”) But
Charterhouse
is just as much the work of a seasoned diplomat only too familiar with the compromises that adult life imposes. The author’s older voice comes through in the fate he chooses for his characters: by the end of the book Fabrice, solitary in the religious retreat to which the book’s title refers, has died, still very young, having inadvertently caused the deaths of both Clelia (by now married off to another man) and their illegitimate child, the victims of a harebrained kidnapping plot gone horribly wrong; Gina follows him to the grave not long after. Only Mosca, the sole character who governs his passions successfully, survives.

So, like its creator, the novel is part Fabrice and part Mosca. Or, to put it another way, it contains the best qualities of its contemporary French rivals: it has the headlong plottiness of Balzac, complete with assassinations, forged papers, disguises, and politically motivated self-prostitutions, and also the elaborate, almost glacial self-consciousness of Flaubert. In other words, it’s got something for everyone.

None of the English versions of
Charterhouse
currently available is inadequate—least of all that of C.K. Scott-Moncrieff, the great
translator of Proust, whose 1925 version was the Modern Library’s predecessor to the new edition and is still remarkably readable. But because language itself changes, even the best renderings of any work stop sounding modern after a while; and precisely because of its narrative momentum and the contemporary-seeming predicaments of its characters,
Charterhouse
needs to sound modern. This, Howard’s translation does. First and most important, it moves with admirable rapidity, fully conveying what James called the “restlessness” of Stendhal’s “superior mind” by means of a number of subtle but quite concrete choices on Howard’s part, not least of which is his rendering of French verbs more crisply and colloquially than has been done before. (In the great Waterloo scene, for instance, Stendhal’s
sabrer
becomes “cut down,” which is better and faster than Margaret Mauldon’s long-winded “killed by a saber-cut” in the 1997 Oxford Classics version and yet more natural than Scott-Moncrieff’s “sabred.”)

Accuracy, however, is never sacrificed; this
Charterhouse
is filled with small and ingenious grace notes that are just right, and that you suspect Howard had a lot of fun working out. When Marshal Ney reprimands a subordinate at Waterloo, he “chews him out”—a rendering that, for once, gives the sense of the French verb
gourmander
, which can mean, as it does here, “to reprimand,” while wittily capitalizing, with just the right masticatory note, on its resemblance to “gourmand.” (In other renderings this is either under- or overtranslated, from the blah “telling off” in Mauldon to the nonsensically literal “chewing up” in Scott-Moncrieff to the rather overbearingly Julia Childesque “making mincemeat out of” in Margaret Shaw’s 1958 Penguin Classics version.) My one reservation concerns Howard’s decision to give the Italian versions of the names instead of the French—Fabrizio instead of the text’s Fabrice, for instance—which obscures the important narrative conceit that this whole tale is one
we’re hearing from a Frenchman who has, in turn, heard it from Italians who knew the principals. It is a book about Italians, but one seen through French eyes.

Howard’s briskness and wit serve just as well in conveying the other side of
Charterhouse
: the very French manner that Proust referred to as Stendhal’s “Voltairean,” “eighteenth-century style of irony.” At the novel’s opening, Stendhal makes a passing but pointed reference to the fate of a group of 150 liberals illegally imprisoned by the conservative faction to which Fabrice’s father belongs: “Soon they were deported to the bocche di Cattaro, where, flung into underground caves, humidity and especially lack of bread rendered a summary justice.” Earlier translations show how easy it is to flub the small but pointed wit here. Mary Loyd’s 1901 version—“where damp and, especially, starvation wreaked prompt and thorough justice”—misses the joke altogether, steamrolling Stendhal’s deliciously dry and oblique “lack of bread” and indignantly overtranslating the word that Howard more properly and dryly gives as “rendered.”

Howard understands that Stendhal’s style is inextricable from his substance—the speed from the passion, the irony from the worldliness—and so he gives you Stendhal’s style whole, with no touching up. Reread Howard’s translation of the line about the murdered liberals; at first glance you’d think it was the humidity and lack of bread that were flung into the bocche di Cattaro. Rightly, Howard reproduces the feel of Stendhal’s French, even at the price of the occasional syntactical clunker. Balzac, hardly the most polished of stylists, complained about Stendhal’s sloppy grammar, a fault about which the latter was deliciously unapologetic, preferring as he did a conversational naturalness and ease to the geometric perfections of
le siècle classique
. In the very first entry in his journals, dated April 18, 1801, when the author was eighteen, he makes a mistake, but displays a nonchalance on the subject of grammar that will provide retroactive
vindication to anyone who struggled through the pluperfect subjunctive in eleventh grade: “There will be a lot more, because I’m making it a rule not to stand on ceremony and never to erase.”

Public ceremonies alternating with private mistakes; battles with banquets; stateliness with speed, epic scope with journalistic detail; loves unrequited and passions disastrously indulged; idealism and cynicism; the giddy heedlessness of self-satisfied youth and the sad wisdoms of old age; the minutes you remember in detail and the three-year chunks you completely forget. The grandeur and the messiness, the magnificence and the mistakes. No wonder Giraudoux’s young infantryman felt he had to know
Charterhouse
. What else would the dead want but what you find so much of in this novel—and in this new translation more than ever before—which is, in a word, life?

—The New York Times Book Review
, August 29, 1999

WHATEVER OTHERS MAY
have thought of the novels of Theodor Fontane—and the long-standing consensus is that they are, as one scholar of German literature has noted, “the most completely achieved of any written between Goethe and Thomas Mann”—Fontane himself clearly thought that they were pretty unexciting. To his mind,
L’Adultera
(1882), one of the studies of tormented heroines on which his present-day reputation rests, was primarily about “the circumstantial and the scenery.” He characterized
The Poggenpuhls
(1896), the story of an aristocratic family frantically maneuvering to extract itself from genteel poverty, as a book that “is not a novel and has no subject-matter.” In May 1898, a few months before he died, at the age of seventy-eight, he wrote a letter rather wearily describing
The Stechlin
, the unusually “pudgy” tome (most of his fiction is bracingly short) that was the last work he lived to see published:

Even Fontane’s characters are plagued by a certain anxiety about having nothing very exciting to talk about. In
Cécile
(1887), a novel about a good woman trying in vain to bury a bad past, a group of tourists in the Harz Mountains are taken around a medieval castle; unnerved by a visitor’s embarrassment that there’s not much to look at, the tour guide “rapidly resumed his lecture in the hope of compensating by narrative skill for the lack of visible items of interest.”

Compensating by narrative skill for the lack of visible interest is an excellent way to sum up both the strangeness and the beauty of Fontane’s fiction. The topography of his plots is, for the most part, as flat and monotonous as the notoriously bland landscape of his Prussian homeland, Brandenburg (about which he lovingly wrote in a multivolume work). Most of
Cécile
is devoted to the excursions and the chitchat of those hapless tourists. There’s some gossiping, a halfhearted flirtation, and then everyone goes home to Berlin; the revelation of Cécile’s sexually compromised early life arrives agonizingly late in the novel, and the denouement, as often in Fontane, is swift, efficient, and a little surprising. In
Jenny Treibel
(1892), a wry social comedy with darker political overtones, a young woman makes a play for the son of the self-absorbed title character, one of the nouveaux riches bourgeois—a class much loathed by Fontane—who dominated German society after Bismarck unified the nation; after the girl has done a good deal of scheming, her plan simply fizzles out. (Fontane loves to create plots in which the characters’ own plots never quite work; for all the Poggenpuhls’ agonized machinations, what saves them in the end is a fortuitous event.)

And in
Effi Briest
(1895), considered by many to be Fontane’s masterpiece, the suffocating dreariness of the young heroine’s provincial existence is brilliantly conveyed precisely because the author isn’t afraid to be dreary himself; by the time you’ve got through a few dozen pages in the Baltic town of Kessin, accompanied by Effi’s excruciatingly correct, “frosty as a snowman” husband, you’ll feel like breaking down in tears, too. Fontane’s taste for withholding action, or at least delaying it improbably, is evident in the novel’s most famous feature, a structural gambit of daring subtlety: the frustrated Effi’s brief affair with a womanizing officer is never actually described—and is only discovered many years later, when she and her husband have settled comfortably into their marriage. (His pursuit of revenge is thus rendered all the more appalling—an effective vehicle for condemning ludicrous codes of masculine “honor.”)

When “excitement and surprises” do occur in a Fontane novel, it’s usually when the book is nearly over. The death, or suicide, or marriage, or resignation in the face of overwhelming social or familial pressure is a culminating little bump in the otherwise long, smooth, and highly scenic road. (Fontane features more suicides than any other German writer of his century; even these are characteristically quiet.)

At first glance, it’s hard to reconcile the sparseness of Fontane’s plots, the way he prefers to linger over what he calls “the circumstantial,” with the extravagant emotions his work has provoked in so many critics and writers over the years. (Thomas Mann: “No writer of the past or the present awakens in me the sympathy and gratitude, the unconditional and instinctive delight, the immediate amusement and warmth and satisfaction that I feel in every verse, in every line of one of his letters, in every snatch of his dialogue.”) The key lies in his understated narrative style, in his paradoxically powerful “discretion,” as some critics have called it: a gift for obliquity, for knowing
what to leave out, and above all for letting the reader “overhear” the speech of his characters, rather than paraphrasing it for us—the last being a particularly effective alternative to the psychologizing observations of an omniscient narrator. It is this skill at delineating character through dialogue—one early scholar of Fontane’s work calls a scene in
Effi Briest
“the greatest conversation scene in the German novel”—that creates the sense of intimacy that his novels have, the sense that you’re in there with his characters: the attractive but somehow desperate wives, yearning for recognition in a society dominated by masculine and military codes; the minor nobles, hardworking seamstresses, and disdained intellectuals trying to keep their dignity in a world destabilized by the materialism and the militarism of Bismarck’s Second Reich.