A Natural History of Love (18 page)

STENDHAL MEETS THE DEEP SOUTH

A special irony in the history of mind and heart is that wise people don’t always act wisely in their own lives. Novelists, blessed with insight about the psychology of their characters, may not be equally intuitive with friends, or with themselves. Lofty thinkers often become petty and obsessive when they’re at home. Even charismatic and inspiring world leaders sometimes secretly suffer from depression, or enjoy being degraded and dominated in the boudoir. We credit famous people with unwavering moods, good character, and a lifestyle defined by their genius. The usual truth—that they are as human, insecure, and neurotic as the rest of us—always comes as a shock, which public opinion rarely forgives. To my mind, it doesn’t matter that Freud was part of a ménage à trois, or that Havelock Ellis liked women to pee during sex, or that Churchill used to get down on all fours, pad over to his wife’s bedroom door, and meow like a tomcat. But I may be unusual in this. Most people expect their heroes to be flawless. I feel greatness is something that otherwise normal people rise to. Although their genius separates them from the rest of humanity, only their genius is different. Indeed, they may well have devised an intricate web of coping mechanisms to deal with that genius. We forget that highly attuned people are also highly sensitive to slight, self-doubt, and rejection.

Marie Henri Beyle (Stendhal) was just such an artist. Insightful as he was about human nature in his novels, in real life he plunged deeper and deeper in love with a woman who just toyed with him. Her rejection was a constant knife wound. And yet he couldn’t break his obsession. Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski was, at twenty-eight, a beautiful Milanese mother of two, who had separated from her Polish husband, and was active in Italian revolutionary politics. In 1818, Stendhal fell vertiginously in love. She never returned his feelings, or understood him. During the winter of his discontent, she grew colder and colder; even rationing him to one short visit every two weeks. She didn’t refuse him entirely; she saw him just often enough to keep his hopes alive. Her power over him must have excited her beyond measure. In time, Stendhal fled to England to avoid arrest, and Mathilde died at the age of thirty-five. He wrote about her longingly for the rest of his life, and during her lifetime went to extraordinary lengths to deal with his ill-favored love for her.

In his famous book
On Love
(
De l’Amour
), Stendhal used a code name for Mathilde, and attributed to other men what in fact had happened to him. Not even his friends knew that he was writing about himself, or that he was limbering up his heart and focusing his creative energies in an effort to win Mathilde’s esteem. Perhaps he also felt that by analyzing his passion, by trying to understand the nature of love, he might be able to break its stranglehold. Before you can exorcise demons you must name them.

He begins the book by explaining that there are four kinds of love: “Mannered Love,” “Physical Love,” “Vanity-Love,” and, the highest of all, “Passionate Love”—a romantic, all-consuming, death-defying feeling that doesn’t need to be returned. This was a state Stendhal knew only too well. Mathilde kept him so off balance that, on the rare occasions they were together, he felt too much pressure to be charming. As a result, he would as often as not become clumsy and tongue-tied, or gabble ridiculously, or say something tactless. He must have seemed pathetic to her. His desire for her was hopeless, even mortifying at times, fed by the illusion that somehow she would ultimately return his love. One November day in 1819, he decided to reveal himself to her in a poised, artful way—as he never could do in person. He would write a novel called
Métilde
. A few weeks later, he hatched a different idea, something bolder, to write a “physiology of love” which would speak on several levels. To the general reader, it would be a profound work of intuitive perception; to Mathilde, it would be a personal appeal. In it, he calls her Léonore, and refers to himself as “a young man of my acquaintance,” but she would recognize both of them, since he quotes her word for word and refers to events in her life. So, although millions of readers have turned to the book for general truths about love, and found it illuminating, it was written about one tormented man’s unfulfilled love for one woman.

Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
had been published the year before, and there was something of that sensitive, underestimated freak in Stendhal, who lived on the outskirts of Mathilde’s bungalow and would stare longingly through the window at her cheerful hearth, knowing that he was repugnant in her eyes.

Stendhal is also reminiscent of a character in Carson McCullers’s
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
. McCullers was only twenty-four when she wrote her novel filled with lonely hearts. The main character, Mr. Singer, though deaf and dumb, is loud with love he can’t make anyone hear. The adolescent heroine, Mick, is desperate for acceptance from her peers, but feels isolated. Everyone in the novel hunts for love in one form or another—stalking it, misfiring at it, sitting quietly in wait behind a carefully constructed blind. Some fire at shadows. Some have infallible aim. But most are like planets in orbit around others—bound together by the gravity of the human condition, trailing in one another’s wake, but doomed never to touch. Many of the characters are invalids or handicapped in some way, as McCullers herself would become five years later, when, at twenty-nine, muscular dystrophy imprisoned her in a wheelchair, where she would remain until she died at the age of fifty. She was relegated to the bleachers for most of her life, watching the able-bodied on the field of play. It made her especially sensitive to hidden infirmities. Her characters are consumed by their own private cancers, or severed from life. None can see the suffering of the other. Each is on a lonely trajectory through life, which they long to share, long to explain, but they can find no one with whom to connect. Mr. Singer appears the sanest, yet is the most alienated because he cannot even speak with other humans. He is like a trapeze artist swinging out over an abyss; ultimately he gives up hope of finding another pair of hands waiting to catch him, and he just lets go. Stendhal would have felt right at home in this circus of high-wire loneliness and lovesickness.

His investigation of love is a small anatomy of obsession. He talks about the paralyzing shyness one feels in the presence of the beloved; how important it is to act naturally—but also how difficult; the way the beloved’s kind words can render one speechless; how the alternating current of hope and despair can fry one’s nerves; the way the most trivial gesture or word can devastate a lover one moment and cause bliss the next; how music can convey the wordless depths of love; love’s power to whitewash the true nature of the beloved; and the pitilessness of self-doubt and self-consciousness that savage one’s heart. Ever the taxonomist, he describes seven stages of falling in love: First one admires. Then one hopes the feeling will be returned. When hope combines with admiration, love is born, and the senses awaken to the joy of touching, seeing, talking with the beloved. The next stage includes one of his key ideas, what he terms “crystallization,” the tendency for someone in love to idealize the beloved, imagining him or her to be finer and nobler than any other human being. It is “a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.” He labels it crystallization because it reminds him of the way crystals form on twigs in the salt mines. The miners throw a bare bough into an abandoned shaft and when they pull it out two or three months later they find it encrusted with glittering salt crystals. “The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable.” After crystallization, doubt creeps in, and dreadful misgiving, as the lover demands proof after proof of affection. (Men and women doubt different things, he explains. The man doubts if he can attract the woman and cause her really to love him. The woman doubts the man’s sincerity and reliability; perhaps he is just interested in sex and will quickly desert her.) When doubt is overcome, “the second crystallization” occurs, with the mind imagining every act as a proof of love. At this stage, the opposite of being in love is death. If the idealized person should leave, the mournful lover assumes it was his fault, and that, through his own bungling, happiness is lost forever. There is no consolation. Depression deadens every light thought. The mind can no longer attach the idea of pleasure to any pleasurable activity. Stendhal writes: “This is the optical illusion which leads to the fatal pistol shot.”

Stendhal also details the role played by the involuntary memory. An object or sensation can unexpectedly remind one powerfully of the beloved. The reason for this, he argues, is that when you are with a lover you are too focused and wrought up to notice the world around you; instead all you are aware of are sensations. At a later time, encountering an object you’d forgotten was relevant, you relive the sensations. Pretending to be reading from a friend’s diary, a man for whom “passion was the first real course in logic he had ever taken,” he relates his own torment:

Love has reduced me to a condition of misery and despair, and I curse my very existence. I can take no interest in anything…. Every print on the wall, every stick of furniture, reproaches me for the happiness I dreamed of in this room, and which is now lost for ever.

I strode through the streets under a cold rain; chance, if you can call it chance, led me past her windows. Night was falling, and as I walked by, my tear-filled eyes fixed upon the window of her room. Suddenly the curtain was lifted for a moment, as if for a glimpse of the square outside, and then it quickly fell back into place. I felt a spasm at my heart. I could no longer hold myself up, and took refuge in a neighboring portico. My feelings were running riot; it might of course have been a chance movement of the curtain; but suppose it had been her hand that lifted it!

There are only two miseries in life; the misery of the unrequited passion, and that of the DEAD BLANK.

In love, I have the feeling that boundless happiness beyond my wildest dreams is just round the corner, waiting only for a word or a smile.

Without a passion … I can find no happiness anywhere, and begin to doubt whether it is in store for me at all….

Growing sour, he laments that it would be better if he had been born without passion, merely possessing a mild heart in calm weather. But like a dog circling and circling before it can peacefully lie down, he returns again and again to the addictive, replenishing power of love, which gives to life a “mysterious and sacred glow.” As he leaves his “friend’s” diary, he continues on with his treatise, inventing such wise adages as:
Sixteen is an age which thirsts for love and is not excessively particular about what beverage chance may provide
. Or:
A long siege humiliates a man, but ennobles a woman
. Or:
Glances are the big guns of the virtuous coquette; everything can be conveyed in a look
. His psychological wisdom weathers well today. He understands, for instance, how the past molds our choice of a partner: “You have conceived an ideal without knowing it. One day you come across someone not unlike this ideal; crystallization … consecrates for ever to the master of your destiny what you have dreamt of for so long.” He notes that “The loves of two people in love with each are seldom the same. Passionate love has its phases, when first one partner and then the other will be more in love.” Some people, “loving on credit,” as he puts it, “will hurl themselves upon the experience instead of waiting for it to happen.” Women didn’t have much control in his society, and he writes, from personal experience: “A woman’s power lies only in the degree of unhappiness with which she can punish her lover.”

For Stendhal, the essence of love is fantasy. We fall in love with gods and goddesses of our devising. We never see them clearly. We never know the forces that drove us to them, but we are predisposed to love them. Indeed, one’s choice of lover is formed by the early experiences of one’s life, and it is but a matter of time before one meets someone who fits the preexisting mold.

Fear, too, is crucial to love. Certainty, familiarity, complacency—they all lead to pleasant relationships of companionship and goodwill, but not to the feverish adventure of being in love. Unlike many later thinkers, who describe love as an emotional event that takes place between two people, Stendhal argues that love is a solitary feeling, which exists whether it is returned or not. An ardent feminist, Stendhal didn’t condemn all women for Mathilde’s cruelty, or even blame her overmuch. It was his own fault that she didn’t love him. Yet he didn’t regret the mad catastrophe of his feelings. Even in its unrequited form, love rewarded him with ambition, imagination, and vigor. It gave a sense of enterprise to each day, filling his daydreams with beauty and hiding his worst nightmares behind a veil of possibility.