A Miller’s Son

Just north of Wiarton, Ontario, a county road splits off from Highway 6, runs east along Colpoy’s Bay, then swerves north toward Purple Valley, where my father owned a sawmill and where I spent long days of my youth piling lumber. Sometimes, if an employee did not show up for his shift, I was kept home from school to replace him. “You don’t work, you don’t eat,” my father growled. During lulls, I read whatever I could get my hands on. Circa 1976, when I was fifteen, I eased the boredom of manual labour with Chinaberry, a cheesy historical bestseller, and Jaws, because the movie had made it notorious. I memorized passages from The Merchant of Venice and declaimed them against the clatter of edgers and trimmers.

Stendhal’s The Red and the Black should have figured on my sawmill list. Had I read it as an adolescent, I might have better understood thwarted ambition, social mobility, and the value of hypocrisy. It wasn’t for lack of trying. In my early twenties, I started the 1830 novel several times, but I never made it beyond chapter 4, when Julien Sorel, a provincial lad, is beaten by his father for reading instead of keeping an eye on the machinery in their sawmill. During the tussle, which leaves Julien stunned and bleeding, his illiterate, money-grubbing parent knocks his book into a stream.

I could read no further.

In my later twenties, I made another attempt to read Stendhal’s chronicle of French society in the 1820s. I was in graduate school, where intellectual posturing ran rampant. My peers never admitted they were reading anything for the first time, as if they had imbibed Ulysses or Bleak House with their mother’s milk and were merely expanding their acquaintance. Stendhal’s name was often dropped in these conversations, usually with regard to his definition of a novel as a mirror moving along a highway, a definition put forward by the garrulous narrator of The Red and the Black.

When I recently returned to Robert M. Adams’s translation of Stendhal’s classic, it was not as fearsome as I expected, despite its passages about clashes among royalists, liberals, clergymen, and the bourgeoisie over who would control France. Julien is a precocious rube. Able to recite long Biblical passages in Latin, he tutors the three sons of Monsieur de Rênal, the mayor of Verrières. Too gauche to know better, he kisses Madame de Rênal’s hand when they first meet. They have a passionate love affair — he is nineteen, she is ten years older — that involves ladders, moonlight, and “transports of uncontrollable joy.” After some dull months in a seminary in Besançon, he moves to Paris to become secretary to the Marquis de La Mole. Julien’s contemptuous silences impress his employer’s daughter, Mathilde, who views them as a sign of originality. More ladders. More moonlight. Pregnancy. Potshots at Madame de Rênal. Prison. Recriminations. A return of the greedy father, who tells Julien that he should pony up for the cost of the food and education he received as a child. A court case, tears, the guillotine, et cetera.

Before he arrives at the scaffold, everyone predicts a brilliant future for Julien. He is aflame with ambition but hesitates over which career to pursue. He thinks he might join the army, then recalls that the heyday of soldiering ended a decade earlier with the defeat of Napoleon. His friend Fouqué tries to persuade him to become a lumber trader, but Julien worries that he would not be able to sustain “the sacred fire with which one makes oneself a name.” He cannot make up his mind. He wants recognition; he loves solitude. He believes in destiny; he commits himself to chance. (The title refers to the colours of a roulette wheel or chessboard.) “Our hero simply lacked the audacity to be sincere,” summarizes the narrator, whose ironic jabs at Julien are one of the enduring delights of the novel.

Being young and out to impress, Julien strikes attitudes. The “gloomy arrogance of his glance” demonstrates his disdain for social distinctions. He tries too hard. As he scrambles up social rungs like a pirate scaling the rigging of a ship, various father figures instruct him in the arts of dissimulation. “Never show any enthusiasm,” one hypocritical priest tells him. In a world where appearances determine destiny, he should hide his true ambitions instead of announcing them. A jovial Russian man tells Julien to stop being so melancholy because it proves he lacks something: “It is admitting your inferiority.” It’s good advice. If only Julien would follow it.