Garrison Romance

LUCIEN LEUWEN (BOOK ONE: THE GREEN HUNTSMAN) (388 pp.) -- Henri Beyle [Stendhal]--Translated by Louise Varese--New Directions ($3.50).

A major work by a great French novelist is making its first appearance in English. But because of curious circumstances and the laggard energy for which publishers are noted, there has been a slight delay of 115 years between French composition and English publication. This is how it happened:

Henri Beyle, who used the nom de plume of Stendhal, wrote Lucien Leuwen between 1834 and 1836, while he was French consul (for the regime of King Louis Philippe) at Civitavecchia, Italy. Since the novel is, in parts, a Louis-Philippie and a mock of constitutional monarchy ("a halt in the mud"), it could not safely be published while the author was "eating off the Budget." Stendhal therefore was in no hurry to get on with it, and died before he finished the job. First published as a whole in 1894, five decades after Stendhal's death. Lucien was acclaimed in France as a "third masterpiece" from the author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma.

Yet for the next 56 years, no U.S. or British publisher felt any responsibility to bring the masterpiece to English readers.

New Directions has done it at last--by halves. The Green Huntsman, Book One of the novel, is now issued in a good translation by Louise Varese; Book Two, The Telegraph, is scheduled for this fall.

Surface Scraping. The Green Huntsman is the account of what happens to a -wealthy young Parisian of republican sympathies and aristocratic tastes during a tour as a second lieutenant of lancers in the provincial city of Nancy. From one of Stendhal's many points of view, the book is a simple daguerreotype of provincial French society of the 18305. A tilt of his head and the author's all-but-invisible monocle glitters in mockery of that society. Another glance flickers derisively over the monarchists; the republicans are next, and so on to the army, the middle class, the official mentality.

Slowly it grows on the reader that Stendhal, like a careful appraiser, is quietly scraping a little surface off everyone in sight, revealing the true metal beneath. Yet as the book advances, Stendhal is more than a carping social critic. He is an ironist; and above all he is a novelist using irony to tell a love story, which is both a tragic and a comic one.

In his garrison town, Lucien falls in love with a great-eyed, high-minded young widow of noble birth named Bathilde de Chasteller. Bathilde soon loves him too, but is too proud to fall into the arms which Lucien is too shy to open. At the end, a rabble of nobility, jealous of Lucien's success with the wealthy widow they want for themselves, conspires to mount a gruesome charade. It convinces Lucien that his innocent lady love has had an illegitimate child by another man. Heartbroken, he rushes back to Paris, utterly unaware that he has been japed.

Heart Surgery. Stendhal's unfinished canvas is a little scratchy in spots. And there are a few major flaws. The biggest : Stendhal introduces supporting characters like platoons of potted palms, and stands them clumsily about this drawing room or that, making small use of them, and mighty little decoration. Still, they constitute an interesting early experiment in the gaseous diffusion process, which Proust was later to perfect, of suggesting a whole society by the rapid, apparently meaningless circulation of a number of its particles.

What raises the book almost to the level of Stendhal's other work is the skillful operation by which the author lays back the tissue of Lucien's happy, unhappy heart. By the end of the operation, it is a cold reader who will not agree with Balzac, who found in Stendhal an unmatched talent for describing "passion in all its glory."

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