Campaign for the American Reader: Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Charterhouse of Parma"

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Charterhouse of Parma"

D.W. Buffa's recent novel is The Privilege, the ninth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. The tenth, Lunatic Carnival, will be published in the spring. He has also just published Neumann's Last Concert, the fourth novel in a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, finally, America in the Twentieth Century.

Buffa writes a monthly review for the Campaign for the American Reader that we're calling "Third Reading." Buffa explains. "I was reading something and realized that it was probably the third time that I knew it well

enough to write something about it. The first is when I read it when I was in college or in my twenties, the second, however many years later, when I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered, and the third when I knew I was going to have to write about it."

Buffa's "Third Reading" of Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma begins:

Marie-Henri Beyle wrote under the name Stendhal on his two most famous books, The Red and The Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. No one reads Stendhal anymore, but he was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite authors. Kennedy, like Churchill, read history and everything else important, and tried to learn from what he read. Beyle wanted to be involved in great events, and because he was the nephew of “the famous and industrious Daru, one of the strong arms of Napoleon,” he was not only “in the Emperor’s service,” but followed him to Italy, witnessed the battle of Marengo, enlisted in a dragoon regiment, and became adjutant to General Michaud.

Like Fabrizio, the main character in The Charterhouse of Parma, Beyle was frequently undone by women. After the peace of Amiens in l802, he returned to Paris to study, met an actress and followed her to Marseilles. His father cut off his money, and Beyle was forced to work as a clerk to a grocer. It is not known whether the actress was impressed by this sacrifice; it is known that she left him immediately to run off and marry a Russian. Whether this broke his heart, or merely cleared his mind, Beyle returned to Paris and from l806 until the fall of Napoleon served in the Grand Army’s commissariat. In l822, he wrote his first book, Essay on Love, which sold all of seventeen copies in eleven years. The Red and The Black, which he wrote in l830, did not do much better, and, in fact, the only thing he ever wrote that had any popular success was The Charterhouse of Parma, his last novel, published in l839, three years before his death.

The novel was read in manuscript - read three times - by Honoré de Balzac who then wrote a review of nearly seventy pages in which he insisted that The Charterhouse of Parma was far too great to ever attract much of an audience. Stendhal had, in his judgment, “written The Prince up to date, the novel that Machiavelli would write if he were living banished from Italy in the nineteenth century.” A novel like this, wrote Balzac, “can...[read on]

About Buffa's new novel Neumann’s Last Concert, from the publisher:

Neumann’s Last Concert is a story about music and war and the search for what led to the greatest evil in modern history. It is the story of an American boy, Wilfred Malone, who lost his father in the early days of the Second World War and a German refugee, Isaac Neumann, the greatest concert pianist of his age when he lived in Berlin, but who now lives, anonymous and alone, in a single rented room in a small town a few miles from San Francisco.

Wilfred has a genius for the piano, “a keen curiosity not yet corrupted by vanity” and “a memory that forgot nothing essential.” Neumann, alone in his room, is constantly writing, an endless labyrinth of questions and answers, driving him farther and farther back into the past, searching for the causes, searching for the meaning, of what happened in Germany, trying to understand what had led him, a German Jew, to stay in Germany when he could have left but instead continued to perform right up to the night that during his last concert they took his wife away.

Neumann’s Last Concert is a novel about the great catastrophe of the 20th century and the way in which music, great music, preserves both the hope of human decency amidst the carnage of human insanity and the possibility of what human beings might still accomplish.