Not Playing Safe

Just finished Book One of The Red and the Black and am beginning to understand why Norman Mailer rated Stendhal so highly. The final chapter sees the deeply ambitious Julien on his way to Paris with the world opening out for him, so he's got no good reason to stop off at Verrieres to do the dirty deed with his former lover Mme de Renal, especially when M de Renal is very much around and hyper-suspicious. But he does - and then sticks around for a whole day and it's all sort of sexy and funny and extremely exciting. Talk about living on the edge!

And there, I assume, lay the appeal for old Norman, a man and writer so used to being on the edge that he fell off it more than once, and spectacularly so. That a man of great gifts might risk it all for the sake of some fleeting encounter with the fundamentally ungraspable is something completely recognised, understood and sort of heroic to Mailer and Stendhal - and all of us via the gifts of insight offered by their fiction.

And I suppose for those of us with far fewer, if any, gifts it's useful to reflect on the degree that we can embrace risk, or at times feel impelled to. I'm keenly aware of my own deep propensity for playing safe, but I like to think I've not been entirely risk-averse, especially in moments that have counted for something. But Julien Sorel takes some beating. Can't wait to read what he gets up to in Book Two.

Also now thinking of revisiting some of Mailer's edgier early novels in the future. The sequence after the brilliant but relatively conventional war novel The Naked and the Dead made for sometimes quite weird but rewarding reading, I seem to remember. Even back in the early 1970s it was tricky getting hold of paperback copies, I assume because they had not sold so well on publication: Barbary Shore, The Dear Park, An American Dream, Why Are We In Vietnam? Punchy stuff. Somewhere along the way I lost all my copies. Hope somebody else enjoyed them.