On Love, by Stendhal

Stendhal's On Love, is a wealth and of delights and prejudices (to steal a phrase from James Beard) on, of course, love and people who love each other. What ideas did I get for stories to write about from his work?

• Story of Hope: a lover dreams of the one he wants instead of accepting life with the one he has. This is a fairly common plot, but it still makes a good story.
  
  
• Romantic Soul: who "walks with loved ones at midnight in a lonely wood." There must be some twist to this conceit that would make an interesting story. Maybe the protagonist travels through the woods to spy on his loved one, or maybe his loved one is dead and buried in a grove of trees, etc.
  
  
• Crystallization: Stendhal writes that the best times to write about love is before it is consummated or after it falls apart. Of course, it could be interesting to write about love once it's consummated, illicitly, and then tearing apart families and relationships and destroying nations.
  
  
• "Jealousy is the last degree of impotent rage and self-contempt which a heart can bear without breaking": Stories of jealous men and women are certainly popular (the movie Basic Instinct). This vein of story telling is not yet worn out!

Stendhal also write about the particular loves of individual cultures, including the culture in Florence, which, according to Stendhal is a society where people's attentions move slowly between subjects (because they are always mentally concentrating on their love passions), everyone is in love and publicly so, no one reads, there no ridicule, and there is much petty pride ("patriotism of the antechamber," he calls it. Such prideful notions as our town painter or our family sculptor). This reminds me of Truman Capote's "Music for Chameleons," where he describes a society where people don't read, fall in love easily, play records that attract chameleons from outdoors, etc.

Here are three longer excerpts to provide an example of his writing (and further ideas for stories):

"A princess of thirty-five, with nothing to do and dogged by the need of action, of intrigue, etc. etc., discontented with a lukewarm lover and yet unable to hope to sow the seeds of another love, with no use to make of the energy which is consuming her, with no other distraction than fits of black humor, can very well find an occupation, that is to say of pleasure, and a life's work, in accomplishing the misfortune of a true passion--passion which someone has to insolence to feel for another than herself, while her own lover falls to sleep at her side." Page 89

"Haughty women disguise their jealousy from pride. They will spend long and dreary evenings in silence with the man whom they adore, and whom they tremble to lose, making themselves consciously disagreeable in his eyes. This must be one of the greatest possible tortures, and is certainly one of the most fruitful sources of unhappiness in love." Page 100

"In passion-love satisfaction, if I can call it such, is often only to be won by piquing the love one's self-esteem. Then, in appearance, the lover realizes all that can be desired; complains would be ridiculous and seem senseless. He cannot speak of his misfortune, and yet how constantly he knows and feels its prick." Page 103

In the third section of his work, Stendhal throws together various ideas and observations regarding love:

• #19: "There is a delicious pleasure in clasping in you’re arms a woman who has wronged you grievously, who has been your bitter enemy for many a day, and is ready to be so again." How many times did Hitchcock use this conceit in his films? What about James Bond?
  
  
• #30: "A respectable woman is in the country and passes an hour in the hot-house with her gardener." The reactions of people are varied: some are offended, some refuse to believe. This idea is rich with story possibilities.
  
  
• #37: "Woman with a heart, if you wish to know whether the man you adore loves you with passion-love, study your lover's early youth." What a story it would be to meld the lives of two people when they were young into the love they have for each other when they are older (or the way their youths set them up to fight each other forever).
  
  
• #40: "No doubt about it--'tis a form of madness to expose oneself to passion-love. In some cases, however, the cure works too energetically…. At Boston, a girl can be left perfectly safely alone with a handsome stranger--in all probability she's thinking of nothing but her marriage settlement." This may be a little harsh regarding Americans, but a love story involving a pre-nuptial agreement, and maybe how easily both parties accepted the agreement at first, and then, in later years, grew apart in ways they never suspected, could be an interesting story of loss and loneliness.
  
  
• #129: "A woman is in despair at the death of her lover, who has been killed in the wars--of course she means to follows him. Now first make quite sure that it is not the best thing for her to do: then, if you decide it is not, attack her on the side of a very primitive habit of the human kind--the desire to survive." This could make an interesting, and moving, story. By attack, I think Stendhal meant to develop the conflict of the story around her will to survive. This quote is also an interesting insight into Stendhal's way of developing story plot--produce a character, and then see how she would react to the circumstances of the story.

Stendhal's classic is fun to read and full of ideas for things to write about. Which would be expected. Love, of course, is one of the universal truths that William Faulkner mentioned in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech as being always worth writing about. Stendhal demonstrates how plentiful, varied and interesting stories about love are.

Literature from the Bible

As Richard Cohen, author of Writer's Mind © 1995, predicted, the Bible is full of ideas for things to write about. At first, I approached it with some trepidation, for fear that it would be difficult to generate topics from lists of proscriptions and retellings of battles, but I had forgotten most of the Bible is comprised of stories, especially the first five books, the Pentateuch.

I read Joseph Frank’s Literature from the Bible presenting selections from the old and new testaments. Here are a few of the sections that interested me and a brief description of the ideas they inspired in me:

• The fall from Eden: Rudyard Kipling’s “Man Who Would be King” about someone who had everything and then lost it all and Henry James’ “Figure in the Carpet” about a man whose obsessive search for knowledge ruined his happiness and alienated those around him.
  
  
• The earth is filled with violence; I will destroy everyone with a flood: Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, where a man takes vengeance on an evil world killing every creature he finds.
  
  
• “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth”: Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw”, or maybe the movie, Bad Seed, where children misbehave and use their imagination for evil purposes.
  
  
• Where Noah was drunk and naked and his children walked in backwards to cover him: A Tennessee Williams story where the children cover for their father’s drunkenness and there are naked family members and incest involved.
  
  
• ”Stranger in a land that is not theirs”: Robert Heinlein used almost that wording to title his book, Stranger in a Strange Land, about a man who returns to a “home” he is a stranger too. The concept seems rich with possibility for inspiring many more stories.
  
  
• Every city Lot stayed in was evil. He went to mountains to live and his daughters slept with him: This seems intriguing in a V. C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic) sort of way.
  
  
• Sarai was barren and Abram slept with their slave instead to bear him a child, Ishmael: This could make a good story describing the repercussions for the family, the child, and their relationship. Ishmael was a wild person. This, too, has interesting potential. Maybe Ishmael can be recreated at a gangster who is fathered by a rich and famous man and whose mother is cast out by friends and family.
  
  
• Absalom avenges his sister and then rises against his father: Faulkner wrote Absalom, Absalom, about just such a young man trying to save his family’s reputation.
  
  
• Books of Isaiah: The heavy descriptions of war with a supernatural component reminded me of the war scenes in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Other books of the Old Testament also spark ideas for things to write about:

• Job: “yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” and “man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble”: Many stories are ultimately about a character being unable to avoid heartache. Aristotle considered such inevitability as essential to true tragedy; the tragic flaw can easily be our human condition.
  
  
• Psalms: “tree is known by its fruit”: I think of All About Eve, a story about people who appear good, but do bad behind the scenes and are ultimately exposed by their actions.
  
  
• Song of Soloman: “I am black but comely, look not upon me because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me”: and the use of the word ‘Beloved’ repeatedly, reminds me of Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name (though maybe not the story). Maybe there are connections with Nora Zeal Hurston’s novels or The Color Purple about finding beauty in oneself.
  
  
• Ecclesiastes: “the sun also rises … what profit from labor, generations come and go, the earth abides for ever”: Hemingway uses the beginning of this text as a title for a book recounting the meaningless wanderings of a ‘lost generation’. There is a lot of existential weight in this selection from Ecclesiastes.
  
  
• Ecclesiastes: “praised the dead, which were already dead, more than the living”: Reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s poems about cruel months, empty streets, anesthetized souls, etc.
  
  
• Ecclesiastes: “there is a just man that perish in his righteousness and there is a wicked man that prolong his life in his wickedness”: Sounds exactly like a Twilight Zone episode.

The New Testament, also, is rich in ideas. I read the Gospel of John and sections from Acts and Corinthians to pull examples from:

• “Blessed art though among women”: Describes the beauty of woman when they are pregnant (as well as this special circumstance where she is pregnant with Christ). Faulkner’s in Light in August presents a woman who is centered, contented, and glowing as she wanders about the book pregnant.
  
  
• The temptation in the wilderness: Reminds me of movies like Jacob’s Ladder or Stir of Echoes where visions and demons tempt one’s convictions and sense of reality. Our modern world could be considered the wilderness.
  
  
• "The spirit of the lord is upon me, because he heath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor and preach deliverance to the captives”: This is Flannery O’Connor meets Joseph Conrad: her short stories of traveling salesman and religious converts and his stories about godless natives and the people who would change them. Many powerful potentials here.
  
  
• "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; what is a man advantaged if he gain the whole world and lose himself”: Reminds me of the Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Corey.”
  
  
• Story of man fallen among thieves who is helped by the Samaritan: E. E. Cummings wrote a poem about this text and goes quite a ways far afield modifying the original text to alter its emotional depth:
  

  a man who had fallen among thieves
  lay by the roadside on his back
  dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
  wearing a round jeer for a hat
  
  fate per a somewhat more than less
  emancipated evening
  had in return for consciousness
  endowed him with a changeless grin
  
  whereon a dozen staunch and Meal
  citizens did graze at pause
  then fired by hypercivic zeal
  sought newer pastures or because
  
  swaddled with a frozen brook
  of pinkest vomit out of eyes
  which noticed nobody he looked
  as if he did not care to rise
  
  one hand did nothing on the vest
  its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
  while the mute trouserfly confessed
  a button solemnly inert.
  
  Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
  i put him all into my arms
  and staggered banged with terror through
  a million billion trillion stars

• "Woe unto hypocrites for ye are as graves which appear not and the men that walk over them are not aware of them": This looks very promising. Maybe it’s the stuff of a movie that Joan Crawford would star in about someone who consumes other people. Is it The Devil Wears Prada?
  
  
• "What is spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light": Reminds me of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf or William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof where secrets that cannot stay hidden are revealed in tempestuous scene after scene.
  
  
• "What king goes to rule war against another king, sitteth not down first and consulteth whether he need ten-thousand or twenty-thousand others with him": We are infinitely interested in the machinations of kings. For instance Shakespeare’s plays and the movies A Lion in Winter and A Man for All Seasons are about the doings of, and decision made by, kings.
  
  
• Acts: where Saul Is called to preach: Joseph Frank points out that there are similarities with Cervantes' Don Quixote.
  
  
• Corinthians: Example of theological arguments and the early writings of a convert, much like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations or Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.

Chapter 3 - What to Write About

In Chapter 3 of Writer's Mind © 1995, Richard Cohen discusses what to write about. He lists topics he calls the big subjects: birth, passage to adulthood, love, marriage, work, illness, war, accident, death and he topics he calls institutional subjects: a journey, a prison stay, a job, a school year, a exploration, a life span. The institutional subjects tend to have built in time spans; the story about a journey is defined by and around the timeline for that journey.

Cohen also describes why it is easier to write about unhappy, rather than joyful, events. He says, “Fiction is a magic device for turning pain into joy” and gives this transformation a name: tsuris, a Yiddish word for pain, suffering and trouble. He encourages exploring topics, giving them a chance to see if they develop into stories or not and provides a number of sources for ideas for stories.

This chapter, I’m going to try a slightly different approach to review the works on the bookshelf. Instead of looking at the ways, and how well, each book accomplishes what Cohen describes, I’m going to present ideas for things to write about that the book inspired.

The bookshelf for this chapter is:

• Great Literature from the Bible edited by Joseph Frank
  
• Writer's Block and How to Use It by Victoria Nelson, and
  
• de l'Amour by Stendhal and translated by Philip Sidney Woolf and Cecil Sidney Woolf