Berlioz Writing the Life of Berlioz
Pourquoi réflichier?… je n’ai pas de plus mortelle ennemie que la réflexion…
—Berlioz, Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie
He was slender and, in the images we have, seems to have been concerned about his appearance, being well if not always stylishly dressed. But he had few of the attributes that Baudelaire famously attributed to the “dandy,” in particular that “air of frigidity that results from his unshakeable resolve never ever to be moved,” for Berlioz was nothing if not passionately demonstrative of his likes and dislikes. Nor did he possess the family income enjoyed by many members of the advantaged class. But when, in a moment of sobriety during a period of woe, he wrote to his friend Humbert Ferrand, on June 12, 1833, that “my life is a novel that greatly interests me,” he was embodying the dandy’s characteristically defensive psychological strategy as it was later described by Oscar Wilde in chapter 9 of The Picture of Dorian Gray: “To become the spectator of one’s own life […] is to escape the suffering of life.”
In his account of himself, what we might have liked to discover is… sex. Not the undressed reality, not the inconsiderate revelation, but perhaps the confessional intimation, the confidential admission of what is being withheld. What we do discover, and in spades, is love. And humor. And truthfulness, elegance, magnanimity, modesty, brilliance, perceptiveness about himself and others, and countless further virtues that Jacques Barzun well catalogued in his great book of many years ago. But is it not curious that the Mémoires—of a man born in the same year as the creator of Carmen, of a man close to such connoisseurs of women as Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas père and fils, of a man on intimate terms with the great séducteur who was Franz Liszt—should remain almost speechless in the theaters of eroticism and lust?