BOOKS OF THE DAY
Proust Again
The Mind of Proust . A Detailed Interpretation of 44A la Recherche du Temps Perdu." By F. C. Green. (Cambridge Universit% Press. I ss.) The Veiled Wanderer. By Princess Marthe Itibe.co. Translated from the French by Roland Gant. (Falcon Press. 7s. 6d.) IF there ever was a slump in the appreciation pf Proust, it did not last long ; even the automatic scaling down that comes after the death of a celebrated writer seems to have been spared him. In Paris, M. Maurois has just published an extremely interesting bio- graphical-critical study, nourished by many new letters and docu- ments ; Princess Bibesco has published a slight but charming collection of letters and recollections, and the Drapers' Professor of French at Cambridge has produced a study of over five hundred pages on the meaning of the great novel. In a world getting even less like the world of Combray than it was when Proust died, with a social order more chaotic even than it was in the last days of the Princesse de Guermantes, the great Proustian oeuvre still fascinates.
It is exclusively, or almost exclusively, with the history of the novel that Professor Green is concerned ; not for him the amiable gossip of Princess Bibesco, the notes on the life-story of Cesar Ritz or the photographs of the Duc de Guiche in the costume in which he played polo against Mr Winston Churchill. For him the book's the thing. To the study of that book he has devoted immense pains and learning. For the "story " of the book is the creation of an art form, the discovery by Proust of his self-dedication, the light that discovery casts on all of our interior lives. From this point of view, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is a Portrait of the Artist not merely as a young man, but as an artist for all his life. And certainly Proust, as much as Joyce, could have put "Et ignotas animum dhnittit in arms" as an epigraph ; no serious novelist can now write in a pre-Proustian manner entirely unaffected by what was attempted and achieved in Le Temps Perdu—although he may well determine not to follow Proust into the maze he entered on. The great merit of Professor Green's book is that by this extremely detailed examination he makes us think continuously of the book and not of the author, though in such a personal writer as Proust it is hard to separate them It is possible that Professor Green has carried too far his refusal to notice that Proust had a " real " life as well as the life lived and reflected on by " Marcel." It is very right not to be led astray by hypothetical identifications, for example. Not only did Proust firmly reject the view that he was writing a roman a clef, but comparatively little help is given by guesses about the models for • the two Guermantes cousins, Madame Greffulhe or anybody else. Even the charming picture of her cousin, the Duc de Guiche (now Duc de Gramont), sketched by Princess Bibesco, does not help much. The Duc de Gramont, one of that group of dukes and princes who adorn the Institut de France, was not at all like Basin de Guermantes, although the Laszlo portraits reproduced here with the rather gushing text do suggest a little the Duc de Sauveterre. But this kind of thing was better done by Madame de Clermont- Tonnerre in her Robert de Montesquiou et Marcel Proust.
Yet when all is said and done, the real life of Marcel Proust, the man who had an eta: civil and shares in De Beers, is of some interest in considering the book he wrote. It especially helps when we come to the question of why Proust devoted so much time to problems of homosexuality. Professor Green seems to hesitate between the views that this theme is not over-emphasised and that Proust had special artistic reasons for dwelling so much on it. But his knowledge of the text is too great, and his feeling for the tone of the novel is too sensitive, for him not to be startled by the gratuitous brutality of the degeneration of Robert de Saint-Loup. It is, surely, not being impertinent to suggest that Proust's own homosexuality is part of the explanation, as is made plain by recent writings by M. Gide, M. Mauriac, M. Maurois. Proust knew " the cities of the plain ' from the inside, and was anxious to over-estimate their population, not a rare attitude in people of his tastes.
Since so much has been written on Proust, the author of a study like this is bound to spend much of his time discussing and, if necessary, controverting the theories of his predecessors. It can be said that Professor Green wastes none of the time he devotes to this necessary task He has to refute M. Feuillerat, and I think he does it successfully. He has to decide whether Proust was right in denying the Bergsonian character of his book, and Professor Green. though right in the main, does tend to use Bergsonism as a key that opens most locks. But I think he is a little too generous to that arid critic, Paul Souday, who, when Proust's glory was established, was given to preening himself on his alleged role as a discoverer of Proust, a claim not securely based.
One minor criticism must be made of a very valuable book. Professor Green is a little too cavalier with the social nuances that, after all, are part of the argument. Bearers of great names are degraded into " Princess Leon," " Prince Borodino," " Mme. Surgis- le-Duc." Basin and Oriane de Guermantes are, by implication, made guilty of believing that the Knights of Rhodes were Templars and that Napoleon Ill held court at Chantilly. What an explosion such errors would have provoked from M. de Charlus! But not only is the argument of the great book conveyed, but much of it, charm We can see "les jeunesfleurs" on the breakwater Balbec like the Empress Eugenic and her maids of honour Trouville in the lovely Boudin now in the Burrell Collection Glasgow. It is, perhaps, carrying curiosity too far to specuLt whether "les jeunes files" were, in fact, girls at all. In any evc:1 " Alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur."
D. W. BROGAN.
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