FICTION
PROUST II.
PERHAPS " aphorism " is too narrow a word for the type of judgment in which Proust excels ; for his judgments arc certainly, in a manner, distilled from experience. And perhaps, again, it is too generous a word : for Proust has a sweet, unconcentrated, sprawling style that never achieves economy and point. In his cadences and structures there is
the same dreaming, the same lack of force ; a clause is tacked on to qualify a clause ; a new thought occurs three-quarters way through a sentence, and subordinates itself gently and inappropriately to the original statement. No, if" aphorism" is too strictly applied, the word will mislead us. There is nothing for it but to quote more examples :—
" I even sketched in the air an outline of that impulsive movement, but this I supposed that I alone had observed. For it is difficult for any of us to calculate exactly on what scale his words or his gestures are apparent to others. Partly from the fear of exag- gerating our own importance, and also because we enlarge to enormous proportions the field over which the impressions formed by other people in the course of their lives are bound to extend, • we imagine that the accessories of our speech and attitudes scarcely penetrate their consciousness, still less remain in the memory of those with whom wo converse. It is we may suppose, to a prompting of this sort that criminals yield when they touch up' the wording of a statement already made, thinking that the new variant cannot be confronted with any existing version . . . -And yet, some years later, in a house in which M. de Norpois, who was also calling there, had seemed to me the most solid support that I could hope to find, because he was the friend of my father, indulgent, inclined to wish us all well, and besides, by his profession and upbringing, trained to discretion, when, after the Ambassador was gone, I was told that he had alluded to an evening long ago when he had seen the moment in which I was just going to kiss his hands, not only did I colour up to the roots of my hair but I was stupefied to learn how different from all that I had believed were not only the manner in which M. de Norpois spoke of me but also the constituents of his memory : this tittle-tattle enlightened me as to the incalculable proportions of absence and presence of mind, of recollection and forgetfulness which go to form the human intelligence ; and I was as marvellously surprised as on the day when I read for the first time, in one of Maspero's books, that we had an exact list of the sportsmen whom Assurbanipal used to invite to his hunts, a thousand years before Christ."
When we have disentangled from such a paragraph the idea which Proust is principally expressing, we shall find it just and true ; and, if we happen to have had experiences similar to it, it may rouse an understanding and alertness in us. But it is, nevertheless, an abstraction from subjective experience ; it is personal thought working upon personal observation, and only half digesting it. For Proust's general temper prevents him—he is too polite and sceptical—from any attempt to raise universally applicable principles : he• is always dubitative and suggestive ; never authoritative and illuminating. We may notice a rather more ophoristic expression of the same judgment in a later book : "The risk of giving offence arises principally from the difficulty of appreciating what does and what does not pass unperceived."
The flow of thought is so smooth and waterish that when we are confronted with a definite appeal to our sense of vision (which is rarely enough) we feel quite thunderstruck. I remember with what astonishment, after I had been reading for some time a loose and dim description of Gilberte Swann, from all of which I gathered only that she must be slim and tall, with a pigtail of golden hair and a bright fair face, I came across the sentence, "When she was like that, when no smile filled her eyes or unveiled her face, I cannot describe the devastating monotony that stamped her melancholy eyes and sullen features." The phrases are not really vivid
or pictorial ; too mach work is thrown on the adjectives, and, anyhow, it is a privative, helpless description. But, in
comparison with the rest of Proust, it seemed to have an unbearable clarity; in any Other writer it would have passed by unnoticed.
The explanation in mere fact is that Proust was a neurotic invalid, and that neuroses inevitably cloak and confuse the memory. A disease like Proust's is founded in a decree of banishment for certain- all-important memories of shame, and everything, in all experiences, which links itself to that first suppression, is hidden and put out of the way of memory. Proust, therefore, had from the beginning a necessity to forget ; he could never analyze his sensations to the end.
He did hot even receive them wholly ; part was not to be assimilated. His "search for lost time" was doomed to be without hope an without direction ; an air of falsity hangs over all he records. As he worked at the- huge- task he set himself, and called up unsystematically the sentiments of his past, he must have found an alleviation of his discomforts ; his dreaming, so close to truth, must have made him feel that he was at last elucidating and mapping out the labyrinth of his mind. And upon all that he wrote he shed a light of gentleness, grace and ingenuity. Pity would keep me from condemning him ; but not from opposing those too sensitive souls who proclaim him great.
The translation of Mr. Scott Moncrieff reads quietly and well. To anyone who has not the original at hand it would seem excellent. But it raises a problem in our minds. We are aware that translations must be idiomatic ; yet if you con- sistently translate idiom by idiom, you will definitely distort the sense. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is by no means Remembrance of Things Past ; Du Cote de Chez Swann and A l'Ombre- de Jeunes Filler en Fleur are really nothing like Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove. Then which do we choose—ungainliness or misrepresentation ? Mr. Mon- crieff chose misrepresentation ; and I have no doubt that Proust would have preferred it himself. ANDREW CAIIEY.
Previous page
