BOOKS
Proust's Way
By ANTHONY HARTLEY
NT EARLY forty-five years have passed since the N publication of the first section of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and I suppose that, by now, hardly anyone would dispute its author's place in the front rank of European novelists. Certainly, if devotion to the mission of a writer is any criterion—but there are those who would deny this—Proust deserved that his work should live. More apparently than most masterpieces it Was drawn from his own vital substance. Marcel the narrator reflects Marcel the creator in the same way as the positive of a photograph reflects the negative, and to read a biography of Proust Is to observe how the whole of his life was drained into his book, until its completion accompanied the final dissolution of an invalid, whose last months were spent in a bare room where the Wallpaper hung in tatters and where the only ornament was a large mass of exercise books con- taining the final drafts of the manuscript. Ad- mirable and exemplary asceticism! There is horror in the description of Proust's last years --`this waxen mask . . . whose hair alone seemed to be that of a living being'—but there is also grandeur.
Contemplating the result of so much toil, it is essential to make the effort involved in consider- ing this huge novel as a whole. Any hundred pages Of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu when read at random give such an impression of profundity of psychological observation and acuteness of ocial analysis that the reader is tempted to linger in the volume he has opened. Swann's jealousy in his love for Odette, the character of the maid Prancoise, equally composed of peasant cunning and peasant wisdom, the sudden terrible ap- parition of M. de Charlus, paralytic and lecherous, on the Champs-Elysées: these passages—and how many more like them—reach the height of the novelist's art. They are so funny or pathetic or tragic or grotesque (and Proust's sense of the grotesque is a considerable part of his talent) that we should like to enjoy them without any !Liss. This is a universe which is doubly fascinat- ing for the English reader who has never entered any of those small historical pockets out of which Prench society is composed and which French logic has made worlds far more separate than Would be the case in London. '
Then there is the encyclopaedic side of Proust. On every page there are digressions on art, on ntusic, even on international affairs. Proust—and in this he resembled his contemporary, Thomas Mann—believed in putting all he knew as well as all he felt into his work. The appearance of Elstir excuses remarks on Impressionism, that of Berma Or Rachel introduces Marcel's reflections on act- ing. These passages are in their place; for the reader there is no sensation of irrelevance, but there is a danger that the main thread of the Work will be lost amid the bustle of the charac- ters and the brilliance of the conversation. Too Often the adjective `Proustian' evokes a kind of decadent Barsetshire, whose recurrent personages are to be used for clever pastiches and parlour games performed over the Third Programme. The talk—so common some years ago—about Proust's having 'caused' the fall of France re- vealed a misunderstanding of the austere mortality of his work so total that it is hard to think that those who indulged in it had ever actually got to the end of Le Temps Retrouve. For these errors even the complication of his style provides little excuse, since English-speaking readers are lucky in having at their disposal one of the best translations of any work in any language.* A la Recherche du Temps Perdu has for its subject the human mind--more especially the artist's mind—and its need, Archimedes-like, for a fixed point in a shifting world. Proust possessed in the highest degree the psychological acumen and power of generalisation common to a long line of French novelists, philosophers and moral- ists. He was the heir to the classical belief in the intelligibility and basic uniformity of human nature. 'Les etres les plus be/es, par leurs gestes, leurs propos, leurs sentiments involontairement exprimes, tnanifestent des lois qu'ils ne pervoivent pas, mais que l'artiste surprend en .eux.' Indeed, Proust's genius is more explicable in terms of the great French writers of the seventeenth cen- tury, whom he quoted so often, than by reference to Balzac or even to Bergson. Like the pensee writers he aspired to the generality of an Every- man and, as with them, the substance of his work is formed by the accumulation of impres- sions on the tabula rasa of a human mind, that of Marcel the narrator.
The more passionate the scrutiny of human nature, the more it leads to scepticism on the part of the observer. The relations between human beings can only be based on misunderstanding; what we call love, what we call hatred, shifts from hour to hour, from minute to minute. The idea of an experience differs profoundly from the thing itself. Reality only exists unchanged for an instant, truth is made relative by time. The events of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu take place in a world where nothing is fixed, where the most seemingly solid facts are whirled round in time's kaleidoscope, where Mine Ver- durin can become Princesse de Guermantes, where Marcel's love for Gilberte or Albertine can be as dead as if it had never been, where Swann's way and the Guermantes's way can meet and be reconciled in the person of Mlle de Saint- Loup. Over the whole surface of the novel a fine patina of illusion is applied.
Proust's search for firm ground in this chaotic universe, a universe without the fixed point afforded by a god, led him to the technique of his novel, which was also to be his cogito ergo sum. The psychological , experience, on which Marcel broods in the Prince de Guermantes's
• REMEMBERING TIME PAST. By Marcel Proust. Translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. With illustra- tions by Philippe Jullian. (Chatto and Windus,I7 10s.) SWANN'S WAY. By Marcel Proust. Translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. (Penguin Books, 6s.) library before going in to the morning reception, is familiar enough. Some small physical sensa* tion, the taste of a sponge-cake dipped in tea, the feel of uneven paving-stones under our feet, can lead us to recapture past scenes in which they figured, Combray or Venice. And this por- tion of the past, freed from time, will be more intense, more beautiful than ever it was before, since it also represents our own liberation from contingency. 'line minute affranchie de l'ordre du ternps a recree en nous, pour la sentir, l'homme affranchi de l'ordre du temps. Et celui-la, on com- prend glen soit confiant dans sa joie. . . .' These evocatory cross-currents both imply and justify a work of art, which is to incarnate the final liberation of the artist. To search for time past, to express it in a novel, is already to be freed from it—much as a psychoanalyst's patient is deemed to be freed from his neurosis by having the experience which caused it reintroduced into his conscious memory.
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is, therefore, simultaneously a diagnosis of, and a cure for, the human condition. On the level of Marcel's own personality the movement is from happiness to disillusion to reconciliation, which, in Le Temps Retrouve, expresses itself in the mystical serenity that follows on Marcel's discovery of his true mission while waiting in the Prince de Guer- mantes's library. Even the awful masque of time at the reception itself—all those whitening heads and halting limbs—hardly disturbs the new mood, and the dark disillusionments that have gone before—the death of the grandmother, the dis- appearance of Albertine, the discovery of Saint- Loup's homosexuality, the decadence of M. de Charlus in Jupien's infamous brothel—are swallowed up in a growing assurance. Much of Le Temps Retrouve gives an impression of grave beauty, and the gradual dwarfing of the charac- ters by the greatness of the experience in which they are participating is comparable to a similar movement in Dante's Parculiso. It is a criticism of life rather than of Proust to say that his characters, too, are at their solidest in hell.
In the mind of its author this great novel was an instrument of salvation, .and, in taking this view of a literary work, Proust was at one with such nineteenth-century authors as Baudelaire and Mallarme, whose construction of a creative myth had been not less total than his. Where he is unique is in •his success in equating the myth, ou which his work reposed, with his tech- nique of narration. The sudden intensity of vision provoked by the uneven paving-stones or by the sponge-cake dipped in tea was at once the method and the raison d'être of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Novelist that he was to his fingertips, Proust sought and found his own mysticism in novel-writing itself.
Life sometimes shows the unequivocal sym- metry of art. Proust put the whole of his own experience into his masterpiece, and we can imagine that it repaid him by an operatiOn upon his personality for which the word `salvation' is not inappropriate. But we are only saved once —by our own efforts or those of others—and, after finishing A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, it is hard to see how Proust could have started over again. He might have expanded episodes or filled out. vignettes, but he could no more have created another such world than Dante could have written another Divine Comedy. Proust's death at the moment when it occurred was in some sense a recognition of the fact that all his potential works had been poured into the one book. Marcel the creator was to yield his place to his own mirrored image permanently fixed out of the reach of time. The myth of the Phoenix has no other meaning.
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