BOOKS OF THE DAY
In Pursuit of Proust
TOWARDS the end of Dr. March's very interesting study he discusses the vicissitudes of Proust's reputation. Perhaps Proust's great novel will never again have the snob value it had in the early 'twenties. And the world he described, if dying in 1919, was dead by 1949. The noble faubourg is more a memory, almost, than Mayfair, and Proust may be condemned out of hand as the mere chronicler of a dead and damned social order, a French Michael Arlen. Yet the continuing demand for new editions, the continual supply of good studies like this by Dr. March, the continued (and, if you like) non- literary interest in the dramatis personae of the great chronicle, suggest that Proust has still a great deal to say to us, that even an egalitarian society can relish a book which is, at first sight, nearly devoid of social significance in the political sense. Proust may, from time to time, talk with admiration of the people ; he may see them as the dark and ominous background to the brightly lit aquarium where such very queer fish disport themselves ; but- his interest in and knowledge of the "common man" was more formal than real, and no conceivable century of the common man would really have suited him. His snobbish, rich, selfish, often illiterate and often base society figures still attract, still satisfy some need in us or, at any rate, provide Proust with the means of absorbing us into his morbid and fascinating world.
It is possible to suspect that Dr. March is a little put off—or out— by Proust's absorption in rank, precedence, the finesse of the social game. Of course such criticism, open or implied, of Proust's choice of a theme is nothing new. His bright young schoolfellows of the Lycee Condorcet, his bright young colleagues of the Revue Blanche, felt that way fifty years ago, when Leon Blum was on the route, via dramatic criticism and the bar, which led him to leadership of the Socialist Party and Leon Daudet wRs on the way to a conversion to Church and King that was very different from the aesthetic religion and politics of Proust. Indeed, until the publication of Swann on the eve of the war of 191,4, Proust's career might seem one of nearly pure waste ; wealth, idleness, vices of various kinds, snobbery, all seemed to have combined to kill a great talent, true "enemies of promise." But Swann justified the early hopes of friends and Proust's obstinate determination to be a writer, a determination which might, had he died, say, in 1910, have seemed in retrospect merely a dodge to escape a regular career such as his family thought the proper thing for him. True, Swann had no great public success, but its readers were fit if few (the young Francois Mauriac was one of them), and all through the war there was an underground growth in reputation so. that the award of the Goncourt Prize for Les ieunes Pities en Fleur, if attacked as a job of Leon Daudet's and an outrage to the intentions of the founder, was yet something for which the literary public was more or less prepared. With Les leunes Fines Proust entered into belated glory, to the astonishment or annoyance
of some older authors who could not see what the fuss was about, and, for all the minor ebb and flow of taste since, Proust's fame has suffered no serious eclipse.
What that fame would have been had we only had Swann is an open question. Though a masterpiece in its own right, it gains a lot from its place in the great scheme. Yet, as M. Feuillerat showed, the complete novel as we have it now is very different from the novel Proust was writing in 1914. The change in tone, as well as in what it is almost absurd to call the plot, is visible enough. The passion for stripping even the most attractive characters of their good qualities may represent (as some have thought) an awakening of Proust to the sterility and worse of the life of the society he had devoted himself to studying. The war of 1914 not only ruined the society but revealed its worthlessness to Proust. Maybe, but the impression made by Proust's obsession with sexual abnormality is not that of an indignant moralist. ft may be that he was never reconciled to his own homosexual temperament, that what Gide despised as hypocrisy was a more complex emotion. But we have M. Mauriac's impression that Proust had dried up, that under his formal extravagance of politeness there was a new and deeply depressing aridity of soul. It is true that, taken by itself, the testimony of the late Maurice Sachs is not worth anything, but his assertion that some of the most startling eccentricities of Charlus were pretty faithful reproductions of Proust's own conduct is not totally implausible.
What Canon Carmont said of "Baron Corvo " (applying the words of Parolles) may have some relevance to the Proust of the most depressing part of thc novel. "If my heart were great 'twould burst at this. Simply the thing I am shall make me live." But what made Proust live was not merely his vices but his artistic virtue, the tenacity of the great, convinced and devoted artist. Perhaps Le Temps Retrouve is a proof of final escape and salvation. At any rate the tenacious invalid hung on till he could write the last lines, the long invocation of the "seal of time." It was (very much mutatis mutandis) like the ending of the Paradiso, although it is open to the rigorous moralist to object that Proust saw mud and Dante stars.
Dr. March brings to his investigation of the birth and growth and meaning of the novel all the virtues of modern American scholarship. No serious Proustian can afford to neglect this book. But no serious Proustian will be totally satisfied with it. Dr. March provides his own translations, not-often an improvement on Scott Moncrieff or Stephen Hudson. (Rachel was not a " chicken" ; she was a " poule," in modern American "a five dollar call girl.") And where Scott Moncrieff corrects 'Proust's confusion of Tobias and Tobit, Dr. March reintroduces it.
Then Dr March is indifferent to some things that Proust took seriously. Thus he describes the Princesse Mathilde as a "Bona- partist." But Proust more than once makes the point that the Princess was not a Bonapartist ; she was a Bonaparte, a very different thing. And in his elaborate contrast of the royal and the imperial "barons." Proust was not in the least concerned with imperial "barons." Charlus could afford to be a mere baron, but the great imperial families could not. They were dukes and princes, Term and Borodino. I once had the pleisure of seeing the head of one of the greatest of French noble houses showing to a member of one of the greatest of imperial noble families the diploma of count conferred on an ancestor, who was " duc et pair," by Napoleon I. Proust would have appreciated the scene ; I am not sure that Dr. March, in Pennsylvania, would. And indeed the indecision whether to write " comtesse " or "countess," as well as such horrors as "the Constable of Guer- mantes," suggests, that Dr. March does not take the questions of title and rank seriously enough—a drawback in a writer on Proust. (It is Proust, however, not Dr. March, who mixes up the various Dukes of Richmond, pardonably enough.) But he might have corrected Proust when the latter boasted that not one of his characters "puts on an overcoat." That was written in 1913, before Proust had designed the famous scene between Marcel and the Duc de Guermantes. But this is a useful, scholarly and evocative book. Proust will always be elusive, but here at least we are shown the trail down which he must
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