AUTUMN BOOKS
The Making of a Master
BY MARTIN TURNELL IT is a strange thing that, in an age as passionately devoted to literary research as our own, an early work by a Euro- pean master running to over 300,000 words should have remained undiscovered for nearly thirty years. Yet this is precisely what happened to Proust. His executors were aware of the existence of the manuscript of Jean Santeuil, but assumed that it did not contain an ceuvre suivie. M. Maurois drew heavily on Proust's unpublished notebooks when writing his biography, but was apparently in too much of a hurry or too indolent to make a thorough examination of the material, and the novel was eventually brought to light by M. Bernard de Fallois, who was given access to Proust's unpublished papers when preparing a thesis on the novelist.
Jean Santeuil* is unquestionably the novel to which Proust refers in two letters that he wrote to his mother and to Marie Nordlinger in 1896 and 1899. M. de Fallois .thinks that it was written between 1896 and 1904, but as the book ends with the Old age of Jean Santeuil's parents and as 'Dr. Adrien Proust died in 1903 it is at least possible that Proust stopped work on it a year or two earlier. It was certainly laid' aside without revision and probably never touched again. M. de Fallois has not given us the complete text. He has constructed, with great Patience and skill, a consecutive narrative from the mass of material at his disposal. There are, inevitably, gaps in the narrative, inconsistencies in the names of the characters and the chronology is as confusing as that of the Temps perdu, but the book (admirably translated by Mr. Hopkins) is still a Pleasure to read. '
`You can tell everything on condition that you never say 1,' Proust once remarked to Gide. In Jean Santeuil he used the device of 'the manuscript found in a bottle.' The book is sup- Posed to be an autobiographical-novel written by a famous novelist, and published posthumously by a youthful admirer. The subterfuge is transparent : Proust is the novelist and his Principal character. Jean Santeuil is the story, told in the-third Person, of the childhood, youth and entry into society of the son not of a doctor but of a high official at the Foreign Office. It corresponds in the main to what we know of Proust's home life and his brilliant social connections. One of the great virtues of the Temps perdu is the skill with which the novelist holds the balance between fiction and what he calls 'the memoirs of Saint-Simon of another period.' The two elements are present in Jean Santeuil, but they are much less closely interrelated. For the novel has no unifying theme. It consists of 'memoirs' divided into a large number of short chapters and only held together by the personality of the principal character, and the Period to which they relate. The memoirs are often delightful. Proust writes of his parents with deep affection and under- standing, and at much greater length than in the Temps perdu; he is also much franker about the quarrels over his friends than he was when writing after their deaths. There is an exquisite vignette of his professor of philosophy. The descriptions of the jealousies and intrigues of high society—particularly Mme Marmet's social climbing and Mme Cresmeyer's disastrous * JEAN SANTEUIL. By Marcel Proust. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. With a Preface by Andre Maurois. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 30s) dinner-party—are scarcely inferior to the most brilliant pages of the Temps perdu; but the direct presentation of the Dreyfus Affair is far less impressive than its indirect presentation in the later book.
* * It has been said that Jean Santeuil was a sketch for the Temps perdu. This is misleading. There are obvious similarities between the two books becausethey are both autobiographical, but they are separate works: This early novel is not so much a sketch for the later as Proust's first attempt to write the master- piece that he felt he had been born to write, and it was dis- carded as a failure. It is a curious fact that the similarities between the books emphasise their differences. Jean's childish infatuation for Marie Kossichef, the forerunner of Gilberte Swann and like her a portrait of Marie de Benardaky, is described with a simplicity and charm which are very different from the much. more complex presentation of the same incident in the Temps perdu. There are other striking differences. There is a maternal grandfather, but no grandmother. There is no Swann, but Swann's attempts to catch his mistress out with another man and to decipher the letter she has given him to post are ascribed to Jean, which lends force to the view that both' Swann and the narrator of the Temps perdu are partial portraits of the novelist. There is no Charlus, but there is the Vicomte de Lomperolles, who has the same tastes and becomes involved with an unscrupulous young musician. Bergotte is there, but he is the painter who will emerge as Elstir. Jean's great friend, Henri de Reveillon, will be transformed into Robert de Saint-Loup, and his relations into the two branches of the Guermantes family. Once again there are differences of emphasis. Proust was already a social analyst of genius, but the Rdveillons were created before he became a recluse and developed his rancorous attitude towards the nobility. The Due and Duchesse de Reveillon stand for all that was most gracious and civilised in the old aristocracy.
An examination of the style of the book is instructive. It does not possess the richness and complexity of the Temps perdu, but it has a freshness and directness which are often found it the early work of a great writer. The lilacs bloom and fade with even greater frequency than in the later novel, but they are without the haunting poetry and the symbolic power of the dead lilacs in Swann which are a prelude to Montjouvain and the cities of the plain. The petite phrase is heard for the first time, but it is attributed directly to Saint-Satins instead of being an amalgam of the work of different composers. The novelist appears at one moment to be on the verge of discovering the memoire involontaire, but the great themes of 'time lost° and `time regained' belong to the future, while homosexuality only makes a fleeting appearance. There are the long Proustian sen- tences, the abundance of images, the massed verbs and con' trasting adjectives—two devices borrowed from Flaubert and Anatole France—but it is evident that the writer is still experi. menting with his instrument and is not yet its master. His sentences have the outer form but not the inner density and complexity of the true Proustian sentence. We do not feel that gradually enveloping, penetrating and transforming the object, extracting new meanings from it, or multiplying the angles from which it is seen.
M. de Fallois has declared that the novel 'gets lost in the sand.' I find this view hard to accept, It seems to me on the contrary that there is marked development, that the later chapters are a good deal more mature than the earlier ones, that there are times when we almost catch the accent of the authentic.Proust. This is what we should expect. It the dating of the novel is correct the latter part must have been written when Proust had embarked on an intensive study of Ruskin, whose work produced an extraordinary deepening of his ex- perience, enabled him to discover himself in the fullest sense of the term. When all this is said, however, there remains an irreducible gap between the two books. Jean Santeuil is im- mensely fascinating, but its virtues are traditional. What we miss is quite simply 'the new vision.' It is an 'ordinary' novel in the sense that even the greatest French novels are ordinary A la Recherche du temps perdu is 'extraordinary' in the sense that nothing like it had ever been written before, and it altered the whole perspective of European fiction.
In spite of its considerable merits, the main interest of Jean Santeuil lies in the light it throws on Proust's development. The publication of the notebooks will no doubt add to our knowledge on matters of detail, but since the appearance last year of the remarkable volume called Contre Sainte-Beuve the main lines have become clear. M. de Fallois is certainly right in saying, as he does in his masterly introduction, that Proust wrote only one book, meaning that everything that went before was a preparation for A la Recherche du temps perdu, was part of the 'vocation' which is its subject. Les Plaisirs et les jours was published in 1896, and in the story called `La Fin de la jalousie' we see the first appearance of what was to be one of the major themes. This was followed by the attempt to write the great work which was unsuccessful because the time had not yet come. Next, there was a period of retrenchment which included the translations of Ruskin and Contre Sainte-Beuve• This book, which was probably written between 1908 and 1910, is a mixture of autobiography, criticism and fiction, and is unlike anything Proust had done before except the essay entitled lournees do lecture' which formed the introduction to his translation of Sesame and Lilies. The main thesis is a Plea for the non-rational in literature, and Sainte-Beuve is roundly condemned for the anecdotic method, for preferring the writer's everyday self to the profounder self which is the only one that matters to the artist. It is the work of someone Who .had not merely assimilated Ruskin but had learnt from Balzac as only one great writer can learn from another. The style is the style of the mature Proust. Most important of all, the experiences associated with the madeleine and the uneven Paving-stones are mentioned for the first time in the preface. There was only one thing to do. And Proust did it. Somewhere about 1910 he sat down and began to write A la Recherche du temps perdu.
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