Marcel Proust

by HARRY LEVIN

1

THE correlation between a writer’s experience and his writing, which is seldom coincidental, was never less so than in the case of Marcel Proust. No novelist has made more exhaustive use of the first person singular, nor given his readers a more immediate impression of the world he knew. Yet we must not take his novel too literally. He expressly warned us against identifying its narrator with himself. Repeatedly, perhaps disclaiming too much, he assured his friends that there were no keys to his characters. Nonetheless some of the latter, not always the most admirable, have been claimed as likenesses by persons still living. Others who looked upon him as a social climber, by a stroke of Proustian irony, have survived to bask in the phosphorescent light he threw upon their society, and to brighten their memoirs with the luster of his acquaintance. Critics and fellow writers, revising their recollections, have bestowed upon him such posthumous awards as few contemporaries had foreseen. Literary gossip, overimpressed by the peculiarities of his subject matter, has elaborated around him a sinister legend.

The twenty-five years that separate us from Proust’s lifetime have blurred distinctions between the man and his work. For the Vichy regime he was too Semitic and decadent; for the Resistance movement he was too supine and luxurious. His reputation continues to have its vicissitudes, and so does the problem of evaluating his achievement. This would not have surprised him, for his long apprenticeship in the arts had taught him that the greatest masters are hardest to recognize, that true originality must build up its own tradition. His unique insight into character was founded on the observation that a single face can wear a hundred masks, that personality is reducible to a discontinuous series of psychological states. Thus the portrait painted by his friend, Jacques-Emile Blanche, highlights the preciosity of Proust as a young man. How different from the family album, or those later snapshots which resemble Charlie Chaplin at his world-weariest! Or that deathbed photograph where the beard has grown and the nose — like Swann’s at the last — has achieved sudden prominence, where the esthete is eclipsed by the prophet!

The “I” that speaks in Remembrance of Things Past is the spokesman for all these figures and many others. An introspective author has so many selves that autobiography can hardly comprehend them; fiction may bring him closer to the truth, as the autobiographer Gide was compelled to admit. But the novelist Proust, even while working out the implications of Gide’s remark, adds a corollary which he might have derived from Montaigne; no one has firsthand knowledge of any self beyond his own. When, after several volumes, the heroine disappears, what do we know about her? What does the narrator? What does Proust leave us with? Nothing, except a tissue of conflicting testimonies and subjective memories. We are surrounded, as it were, by a metaphysical abyss which is only crossed when he puts himself in the place of his objective characters. It is Proust who plays the man about town in Swann, the man of letters in Bergotte, the Jew in Bloch, the homosexual in Charlus.

A gifted mimic, he naturally caught the inflections he heard most often, just as he registered sensations he had felt and recollected vistas he had seen. He lived his book in a double sense: his life provided the substance for his work, his work the justification for his life. So organically were they bound together that we cannot imagine him finishing Remembrance of Things Past and undertaking another project. Every great writer, according to James Joyce, has one book in him; and if he ever finishes it, he merely rewrites it, one way or another. Had Proust lived longer, he would doubtless have gone on rewriting and amplifying his manuscript until the deferred point of death. Since it was, among other things, an inquiry into the nature of reality, we must not be too categorical in distinguishing what is true from what is fictive. If we would understand the process of refinement that fitted his biographical circumstances to his artistic intentions, we must turn to his letters.

On a first consecutive reading, they may seem to conceal rather more than they reveal, like so much of the correspondence of Henry James. They sustain the high pitch of effusiveness, the mannered tone of formality, that Proust’s friends characterized by inventing a verb: “to Proustify.”Significantly, he cautioned one of them against showing a letter to another because, he said, “It’s too honest to be sincere.” This was no paradox; for though, by consistent devotion to an exacting set of ideals, he attained the higher virtue of honesty, more often than not he missed that simple, direct relationship which constitutes sincerity. In his lifelong quest for friendship, he ranged from morbid sensitivity to misplaced generosity. But between his nervous queries to early schoolmates, and his gracious responses to latter-day admirers, the development is profound. To trace it is to traverse the distance from self-consciousness to self-knowledge, to commence with the self and widen the exploration.

2

BORN in the “terrible year,” 1871, he was an exact contemporary of the Third Republic. His father, one of its solid citizens, was professor of public health at the medical school of the University of Paris. Vacations spent with paternal relatives, at Illiers near Chartres in the heart of France, are recorded in Proust’s memorable sketches of Combray. The two walks around the village, to which he gave the names of Méséglise and Guermantes, set for his childhood the social pattern of his adult experience: the divergence between the bourgeois and the aristocratic ways of living. Like Flaubert and Dostoevsky, Proust was not only the son of a doctor, he was also a congenital patient, thereby fulfilling the trend of modern novelists toward a clinical approach and a pathological situation. Though his peculiar symptoms have never been satisfactorily diagnosed, his movements were gradually hemmed in by an invisible network of allergies.

Sickliness reinforced his strongest emotional tie, his dependence upon his mother. It was she, the daughter of a prosperous and cultivated Jewish family, who awakened his fondness for literature and the arts. The introductory episode of his novel, where her good-night kiss is delayed by the visit of M. Swann, and the agony of the child is not soothed until she consents to read through the night at his bedside, establishes a psychological pattern: infantile caprice, parental indulgence, “abdication of the will.” Yet, despite the intimation that his would not be a normal existence, Proust did most of the things expected from a young intellectual of the upper middle class. He attended the University, volunteered for military service, contributed to little magazines and literary journals, and even took part in a duel. He studied law and dallied with diplomacy; he was invited to numerous salons and appointed to a sinecure in the Mazarine Library. When he published a precocious collection of sketches, he entitled it Pleasures and Days. Hesiod’s title had been Works and, Days.

If the substitution of pleasure for work betrays the spoiled child, the emphasis on the calendar foreshadows the mature Proust. Meanwhile from the lectures of Bergson, a distant connection, he learned that the individual is related to time through memory. From the books of Ruskin, two of which he translated, he learned how the present is related to the past through art. Everything encouraged him to regard himself as heir of the ages. Neither fabulously wealthy nor desperately ill, he was just rich and sick enough to lead the pampered life of a rentier and a valetudinarian. In the leisure thus afforded, he visited cathedrals and traveled to Italy. For the Figaro he chronicled fashionable gatherings and parodied other writers. At the verge of thirty-five it must have seemed that he was making a career of dilettantism. Then, two years after his father’s death, he realized the idea of misery that he had once noted in a children’s questionnaire: “to be separated from Mamma.”

Between the actual event and the realization, according to Proust, there is a kind of intermission: his protracted infancy was succeeded by a longdrawn-out “puberty of grief.” Retrospectively he wrote that no mistress had ever replaced his mother, that nothing was disinterested except maternal love. Reliving his loss by describing the death of the grandmother, his narrator concludes that “each of us is really alone.” But solitude was the precondition of his final effort. To consummate it in his remaining seventeen years, he shut himself into a narrowing sequence of bedchambers, apartments, sanatoria, substitutes for the womb. Weeping and smiling across his mother’s deathbed — this is the haunting attitude in which he is best remembered by one of his closest friends, the musician Reynaldo Hahn. Proust’s own analogy was Noah’s ark, where he lay in secluded comfort while storms raged outside, with his mother playing the benevolent dove and maintaining touch with the world. Freed from the world’s engagements, he believed he could view it more clearly, could keep the engagement he had made with himself.

The cork-lined room in which he immured himself has come to stand for the ultimate in isolation, the last hermetic compartment of the proverbial ivory tower. It happens that other writers have had such rooms, notably Henry Bernstein the boulevard playwright, whom nobody accuses of being a recluse. What is so extraordinary about Proust is the intelligence that had to be cushioned, cribbed, confined. If his suffocations were personal appeals for help, his fumigations purified the general atmosphere. Yet where could he, so carefully insulated, feel the pinches that tormented other men? Not so much in his own poor health as in the indifference of the healthy, in the chronic invalid’s complaint that no one sympathizes with his sufferings. The storybook princess deserting her moribund lover, the elder Swann unable to grieve for his wife, the doctor putting his decoration ahead of his patient, the Guermantes ignoring Swann’s illness and proceeding to their ball — each case presents a sensitive perception of human insensitivity. The plea for sympathy becomes an attack on callousness. The ego repudiates egoism.

3

PROUST liked to look for the figure in the carpet, the characteristic note of other novelists. In Stendhal — he pointed out — it was altitude, in Hardy it was landscape, in Dostoevsky it was crime. In his own novel, we may suggest, it is nonrecognition: the failure of his worldly characters to recognize the claims of human decency, the cut that the narrator meets from his best friend, Saint-Loup. This is a negative criterion, based upon values whose absence is profoundly felt, but attached to a mode of existence which expects very little to happen. Circumstance and temperament cast Proust in the role of the passive spectator, watching the bathers romp along the beach at ’Balbec.’ Like the seascapes mirrored in the glassdoored bookcases of his room at the Grand Hotel, reality seems to be several removes away. But here the original patterns of Combray are repeated: the near-by watering-places of Rivebelle and Marcouville are socially as far apart as Méséglise and Guermantes. And the narrator is still in the same predicament, though the grandmother has psychologically replaced the mother.

Back in the city it is not so easy to shut out the world; with an acute ear Proust renders the streetcries of Paris. His guarded regimen could not make him invulnerable. His gentle disposition could be aroused by urgent moral issues impinging upon him: the conflict of his epoch, the conflict with himself. Each of these conflicts resolved a tragic situation which would otherwise have lacked recognitionscenes, and the recognitions were accompanied — in the best Aristotelian tradition—by reversals. On the social plane, the problem was antiSemitism, which came to a climax for Proust’s generation with the Dreyfus case. In the psychological sphere, the subject was homosexuality, to which he gave the frankest and fullest treatment that literature had yet attempted. The first theme enabled him to reveal the rift that was opening under the two classes he had described. The second supplied a psychophysical parallel for the isolated condition that he was approaching. In both instances, he no longer excluded society; he was in the position of a man whom society might exclude.

Society, in the exclusive sense of the term, accepted Proust at the ironic moment when it was called upon to side with the military and clerical forces that supported the condemnation of Captain Dreyfus. Proust had not been brought up to consider himself a Jew; indeed he had some degree of exposure to Catholicism; but the anti-Semitic bias that now affected the circles in which he moved, though it might have spared him, touched a tenderer object — his mother. His tact and friendship, his regard for tradition, his disinclination for politics, were overpowered by the sense of justice that propelled him into the single public sally of his career. He prided himself on being “the first Dreyfusard,” and did not relax his concern until the twelve-year judicial error had been rectified. Though the motives of the Verdurins are no loftier than those of the Guermantes, Dreyfusism is the political touchstone of his novel. It brings home to Swann the artificiality of the standards by which he has lived, and sweeps him back from the realm of manners into the realm of morals.

At this point, with an almost Biblical exordium, the novel shifts from racial to sexual themes. Maladjustment is linked to neurosis, for Proust, by the pressure of ostracism, which engenders both ghettos and underworlds. Where the one provided a means of evaluation, the other is used to devaluate his characters, pointing t he searchlight of suspicion at each in his turn. Unlike Gide, Proust is no apologist for inversion; if he speaks from experience, the experience has been bitter. Furthermore, as he keenly appreciates, the most poignant aspect of the homosexual’s plight is that:—to the normal person — it must seem slightly comic. Proust’s awareness of this hopeless contradiction is magnificently embodied in his seriocomic characterization of the Baron de Charlus. The underlying scruple, as always, was an outraged sense of family integrity. Others had observed that dominant mothers often had effeminate sons — or that Lesbian daughters had fathers like M. Vinteuil. What is characteristically Proustian, what is hinted in the self-reproach of his sketches and notebooks, is the mood of guilt that he calls “the profanation of the Mother.”

Scandal and scholarship have combined to allege that his heroine was a man. For Albertine, they tell us, we must read Alfred Agostinelli; we must remember the erstwhile chauffeur, afterward secretary, who was killed in an accident learning to fly a plane. Proust has explicitly paid his tribute to Agostinelli, and there are moving pages on which Albertine is associated with the imagery of automobiles and airplanes. To transpose her sex, however, raises more difficulties than it explains. Proust’s letters give ample evidence of his extreme susceptibility to feminine charm — and, what is more, of the continued interest that many charming women took in him. The particular relationship that he analyzes, which is triangular, opposes the claims of homosexual and heterosexual love. If Albertine eludes the narrator, it is because he has cloistered her even more jealously than himself. Like Swann, who is never so much the art collector as in his love affairs, he strives to possess her as absolutely as the gowns and gifts he buys for her. In the end it is he who remains the prisoner.

4

SINCE Remembrance of Things Past is the fruit of Proust’s experience, if not the experience itself, we may draw the drastic inference that he found no satisfaction in love. The mixed emotions and crosspurposes of the individual, who can neither forget his own individuality nor accept that of another, confirmed the realization of loneliness to which his mother left him. While pleasures can be shared gregariously, sufferings must be endured alone; hence the isolation of tragedy. Comedy, on the other hand, habitually assumes the social view. Alternating between these dramatic attitudes, Proust constructed a series of climactic scenes; whereas the note on which his novel opens and closes is personal, poetic, philosophic. Thus the book seems, like its author, to move out into the world and to withdraw again. Meanwhile the Dreyfus affair had helped him to perceive the limitations of the little group that considered itself le monde — to understand society in its more fundamental significance. The growth of his knowledge kept pace with the elaboration of his work.

The more we learn about the actual process of composition, the more evident it becomes that his novel was the labor of a lifetime. As early as 1896, when his first book came out, he began to mention a second. By another decade the scope of this undertaking had increased to the point where, in his correspondence, he invoked the Iliad. Less magniloquently, he compared his own efforts to the futile researches of Mr. Casaubon in one of his favorite novels, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It may well be that the death of Proust’s mother provided the long-postponed occasion to carry through his work-in-progress. But by that year, 1905, he must already have set down a rich accumulation of notes. His surviving notebooks have been entrusted to André Maurois, who has recently dropped a few tantalizing hints. Something of the original conception, it would appear, has survived in the episode of “Swann in Love.” Swann was to be the protagonist, Odette then bore the romantic name of Carmen, and their story was impersonally told.

The circumstances whereby the novel achieved its present form are Proustian in their ironic complexity. The complete version was never published; the published version was never completed. When Swann’s Way was published in 1913, two subsequent volumes would have completed the series, which was to comprise about 1500 pages. The First World War, suspending their scheduled publication, gave Proust a chance to revise and augment his material. To his projected second volume he added a third, fourth, and fifth. While he was working on the sixth he died. Fortunately the last, The Past Recaptured, existed in his earlier manuscript. It became the seventh volume of a sequence now augmented by some 2500 pages. In qualitative terms, this meant that the work was an organism which grew and changed with Proust, continually reconsidering ideas and characters, gradually overtaken by afterthoughts and new preoccupations, finally responding to the impact of the war self. The total effect, as Professor Feuillerat has shown, was to darken the picture.

Proust had proceeded, he explained, “in reverse order, starting from beliefs and illusions, and correcting them little by little, as Dostoevsky would tell the story of a life.” His starting-point was the magic of glamorous names, faraway places, historic associations. Reproached for being a snob, he equivocally replied that he numbered chauffeurs and valets among his friends, as well as dukes and princes. He might have answered, with Henry James, that he was haunted by “the poetry of something sensibly gone.” If he had started by “Proustifying,” he ended — to echo his expression — by “depoetizing.” He built up his hierarchies in order to tear them down. Twisting the psychological kaleidoscope, he confounded the social pattern; outgrowing “the age of words,” he entered “the age of things.” Protected by the coloration of snobbery, he ascended the Guermantes’ way. The farther he penetrated, the deeper his disillusionment and the purer his nostalgia. The former is dramatically symbolized by the red slippers of the Duchess. The latter is awakened by the stroke that overcomes the narrator’s grandmother.

As the narrative moves from its lyrical to its satirical phase, the author disengages himself. His detachment is so sharp that he seems at times to be eavesdropping upon his material. Instead of looking out from the inside, he peers in from the outside, like those fishermen of Balbec to whom the hotel is an aquarium and the summer people are exotic fish. Such had been his ornamental existence. Laure Hayman, herself the ornament of the Bois de Boulogne, had referred to him as her Dresden figurine. Robert de Montesquiou, his “professor of beauty,” had treated “the little Marcel” as a promising disciple. But taste was not enough, as he reminded his English correspondent, Marie Nordlinger; even Ruskin had mistaken esthetics for ethics. To play the dilettante was to condemn one’s self, like Swann, to ultimate frustration. Satisfaction lay, not in passively collecting, but in actively creating, works of art. If the two ways had proved equally barren there was still a third, which followed the music of Vinteuil toward “a forgotten country,” which offered Proust “the keys to a hidden reality.”

These, of course, are metaphors; but it is metaphor which conveys a fresh impression of a familiar subject, as the painting of Elstir is said to do. It is metaphor, Proust declares in his article on Flaubert, which makes for literary immortality. His own metaphorical style is the positive affirmation of a Platonic ideal, as well as a criterion for judging the superficial values of mundane reality. Art for him is the last judgment, the absolute in a welter of relativism, the one immovable object that stands against the irresistible force of time. A Bergsonian rhythm of change and flux and mutability pulsates through Remembrance of Things Past, but out of it rises a Ruskinian conception: the patient, architectonic, perduring image of a cathedral. ScottMoncrieff’s English title, though it echoes Shakespeare, mistranslates Proust; “making up for time lost ” would come closer to the purport of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. That search — or research — had begun in boyhood, when Proust wrote his father that everything else except literature and philosophy was a “wasted time.”

Years and distractions and disillusionments, intervening between his intention and his accomplishment, accelerated the sense of urgency and strengthened the will to create. In the disinterested compunctions of artists, if nowhere else, Proust encountered a moral equivalent for the thankless sacrifices of parents. If we assume that his man of letters is modeled upon his earliest mentor, Anatole France, we may agree that Bergotte is merely “a flute-player.” Yet Proust himself, whose developing stature was recognized by the Goncourt Prize in 1919, posed for the final portrait. We know that he was on his own deathbed, in 1922, when he completed his account of Bergotte’s fatal pangs. Like his character, he had attended an exhibition of Dutch paintings, and had paused at length before Vermeer’s “View of Delft.”His fascination with this picture, like his Ruskin-inspired pilgrimage to Venice, is significant; for both perspectives exhibit the culture of cities at its richest and ripest. His prophetic horizon, which extends so far backward to Sodom and Gomorrah, culminates in the Wagnerian spectacle of Paris during an air-raid.

In contrast to the youthful innocence of his landscapes and seascapes, the city is the grim habitation of experience. The Duchesse de Guermantes, once the chatelaine of a remotely feudal household, becomes the occupant of the neighboring apartment. If any artistic medium has been uniquely expressive of bourgeois Europe, it has been the novel; hence the decadence of the society that Proust chronicles is expressed by the overripeness of his form. Those who confuse form with content make him the scapegoat for the sins he bitterly denounced. They held him responsible for the collapse of an epoch against which he cried out in the wilderness. André Gide, too, cited the Old Testament; but, crossing Proust midway, he moved in the opposite direction — from austerity to availability. The charge of timeserving might more justifiably be leveled at him. Not that Gide’s periodic enthusiasms were really insincere; perhaps he is too sincere to be, by Proust’s definition, completely honest. Timelessness rather than timeliness was the essence that Proust discovered in his particular cup of tea.

The tragedy was that, aside from the arts, man had no defense against the ravages of time. The processes of aging, vieillissement, have never been more painstakingly or painfully registered. One of Proust’s discoveries was that people tend to grow old suddenly rather than gradually. The last reception of the Princesse de Guermantes, formerly Madame Verdurin, can only be compared with Swift’s terrible picture of the Struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels. The news that a casual acquaintance had killed his mother in a fit of insanity shocked Proust into writing a powerful essay, “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide.” The deaths of those we love are as criminal and catastrophic, he argued, as the great domestic tragedies from Œdipus to the Russians; every son must accuse himself of hastening the advance of his parent’s old age. The elements of pleasure and suffering are so mixed that callous souls may live from day to day without recognizing the evils that encompass their fellow men. But between the joy of living and the tragic vision, Proust concluded by asking, which is the truth?

His answer is suggested in a remarkable letter on the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus. For once it appeared that truth had caught up with fiction. Since the case against Dreyfus was fictitious, his grievance could be resolved in a happy ending. But the griefs that beset most men, not excluding Proust, were unhappily true. All too seldom could life, like a novel, dispense poetic justice. In George Sand virtue may triumph, in Balzac vice; in Proust the same event is subject to both interpretations. When Remembrance of Things Past is unlike other novels, it is more like life, which is neither an idyl nor an intrigue but both. No novelist seems more intimately conscious of the way things happen: the combinations of chance, the configurations of motive. Art must base its findings on facilities for observation which perforce are limited — and which, with Proust, were rarefied and specialized beyond the norm. But since he was both the observer and the observed, these conditions heightened the intensity of his introspection to the point where his own self-knowledge helps others to know themselves.