BOOKS
Lives of Proust
BY ANTHONY HARTLEY THE relationship between a writer's work and his life always poses complex theoretical problems. And this is particularly the case with men like Marcel Proust, where the work has eaten the life or the life the work, and nobody can be quite sure which. It is easy enough to perceive the moment (somewhere around 1908 or 1909) when Proust's work became his life, but how to fix that far more elusive, but no less important • date when his life became his work? Which figure has the greater reality, Marcel Proust or Marcel? Reading his biography after his novel, it is difficult not to think that he deliberately lived a pattern of experience with a view to an eventual re-crea- tion (and ordering) of the turbulent data of existence. Of course it was not so: the architec- tonic factor was not Proust's life itself, but the vision he was able to bring to bear on it in later years. The details of his biography stand in rela- tion to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as the piles of marble chips beneath a designer's hand to the future saints and martyrs of a mosaic.
Inevitably, therefore, a biography of Proust becomes a commentary on his masterpiece. George Painter's new book* makes no attempt to avoid this dilemma. Indeed, if Mr. Painter's second volume lives up to his first, which takes us to the death of Proust's father, he will be in some danger of having written the definitive com- panion to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as well as the definitive biography of its author. To see what Mr. Painter has achieved we have only to glance at another new biography of Proust, this time by Richard H. Barker.l. Mr. Barker has pro- duced a good enough biography even if it is a little summary in its literary judgments (Morel, for instance, is defined as 'a complete cad'), but Mr. Painter has done the hard detective work which enables him to carry the argument one stage farther at every point.
From Mr. Painter's account, therefore, we get a stereoscopic picture of the society in which Proust lived, and, through this, a comprehension of his magpie methods of composition which is
totally lacking in the other book. Sometimes this leads to conclusions of considerable critical importance. Proust has always been blamed for the unreality of Marcel's affairs with women, a failing which has been put down to his habit of disguising in female clothing his own relationships with young men. But Mr. Painter shows, to take one example, that if the character of Albertine owes a great deal to Alfred Agostinelli, Proust's chauffeur, it also borrowed elements from Marie de Chevilly and Marie de Finaly (neither of whom are mentioned. in Mr. Barker's book). The per- some of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu are always composite : a face borrowed here, a bon mot there, a setting or a detail of dress elsewhere. The Baron de Charlus was by no means entirely Robert de Montesquiou, and Bergotte owed almost as much to Ruskin as to Anatole France.
The difficulty when writing of the life of Proust is that nothing really happens. The events take the form of a succession of different atmospheres. There is the village of liliers near Chartres, from which a cluster of paradisal childhood mem- ories was carried over into Combray. There is the Lyce:e Condorcet and the gold-rush period of literary enthusiasms and discoveries. Then the round of the salons with their quota of lions and their eccentric, frequently decadent and almost invariably extravagant aristocrats. This is a world of wit and murderous retorts ('Read my books, madam, and let me get on with my food,' answered d'Annunzio when asked at a dinner what he thought about love), of a superficial salon cul- ture which occasionally recognised profundity, a society where the artist was expected to pay his tribute of flattery and amusement in return for meeting what Ezra Pound has described as 'the leprous upper crust of society.' The phrase is apt : a detailed glance at the manners of almost any society in its upper reaches is liable to produce feelings of bourgeois disapproval, but the tout- Paris of 1900—from the ridiculous artistic preten- tions and posturings of Montesquiou through the insane family pride of Count Aimcry de la Rochefoucauld to the generalised pursuit of American heiresses by the French aristocracy—
seems wholly given over to spite, snobbery and feebleness. Yet it was a society which produced art and artists in considerable quantities, and, if
the faubourg were not always the most discerning
of patrons, they were prepared, in the abstract, to recognise the importance of literature and painting to a far greater extent than has been the case in England since public-school education first began to devastate taste.
Proust's relationship to them (and, indeed, to everyone he met) was an uneasy one. Time and again in his career friendships are seen kindled, dying away, then flaring up again. And here I ant not speaking of those passionate involvements with young men, which were necessarily unstable by their very intensity. No doubt Proust carried this instability into the rest of his life, but there was also something else. Georges Bernanos in his novel L'Imposture (where the sinister household of M. Guerou seems partly a caricature of Proust's way of life) claims that 'une extreme attention fruit par consumer la pike.' This was very much the case with Proust. He appears to have regarded.i his friends as so much raw material, and it is a matter of experience that no one likes to be SO, regarded. So there were quarrels, reconciliations,: constant emotional strain and sometimes a break expressed with all the spite of disappointed schwarmerei, an emotion which took on a double force when the relationship was one of passion. 'I don't wish to see you any more, or to write to you, or to know you,' he wrote to a certain M. when giving him his conge, commenting to a, mutual friend, 'yet another lemon squeezed dry.'
That bitter taste exudes from much of Proust's life. Immediate happiness was limited to some fleeting moments of reciprocated love, and any; more lasting satisfaction had to be wrung from the enormous task of creation which he had set him- self. From the dawn of an infantile devotion 10 his mother, whose bright colours were bound to fade in the light of day, to the apotheosis of the voyeur who, if Maurice Sachs is to be believed, used his connection with a brothel-keeper to satisfy a pitiless curiosity, one has the impression of an appalling and distorted emotional ascesis. The mother died, he was crippled by asthma and hypochondria, and habitués of Weber's would see his face dissolving in its own shadows after an all-night session of talk. But in the famous cork' lined room at 102 Boulevard Hausmann the pile of manuscripts continued to grow steadily. Inter- rupted by the war, the publication of A la Recherche du Temp.s. Perdu began again in 1919 and continued after the creator's death.
This life which was to be separated into its elements and so gloriously resurrected was neither a particularly cheerful nor a particularly appealing one. It was, however, exemplary. The career of the delicate and pampered youth brought up be' tween liliers, Auteuil and the Boulevard Males' herbes, of the dandy who found one salon after another opened to him, of the intellectual who behaved with singular courage during the Dreyfus affair, was to narrow down to the final portrait left by Francois Mauriac: a sick man lying on dirty sheets in a bare room, surrounded by heaps of notebooks and scribbling furiously. So much abnegation was necessary to become the greafest novelist of the twentieth century, and the spectacle is as awe-inspiring as some gigantic freak of nature. Proust's death at the moment of comple- tion appears too symbolic to be an accident. If creation is a disease, he died of it.
* MARCEL PROUST. VOL. I. By George Painter. (Chan() and Windus, 30s.)
t MARCEL PROUST. By Richard H. Barker. (Faber, 36s.)
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