Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
IT should be some com- fort to anyone who has ever been tarred by the brush of publicity that, a year after it first hit the headlines, Christine has become the name of a • -•■• yacht. The public mem- ory, however, tends to be catholic in its amnesia. The famous and the notorious sink as easily into the ooze of oblivion. For instance, how many readers can recall the achievements of Giosue Carducci, Rudolf Eucken, Selma Lagerlof, Paul von Heyse, Verner von Heiden- stam, Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan, Carl Spitteler, J. Benavente y Martinez, Wladyslaw S. Reymont, Grazia Deledda, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Frans Emil Sallpaa, Johannes V. Jesen and Juan Ramon Jimenez?
If I said that they could be found in that order, in a list which also includes Rudyard Kipling, Romain Rolland, Anatole France, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw Thomas Mann, Sinclair Lewis, John Galsworthy, Eugene O'Neill, Andre Gide, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Sir Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway, would you be any nearer discover- ing the kind of fame they share? All of them were winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature between 1906 and 1956. Yet can anyone lay his hand on his library card and swear that he has recently been reading the poems of Signor Carducei, attending performances of plays by Herr Heyse and. Senor Martinez, staying awake far into the night to finish the novels of Sillanpaa, Jensen, Lagerlof, Spitteler and Deledda? With fifty-six names to choose from, over half a century, in every country in the world, is it not extraordinary that two of them should be called Mistral? (Freddric, 1830-1914, a French poet, and Gabriela, 1889-1957, a Chilean poet.)
One of the great OK names of the period, centre of a passionate undergraduate crush 's
my Oxford days, is missing—Marcel Proust. Everybody remembers the incident of the petite madeleine dipped in lime-flower tea (perhaps because it is on page 62 of volume one) but how much else is retained after twenty years? Here is an author who has been compared to Petronius and to Henry James, to James Joyce and to Tolstoy. He has been exalted from a novelist into a philosopher-poet-historian who embodies and represents his age like Shake- speare or Dante. Richard Aldington has written: `his work is the first attempt at a synthesis of modern European civilisation, localised at a point of intensity. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu has so many roots, so many intentions; it is packed so full of meaning, of thought, of observation, that it is a kind of literature in itself.' John Cowper Powys has claimed that `like all masterpieces of great novelists, it is a whole world in itself, a world into which you can pass, in which you can dwell, in which you can continually be discovering new avenues, new vistas, new horizons.' Such tributes can be multi- plied indefinitely.
I have just been scything my way through the first three volumes and never has reading seemed such a form of manual labour. Those creeping, convoluted sentences, spreading their tendrils and shoots across the path, physically resist the progress of the eye. They are hung with reno- vated clichés and restored commonplaces like paper lanterns. On the first page of `Swann in Love' there are phrases like 'one condition suf- ficed,' dull as ditch-water' and 'the female sex.' It is not so much that this is a lazy and diffuse style as that each piece of the mosaic is laid with elaborate self-consciousness as though part of some sacred ritual of creation. (I realise that my complaints are directed at the English ver- sion but this is the form in which Remembrance of Things Past became the culture totem of the Forties—and C. K. Scott-Moncrieff's transla- tion has often been described as an original work of art in itself.)
If we had not been told in so many introductory essays that Proust was so sensitive that he wore
galoshes even on dry days and lined his room with cork, we would guess that these pages were written by a man who was padding each line with cotton wool. Nothing and no one is touched with a bare hand in Proust. It is,picked up with gloves and tongs, boxed and packaged in shiny paper with satin bows, and dispatched by a liveried messenger. Proust behaves as if the whole world were radioactive. The Hemingway tough- guy manner, where the words are slapped down before the reader like coins on a bar-counter, is now out of fashion. But we can see how this swaggering masculine approach, even if one might suspect that some of the chest hair was false and the knuckle-cracking handshake had been practised in a gymnasium, would be an understandable reaction to this sick-man's Paris. Tennyson once said that the characters in Ben Jonson's comedies appeared to be wading through glue. In Hemingway, the people swim in beer but, in Proust, they tiptoe through cold cream.
Conversations, other than question and answer " repartee, are written in the style of fin-de-sickle essays by precious and affected undergraduates. Here, taken at random, is a specimen of M. Legrandin in full spate : But, down there, the places themselves seem to me just like people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality which would have been corrupted and ruined by the gift of life. Perhaps it is a castle which you encounter upon the cliff's edge; standing there by the roadside, where it has halted to contemplate its sorrows before an evening sky, still rosy, through which a golden moon is climbing; while the fishing boats, homeward bound, creasing the watered silk of the Channel, hoist its pennant at their, mastheads and carry its colours. Or perhaps it', is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, ugly, if anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from every eye some imperish- . able secret of happiness and disenchantment. That land which knows not *nab . . .
This speech, spoken according to Proust, in a characteristic cliché, 'with Machiavellian, subtlety,' is meant to come from the mouth of a snob and a poseur. But the use of words, the pre- fabrication of attitudes, the stereotyped descrip- tions, can all be found almost unchanged in the passages where the narrator, Marcel, speaks his own jewelled thoughts.
The characters, too, so praised for their com- plexity, are cardboard cut-outs, equipped with a repetitive catch-phrase, who make the most cartoon caricatures of Dickens seem miracles of imagination. Proust always announces what sort of person each new member of the cast is before he appears. He warns us of how he will talk and what he will think. And then he produces the puppet, who behaves exactly as predicted. It is a kind of simple conjuring trick which, in magnifying the insight of the author, inevitably diminishes the stature of the character. ' • Even the behaviour of someone like Swann, who continually acts as if he were under some kind of drug which compels him to misunder- stand every situation and mistake all motives, does not follow any psychological pattern obser- vable in real life. He is a purely synthetic mystery, . an arbitrary and erratic mixture of incongruities. • I still have four books to go—and I am perse- vering with them more as an eye exercise than anything else—but I cannot conceive that they well ever add up to a complete work of art. At its best, Remembrance of Things Past is an in- valid's revenge upon a society which carries on as if he had ceased to exist. Perhaps Proust ought to have been given the Nobel Prize for Literature after all so that he could take his place with his peers—Lagerlof, Gjellerup, Pontoppidan, Karl- feldt, Reymont, Deledda and the rest.
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