There's Rosemary - That's For Remembrance
KALLEN, H. M.
There's Rosemary — That's For Remembrance Review by H. M. KALLEN THE MIDDLE SPAN. Vol. II. Persons and Place by George Santayana. New fork. Charles Seribner'a Sons. l»Of'<'E" in * Ron**n convent...
...while in the avowedly autobiographical volumes they deprecate them for fictions presented ss facts...
...Sanlayan declares, for mysterious reasons that I do not believe have any connection with the books snd their influence, were not worth writing...
...Equal in literary quality, perhaps without parallel in contemporary biographical writing for a diction at one* precise and charming, a prosody as gracious and patterned as a Mozartian minuet, they differ greatly in warmth...
...And often the decisions so contradict each other that, like "youth and crabbed age," they cannot live together...
...Most interesting are the reference* to impressionistic techniques in Proust's phraseology and syntax which have contributed so much to loosen the texture, of French pro...
...It "evaluates* rather than records the author's student days in Germany, his student visits to England, his duty-calls to father and sister in Spain, his experiences in Boston and at Hsrvsrd as a young instructor (they kept him at thst bottom of the academic hiersrchy for fourteen years...
...Apart from th* pT0 torial medium from which certain transpositions msy hsve been made, there was however the direct impact on Proust of Baudelaire, Verlalnt and Mallarm* which, In th* opinion of this reviewer, has to be accounted for to a more considerable measure...
...The book sbounds in swift, sharp designations of both...
...1 knew him when":—and it is only by a sharp effort of • identification that I can bring together the judgments and attitudes of the Santayana remembering his Middle Span and the Santayana of the Life of Reaion, who lived and moved and served as a friend among friends, and on occasion referred to himself as a Socialist...
...I have read others whose authors have labelled Santayana malicious, selfish, a gossip, a moral cripple, a bearer of grudges, an anti-Semite...
...Ssntayana's readers who remember the same things, see in The L*at Puritan the ssme persons sad places aa in his svowedly autobiographical volumes, and see them as facts paraded as fictions...
...Yet there ar* million* of people today—soldiers and civilisns alike—who, under the pressure of war and It* perverted morality, feel "guilty" because they are healthy, because they still can have pleasures, and-the book makes s point here, It is full of points liks this, and they constitute its realism...
...such American commoners as John D. Rockefeller and his rather pitiful son-in-law, C. A. Strong...
...Of the students at Harvard, its was ostensibly the poets and athletes whom Mr...
...Price $3.75...
...His love experience, then, is blended in the novel with the fascination of Vermeer...
...Jeff Mitchell's immediate excuse for going astray and getting himself into a jam is that he became convinced of h.i wife's infidelity after overhearing a barracks conversation about her, tic convicted her on circumstantial evidence...
...t,i ||Pey>f7i*r AND BERGSON or Proust 'M*M Freud would be s title more easily qndetstood...
...The consecutive layers of his artistic experience csn well be discerned in the novel...
...Andre Maurols said of Proust that his work would remain in the history of French letters a landmark as important as the works of .Flaubert and Balzac...
...an emotion at once the cause and the life of the new imsge Is which an old experience newly comes t« mind...
...Whitman and Mrs...
...Guilty of what...
...She, too, is impotent, and yet is made to feel ss truly guilty as though she had sinned...
...The persons who receive mention are, as is perhaps natural, those that would have impressed also more commonplace spirits than the lonely philosophical poet who could appear to take the life of reason and sympathetic understanding of multitudinous diversity for his philosophic principles and nevertheless describe himself as a "cynic and a Tory...
...Among his gallery of persons, the image of exnlosive Earl Russell stands out especially /oil a ml largo, and the fs inter's summsry comment on it is representative: "A young man with a brilliant career open to him is a fool to flout public opinion even if he secretly despises it...
...As time pastes, the multidimensional richness of the living event col-topses into a pregnant phrase or symbolic lias to which, on occasion, the •adoring emotion of rembering brings a simplified and factitious life...
...We sre not made acquainted with it, we are only told about it...
...or being bawled out for not appreciating how lucky he Is drawing the maps instead of being "over there" with the boys who are using them...
...a time of life when that early bitterness over his lot works more freely across the threshold of his consciousness and imparts to his recollections a tone that is neither true of his subjects nor of himself as he wss...
...These two motifs sre very aptly pointed out by Dr...
...which the English translator has •**red more soberly but not quite "knfully Rsmembmnce of Things Past...
...Both for the re-sjsmberer, and for his resder snd critics, purpose and desire decide which...
...He became familiar with Ghirlandaio, Marcgna and other painters sdmired by the Enlish Ptersphselitea...
...I rather think that the poet is at a time of life when the sentiments of intimacy and belonging which, as he grew up, had suffused and covered over his childhood feelings of being unwanted, shut out and cut off, have shrivelled and fallen away...
...By Arose vi tiee E. Chernowitz...
...Melodramatic Realism govle w by $T4NLIf LICHTtNSTEIN THE MUCK FOXHOLE...
...But despits the author's intense preoccupation with war sickness, and his plausible characterisations (these include two native fascists, a rebellious Jew, s homosexual, a prostitute, ¦ detective), he rob* bis work of th* slgttflcanc* it might have had by turning It into s tin itler-diller, with its protagonist falsely accused of murder on circustsntial evidence...
...This life flat rememberer may feel as sure fact or ambiguous fiction...
...It appears that the art material gathered from the study of Ruikin was used by Proust to a greet extent to enrich his vocsbulsry .with pictorisl quotations...
...Th* buddy is perfectly right, of coarse-Mitchell deserves little sympathy for this kind of masochism...
...It reports his travels to Greece and Egypt and Palestine...
...Since this seem* a paradox, a bit of explsnstion ia in order...
...Tbe effect of the Ispse of this one of the writer's central emotions from the recreative energies of recollection, is to form in the minds of his readera a false, distorted image of the rememberer himself...
...Santayana preferred (he refrains from indicating that they chose him first...
...urryHR BRICK FOXHOLE" is a I reslistic novel...
...Its predecessor recslling cbJWhood and youth is, as should be ex-pected, |%armer, more humsnly sware...
...His was to analyze from a perhaps ¦*Wpectod but important angle Proust's •Jat novel with the so typically Injj**l title A la Recherche d,i Temps •W...
...Elstir, one of the chief characters of the novel, whom some identify with Whistler, is shown to be a portrait of Claud* Monet, the leader of the French Impressionists who survived Proust...
...2.18 payee...
...It is slso s ter-ribly contrived, artificial thing...
...Thus it hi that seme of Mr...
...By «.',¦/...-.I Brooke, Harper...
...That you've got both your legs and arms...
...But the more importsnt figures stc such Boston ian grand dame* as Mrs...
...There are, to begin with, tjie impressions of his boyhood, those reproductions of Giotto's allegories of the Virtues snd Vice* from (he Arena Chspel in Padua which Proust happened to have in his study...
...They ate "Copey" of Harvard, Billy Phelps of Yale...
...H* suffers from guilt feeling...
...There sre signs that the volumes of Persons and Places msy sustsin such an effect...
...l»Of'<'E" in * Ron**n convent ot blue-flothetl, English-speaking nuns, sup-emSLj calm of mind, all passion spent, (ieorge Santayana, Spanish-born citizen tj Spain who cannot endure to live in ti> native land, American-grown master of English prose who cannot endure to }ire in the land of his growth, hss dedicated the evening of his life to regent be ring its morning, midday and .fternoen and writing down for posterity his Images of the persons and places ?f kit, passing day...
...The last "er* brought: ut posthumously...
...When emotions of recollection differ, the issue whether the images they induce be fiction or fact lends to fsction...
...I have read reviews of The Middle Span whose authors inflate into a spiritual and moral snobism San-tsysna's own transmutation of a deep and original loneliness and insecurity of which the Lost Puritan and his various autobiographical statements uncover th* root, into sn image of himself as but a helpless visitor in the Intellectual life of his time, choosing therefore to escape it and "live in the eternal...
...Plein-air, fragmentarization and casiuluiss of vision and other peculiari-ties ?f presentation due to rhsnge of emphasis find their striking parallel in the novel...
...The book Is supplied with an extentiv* bibliography and a most serviceable index...
...However, Proust had not to flght for the impressionists as actually did Zola...
...As time passes, much, per-kspt meat, of that which had gone into the impact of the persons and places upon the recollecting mind falls away...
...No writer aa candid, as honest as their subject could fail, in setting down bis recollections as hs presently feels them, to provide such critics with materials and grounds...
...Chernowitz...
...Jack Gardner, such English gentlemen as Bertrand Russell's older brother the earl, and Lionel Johnson the poet...
...Of his colleagues at Harvard or Yale, only two he mentions, other than philosophers, are neither "society" nor independently rich...
...Through the scqusintsnce with Ruskin, Profit translated snd prefaced two books of Ruskin when he was in his thirties— his field of viaion considersbly brosdened...
...New York: In-I* ttrnattoitni University Press, 1945...
...He pointed to the subtlety of Proust's character analysis and particularly the quality of his style...
...Nevertheless, he sums up his "official career at Harvard" as thirty years of "somnsnbulism...
...The closeness of Proust" to th* impressionists is th* more surprising since he mingled with society so long as hi* poor health permitted him to see people, with portraitists of glamorous women such as La Ganders or rather second-rate artists...
...The result is a novel which makes of lealavm • Dismal Science, and a rather phoney one at that This soldier, Jeff Mitchell, is tortured by the fact thst he is permanently stationed in a camp near Washington, d. C, engaged in drawing maps, when he Isn't doing K.P...
...What are the sources of Proustisn style...
...He worked **, » until his death (1922...
...Striving to image facts, he creates fiction which, once recognized as such, may be enjoyed for what it is in itself—its sad luminousness, its tangencies of wisdom and wit and its bitter beauty, delicate and hard...
...Proust's Artistic Personality Pevlewr hy KACHEL WfSCHNfTZf ft ,/lQlASjT AND PAINTING...
...Other men snd women in the novel-some very trivlel—hsve s rs-semblsnce to a Bellini portrait or a bust of Antonio Rizzi...
...Yet it has indubitably been there, lively and generous, snd 1 am certain, continues...
...Chernowitz hss shown that art played s considerable part in the formation of Proust's personality...
...Although many of Mr...
...Readers get the impression that Mr...
...nrst volume of the novel appeared J WW, when P oust was 42...
...They are the energy of an emotion that is th* power «f recollection itself...
...In addition he has appreciative words, with reservations, for Charles Eliot Norton and Barrett Wendell (whose books, Mr...
...2.f...
...At the age of 20 he discovered Vermeer of Delft and was stilted by the sensuous quality of color...
...the Middle Span seems to me to communicate observation without nostalgia, ironic, often malicious remembrance, and occasionally, very occasionally, sympa-mstie insight...
...Bareness of style and realism de not necessarily preclude melodrama...
...Its central charcter is a weak individual, a way-behind-the-lines soldier in a situation admirably calculated to play upon his weakness and make him crack...
...By ths time Proust appeared on the scene, they had slresdy established their reputation...
...Memory, however, his Its own hest, its own passion...
...Not many know that Marcel Pttust published a volume of Portraits *» Peiatres, but it is not this work of s y°tt»« men, of 26 thst Chernowitz had ¦>*ihd when he conceived his study on jntosst's relationship to psnting...
...He reveals both an unfailing prejudice for the rich, the well-born and the privileged (which is by no means the whole truth), and a wilfull withdrawal into "the eternal" (which is compelled rather f1 an chosen), Aa one reads the impression becomes inescapable that the writer ia at once a man very worldly-wise, a "prudent" man in Aristotle's sense of "prudent" and an otherworldly ascetic and sage...
...The following nostrum for the young couple's Ills Is Indicated in the closing sentence of the book: "She wanted to go to bed with him...
...But, in Santsyans's case, if the grounds give . some indications of the moods of his evening, they are by no means so continuous with his noonday passion as they lead the readers to imagine...
...The old man remembering pulls the younger man remembered by his evening passion all askew...
...These figures, not exactly the be-d in Giotto's work, provoked Proust's sense of humor mid some ponderous reflections rather than his artistic sensibility...
...And these are not of tbe "emotion recollected ia tranquillity" to which William Word-vorth reduced poetry...
...x + 281...
...Swsn's love for Odette is associated with his amh\«*lent feeling for Botticelli's line and Vermeer's color...
...his buddy, s vetersn who has been overseas and killed "lotsa .laps," angrily demands...
...Santaysna'e field of folk are called "frbnds," no feeling of friendship is communicated...
...koth bring places more warmly to life teen persons, but the persons of the current volume come in flatter, shsrper, more brittle outlines, with a quality, to those who also rememrer the persons, of caricature which the perfect prose disguises and the rarely-appearing sympathy accents...
...The book Is ultra-realistic, and ultimately a disappointment...
...It was the contact with living art, however, with the impressionists in particular, which actually molded Proust's style...
...Chernowitz has drawn a brilliant picture of the major phases of the impressionist revolution of aesthetics and its counterparts in Proust's literary worn...
...He describes his colleagues there whose multitude remained strangers to him, ss "an anonymous concourse of coral insects . . . much overworked, too poor...
...Santayana is able to communicate his aversions and distastes more resdily than his loves...
Vol. 28 • September 1941 • No. 39
