PROUST-MAN OF GENIUS?
SENDER, RAMON
Proust—Man of Genius? Reviewed by RAMON SENDER 'LETTERS OF MARCEL PROUST. Translated and edited, with notes, by Mina Curtiss. With an introduction by Harry Levin. New York: Random House, 1949....
...But beside Dostoyevsky most of Proust's' work seems to us superfluous and obvious...
...IN ALL OF THIS relating to reason, psychology and interpretative loquacity and wordiness, Proust could be a typical Frenchman — according to what the world, at least, understands as French - but for that he needs the good sceptical faith of bon monsieur and perhaps he has an excess of narcissism...
...Maybe Paris is not France, as some Parisian writers in the last decade have said...
...Let us ipiagine how they would be if they took place in the work of Dostoyevsky, that author Proust read so much...
...And experimentation and conclusion kill the poetic fact or sterilize it...
...An old Spanish poet now dead used to say: "1 can't put up with those overflowing novels of -P>oust's that always begin with a tea in his grandmother's house...
...It often happens that in New England an American of English origin seems more English than the English because, perhaps, he has the affection of the British whereas the authentic English have only the nature...
...This is not true in the case of Chateaubriand, Balzac, Renan or in so many others of the 19th century, but it is true of Proust...
...Balthasar Gracian, the 17th century Spanish philosopher and novelist so greatly admired by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, says that the French confuse glory with vainglory, genius with ingeniousness, wit...
...Ramon J. Sender is the author ol the newly published The Sphere...
...I recognize that Proust is a man of genius but he is P01 Hie genius uiai appeals iu unr...
...Or it has become too rarified—in other latitudes— for them to attract our attention...
...All of this leaves us cold...
...Proust's asthma was probably an epileptoid asthma...
...I do not mean that the teas of a writer's grandmother cannot be important...
...5.00...
...Also Proust gives me the impression of being older than some of the 19th century writers who came before him: for example...
...Maybe Proust's illness was of the same nature as that of the Russian author, only less developed...
...But just as Dostoyevsky's illness may be one of the determinants of his need to refer all the movements of men to absolute values, so Proust's lesser malady makes him only a brilliant usufructary of the relative...
...Great authors in France or in any other country are not people of esprit...
...All at this would have much more interest in a time of moral stability and fixed values such as the European period from 1890 to 1914...
...Possibly because it is not French Proust's work has had little influence in France and much more in the rest of Europe, especially Germany and England...
...It is rather that of the capitalistic bourgeoisie impregnated with . aristocratic decadentism...
...Psychological plays of wit or fancy go well , with transposition of sentences, metathesis in words and other resources with which one gives lightness and briliance to the dramatic fact of sterility in the world of poetic emotion...
...The French writer profouhdly admires the author of Crime and Punishment...
...And yet it is not French...
...The psychological analysis and moral problems of Les Liaisons dungereuses strike me as being nearer the concept of the human that we hold today...
...IN HIS NOVELS PROUST Starts out with the idea that a tea in the house of his grandmother is a fact which in itself has some exceptional importance...
...It has rained a great deal since Proust and the atmosphere has cleared too much for his nebulosities to prosper...
...That ia true in the work and in the person of Proust...
...Nor a homunculus...
...And for that very reason less complex of sensibility than all the Pleiades of poets beginning with Baudelaire and continuing to the end of the century...
...In that case Proust can be a typical Parisian who does not need to be Krench...
...To me he seems older than some writers of the 18th century: Laclos, for instance...
...But while in the heights Dostoyevsky towered above crime and in crime tempered and contrasted the soul of his heroes, provoking in them the most dramatic virtues, Marcel Proust enveloped in the spiderweb of circumstances moves about restlessly seeing only what surrounds him, although this he does see with the admirable minuteness of detail of an insect...
...There is also an absolute lack of gravity, of responsibility, in the ethical and heroic just as in the civic and social—in spite of the plausible Dreyfus incident, and to such an extent that when France fell into the chaos of 1940 and some of her writers like Bernanos and Benda spolfe of the culpability of intelligence everyone thought of that kind of intelligence represented by Marcel Proust that seems to be the negation of the slightest heroic possibility and is by antonomasia the counterepic of our time...
...They speak of Proust's modernity but it is a modernity that refers only to the resources of style...
...There are novelists who have used and abused the psychological without destroying or attenuating the poetic impulse...
...Anyway I do not find in his books any of the qualities that make me admire French literature.of which I am ap obstinate and impenitent reader...
...Proust in his private life is that also...
...The same thing is sometimes true of Creole Spaniards in South America...
...The phenomenon is typically French...
...Proust is a typical Frenchman, if not for the French at least for foreigners...
...Proust is not among them...
...In England the Bronte sisters...
...Proust's letters because they lack that marked striving for effect permit us to see the most human and true part of his soul...
...And any form of coquetry has accustomed us to see how easily it makes use of all resources, whatever they may be, if in them there is some possibility of "charm...
...These novelists are Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky...
...Nevertheless his letters, in modern literature, do have a certain historical value deserving of the attention of specialists and also of any reader with an alert and curious spirit...
...Proust's wealth has a name hated by all great poets: psychology...
...Proust's wVrld is not the aristocratic one although he seems bent on convincing us that it is...
...I have the impression that back of it there is an immense falseness...
...Nevertheless when I received the book just published by Random House and began to read the first letter I continued until the end with a sustained curiosity...
...There are Frenchmen who-deny this...
...When Proust gives great importance to one of Swann's moral observations many times we only see that importance in the deformation of the bourgeois spirit of Proust who is trying to accumulate merits in order to reveal himself to us as the great bourgeois that he is socially and so to win the good will of the Princesse de Polignac or the Comtesse de Noaillcs...
...A great bourgeois who wants to pass for an aristocrat...
...Stendahl...
...He was not what we call a man...
...The authors of esprit form another Pleiades: Marivaux, Musset, Gautier...
...Spaniard or Turk strolling about the world of French letters as a tourist, Proust's work can be France...
...He makes mistakes at every step even in the most insignificant details -his use of the particle "de" before the surname, for instance, —for which his friends occasionally correct him...
...But today it strikas us as sterile luxury...
...I say this with all respect for Proust...
...All his work is nothing but the analysis of that intimate attitude done with the zealousness of a high school eacher...
...But the principal defect in Proust's work in my judgment is his presenting as established social, moral and esthetic values which are only in force in his own way of understanding and which the rest of us cannot accept unless they are imposed upon us by dint of genius and dialectical skill, two qualities that abound in Dostoyevsky's work...
...Poets hate psychology because it is experience, because it is the science of the relative affinities of moral facts and takes conclusions for granted...
...THERE ARE THOSE who say that Proust is a typical Frenchman but he has never seemed so to me...
...In his work Proust occasionally speaks of Dostoyevsky...
...Yet In the Dieyfuss Case he was op• posed to the nationalistic party...
...I am not sure that he is to blame and I would gladly take all the blame upon myself on condition that I be relieved tof the obligation of reading him again...
...Some times his prose is irritating because of its trivialness, again because of its prolixity, and always it exasperates and tires...
...He impresses me as being someone who "wishes to be French" and who, precisely for that reason, because of his affection of the Gallic, seems more French than the French...
...The Russian writer dominates a reality in which the French writer loses his bearings in spite of his maps and compasses...
...462 pages...
...In modern times Anatole France and his protegee Marcel J'roust...
...But the work and letters of Proust in their ensemble form something like a monument of intellectual coquetry at whose proportions we all have the right te be astonished...
...And Proust, isolated from the society of Paris in the lost years of his life, writes the greater part of his work thinking of "what has not been," and gives us possibly a notion of the emptiness that would have filled his life if it had really been...
...He was sather a phantom and he had been so ever since childhood...
...The psychology of Proust's types exhausts all their possibilities and there is no room left for the ineffable, for hypothesis or lyrical sentimenf of a greatness exceeding the*, pages of the book...
...Indeed the English wrifers influenced by Proust — Virginia Woolf and James Joyce —seem to me to be very superior" to the model...
...What charm it matters not, nor at cost of what...
...He, Dostoyevsky, convinces us easily even though he is further from our own way of understanding civilization...
...Prousf does not conform to the appearances of French personality but he does wish to attain its ultimate essence...
...Proust was one of the most inconsistent personalities of his time...
...His letters read better than his novels because even though the falseness is also present the dressing gown for lounging around the house has at least taken the place of the disguise...
...His poverty has another name which only has meaning among the orators and minor writers of the end of the last century: esprit...
...Almost always the author in whom the values of experience predominate is an author of esprit...
...One must not think, however, that the letters of writers are more sincere than their published writings...
...In letter number 143 addressed to Louis da Robert he says: "The more I am caught in the fatality of circumstance*, the way that character in Dostoyevsky becomes involved in crime...
...I read his novels in Spanish with .difficulty and when I read them again in French, thinking that in the original language they would be better, I was bored and had the sensation that I was losing time I would not find again...
...Those brilliant effects obtained by the accumulation of psychological observations barely hold the reader's attention in a world that has lost moral gravity and specific weight...
...People knew it and his friends addressed him as they would a phantom or contemplative "entity" rather than as a human being...
...For the Englishman...
...Also for tourists spending vacations in France the Eiffel ToWer is Paris...
...With those two elements—psychological sharpness and esprit—the pages of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu succeed in raising a monument of impressive proportions in which*"some of us admire only the skill with which the reader's curiosity is maintained without emotional elements, and what we might call lightness in monotony and precision of detail without profundity...
...MARCEL PROUST, who has written admirable pages, is on the whole a confused and not very attractiveypersonality, at least for me...
...AS FOR ESPRIT, one must understand it as a secondary virtue...
...But every time that he remembers it he is so deeply moved by his own heroism that he makes us forget it...
...When Dostoyevsky is Sjrfore the abolute in the religious attitude of the true poet, which is a humble attitude and one of homage, Proust is enjoying the usufruct of the world of current values, and if none of the movements of his characters are directed toward the eternal it is because they are not really human beings but persons—masks—and only live d'apris If* iiufres...
Vol. 32 • May 1949 • No. 20
