Prelude to a Masterpiece

...But, having disposed of this starchy formality, the question still remains: Do we have here a freshly discovered masterpiece comparable to those I have mentioned...

...It was only when he felt free, after the death of his parents, to release his thoughts upon this subject that Proust was prepared to fulfil himself as a writer...

...Here in Jean Santeuil, too, we have a vivid picture of the extraordinary tolerance which Proust stood for all his life and which made him bend over backward to be completely fair to the views of his worst enemies...

...Innumerable episodes and some of the principal characters of Proust's later novel??like Gilberte Swann and the Marquis de Saint-Loup-are recognizable under different names and disguises in this book...

...So that what we have here is largely a collection of anecdotes, character sketches, etc...

...In this earlier book, his hands are still tied...

...The case has an important part to play in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and in the person of the Ambassador Norpois we are admitted to a view behind the scenes of diplomacy...

...Such a rendition spoils the thing for me...

...It comes to us as a pleasurable shock to be able to enthrone henceforward an idea previously expelled and humiliated because we lacked respect for what we genuinely felt, when we read a letter written by Monsieur Boutroux [not a Jew] in which he states that anti-Semitism is abominable, and that Jews are just as good as Christians, or hear Monsieur Bertrand say that if the juries had had any breadth of vision at all they would have acquitted Zola, or Monsieur Manau publicly pay tribute to the Scheurer-Kestners and the Trarieux...

...were that they should not publish anything which had not been finished and given to the world by himself...

...It took a command from the Emperor Augustus himself to release the poem...

...But, if we feel that something has been lost on this ground, there are also distinct gains in other respects...

...Charlus is missing from the cast of characters, and, if anyone had been in any doubt about his importance to the structure and success of the later book, the difference which is made by his absence should prove convincing...

...It is the story of his childhood, of his youthful development, of his first excursions into society, of his participation in the Dreyfus Case, of his temperamental conflict with his parents, and of sundry adventures that befall him...

...We certainly have plenty of beautiful aphorisms, phrases and figures of speech in Jean Santeuil which might accomplish the conversion to Proustolatry of a reader possessed of a sensitive ear for language...

...Like Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, for example, it begins with a chapter in which the author, writing in the first person, gives a circumstantial account of how the manuscript of the story came into his possession...

...Proust at his best in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is digressive, but he is also beautifully patterned...

...It leaps unaccountably from one point to another because it is not under the central control which governs Proust's great composition...

...A variation on the theme of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is all that the publishers on the dust jacket and Andre Maurois in his preface lead us to expect...

...if we are believers in Dreyfus...

...He goes to such lengths in this respect that occasionally we cannot help feeling that there was something masochistic in his attitude, but he gives us a credible explanation of it which makes it a sign of moral delicacy rather than masochism...

...It is curious to remember, too...

...that among the compositions still in manuscript which Chopin wished to be destroyed at his death was the Fantaisie Impromptu, surely one of his most popular works...

...This in itself, however, is no reflection on its possible value...

...author, "The Proustian Vision,'' "The Crippled Giant" Had the decision been up to Marcel Proust himself, this book would never have seen the light...

...Had Kafka's instructions to his literary executor been followed, we would have been deprived of some of his most remarkable works...

...What we have in Jean Santeuil is the work of a master which is mainly an abortive suggestion of the materials and form of his masterwork...

...There's a perfect Proustian labyrinth for you, grammatically speaking...

...His figure dominates the center of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and the homosexuality which he represents laces its way through every part of that book...

...In a sense, of course, as I have said, this is justified...

...In fact, we would have been better served by a very careful re-editing of the materials here that preserved those sections which are really new, which have no analogy in the later novel, and which are likely now to be lost to the view of all but the most careful, complete and specialized students of Proust...

...The answer is clearly no...

...The treatment of politics, and of the Dreyfus Case in particular, in Jean Santeuil is a distinctly new aspect of Proust...

...Jean Santeuil is less than a masterpiece as the Parthenon is less than a temple, but what we have in the Parthenon are the ruins of what was once a temple, while in Jean Santeuil we have a quarry out of which a temple or cathedral (to use Proust's metaphor for the end-product of his "architectural labors") was later to be built...

...The Dreyfus Case, instead of being glimpsed indirectly through its effect on various characters, is here reported directly, and so is a political crisis in the Chamber of Deputies which has no analogue at all in the later novel...

...I do not mean that politics and the Dreyfus Case are completely absent from Proust's later work...

...One wonders what possible audience the publisher may have had in mind??perhaps those Book-of-the-Month Club buyers who some years ago received (as a dividend) a two-volume set of Remembrance of Things Past...

...But this again is present only in shadowy form in the English translation, and for its full savoring requires a knowledge of the French text...

...But we also have material here which was never used in the finished work and which has great interest for us...

...In the hero of Jean Santeuil, we recognize many of the characteristics of Proust himself...

...These things will all sound familiar to the readers of Proust's great book, and if I add that the story of Jean Santeuil begins with his unease as a child over the good-night kiss of his mother, they may be under the impression that what we have here is simply another (earlier) version of a story which they already know...

...This set graces the shelves of many a home I have visited, but remains largely untouched by human hand...

...In our constant effort to be sincere," he writes in Jean Santeuil, "we feel that we ought not to rely on our own opinions and range ourselves on the side of those whose opinions are the least favorable to our own attitude...

...You would have to go back and re-read every sentence of his to grasp what he really means...

...Its general plan is the essence of simplicity and has a long tradition in the history of the novel...

...Of course, what remains constant in all of Proust, from first to last, is his beautiful style...

...All the material is within his reach...

...But we must turn from such considerations to the work itself...

...If we happen to be Jews, we make a great point of trying to understand the anti-Semite point of view...

...To whom but to Proust would it have occurred to call the buzzing of flies "the chamber music of summer...

...the same old life or the same old human beings, wearing slowly away in the enjoyment of the same old vices which would die only when they died, and every day could give them only the same old pleasure, vices and characters which nature had implanted in them until the moment should come when men and vices alike would wither up and drop to the bottom of the cemetery which boasted more inhabitants than the town...

...Granted the form is the loosest that we have, still there is a minimal coherence and unity that seems to be required even of the most episodic of narratives...

...But whatever else is true of Jean Santeuil, there should have been no pretense that it is a novel in any real sense of the word...

...Jean Santeuil is not merely digressive, it is positively desultory...

...during his final illness, called for the cases containing the manuscript of his Aeneid with the intention of burning it...

...But there are chapters on politics in this new book which are entirely new and extremely interesting...

...The principal lack of this earlier work, so far as subject matter is concerned, is felt by the reader in the almost complete lack of unconventional sexual episodes...

...The winding, serpentine sentence based on the long-drawn-out epic simile which is so characteristic of Proust may not lose quite as much in its transition to another language, though the lack of grammatical coherence is unpleasantly apparent in English but somehow difficult to notice in the original French: "The streets through which he walked again were the same as he remembered them, the shop-windows the same, behind which to the same counters, like shell-fish clamped to their rock and visible through a thin screen of water, the same men, animated by the same vices, seemed as though permanently attached, leaving them only for a few hours each day to float as far as the Public Promenade, or to the harbor, and then making their way back...

...It was to be one of the distinguishing marks of the mature Proust himself and one of the most potent causes of his influence upon the drifting intellectuals of the Western world that for him, as for the Irish poet Yeats, "art had assumed the burden that had dropped from the shoulders of the priests...

...Here the pattern is almost entirely lacking, and where it is present it is worked in awkwardly...

...Fair" does not seem to he a well-chosen word, but it is hard to say if "beautiful" would have been better...

...Except, then, for this opening chapter, we are left with the story of Jean Santeuil, objectively told...

...we try to see precisely why it was that the jury found against Zola and the civil authorities cast a slur on the good name of the Scheurer-Kestners...

...As an example of the short, sharp aphorism which is just as much a part of Proust's equipment as the long, winding, serpentine periods generally thought typical of him, I would choose a sentence which in French reads: "La vie n'est belle que de loin...

...In the English of Gerard Hopkins, unfortunately, this felicity turns into something that reads: "Life is fair only when seen from a distance...

...Proust proves in these chapters that he could have become, among other things, a great journalist had he so wished or had he not been minded to become something better still...

...It may be harder to sell to the public a collection of shorter pieces, like essays or stories, for example, than it is to sell a novel, but the plain fact is that it is no service to Proust to pretend that we have here much more than a miscellany by a writer of genius...

...But, in another sense, this sort of description does an injustice to the new discovery, which at the same time contains both less and more than the greater work of Proust which we already have...

...And the addition of "seen," which is left to be understood in the French, slows the thought up...

...The exhumation and reconstruction of the manuscript is the work of a French scholar, Bernard de Fallois, and to me the most curious thing about this edition is the imprint of the enterprising firm which it bears and the report of the large sum ($10,000) paid for the American rights...

...Here, for example, is a young man who has not been brought up in any religious belief the docs not add that the cause of this was that he came out of a mixed marriage between Christian and Jew) and for whom "literature constituted his sole belief...

...Having established its origin, the fictitious narrative is then allowed to unfold in the third person...

...Charlus, it is agreed, is a fusion of Proust's friend Robert de Montesquiou and Proust himself...

...Or to speak of a "fugue" of city housetops mounting into the sky...

...These examples, if they prove anything, prove only that those people in France (cited by Andre Maurois in his preface) who argued that Proust's wishes in the matter of Jean Santeuil should be respected without question may have been wrong and were certainly using a weak argument...

...And yet, if the guiding Ariadne-thread of good sense slips from you before you have reached the end of such a period, Proust is probably not for you...

...The publication of Proust's true and finished masterpiece had to be subsidized by the author, because no publisher would risk the investment in it...

...as it has been called, expresses itself through those strange metaphors by which various objects in the real world are compared with artistic phenomena...

...Ironic reflections are suggested both by the publication and by the price paid for the American rights to Jean Santeuil and the contrast which these provide with the fate of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu...

...Jean Santeuil amply justifies the prediction of his "incomparable friend" Leon Daudet, who wrote in his memoirs at a time when Proust's name was almost unknown to the world at large: "If he can manage to guide his steps, to control himself, to establish firmly his literary point of view, he will one of these days write on the margin of life itself something quite extraordinary...

...This "religion of art...

...It has, in fact, been shown convincingly that the later book sprang originally from Proust's intention to write an article for a newspaper dealing with a sexual scandal at the court of Wilhelm II...

...His precise directions to his literary executors, Varius and Tucca...

...Except for a few pages dealing with a wayward nun (probably transposed from an original male novice) and with the blackmail and suicide of a homosexual, the existence of the underworld of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis is hardly hinted at...

...Proust was, indeed, to become famous as a great architect of literary form, but he had not yet reached this stage before 1900, when most of the present work would appear to have been written...

...It is likely to be of interest, therefore, less to the public at large than to the literary public (such as it is in our country), and perhaps not even to this literary public but to the still more limited world of scholarship in modern letters...

...The most famous of such instances in history is that of Virgil, who...