Mauriac's Hocus-Pocus

...One feels that this is a contrived, constrained, artificial piece of work —not as the best dramas or novels are contrived, constrained or artificial—and one refuses to take the fiction really seriously...

...to put it another way, of plain talk about social climbing in the provincial French setting of Bordeaux and a kind of "religious" hocus-pocus, the import of which remains largely unintelligible to me...

...The object of her ambition is to enter the ranks of the local aristocracy, that is to say "the Sons" of the great wine-merchants of Bordeaux...

...The narrator himself is presented to us as a social-climber, but his sister Florence is still more so —she is a single-minded social climber...

...It is regrettable that this should be so, because one appreciates that it is not dearth of talent in the author that accounts for his failure to inspire his reader with conviction...

...Now the original Augustin miraculously returns to the scene, even more radically changed (physically ugly where he was once beautiful) than the imposter...

...The story opens with a cruel (in truth, a farcically caricatured) rebuff to the social pride of the narrator and his ambitious uncle...

...His sister Florence, like Lady Macbeth, is made of sterner stuff...

...Proust saw snobbery as something of a foible: at worst, it threatened to stunt one's spiritual growth...

...We can understand from this book whv this should have been so...

...Author, "The Proustian Vision" THIS BOOK is an odd combination of realistic satire and eccentric stylization—or...

...The viciousness of snobbery could not be more callously exemplified than in these scenes...

...That, given the position of her own family, takes some doing...

...The coincidences and facts he requires the reader to believe "as given" prove a strain to the most liberal kind of credulity...

...It goes without saying that Florence is not long satisfied with the kudos she has gained, and...

...If we are to believe him, Mauriac was one of the first French readers to appreciate the genius of Marcel Proust, long before A la Recherche du Temps Perdu appeared...

...And yet it is not the skeletal outline of the story as I have traced it that is its weakest point, but rather the embroidery of imaginative detail that Mauriac has placed upon it...

...In Proust, snobbery enters into the composition of a character, but it never quite dominates him...

...At their confrontation, the real punishment of Florence is revealed, for, having to choose once more between the real Augustin, whom she loved without knowing it until too late, and a physical simulacrum of what he was in his youth, she chooses—the simulacrum...

...The story, on the plane of credible reality, is soon told...

...Augustin serves as the bait with which she manages to hook one of the most exclusive catches among "the Sons...

...Hocus-pocus is the dominant impression left by the book, and the taste of the pinches of satire with which Mauriac seasons his story is in the end completely suppressed by his too-luxuriant fantasy...

...Charlus is mercilessly juggled by his various vices, yet he is never so completely eroded by them as Mauriac's characters are...

...Mauriac's characters are so exclusive in their pursuit that they lose, in a kind of monstrous one-sidedness, whatever reality they initially possess...

...Character is inescapable fate, and the fault in her character which made her choose falsely the first time will make her do so again and again and again...

...These arabesques can only be described as so romantically fantastic as to require a really extraordinary generosity, or else a perversity of taste, to tolerate them...

...Mauriac's style is felicitous (even when it is sensed through the medium of translation) and his dramatic facility is great, but something is lacking in his book without which all its other qualities are useless...

...One can admit that Mauriac is brilliant enough to have been a worthy recipient of such a signal honor as the Nobel Prize, and yet doubt that his work has the literary stamina to survive into another generation...

...The reader refuses to surrender his critical sense or willingly to suspend his disbelief —the suspension of which, according to Coleridge, constitutes poetic faith...

...The reason for this may be that Proust's naturalistic philosophical bias kept him within bounds of probability, whereas what Mauriac takes to be his religious sense has betrayed him into lurid melodrama...

...Its subject is one most fully developed by Proust —the perils of snobbery, first to others and ultimately to oneself...

...His plan is to create a form of intellectual snobbery which shall exclude the social snobs he envies, until the day they are willing to come to terms and admit him to their circle...

...Mauriac once complained that "God is terribly absent from the work of Marcel Proust...

...Even in this abbreviated retelling, it must surely strike us that the author is exercising his poetic license to the utmost...

...It is the narrator's saving grace, however, that he is hoisted by his own petard—that is, he finds the spiritual attractions of Augustin compelling enough to compete for a time with the worldly ambitions which form the basis of his character...

...I do not agree with this judgment, but I note that Mauriac's own work might have benefited if his particular conception of God did not haunt him like a chimera...

...after a descent into dissoluteness, begins to show alarming signs of regression and longing for the true lover whom she had spurned...

...I deliberately surround the word religious with quotation marks, because the author's interpretation of religion appears to me so bizarre that I have no doubt that it is as puzzling to his fellow Catholics as it is to a non-Catholic reader...

...later, after being convinced that Augustin has been killed in the war, to replace him with a reasonable facsimile who might impose himself upon the disordered Florence...

...This is true even of the character who is most infected with it—the Baron de Charlus...

...But Mauriac insists on the potentiality of its actually overthrowing the mental balance of the sufferer and endangering his immortal soul...

...Who, with the same motives that once actuated Florence, now wishes to take his place...

...Thereupon the narrator decides, in revenge, to cultivate one of his intellectually brilliant fellow students, Augustin, who has no standing in society whatever...

...The plan enjoys a certain success...

...The principal character is the sister of the narrator...

...Mauriac is even more insistent on these perils than Proust...

...She never for a moment loses sight of her aim, but enters into the game of toying with Augustin's love because it is an amusing occupation in itself and because it fits in with her deep schemes of social conquest...

...The narrator, as a way of restoring her emotional health, undertakes first to find Augustin, who has long since disappeared from view, and...