Proust

THE PAST RECAPTURED--Marcel Proust --A. & C. Boni.

Proustians, whose numbers are growing in all Western lands, say that the late great Marcel Proust (died Nov. 18, 1922), half-Jew, half-snob, wholehearted rememberer of his past, was the ranking writer of his time. With U. S. publication of The Past Recaptured, seventh and last part of his gigantic "novel," The Remembrance of Things Past, which crept into print in France from 1913 to 1926, U. S. Proustians may now read their Bible from Genesis to Revelations, without benefit of dictionary.

Translation of Proust's work into English was begun by able Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff in 1922. He carried on his job leisurely and well until death stopped him two years ago, with only one more volume to do. So pleased had critics been by his translation that Publishers Chatto & Windus looked high, low and carefully for a worthy successor, finally hit upon Author Stephen Hudson (A True Story). Hudson's version did not satisfy U. S. Publishers Boni, who chose Frederick A. Blossom, Ph. D., ex-professor at Johns Hopkins, to make the U. S. translation --careful, sober, with occasional Ph. D. irruptions into footnotes.

The Author, Marcel Proust (pronounced "Proost") was born in Paris in 1871, son of a well-to-do bourgeois doctor and his Jewish wife. Delicate and sensitive from birth, he suffered all his life from asthma. From a very early age he was intellectually and socially ambitious, took himself with a seriousness which only success can excuse. His poor health did not prevent his taking his degree and serving his military service. His father wanted him to be a diplomat, but he postponed the issue by dabbling at the Sorbonne. Meeting with Henri Bergson influenced his decision on a literary career.

Meantime he had wormed his way into aristocratic salons of the Faubourg Saint- Germain, gradually built up a reputation as a man of fashion, a wit, a beautiful talker. So great was his renown and his care for it that when he entertained at dinner he would eat beforehand so that his tongue could wag undisturbed. His entrances were timed strategically: just as a gathering was preparing to break up Proust would enter, set the room abuzz with his rapid-fire monolog: "Do you know whether the Due de-- stayed on in the boudoir with Mme Z? Could you explain the kiss he gave her, in the very middle of the ball?" "Overwhelmingly" gentle in voice, elaborately formal in manner, Proust smiled continually, gazed fondly at society from brilliant black eyes under drooping eyelids and "a Saracen's beak." Extravagant, generous--his tips were fantastic--he dressed like the dandy he was: creamy pink shirtfront, a rose or orchid in his lapel, light-colored gloves with black points. Even in summer, for fear of catching cold, he wore a heavy pelisse. An impressed English visitor to Paris said that Proust was "really the only man I ever saw dining in a fur coat." Some of the lions Proust tamed: Prince de Polignac, Count Robert de Montesquiou (chief prototype of Proust's "Baron de Charlus"), Baronne Alphonse de Rothschild, Edmond de Goncourt, Massenet, Saint-Saens, Anatole France, Prince Antoine Bibesco and his cousin Marthe. No coward, Proust fought a duel with a journalist who had reviewed him unfavorably. He was a Dreyfusard when merely to be a Jew in France was dangerous.

Though his friends said of him: "Marcel can never be anything but a man-about-town," Proust intended something different and bigger. Though his first two books (Portraits de peintres, Les plaisirs et les jours) were comparatively slight, attracted little attention, he was always taking notes for his Big Book, eventually filled 20 huge notebooks with material. After his beloved mother died in 1905, Proust retired from society, set to work in earnest. In his famed cork-lined (soundproof) room he lived, an invalid-recluse, for the remaining 17 years of his life, occasionally venturing out again into society to verify a point in his reminiscential writing, often summoning his fashionable friends to question them about so-&-so's gestures, the material of so-&-so's gown. He wrote mostly at night, with the win- dow shut on account of his asthma, "in an attitude as inconvenient as possible: a bad pen, a half-empty bottle of ink. . . . He held his sheet of paper in the air and wrote without supporting it on anything at all. . . . He refused to have a shade fixed on the lamp that dazzled him." He became so completely absorbed in his writing that he once worked three days at a stretch. Once he sallied out to the Louvre to refresh his memory about a picture, did not realize until he got there that it was midnight. Proust was sorry to die because he wanted three more years in which to revise his book; he was glad dying took him a long time because he could take notes on what it was like, work them into his deathbed scene of Bergotte. As his fever grew worse he sent out to his favorite hotel, the Ritz, for iced beer, took no other nourishment.

It was not easy to find a publisher for The Remembrance of Things Past. Andre Gide, who later found in Proust "a lake of delights," was at first unimpressed. One publisher was annoyed at Proust's devoting 50 pages to "how he turns over & over in his bed before getting to sleep." Finally the first volume was published by Grasset at Proust's expense. Critics, except for a few, hardly knew what to say about it. could not make up their minds until the second volume won the Prix Goncourt. From that day on. Proust's reputation, like his ponderous book, slowly gathered strength.

The Book. Proust describes his book to a friend as a novel. "At least it is more a novel in that it 'swerves less from that form than from any other. There is a person who tells it and who says: I; there are plenty of characters. . . . And from the point of view of composition it is so complex that it develops very belatedly when all the 'themes' have begun to combine. You can see that all this has nothing very engaging about it." A series of interrelated stories of interrelated characters, it is linked and bounded by the stream of time meandering through it, on which the gradually aging narrator is the central voyager. Says Proust: "Thus a part of the book is a part of my life which I had forgotten, and which I rediscovered eating a little madeleine which I had dipped in tea, a flavor which delighted me before I had recognized it and identified it as one I had once relished almost every morning; immediately all my life at once was resuscitated, and, as I tell it in the book, as in the Japanese game where the little bits of paper immersed in a bowl of water become persons, flowers, etc.. all the people and gardens of that period of my life came out of a cup of tea."

No realist, Proust sums up, in The Past Recaptured, his creative process, raps shrewdly in passing at more "objective" writers:*

"To read the subjective book of these strange signs (signs standing out boldly, it seemed, which my conscious mind, as it explored my unconscious self, went searching for, stumbled against and passed around, like a diver groping his way), no one could help me with any rule, for the reading of that book is a creative act in which no one can stand in our stead, or even collaborate with us. And therefore how many there are who shrink from writing it; how many tasks are undertaken in order to avoid that one! Each happening, the Dreyfus case, the War, supplied fresh excuses to the writers for not deciphering that book--they wished to assure the triumph of right, rebuild the moral unity of the nation, and they had no time to think of literature. . . . But ... art is the most real of all things, the sternest school in life and truly the 'Last Judg- ment.' "

"I" is a sensitive, spoiled child, morbidly dependent on his mother. He grows older, spends vacations in the country town of Combray, the seaside at Balbec, falls in love with little Gilberte Swann. The story of M. Swann's hopeless love affair with Odette is introduced. Later the narrator takes up with Albertine, is desperately unhappy with her--among other reasons, because he suspects her of Lesbian tendencies. She runs away from him and is killed in an accident. During the War the narrator takes refuge in a sanitarium, emerges to find his social world tottering, aged, ready for death. As U. S. Proustian Edmund Wilson epitomizes, "in the long last sentence of the book the word 'Time' begins to sound, and it closes the symphony as it began it'': "If, at least, there were granted me time enough to complete my work, I would not fail to stamp it with the seal of that Time the understanding of which was this day so forcibly impressing itself upon me, and I would therein describe men--even should that give them the semblance of monstrous creatures--as occupying in Time a place far more considerable than the so restricted one allotted them in space, a place, on the contrary, extending boundlessly since, giant-like, reaching far back into the years, they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives--with countless intervening days between--so widely separated from one another in Time."

Womanhood Affronted

THE SHELTERED LIFE--Ellen Glasgow --Doubleday, Doran.

The Southern lady of the old school, helpless product of exaggerated chivalry and Victorian prudishness, may never in real life have been such a pathetic monster as Authoress Glasgow's heroine, but she was at least recognizably similar. This sad story of how a fading Virginia belle tried to taper off into normal old age may affront the shades of Southern colonels but should arouse only wondering pity from a differently complicated generation.

To the aristocracy of her Virginia town Mrs. Birdsong had become a legendary beauty long before she began to lose her looks. In the best tradition of famous belles she had married George, least eligible, most worthless of all her flocking beaux. George was a charmer, that goes without saying, but he was woman-crazy, could not even draw the color line. The situation was unfortunate but usual. Where Mrs. Birdsong deviated from the human to the holy was in refusing to do anything about it except by straining more & more to be George's ideal. Never natural when George was around, she never reproached him, always smiled, always pretended he was knight to her lady. Both of them had a terrible time but pretended to each other that everything was perfect. When little Jenny Blair, daughter of her old friend the General, began to grow up and be attractive to George, he manfully resisted temptation as long as he could. Jenny Blair chose an unfortunate moment to throw herself into George's arms. Mrs. Birdsong saw them; for once her lacquer cracked. The result was shattering for George, disastrous for George's overworked ideal.

Authoress Glasgow writes of her Southerners as one having authority; through her velvety Southern glove she makes her iron fingers felt. Only the old General (who has not been successful with women) seems to have her full sympathy. She allows him several pretty speeches, some good ones: ''When a man is young, every woman seems to be moving in his direction. When he is old, he realizes that they are all moving away."

The Author. Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, born, raised and resident in Richmond, Va., hotbed of Southern tradition, decided she would not be a romantic, sentimental Southern belle-lettriste. She announced: ''What the South needs now is--blood and irony." Plump, lively, slightly deaf, she finds life agreeable and amusing. Though she thought she could die of happiness if her first book was accepted, after her 17th was published she remarked: "I've never been happy and have not died." Authoress Glasgow lives in an old house in the heart of Richmond at No. i West Main Street, entertains there her friends James Branch Cabell, Mary Johnston, Joseph Hergesheimer, Hugh Walpole. She has never married.

Timid Soul

THE STRANGE RIVER--Julian Green-- Harper.

Surprisingly likened to Dostoyevsky (by Andre Maurois, now No. 1 French popular writer and blurber) whose sympathy for his characters is notorious. U. S.French Author Julian Green writes of his human specimens with the coldness but without the spite of an Aldous Huxley. His uninspiring, rather clammy books are informative but disagreeable, arouse respect but rarely sympathy.

Philip, hero of The Strange River, is a timid, rich, unambitious young man whose growing neurasthenia takes the uninteresting form of preoccupation with the petty details of his own life. He lives in a menage a trois with his wife, with whom he is only on speaking terms, and his older sister-in-law. Eliane, just shivering on the verge of old-maidhood. Eliane knows Philip better than he knows himself, knows also all about her sister's lover, does not resent Philip being cuckolded because she loves him herself. Her minute caretaking of him gets on Philip's nerves, but it never occurs to him why she does it. At last Eliane, unable to stand the situation any longer, goes off to a boardinghouse. Philip finds her there, seems agitated, wants to ask her "a serious question." The question: Is he getting fat? Eliane has hysterics, finally comes home, tells Philip just what she thinks of him as a man, as a cuckold, as a human being. But she continues to love him. Philip swallows it all, wanders down to the Seine to contemplate suicide timidly; then goes home to his colorless wife, his dreadful Eliane.

Wabash Wildwood

THE YEARS OF PEACE--LeRoy Mac-Leod--Century.

Of the small but increasingly respectable group of U. S. historico-pastoral novelists (some of them: Willa Gather, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, T. S. Stribling. ''Maristan" Chapman), Author LeRoy MacLeod is not smallest or least respectable. The Years of Peace, his second novel, is quietly & fully written. Like any well-told story of the past, it seems truer than history.

Tyler Peck was no ordinary Hoosier farmer. Hot-headed Kentuckian, he had had to come home from college to work on the farm when his older brothers went off to fight for the North. Tyler had itched to enlist, but on the Confederate side. As a youthful revenge on his family for not letting him go to War he married the daughter of a no-account neighbor, emigrated to Indiana to his Uncle Lafe's farm. There he worked with erratic energy as husband & husbandman. Crops & children came, but Tyler wanted wilder oats. At the news of Lee's surrender Tyler was furious, thought he had missed his big chance, meditated going West. Instead he began to call at easy Minnie Scott's when her husband was away. Tyler's wife tried hard to be his better half, but it was rock-like Uncle Lafe who kept his hand to the plough. And to such good purpose that when Uncle Lafe died Tyler had learnt his lesson. The years of stormy peace quieted into real peace at last: Tyler dropped Minnie, took up with his wife, was glad to be a farmer.

Books of the Week

LOST LECTURES--Maurice Baring --Knopf ($3).

THE STRANGE RIVER -- Julian Green--Harper ($2.50).

THE PAST RECAPTURED--Marcel Proust--A. & C. Boni ($2.50).

THE YEARS OF PEACE -- LeRoy MacLeod--Century ($2.50).

BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD--J. W. N. Sullivan--Knopf ($2.50).

THE SHELTERED LIFE--Ellen Glasgow--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

LARK ASCENDING--Mazo de la Roche--Little, Brown ($2.50). Small-town bohemians junketing abroad--a far cry from the W'hiteoak clan.

A PRINCESS IN EXILE -- Grand Duchess Marie -- Viking ($3.50). More royal vicissitudes of a princess who became a bestseller.

THEY WINTER ABROAD -- James Aston--Viking ($2.50). Clever stuff about English hotel-inmates in Italy, a la Aldous Huxley.

*Only contemporary writer whom Proust mentions is Aldous Huxley.

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