76 Books&Writers

Dream and Nightmare that is so marked in pointed forward to Cantre Sainte-Beuve, which
Americanliterature in the last hundred years Mr. Painter analyses step by step, emphasising
and more. The paradox of the co-existence of that passages which were once taken as intima-
the Great Society and the H-bombis not new. tions of the masterpiece to come are in fact
David Daiches morelikely to be reworkingsof earlier drafts.
The momentof transfiguration was close at
hand, however.In a sense it had already come:
the episode of the madeleine(in reality, a rusk)
took place just as Proust was embarkingon the
second version of Contre Sainte-Beuve, at the
Painter’s Proust beginning of ~9o9, but at first he failed to
appreciate its significance for him. Continuing
Marcel Proust. VolumeII. By GEORO~. PA~N~R. to revise the essay, he juxtaposed two novels in
Chatto &Windus, 4os. the section on Balzac--La Recherchede l’Absolu
I U: rI ^s v^ ~ E N GeorgePainter six years to
bring out the second half of his biography
and Les Illusions Perdues--and stumbled to-
wardshis title. Finally, a monthor twolater, the
of Proust, instead of twoas originally announced. revelation of the madeleine camehometo him.
Evidently he underestimated the length and By July ~9o9 he was hard at work on Swann.
scope of his labours--a habit which he maywell Mr. Painter’s treatment of A la Rechercheis
have caught from his master. For it was only as admirably methodical as one would expect.
while actually writing A la Recherche that He unscrambles the chronology and separates
Proust cameto discern its true proportions, and layer after layer, revealing a Proust who was
despite his initial chagrin the long delay in pub- ready to feed his immediateexperiences of war-
lishing A l’Ombredes Jeunes Filles en Fleurs time Paris into the stream of recollection, and
turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The even to go out in deliberate search of material.
postponement (from i9i 3 to I9z9) enabled him (He hired musicians in order to help him distil
to roundoff. the pattern of his experience,pursu- the Vinteuil Septet.) Somepersistent fallacies
ing the possibilities of his nature further than he about the history of Proust’s reputation are
would have dared before, and also gave him a cleared up--Swannwas by no means a complete
chance to expand and refine his masterpiece flop, nor was d l’Ombrean instant success; and
until it tallied with his inner vision. The there is a blow-by-blowaccount of his dealings
material which he added during these years was with publishers, notably his efforts to extricate
bone and musclerather than fat, not self-indul- himself from Grasset once he had overcomethe
gent but essential to his artistic purpose. suspicions of Andr~ Gide and the NRFgroup.
The inception and growth of .//la Recherche Judged by ordinary business standards Proust
naturally overshadow everything else in Mr. doesn’t come particularly well out of this
Painter’s new volume. Wherepreviously a touch episode, but wherethe future of his novel was at
of the gossip-columnist was called for, he now stake he could be like a tigress defending her
needs to be far more the patient editorial young, and he knew the value of the NRF
excavator. This is a role in whichhe shines, as imprint. (He could also be decidedly unsenti-
anyone who recalls his masterly handling of mental in money matters: when he left the
Proust’s submission to Ruskin in the first Boulevard Haussmann he arranged for the
volume will know. In the present volume he famouscork walls to be sold to a bottle-manu-
begins by showing how Ruskin’s influence facturer). In the end his manoeuvreshelped him
waned,a process as fitful and long-drawn-outas to taste the glory which he was quite frank
the oubli whicheventually dissolves a Proustian about wanting to enjoy before he died, although
love-affair. The introductory essay to Proust’s he owed even more to the exertions of his
translation of Sesame and the Lilies marks a friends---notably IAon Daudet, who led the
crucial break, all but standing Ruskin on his backstairs campaign which secured him the
head in its denial of the direct moralbenefits of Prix Goncourt.
literature. It mustbe taken in context, however, Despite the incidental excitementsof literary
as a declaration of independence,the expression politics, the ructions and intrigues, it is inevit-
not of a settled Proustianattitude (whichif only able that the life of a middle-aged novelist
in view of his powers as a critic would be should makedrier reading than that of a young
absurd), but of his moodin x9o5. A further stage social climber. Fewperiods in a writer’s career
in his struggle to emancipate himself from his are as humdrum as the ones when he is
literary forbears came three years later with actually engagedin writing, and Mr. Painter is
the series of brilliant parodies promptedby the hardly to be blamedif muchof his material is
Ars~neLupinesqueaffair of Sir Julius Wernher less immediately colourful than it was in his
and the Lemoine Diamonds. These in turn first volume. But he also has murkier or more

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 Books & Writers 77.
sensational regions to traverse than those of
authorship. In the years whenProust was work-
ing out his artistic salvation he was also giving
the rein to tendencies which he had largely
kept under control during his mother’s lifetime.
It was as though he were simultaneously trying
to transform himsel£ into both Charlus and
Bergotte. His affections fastened, gradually but
tenaciously, on Alfred Agostinelli, whoemerges
from these pages as a likeable and rather
pathetic figure: one of the most touching pas-
sages in the book is the account of the plane-
crash in which he was killed at the age of
twenty-six. (He had run away from the Boule-
vard Haussmann and enrolled in a flying-school
near Antibes under the pseudonymof "Marcel
Swarm.") Oddly enough, Proust had already
sketchedout the captivity, flight and accidental
death of Albertine six monthsbefore Agostinelli
first becamehis "prisoner"--a doleful instance
of nature catching up with art. Not that Mr.
Painter accepts the total identification of Alber-
fine with Agostinelli, except in the final phase.
He argues that she was as muchof a composite
as the other major characters, with elements in
her of several of the girls to whomProust was
attracted in youth, and even more of the ones
JOHN
whovisited him, with his mother’s tacit encour-
agement, in the relaxed period following his WAIN
father’s death.
Mr. Painter has been criticised in some his newnovel
quarters for endowing Proust with stronger just out
heterosexual feelings than he could have had
in reality. At times he does admittedly push THEYOUNG
VISITORS
rather hard in this direction: one isn’t entirely recentlypublished,
convincedby references to Proust’s "silent im- his long poem
mobile love-making" with Louisa de Mornand.
But personally I can’t bring myself to object
very strenuously on this particular score. After WILDTRAGK
all, Proust must certainly have been susceptible
to women--hecould hardly have created Odette
or Gilberte or Rachel-when-from-the-Lord other-
wise. (Even Albertine, though abstract and SHADOWS
ON A WALL
shadowy in comparison with Proust’s other Apowerful novel of race tension with a difference.
By Charles Israel author of The Mark. 25s
women,is plausibly feminine, not in the least
a manin skirts.) Mr. Painter’s treatment of
Proust’s openly sadistic phase, on the other
PURPOSE
ANDPLAGE
Essays on Americanwriters by the first Professor
hand, leaves me somewhatuneasy. There is too of AmericanLiterature to be appointed in this
muchtut-tutting, and at the sametime too much country, Douglas Grant of Leeds University.
reliance on the hearsay evidence of Maurice Macmillan also publish this month Professor
Grant’s
Sachs, whocommandsabout as muchconfidence
in the wimess-boxas Baron Miinchausenwould. THE GOGKLANEGHOST
Nodoubt Proust was capable of tormenting rats a light-hearted look at the 18th century psychical
for his pleasure, or furnishing a brothel with fraud that had all literary Londonin an uproaru
including Dr. Johnson, whohurried downin a cab
his dead parents’ chairs and sofas; but as pre- to inspect the phenomena in person. Illustrated.
sented here, the picture seems unduly melo- 21~
dramatic. published by
TrxE c^sE oF Maurice Sachs may well be
exceptional. WhetherMr. Painter is generally

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 78 Books & Writer’s
inclined to be uncritical of his sources, to treat Poincar~ was a celebrated figure in Proust’s
them as all of equal value, only another Paris, and his ideas were in the air. The in-
Proustian scholar could say for sure, but as far tangibles of intellectual history like these are
¯ as a layman can judge his standards are high. surely at least as relevant as recording whatone
He has sifted the evidence scrupulou.sl~,, and Bibesco said to another, or keeping track of
rearranged an unwieldy mass of materims with Proust’s dinner-engagements(not that one wants
admirableclarity, so that for ordinary readers, to dispensewith the chit-chat either).
in England at least, his book now subsumes The second instance is one which touches
most of the previous biographical literature on Proust’s sense of himself moreintimately. There
Proust. In a word, he is indispensable, and we are only fleeting references to Proust’s Jewish
must signal our gratitude. Yet one reader at ancestry in Mr. Painter’s second volume, which
least must also admit to a certain lowering of at one level is logical: after all, oncethe Dreyfus
the spirit. Mr. Painter sometimessucceeds in Affair had died downthere can have been very
doing what Proust himself even at his least little formal documentationon the subiect. But
engaging never does, making one ask whether
it is really worthall the effort. Needlessto say ~h
sychologically a mandoesn’t suddenly forget
at he is half-Jewish in middlelife. Therefer-
one feels far better-informed after reading him, ences which Mr. Painter does give make Proust
but I don’t knowif one is that muchthe wiser. sound little more than the most crass kind of
Ultimately there is something about Proust’s Jewish anti-semite; but it is plain from the
greatness whicheludes him. novel that he was subject to a gnawinginternal
Part of the trouble comesfrom his decision conflict. Think of Swann,think of Bloch, think
to adhere so faithfully to the publishedsources, of a hundredoddities beginningwith the strange
which inevitably meansthat he is unwilling or episode of Marcel s grandfather, whowhenever
unable to tell one half the things one wants the boy brought homea new friend would make
to know. It is as much a matter of raising out that the visitor was a Jew ("not usually of
questions as of answering them: nobodyis ask- the best type"), and huma few bars from La
]uive or "Israel, break thy chain"--to Marcel’s
. ing for an orgy ,o.f speculation (althoughin fact
Mr. Painter isn t shy about applying a little intense embarrassment, but without implying
amateur psycho-analysis from time to time). "any ill will whatsoever towards myfriends."
Whatis missing, rather, is a freer and fuller use Or so Marcel hastens to assure us. But as
of that incomparable source-book for the life Maurice Samuel has remarked, "if I were a
of Proust, .4 la Recherche itself. This is one casemulatto and couldn’t bring home a Negro
where a good biographer also needs the insight friend without myall-white grandfather hum-
and curiosity of a good critic (and indeed, ming the tune of SwanneeRibber or Old k Blac
think that the best recent critical studies in Joe, I shouldn’t by any means absolve the old
English, by HowardMoss and Roger Shattuck, manof ill will." Mr. Samuel, whohas written
have taught me more about Proust’s actual more searchingly on this aspect of Proust than
personality than Mr. Painter, and in consider- anyone else I know (see Commentary, March
ably less space). Wholeareas of the story are x96o), also makes it plain howentangled what
impoverishedor sealed off if a biographysticks he calls the "concealments" of the novel about
too closdy to the external comingsand goings. race are with those about sexual deviation. For
Twoexamples, chosen more or less at random, what applies to Proust the half-Jew applies even
must serve. There is no mention in Mr. Painter more to Proust the homosexual: no amount of
of Henri Poincar~ (though there is in Proust, corroborative evidence from the outside can tell
and also in Mr. Shattuck). Yet in an essay like us as muchabout his tensions as he himself has
"The Measure of Time"1 the great mathemati- already revealed, obliquely.
cian is only a step awayfrom ~/ la Recherche: Proust condemned Sainte-Beuve’s biographical
method, believing as he did that "a book is a
For an aggregateof sensations to havebecome product of a different self from the one we
a remembrance capable of classification in time, manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices."
it must have ceased to be actual, we must have Whenhe comes to this passage Mr. Painter
lost the senseof its infinite complexity,otherwise glances rather anxiously over his shoulder, and
it wouldhave remainedpresent. It must, so to
speak, be crystallised arounda centre of associa- then insists that "the biographer’s task is to
nonsof ideas whichwill be a sort of label. It is trace the formation and relationship of the very
only whenthey thus have lost all life that we two selves which Proust distinguishes." But
can classify our memoriesin time as a botanist dwelling too minutely on this relationship can
arrangesdried flowersin his herbarium. simply serve to stress howunbridgeable is the
gulf betweenfact and imagination. It is a pity
Available in Science and Ideat, ed. Aronsand that Mr. Painter is so muchon the defensive,
Bork(Prentice-Hall). that he hasn’t been moreboldly biographical and

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80 Books & Writers
written a straightforward Life and Times. (The I think of this implacable Germanjoke, be-
self manifestedin "our habits, in society, in our cause the joke in James Purdy’s new novd,
vices" may not be the self which produces equally implacable in its American way,
novels, but it is still undeniablyinteresting.) happensto be the precise opposite of it. Whatis
Either that, or a critical study. As it is, he is Purdy’s answer, or the answer of his hero, to
hobbled by his initial assumption that A la the hated Americanwayof life? It is not self-
Rechercheis a creative autobiography, a trans- emasculation but rape; or, in moral terms, not
parent kunstlerroman, rather than an auto- to prostrate onesdf before it as a victim but to
nomouswork of art. In a secondary sense it is adopt its ways,to turn it against itself. Purdy’s
certainly autobiographical--whatfiction is not? Cabot Wright, born (though only "supposi-
But it is only becausein the first place it is a tiously’) into the role of the youngupper-crust
great novel in its ownright that one wants to American(clean-cut and grey-flannel suited, Ivy-
knowabout Proust’s life anyway. league university and Wall Street broker’s
lohnGross office) is perpetually tired--tired, though he
doesn’t then knowit, of the whole American
wayof life,
of the yotmgmarrieds, the professional brief-
case sm.ardes,the sun-bathersh’omthe Hamptons
Opting Out comparingtheir browns, the baseball addicts,
race and fight pros, sports-car nuts, TVglau-
Cabot Wright Begins. By JAM~S PURDV. comapeople, jeans-wearing faggots of forty,
8ec/(er &Warburg, uxs. ginger-beer voices of the off-track betting
The Clown. By H~mRmH B&L, translated by baboons.
L~IL~ VrNNEW~XZ. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ass. To be cured of his tiredness he goes to a Brook-
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. By Gxo~¢~o lyn Heights quack, who hangs him naked on
BASSANI, translated by IS~L QUXCLY. Faber, zxs. a padded hook, till his mind is filled with
galloping gauchos and TV bullfights. The
T H ~ g X I S a Germanposture in attacking
society, as there is an Americanand Italian,
doctor cures him all too well; he becomes, to
excess, the "tinglingly alive" young American
a French and an English one. To view existing that all the advertisementsand the psychiatrists
society with pure hatred and fear, to scc it exhort him to be. He becomes, that is to say,
altogether as the enemy, seems to mc an espe- an habitual rapist.
cially Germanliterary characteristic. There is Andfor Americansociety it is the solution.
a peculiar self-immolating recklessness about With true democraticfeeling Cabot, as a rapist,
writers such as Jakob Lenz and Bfichner and neglects neither young nor old. Women not yet
Kafka; they like to place their victim, isolated molestedby Cabotbegin to suffer status-worries.
and in a state of total helplessness or down- Sporting interest reaches nationwideproportions
hood, against Society, a monolith of grccd, as his total of victims tops the hundredmark.
hypocrisy, and impregnablecallousness.
The reader may rememberthe thesis of Jakob He was called the Anonymous Coon, the Kosher
Jack, the Eternal Tar Baby, working with his
Lcnz’s The Tutoe, that extraordinary Sturra- weapon into the far hours of the night ....
und-Drang comedylater re-vamped by Brecht. Cries go up as hallelujahs tell everybodyit’s
Youtreat a tutor purely as a menial, ~ou closet happening again. Boats whistle, there is the
him alone with your daughter as if he were a rumble of the subway down in the guts of
eunuch or a dog, and still you expect no harm Brooklyn,a scavengerlets fall the lid of the
to follow; and whyshould you not, since you garbage can, muggersdrop thdr brass knuckles.
t’
"RAPIST IS OUT ~ ANONYMOUSCOON STRIKES AGAIN.
makethe rules? The tutor Lauffcr disobeys the
rules and seduces, or is seduced by, Maior yon In Cabot, the Great American Novel seems at
Berg’ s da ughtcr, when hc should have been last to have found its subject; a failing husband
giving her her drawinglesson. Hc iust escapes is ordered to rehabilitate himself by writing it,
with his life, through the help of the village a failing MadisonAvenueeditor plans to re-
pastor, and then a year later finds himselfon the coup his fortunes by publishing it, the ghost-
point of seducing the pastor’s owndaughter. He writers and other assorted ghosts flock twitter-
is turned out, wanders like Lear through the ing round their Achilles, their Don Juan in
stormy night, questioning God, and returns hell.
next mormngannouncing hc has found the
solution to his vocation--be has castrated him- WHAT PU~DY ~S doing in this novel, one might
self. The pastor, receives the newswith great say, is to translate the act of swearing into
enthusiasm. It is the solution. He nowsccs the actuality. He is saying "F---- America" (with
most golden prospects for the young man’s all the ambiguity that is involved in swearing,
future. that is, the invoking of what is most desirable

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