By Violent Hunt
IWENT Proust’s way for the first time one rainy winter evening five years ago, waiting in her warm boudoir for a foolish Society woman to come in and give me tea and an introduction to the new popular novelist. But she had not come in, and on a table near me, by the powder-puff and the cigarettes, I found an author who had not yet swept the board as he has since done.
A re-bound copy of Du Côté de chez Swann, from that accredited emporium which Thomas Carlyle founded for the reading of the Intelligentzia, the London Library, lay, dull and forbidding, among the brocade and tinsel of the bibelots. Surprised, I opened it, intending, as one idly may during these interludes, to take good-humoured cognisance of the nature of another’s chosen study. At once I became involved in an enchevêtrement, a leash of moods, a congeries of complexes, of crankinesses, all that goes to make up a man—Swann. There was no breathlessness, no sense of hurry, yet it was “good going.” There were hairbreadth but quite actual escapes from bathos, ugly grazings averted, artistic difficulties compounded: this author backed his sentences in and out of garages like a first-class motorist....
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And, suddenly, the rumble of an earthly car sounded and my hostess and the popular author came in and tea was a weariness, for Tante Léonie—we all have our Tantes Léonie—had entered into my knowledge, and the Lady of the Cattleyas was just beginning to cause Swann, whom I already loved, to suffer after the way of all men who want anything very badly. We never mentioned the shabby, black book I had put down, but began to discuss, in this Kensington drawing-room, Freud, much as people discussed music in the drawing-room of Mme. Verdurin in Paris, and in very much the same style as if Madame Odette de Crécy had taken a hand, and Swann, blinded by love, had listened to her.
But I—I had become acquainted with Proust and had gained a world—one of the worlds in which, through a book, we can go to live awhile whenever we choose.
Proust! What is Proust? This is the cry of the Carping Uninitiated among us. To such persons, constitutionally unwilling to be instructed, one replies that Proust is a fashion—a disease—and that a Proustian, so-called, is an Opium-Eater. But, to those who know him and love him, he is a wise and cunning Prospero whose wand is style, and Combray an enchanted island—Ferdinand, not much Miranda, but Caliban, drunken sailors and all.
The Opium Trance, indeed, offers some-113- parallel. Dr. Hochst tells us that the wily subconsciousness, at odds with its earthly environment, is able to invoke and maintain an attitude of benign stupor towards the universe, holding it, as it were, at arm’s length, able to subsist in tranquil abstraction from chill and hateful circumstance. And one can easily imagine some triply disillusioned soul, rebuffed of love and ambition and the fount of life itself, entering on a course of the Master, content to live, lullabyed by the slight movement as of flickering woodland leaves, warmed by the soft light that falls on grey cathedral walls and white, dusty roads, quietly appreciative of the Master’s passionless, infallible display of the complications and unconscious betrayals of their ego by Françoise and Tante Léonie, Odette and the Duchess; intrigued by his fine sense of social values shown by the apt posing of the social Inferiorities of the Verdurin ménage in Paris against the ineffable Aristocracies ensconced in their old château, Guermantes Way—and so on, through terms of months or even years, till the stupor, benign in character, ends at last in the ordinary manner, the patient dying, still en plein Proust, with, perhaps, a volume or two unread, to the good, for there are, or are to be, a good many.
The normal, healthy person, still active, still complying with life, finds it more than soothing to commit himself to this peaceable, effluent mind-flow, a current of thought that has, like life, its-114- eddies, its transes, but persists, as must we all who agree with our destinies, in its appointed borders and so gains something of the peace of resignation that Renan speaks of: “Il n’y a rien de suave comme le renoncement de la joie, rien de doux comme l’enchantement du désenchantement.” For there is, indeed, no joy in all these myriad pages: how could there be, since joy is clear-cut and impermanent and all Proustian values fade and are merged in each other without such a thing as an edge anywhere! The sharp, dramatic point popular novelists excel in would break the spell.
We surrender ourselves to these entrancing longueurs; to indescribable sensations that endure. Reading in Proust is, to me, like the long drink of a child whom, by and by, a solicitous elder bids put the cup down ... a gesture that this Master will never make. It is a suave, sensuous pleasure, like stroking the long, rippling beard of Ogier the Dane as he sits, stone-like, in his enchanted castle. It is a patient, monkish task like that of tending with loving, religious husbandry the Holy Rose at Hildesheim, that has gone on growing for four hundred years. It suggests a sense of going on, a promise of a future that may not be so very different, such as we got when our German nurse told us that Grimm’s tale of the man who fell in and was drowned, but, presently, found himself under the still waters of the mere, walking, langweilig, in-115- meadows prankt with daisies and buttercups and fat flocks grazing....
Proust translated Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens—just the unexpected sort of thing he would do—and one might theorise and hint that his learned appreciation of the beauties that lie within due submission to architectural rules, and acceptance of the limitations and possibilities of shaped stones, have helped to form the backbone of his style. It has the precision and poise of the arch, supported by the virility and integrity of the pillar, with the permitted fioriture of the pinnacle sparingly used, as one sees it in the Norman churches dotted all round about Combray and Balbec. And I am sure his style is the magician’s wand without whose composed and certain wielding we should never have allowed him to lead us, like willing children, through the mazes, winding, twisting, but always planned and in order, of his mind—or Swann’s. And if Swann—remote, withdrawn, half-unsympathetic character that he is—had not been so essentially lovable and had not, while telling us all, succeeded in being at the same time suggestive, we should not have yielded ourselves so utterly to his mind-flow.
Proust made Swann a financier, a Jew, and gave him a German name, because, I think, he wished to indicate to our subconscious judgments a cause of Swann’s curious racial patience, his waiting on and deference to the caprice of others. He allows life “to ride” him, Mme. Verdurin-116- to patronise him, Odette to make him love her: just as the trees let the winds lash their boughs and break them, as rivers, flattened and contradicted by raindrops, flow on all the same under a grey sky. Swann, beautifully groomed as he is, apt for drawing-rooms, and acquainted with dukes and ashamed to say so, is a piece of Nature—Nature whom I always see as an old man working in a field, with a sack over his shoulders, bowed to the elements. For Swann doesn’t act; things happen to him. Even his deep and pertinacious affection is discounted by the inferior object of it. He is the golden mean in man, no more a crank than we would all be if we were rich, with weaknesses that we could, if we would, translate into heroisms. Most cultivated women infallibly must have loved Swann—he is probably, therefore, of the kind that finds only the Odettes of the world to its liking.
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