The Pursuit of Laughter (49 page)

Some of these critics, seeking to illumine the psychological complexities of its author, fall over themselves in their eagerness to discover a new ‘truth,' like the American who recently announced that the name Robert de Saint-Loup derived from Proust's brother Robert and ‘mon petit loup,' a term of endearment used by his mother. If this critic had crossed the Atlantic he might have hit upon a simpler explanation. Among the villages and castles in Seine et Marne whose names Proust borrowed for his noble personages—Guermantes, Villeparisis, for example—is the château of Saint Loup, well known to a number of people since it has been occupied for years by a hospitable English lady. Thus, although the novel and its author are inexhaustibly interesting subjects, readers are
becoming
wary of some of the far-fetched and inexpert criticism to which they constantly give rise.

Retour à Marcel Proust
falls into an altogether different category; here the critic himself is one of France's foremost writers. Biographer, historian, internationally famous
authority
on military matters, M. Benoist-Méchin was a minister in Pétain's government and is a great European.

His book is divided into two parts: the first, a long essay on ‘La Musique du temps retrouvé,' he wrote as a young officer in the French army of occupation in the Rhineland immediately after the first war; in the second, thirty five years later, he looks back at his youthful self across the gulf of strange and tragic happenings which this troubled period represents, and at Marcel Proust. He re-read
A La Recherche du temps perdu
almost
reluctantly
, he says. He feared to break the Proustian spell, and that the enthusiasm he had
formerly
felt for a magnificent work of art might prove to be illusory. But the novel appeared to him once again as fresh, as intelligent and as brilliant as it had done when he read it first, and more comic than ever before. ‘
Quel plaisir intense, vivace, inespéré m'a procuré cette nouvelle lecture de
La Recherche du temps perdu!' he exclaims, adding: ‘
et j'ai compris alors que son
oeuvre
était
impérissable'
[the work is indestructible].

The theme of M. Benoist-Méchin's first essay is the role of music throughout the whole work; Proust's love and understanding of music were profound, and
la petite phrase
from Vinteuil's sonata is the
leitmotiv
not only of Swann's love for Odette but also of love itself, in all its aspects—down to the sordid antics of Vinteuil's daughter and which, for Proust, was synonymous with tormenting jealousy. Those whose down-to-earth realism persists in discovering real men and women in all Proust's characters have also attempted to guess the original of
la petite phrase
. A complete answer to such pretensions is quoted here, from a letter in which Proust himself says it may have been suggested by Saint-Saëns, or the Good Friday music in
Parsifal
, or César Franck, or
Lohengrin
, or Schubert, or
possibly
Fauré. In other words, by all and by none.

If Proust were living now, a prisoner to asthma in a darkened, blanketed room, he would most likely listen to faithful recordings of his favourite music. He would probably hear so much music, repeated so often, that the intensity of the pleasure he felt in it might be dissipated, and the power of evocation lost. Instead of thinking about Beethoven's string quartets, and writing down his thoughts, he might have played them on a
gramophone
. There may be too much music in the modern world. Madame de Cambremer, whose mouth watered when she heard Chopin so that she dribbled, might have learnt to listen unmoved, while Madame Verdurin could hardly have demonstrated her extreme musical sensibility by burying her head in her hands if she were obliged to do it several times a day.

‘
La musique
,' said Proust, a few months before his death, to M. Benoist-Méchin,
‘a été une des plus grandes passions de ma vie, je dis a été, car à présent je n'ai plus guère l'occasion d'en
entendre
, autrement que dans mon souvenir.'
[Music was one of my greatest passions, I say ‘was' because I am no longer able to listen to it other than through what I remember.] Through memory, he communicates his passion for music to the reader; M. Benoist-Méchin also possesses the power to recapture and to set down in words the deep though transitory impression that music can make on the individual and on the crowd. His description of a performance of
Meistersinger
at the time of the Ruhr crisis is unforgettable.

Retour à Marcel Proust
, Benoist-Méchin, B. (1957)

Proust died in 1922, but his name and his novel were so famous that Scott Moncrieff's
translation was already a classic in the 30s. Aged 51, he died of cold. He had moved to a flat in rue Hamelin where the fire smoked and gave him asthma. With no fire, he lay swathed in rugs, shawls and hot water bottles, his bed, the floor, every table and chair
covered
in paper: galley proofs smothered in almost illegible corrections, carnets full of
writing
, even scraps and envelopes. He knew he had not long to live, and was trying to finish and correct
A La Recherche du temps perdu
. His brother (like their father, a doctor) implored him to move to a warm clinic. He refused. Only he knew how his life's work could be
deciphered
; the precious proofs and papers must not be touched. He worked until he died, and then artist friends made drawings of his thin white face, half covered in black beard. Might he have cut, or altered his work?

The first volume,
Swann's Way
, had been published at the author's expense in 1913. The next volumes, highly praised, some published after his death, completed his enormous novel.

Stepping on a broken cobblestone in Paris, Proust had been transported to St Mark's, with its uneven mosaic pavement. For him, Venice was art, and in that moment he realised that only art brings no disillusion.
Le Temps perdu
is the novel of disillusion. Love is but jealousy, beauty fades, fashions change, friendships grow cool, art remains. Resolving to devote his life to the work of art he knew his novel could be, he turned night into day, working in the silent hours, seeing only a few old friends for an occasional midnight feast at the Ritz.

His last party is in the final volume,
Le Temps retrouvé
. Everyone is changed by white hair, baldness, wrinkles, but even more from a worldly point of view. The aristocrats whom Proust had longed to know in his youth, and who had become his friends, were now mixed up with the middle-class people they had formerly so rigidly excluded. The Great War had been the catalyst, rich bourgeois gifts to war charities had broken the taboo, and the snobbish Proust becomes disillusioned.

All Proust's characters are caricatures, from the Duc de Guermantes and his brother Charlus to Mme Verdurin, all three so grossly rude and absurd that Charles Dickens's grotesques pale beside them. Oriane de Guermantes, however, is a real heroine, like Trollope's Lady Glencora. The narrator has loved and admired her ever since, as a boy, he glimpsed her at a country wedding; her brilliant blue eyes, gold hair and beaky nose have been his ideal of what an aristocrat should be. Yet even she lets him down. Her witticisms are only paradoxes spiced with malice.

The only tender and loving portraits in the novel are of the mother and grandmother, and, up to a point, Swann. The most fashionable man of his day, a recognised expert who advised his grand friends about pictures and music, he is perhaps what Proust himself would have liked to be; but he makes him spoil his life by marrying a woman not received in society. He marries in an attempt to assuage his jealousy of her many lovers, a jealousy that foreshadows the narrator's own suffering with Albertine.

I once asked an old French duke to what extent Proust had known ‘Guermantes'
during
 
his party-going years before the First World War. ‘
Mais pas du tout!
' was the reply. Not quite true, but much imagination supplemented small acquaintance.

I read Scott Moncrieff's translation in 1934, having been put off for years by Clive Bell, who wrote that the novel was difficult. In 1935, I read it in French. The translation is a delightful book, but it is not Proust. The jokes that make one choke with laughter are not so funny, the descriptions of flowers and rivers and churches lose their poetry.

Mine is the old NRF (
Nouvelle Revue Française
) edition of 1929 in 15 volumes. One of them,
Sodome et Gomorrhe II
, succumbed to damp in an Irish house. They have moved with me from place to place, books to re-read. Newer editions, over-burdened by the scribbles found in Proust's room when he died, have become holy writ, but I prefer the beautifully printed NRF of Gallimard.

Sunday Times
(1998)

Every few years somebody writes a book about the Dreyfus case, and this is likely to
continue
until kingdom come, because it is a story containing every ingredient of the most thrilling thriller and it never fails to enthrall. David L. Lewis's is the latest version, written in American.

Alfred Dreyfus was a Jew from Alsace. He was eleven when the Prussians took his native province from the French. His brothers remained in Mulhouse looking after the family business, but Alfred was educated in Paris and joined the French army. He became a captain in the artillery in 1889, passed through the staff college and received an
appointment
on the staff. He was fairly rich, and married with two small children at the time the drama begins in 1894.

A charwoman who worked at the German embassy was paid by the French secret
service
to collect the contents of the embassy waste paper baskets. The German military attaché threw most interesting things into his, including love letters. He employed various French spies, among them a raffish officer who was always short of money, Major Esterhazy. One day Major Henry, who worked in the Statistical Section of the War Office—a parallel section to the Second Bureau, the formal Intelligence branch—found among the waste paper a letter offering a list of five items of military information, none of them top secret, but nevertheless clearly emanating from a spy. This was the famous ‘
bordereau
'. Major Henry passed it on to his superiors, and it was circulated to the chiefs of all the War Office departments. Somebody thought the handwriting on the
bordereau
resembled Dreyfus's hand. Graphologists were called in, who disagreed with one another. In spite of this, it was upon the slender evidence of his authorship of the
bordereau
that Dreyfus was arrested, court martialled, publicly degraded, sentenced to life imprisonment,
and sent to Devil's Island.

He continually protested his innocence. No motive for his treachery could be found. He was passionately devoted to the French army, and he had plenty of money. He was unpopular among his fellow officers. They said he was inquisitive, forever asking questions about things which were no concern of his. There were a few who resented a Jew being on the staff at all, but it would not be true to put down his unpopularity to anti-semitism; he simply was not liked. The idea that a rigidly Catholic, Jesuit-educated aristocratic army caste manufactured evidence of treason because Dreyfus was a Jew is not borne out by the facts. On the other hand, the shrill cries of the anti-semitic press influenced the
outcome
. Once the journalists had got hold of Dreyfus's name, to acquit him was to be accused of being in the pay of the Jews, and through them in the pay of the Germans. No law of libel curbed these rabid men, and they succeeded in frightening both politicians and generals. Also, since even a court martial held in camera might not have convicted on the
bordereau
alone, Major Henry recklessly added forged evidence in order to obtain a
conviction
.