Monday, Apr. 17, 1950
Off with the Lacquer
PROUST: PORTRAIT OF A GENIUS (332 pp.--Andre Mauro/s--Harper ($4.50).
In the 1920s, Andre Maurois wrote Ariel, a pastiche of Shelley's life which was neither imaginative enough to be a good novel nor close enough to history to be a good biography. But since Ariel was highly readable, and since a lot of people proved to be curious about romantic poets, Maurois soon had a hit on his hands. With this encouragement he turned out polished and readable, and somewhat empty lives of Disraeli, Byron and Dickens. Reread today, such Maurois works seem pretty thin; where the peerless Lytton (Eminent Victorians) Strachey was genuinely witty, Maurois was merely suave; where Strachey conveyed the quality and texture of a period, Maurois lacquered his work with the weary irony of the worldly boulevardier.
Now, at 64, Maurois has written a biography that almost seems an act of penance. His Proust is a sober, even severe book, faithful to the facts and next to Proust's letters themselves (TIME, Feb. 21, 1949), the best account of the great French novelist's life that is available in
English. Maurois skillfully retells the familiar story of the foppish, incredibly hypochondriac man, who, in a cork-lined, fumigated bedroom, wrote a mordant masterpiece about the decay of French society. Maurois heavily emphasizes the weaknesses in Proust's character--his dependence on his mother, his excessive need to be sure of the admiration of his friends, his failure to establish a normal love life, his toadying to decadent aristocrats. This Proust is a very sick man, but did his sickness dictate Remembrance of Things Past?
Maurois seems to think it did. He maintains that sickness "increases the power of analysis" and that Proust's neurotic throwbacks to childish ways were part & parcel of his genius ("To remain a child is to become a poet"). Such a relating of art to neurosis, quite fashionable these days, is only half true and is dangerous on two counts: it confirms the scoffer's prejudice that all artists are nuts anyway, and it caters to the illusion of the idle bohemian who thinks that because he is neurotic he is also talented.
Proust was certainly a neurotic, but there was in him also both the strength of will and the self-discipline which made it possible for him to spend hours hunting down details for his book, revising parts -; of it over & over again, planning its total structure with the care of a general plan ning a battle. Proust said, "Life may bring solation." A man who disappointments, but knew in this work and is con could act upon it may not have needed sickness to increase his power of analysis ; he could be a great writer, not because he remained a child, but because at least part of him had grown into a man.
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