Marcel's Wave

By Melvin Maddocks

MARCEL PROUST: A CENTENNIAL VOLUME, edited by Peter Quennell. 216 pages. Simon & Schuster. $12.95.

It takes talent to recognize genius. Marcel Proust caught his first readers napping. One of the publishers to whom he submitted the first volume of his seven-volume masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past rejected it, explaining: "I cannot understand why a gentleman should employ 30 pages to describe how he turns and returns on his bed before going to sleep." When that first volume, Swann's Way, finally appeared in print in 1913--at Proust's expense--an influential critic dismissed the author as the "crudest of improvisers."

How things have changed. One hundred years after his birth (July 10, 1871), Proust is a critic's industry. "More has been written about Proust in many languages than about any other author of the 20th century," Proustian Scholar Roger Shattuck claimed a few years ago, counting over 3,000 items in bibliography. To which now can be added this slender volume of eleven essays of French, English and American Proustians collected by English Biographer and Critic Peter Quennell. The book is splendidly illustrated with a variety of period images ranging from lady bicyclists to Sarah Bernhardt reclining amid pillows, fringes and a polar bear rug.

Funny and Cruel. Latter-day readers with almost Proust-like patience have even counted the number of images contained in Remembrance of Things Past --4,578. The Master himself has turned into a series of literary images, perhaps at the expense of his own work. There is le petit Marcel in his fur-lined greatcoat, posed like a sad Charlie Chaplin. Or running from salon to salon: the funniest and crudest young man in any room. Or crouched motionless before a rose, as if he could devour it and the whole world just by looking. Finally attention is drawn to those eyes: great smudged pools, staring like a lover at life and death. The eyes of a Jew, a homosexual, an invalid and an artist--a foreigner to all countries. What was his favorite Dickens novel? Bleak House. How did he like his coffee? Double strength. Was he a generous tipper? He overtipped.

What remains for the Quennell corps are mostly second siftings, attractively presented, which reinforce the charm of the whole Proust legend. The English novelist most often compared to Proust, Anthony Powell, contributes a pleasant little piece about "Proust as a Soldier." (When Proust was asked "What event in military history do you most admire?", he answered: "My own enlistment as a volunteer.")

The endless game of guessing who's really who in Proust gets another whirl from Novelist Elizabeth Bowen. She takes the character of Bergotte, Proust's fictitious writer of fiction, and after wondering briefly whether the original might have been Anatole France, finally decides Bergotte is really a "standin, scapegoat, whipping-boy for" Proust--particularly as a purple stylist and a snob.

Proust and fashions, Proust and the 19th century--no approach is too narrow, no approach is too wide. Proustians are forever arguing among themselves. In this short volume the Master is variously defined as a chronicler of society whose work was "a summing up of the nineteenth century" and, on the contrary, a "visionary artist" whose genius was to transcend time. He is described as a moralist who "judges" and "condemns" and a "visual writer" who sees. He is compared with French Impressionist paintings and Wagnerian opera.

Proust criticism remains more a matter of saturation than of precision. He still gets praised a little abstractly as a technical innovator, a man who ran time present and time past on dual tracks and played with memory like a zoom lens. Read today, Proust gives curiously old-fashioned satisfaction: full-flavored character and a rich sense of time and place.

Possibly the best cultural and historic fix on Proust is that he was a man caught between two centuries. Proust valued three things in life: love, society and art. He became disenchanted about the first two, and out of this half-cured 19th century disenchantment he created his 20th century art--as tragic and as comic and perhaps ultimately as mystifying as life itself.

. Melvin Maddocks

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