32. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 699-723

Self-Consciousness: Self-Realization (André Gide, D.H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky); The Field of Consciousness (Henry James, William James)

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André Gide: The Value of Inconstancy


In these excerpts from Later Fruits of the Earth (1935) and his journals for 1923, Gide embraces the fluidity of the personality as a form of liberation, looking back in particular to the repressiveness of his strict upbringing. "I feel that what is diverse in me is still myself," he asserts, rejecting the ancient command to "know thyself." In his experience, "only rather poor and limited personalities succeeded in finding and understanding themselves." He chooses instead "the perpetual and elusive process of becoming." 


In his childhood, he recalls, "My parents had accustomed me to act, not according to my inner urge, but according to an ethical rule outside of me, which they considered applicable to all men.... Not to have acted, in whatever combination of circumstances, precisely as I was expected to act seemed to me abominable to such a point that all inner peace was immediately compromised, that peace without which I believed that I could not live." Following the rule seemed to them true freedom, while not following it made one "a slave to his passions." As a result, "they have an illusion of acting freely while already their choice has ceased to be free."


But liberating himself from "the rigorous puritan upbringing by which my parents had fashioned my childhood" brought about a recognition that he had achieved a kind of sincerity that replaced the hypocrisy of rule-following: "I never seemed more moral to myself than at the time when I had decided to cease being moral; I mean: to be moral henceforth only in my own way."

Henceforth, acting in any way whatever and not giving myself time to reflect, my least acts seemed to me more significant since they were no longer reasoned out. At the same time I delivered myself from anxiety, perplexity, and remorse.

Finding a historical pretext for the instinctual life, he observes that "The Greeks ... recognized as many gods as there are instinct, and the problem for them was to keep the inner Olympus in equilibrium, not to subjugate and subdue any of the gods." And he observes that for the people "I consider among the best tempered, happiness lies not in comfort and quietude, but in ardor. A sort of magnificent using up is all the more desirable to them since they are constantly being renewed by it and do not so much suffer from the wearing away as they rejoice in their perpetual re-creation." 


This leads him to the assertion that, as this life is all we are given -- he rejects the idea of immortality -- we might as well make the most of it, accepting "that almost perfect satisfaction I enjoy in effort itself and in the immediate realization of happiness and harmony." He turns Christ's command, "Sell all your goods and give them to the poor," into an injunction to liberate himself from moral conformity: "I began then to seek out which, among the thoughts, opinions, and tendencies of my soul and mind that were most familiar to me, were the ones that I most certainly derived from my ancestors, from my upbringing and puritan formation," and to get rid of them. "I soon felt my soul only as a loving will ..., palpitating, open to all comers, like unto everything, impersonal, a naïve confusion of appetites, greeds, desires." 


But once again he finds the words of Christ applicable to his situation: "Why should you be troubled?" 

I surrendered then to this provisional disorder, trusting in a more sincere and natural order that would organize itself, I thought, and believing moreover that the disorder itself was less dangerous for my soul than an arbitrary and necessarily artificial order, since I had not invented it.

He also rejects what he sees as the spiritual pride of the puritan: "Considering ... that nothing separates one more from God than pride and that nothing made me prouder than my virtue, I began to detest that very virtue and everything on which I could pride myself, everything that allowed me to say: I am not like you, common run of men!" By standing puritan-Christian morality on its head, he found his way, or the freedom of lacking a way: "Every step I took forward was a venture into the unknown." 




D.H. Lawrence: The Living Self 


Like Gide, Lawrence finds an affirmation of this life, rather than a narrow moral path leading to the next one, provides true liberation of the spirit. And in the essay "Why the Novel Matters" (1936) he proclaims the novel to be the true holy writ. 


He begins with a rejection of the mind-body dualism: "We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it," but argues that "the tin can business, or vessel of clay, is just bunk. And that's what you learn, when you're a novelist. And that's what you are very liable not to know, if you're a parson, or a philosopher, or a scientist, or a stupid person." The body is what matters. 

Every man, philosopher included, ends in his own finger-tips. That's the end of man alive. As for the words and thoughts and sighs and aspirations that fly from him, they are so many tremulations in the ether, and not alive at all. But if the tremulations reach another man alive, he may receive them into his life, and his life may take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown rock on to a green leaf.

"Only connect," urged E.M. Forster, and art is a medium for connecting one human being to another, via Lawrence's "tremulations in the ether." 


"Nothing is important but life," Lawrence proclaims. And the artist is the true affirmer of life. "The philosopher, on the other hand, because he can think, decides that nothing but thoughts matter. It is as if a rabbit, because he can make little pills, should decide that nothing but little pills matter." The scientist, he says, works on inert things: "he has absolutely no use for me so long as I am man alive." 

Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the parts.

Earlier in the anthology, Lawrence had rejected the notion that the sun was "a sphere of blazing gas" as a reductionist view of science. It is the novelist, he says, who gets the point, who sees things as a whole. "And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog." Novels, too, "are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do." 


Lawrence naturally has a broad view of what a novel is: He includes the Bible ("but all the Bible"), Homer and Shakespeare as "the supreme old novels," because "They set the whole tree trembling with a new access of life, they do not just stimulate growth in one direction." Like Gide, Lawrence values process, becoming: "All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another." He acknowledges that the individual maintains a kind of integrity, but that it's impossible to isolate: "It is useless to talk about my ego. That only means that I have made up an idea of myself, and that I am trying to cut myself out to pattern." 


The peculiar value of the novel is that its "characters can do nothing but live. If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead." This is the great function of the novel, to demonstrate the difference between being alive and being dead. "To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point," and "in the novel you can see, plainly, when the man goes dead, the woman goes inert. You can develop an instinct for life, if you will, instead of a theory of right and wrong, good and bad." For "only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living." 




Rainer Maria Rilke: The Self and Reality 


Rilke's letter to "L.H.," written in 1915 -- a time of war -- expresses the difficult relationship between an individual and a cosmos that increasingly seems severely alien. In fact, Rilke expresses "astonishment over the fact that men have for thousands of years [dealt] with life (not to mention God)" and yet "remain such helpless novices, so between fright and subterfuge, so miserable." He refers to "God and gods" as a shorthand for the undying sense that humans are dwarfed by their environment. 

Who knows, I ask myself, whether we do not always approach the gods so to speak from behind, separated from their sublimely radiant face through nothing but themselves, quite near to the expression we yearn for, only just standing behind it -- but what does that mean save that our countenance and the divine face are looking out in the same direction, are at one; and this being so, how are we to approach the god from the space that lies in front of him?

Humankind may, in fact, be confronting the same dilemma as the gods -- so rather than a separation, perhaps there is a harmony of purpose between us and ... whatever you want to call it. 

Let us agree that since his earliest beginnings man has shaped gods in whom here and there were contained only the dead and threatening and destructive and frightful, violence, anger, superpersonal stupor, tied up as it were into a tight knot of malice: the alien, if you like, but, already to some extent implied in this alien, the admission that one was aware of it, endured it, yes, acknowledged it for a sure, secret, relationship and connection.

Instead, why not recognize the gods as a projection of humanity, "a part ... of the human mind" and that this "tension" between the individual and the universe is self-defeating, a tension against oneself? Like God, death is not external, not the "other." To treat them as outside oneself is a mistake. 

Nature knew nothing of this removal we had somehow accomplished -- if a tree blossoms, death blossoms in it as well as life, and the field is full of death, which from its reclining face sends out a rich expression of life, and the beasts go patiently from one [to the] other -- and everywhere about us death is still at home and he watches us out of the cracks in things, and a rusty nail, sticking up somewhere out of a plank, does nothing day and night but rejoice over death.

By accepting that the universe is not alien, that in the midst of life we are in death, we liberate ourselves.  




Wassily Kandinsky: An Expressionist Credo 

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913

Wassily Kandinsky, c. 1913? 

Kandinsky's 1913 Concerning the Spiritual in Art is one of the intellectual documents of Expressionism, proclaiming the necessity of the subjective element in painting and the other arts. 

The artist is not only justified in using, but is under a moral obligation to use, only those forms which fulfill his own need. Absolute freedom from anatomy or anything else of the kind must be given to the artist in his choice of means. Such spiritual freedom is as necessary in art as it is in life.

As such, art's function is "the development and refinement of the human soul," and a reaction against not only materialism but also the doctrine of "art for art's sake." The center of the credo is Kandinsky's proclamation: "The artist must have something to communicate, since mastery over form is not the end but, instead, the adapting of form to internal significance." For Kandinsky, "communicating" certainly does not mean slavishly reproducing external objects, but baring the contents of his soul. Art is a kind of priesthood in which  "the artist has a triple responsibility: 

1. he must return the talent which he has; 
2. his actions, feelings and thoughts, like those of every man, create a spiritual atmosphere which is either pure or infected;
3. his actions and thoughts are the material for his creations, which in turn influence the spiritual atmosphere."

Beauty, in short, "is produced by internal necessity, which springs from the soul."

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition X, 1939

Henry James: Centers of Consciousness 


The preface to The Princess Cassamassima (1908) is late James, which means dense and mannered prose, entwining itself around a topic without clinging to it. In essence, what James is arguing here is that the novel needs a central consciousness expressed through a character who is neither a fool nor someone so intelligent that his awareness prevents him from being detached from the action in which he takes part. 

We care, our curiosity and sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really sentient. Hamlet and Lear are surrounded, amid their complications, by the stupid and the blind, who minister in all sorts of ways to their recorded fate.

It is Hamlet and Lear, of course, whom we care about. Not Regan and Goneril or -- unless one is Tom Stoppard -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. On the other hand, "no 'story' is possible without its fools -- as most of the fine painters of life, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Balzac, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Meredith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, have abundantly felt." But they knew that to put the fool at the forefront, to have the narrative point of view that of the fool is to put it "within the scope of a denser and duller, a more vulgar and more shallow capacity," resulting in "a picture dim and meagre." They know to place "a mind of some sort -- in the sense of a reflecting and colouring medium -- in possession of the general adventure." 


When Scott fails to do so, in The Bride of Lammermoor, the novel fails: "Edgar of Ravenswood ... has a black cloak and a hat and feathers more than he has a mind," whereas Hamlet, "while equally sabled and draped and plumed, while at least equally romantic, has yet a mind still more than he has a costume." In Tom Jones, Fielding falls somewhere in between: Tom "hasn't a grain of imagination," but the novel succeeds because "his sense of bewilderment obtains altogether on the comic, never on the tragic plane." Moreover, he has an author, "handsomely possessed of a mind" so "that we see him through the mellow air of Fielding's fine old moralism, fine old humour and fine old style, which somehow really enlarge, make every one and every thing important." 


The trick is to find the novel's center of consciousness in a character who "may feel enough and 'know' enough -- or be in the way of learning enough -- for his maximum dramatic value, without feeling and knowing too much for his minimum verisimilitude, his proper fusion with the fable." George Eliot presents her characters' "emotions, their stirred intelligence, their moral consciousness," which become "our own very adventure." 




William James: The Stream of Consciousness


Henry's brother William is an expert on consciousness, as these excerpts from The Principles of Psychology (1890) demonstrate. It's a difficult thing to be an expert in: "No one every had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day is a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree." We think, therefore we are, but more importantly, we are always thinking, and not in discrete little packets of thought. And even if we can isolate a thought, or an idea, we find that it mutates over time: "Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successive view of the same thing."

A permanently existing "idea" or "Vorstellung" which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.

Thought is continuous. "I have already said that the breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature," but there is no breach within the individual mind. Consciousness may be interrupted -- by sleep, by anesthesia, by trauma -- but "within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous. Even after an interruption, "the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self." We don't -- except perhaps in exceptional, pathological cases -- awake from an interruption of consciousness feeling as if we are not the same person. And "the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt." If there are gaps, somehow we span them. 

To expect the consciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective continuity as gaps, would be like expecting the eye to feel a gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a gap of darkness because it does not see.

The "common whole" that bridges the gaps "is myself, I, or me." Consequently, "In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life."


Even violent irruptions into the stream are nevertheless part of it. "Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it." Context is everything. "Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know." 


But although the stream of consciousness flows steadily, we don't perceive it that way. "Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings." The parts of it where it seems to perch, James calls the "substantive parts"; the flights are the "transitive parts." But it is difficult to examine the transitive parts because of what Heisenberg would later call the uncertainty principle: 

As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas [i.e., switch on the lights] quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. 

Or trying to measure the position and the velocity of an atomic particle simultaneously. 


The consciousness has its own grammar and syntax: "We ought to say a felling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use."


Yet that every datum in our remembered experience has its own context ought to be obvious when we try to remember a name that's on the tip of our tongue. If someone suggests another name, we know it's not the right one. There is a gap there that only one name will fill, just as only one piece of the jigsaw puzzle fits the gap in the picture: "A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the senses of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term." 


In our use of language, "large tracts ... are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense." We have "rapid premonitory perspective view of schemes of thought not yet articulate," so that we can read aloud a passage that we've never seen before and anticipate the words we should emphasize and the direction that the sentence is taking. 

And this foreboding of the coming grammatical scheme combined with each successive uttered word is so practically accurate that a reader incapable of understanding four ideas of the book he is reading aloud, can nevertheless read it with the most delicately modulated expression of intelligence.

So although consciousness may seem to be made up of discrete bits of perception, a "halo or penumbra ... surrounds" them and "escorts" them through the stream.  

15. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 309-328

Realism: Melioristic Realism (F.M. Dostoevsky, George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, H.G. Wells and Henry James)

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F.M. Dostoevsky: Prophetic Realism

In his letters, Dostoevsky explained that his novel The Idiot was an attempt to represent "a truly perfect and noble man," a task he didn't underestimate: "All writers ... who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, where unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one." Like Tolstoy, he bases his ideas about the novel in Christianity, but only insofar as the image of Christ -- the "one figure of absolute beauty" -- gives him an ideal to strive for.

Vasily Perov, Portrait of F.M. Dostoevsky, 1872

Dostoevsky's choice of the noblest figures in Christian literature are comic ones: Don Quixote and the members of Dickens's Pickwick club. "The reader feels sympathy and compassion with the Beautiful, derided and unconscious of its own worth. The secret of humour consists precisely in this art of wakening the reader's sympathy."

Dostoevsky's realism was of a different order from Zola's: 

I have my own idea about art, and it is this: What most people regard as fantastic and lacking in universality, I hold to be the inmost essence of truth. Arid observation of everyday trivialities I have long ceased to regard as realism -- it is quite the reverse. In any newspaper one takes up, one comes across reports of wholly authentic facts, which nevertheless strike one as extraordinary. Our writers regard them as fantastic, and take no account of them; and yet they are the truth, for they are facts.

He proposed to concentrate on the spiritual development in Russia, even though "all the realists would shriek that it was pure fantasy! ... It is the one true, deep realism; theirs is altogether too superficial."


George Sand and Gustave Flaubert: The Counter-Religions of Humanity and Art

George Sand in 1864

In their correspondence in the mid-1870s, Sand seems determined to cheer Flaubert up: "You love literature too much; it will destroy you and you will not destroy the imbecility of the human race." Though they both agreed that humanity was messed up, she viewed it, she says, "with maternal eyes: for it is a childhood and all childhood is sacred. What hatred you have devoted to it! what warfare you wage on it!"

She urges him to remember that "there is something above art: namely, wisdom, of which art at its apogee is only the expression." She insists on optimism: "to perceive the continual gravitation of all tangible and intangible things towards the necessity of the decent, the good, the true, the beautiful." She admits that "the general aspect is for the moment poor and ugly," but refuses to let go of her expectations for improvement. And she wants him to recognize that he is "about to enter gradually upon the happiest and most favorable time of life: old age. It is then that art reveals itself in its sweetness; as long as one is young, it manifests itself with anguish."

She advises him to make the aim of his books clearer:

L'Éducation sentimentale has been a misunderstood book ... because people did not understand that you wanted precisely to depict a deplorable state of society that encourages these bad instincts and ruins noble efforts; when people do not understand us it is always our fault. What the reader wants, first of all, is to penetrate into our thought, and that is what you deny him, arrogantly.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise.

She expresses disbelief in his claim that he "writes for twenty intelligent people and does not care a fig for the rest. It is not true, since the lack of success irritates you and troubles you." She asserts a more sensible version of Tolstoy's view of art: "Whatever you do, your tale is a conversation between you and the reader." By hiding himself from the reader, by insisting on the autonomy of the work, he misses this essential connection. "Keep your cult for form; but pay more attention to the substance. Do not take true virtue for a commonplace in literature. Give it its representative, make honest and strong men pass among the fools and the imbeciles that you love to ridicule.... in short, abandon the convention of the realist and return to the true reality, which is a mingling of the beautiful and the ugly, the dull and the brilliant."

Flaubert calls her advice "affectionate and motherly," which he presumably meant kindly but which sounds condescending. But he rejects her advice with an insistence that he can do no other: "I write according to the dictates of my heart. The rest is beyond my control." And he continues to insist that art should conceal the artist:

I burst with suppressed anger and indignation. But my ideal of Art demands that the artist show none of this, and that he appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing, the work is everything!

Nor does he intend to compromise on his view of human nature: "No monsters, no heroes!" As for style, it remains a primary concern: "Goncourt is very happy when he has picked up in the street some word that he can stick into a book; I am very satisfied when I have written a page without assonances or repetitions.... I try to think well in order to write well. But my aim is to write well -- I have never said it was anything else."


H.G. Wells and Henry James: The Counter-Claims of Content and Form

H.G. Wells, date unknown

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Henry James, 1913

Virginia Woolf was not the only writer to have problems with the fiction of H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. In an article, "The Younger Generation," in the Times Literary Supplement in 1914, James trained his exquisite sensibilities on both writers and found them somewhat wanting. Bennett and Wells, he wrote "squeeze out to the utmost the plump and more or less juicy orange of a particular acquainted state and let this affirmation of energy, however directed or undirected, constitute for them the 'treatment' of the theme." They mass details for us, as Bennett does in his novel Clayhanger, recording "in dense unconfused array, every fact required to make the life of the Five Towns press upon us and make our sense of it, so full fed, content us." But then it occurs to the reader (or at least to James) to ask: "Yes, yes; but is this all?" We see the details, but not why they're being presented to us: "where is the interest itself, where and what is its centre and how are we to measure it in relation to that?"

He takes Tolstoy "as the great illustrative master-hand on all this ground of disconnexion of method from matter." His "epic genius," however, makes him a bad model: "from no other projector of the human image and the human idea is so much truth to be extracted under an equal leakage of its value." James sees Bennett and Wells as deriving, "by multiplied if diluted transmissions, from the great Russian." Descriptive detail in Bennett's novels gives the reader such a sense of "the solidity of every appearance that it may be said to represent our whole relation to the work and completely to exhaust or reaction upon it."

In Wells's case, he "affects us as taking all knowledge for his province and as inspiring in us to the very highest degree the confidence enjoyed by himself.... The more he knows and knows, or at any rate learns and learns -- the more, in other words, he establishes his saturation -- the greater is our impression of his holding it good enough for us, such as we are, that he shall but turn out his mind and its contents upon us by any free familiar gesture and as from a high window forever open." His books are a kind of brain dump. But James finds him a careless artist, who gives us only the outlines of the experience of his characters.

In Wells's 1934 Experiment in Autobiography, he recalled his acquaintance with James, who "liked me and ... found my work respectable enough to be greatly distressed about it." Where they most disagreed, he says, was that James "had no idea of the possible use of the novel as a help to conduct." James, Wells says, believed in "The Novel ... as an Art Form and ... novelists as artists of a very special and exalted type.... I was disposed to regard a novel as about as much an art form as a market place our a boulevard. It had not even necessarily to get anywhere. You went by it on your various occasions."

James had focused on Wells's novel Marriage in his TLS article, and criticized it because the characters seemed to talk to the reader more than they did to each other. Wells responds,

If the Novel was properly a presentation of real people as real people, in absolutely natural reaction in a story, then my characters were not simply sketchy, they were eked out by wires and pads of non-living matter and they stood condemned.... And the only point upon which I might have argued ... was this, that the Novel was not necessarily, as he assumed, this real through and through and absolutely true treatment of people more living than life. It might be more and less than that and still be a novel.... The important point ... was that the novel of completely consistent characterization arranged beautifully in a story and painted deep and round and solid, no more exhausts the possibilities of the novel, than the art of Velazquez exhausts the possibilities of the painted picture. 

Wells concludes by questioning whether "The Novel, a great and stately addendum to reality," has ever "been realized -- or can it ever been realized?"

But this autobiographical retort, some twenty years later, was not Wells's first response to James's critique. In 1915, he published a satire called Boon, in which the characters discuss James's fiction.

"He wants a novel to be simply and completely done. He wants it to have a unity, he demands homogeneity.... Why should a book have that? For a picture it's reasonable, because you have to see it all at once. But there's no need to see a book all at once. It's like wanting to have a whole country done in one style and period of architecture." 

One character suggests that James should "have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his wonderful brother," and argues that "if the novel is to follow life it must be various and discursive. Life is diversity and entertainment, not completeness and satisfaction." James's characters have no "opinions," in them there are "no people with defined political opinions, no people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or whims, none definitely up to any specifically impersonal thing.... James's denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those egg-faced, black-haired ladies, who sit and sit, in the Japanese colour-prints, the unresisting stuff for an arrangement of blacks."

And then comes the often-quoted simile, likening a James novel to "a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string." And the effect of the novel is that of a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea.

James was not happy with what he called "the bad manners of Boon," and wrote to Wells arguing that "the extension of life ... is the novel's best gift," and asserting, "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, ... and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of its process." But it was posterity who gave James the last word, keeping his novels alive while James's, except for the science fiction, are forgotten. 

4. Marcel Proust: A Life, by Edmund White, pp. 89-119

VII. His parents' deaths; financial independence; the cork-lined room; the beginnings of the Search. VIII. Against Sainte-Beuve; sense of urgency in writing; models for "the gang of girls"; Marcel Plantevignes; original conception of the Search; "Swann in Love"; Charles Dickens and Henry James; Richard Wagner; Albert Nahmias; searching for a publisher.

_____

In February 1903, his brother Robert married, and in November of that year their father died, one day after the birth of Robert's daughter. Two years later, in September 1905, their mother died at age fifty-six. Marcel would mourn her death for the rest of his life, saying, "In dying, Maman took with her her little Marcel," which White interprets as a turning point from "the intellectual dandified Marcel" to "the determined, wise, ascetic Proust." He also observes that the narrator's mother in the Search has Proust's mother's "disappointment with her son's lack of self-discipline," while the narrator's grandmother is given "his real mother's tenderness, her unconditional love for him in spite of all his failings."


He was thirty-four when his mother died, and had published only a book of stories and a translation of Ruskin, but his ambition was "to write a book that would rival Balzac's panorama of Parisian society." He had both the knowledge of the world and the sensibility to accomplish the task, and he had been left a fortune by his parents: "the equivalent of about $6 million of our money today, including a monthly revenue of some $15,000." He would squander a lot of it on gifts, even ordering an airplane for Alfred Agostinelli -- though he canceled the order after Agostinelli's death -- which becomes the yacht the narrator offers to buy Albertine in The Prisoner. He would also make bad investments on a whim. But he spent little on himself: "He was a playboy-monk."

In December 1906 he moved to 102 boulevard Haussmann, where he insulated his bedroom from noise and dust, lining the walls with cork and covering the windows "with layers of heavy curtains that were never opened." Here he began his project, beginning it "as a sort of Platonic dialogue with his mother on the subject of Sainte-Beuve, the nineteenth-century literary critic," the centenary of whose birth had been widely celebrated in December 1904. Proust dissented radically from Sainte-Beuve's belief that the reader should study a writer's biography in order to fully understand his work. Proust believed that this led Sainte-Beuve to radically undervalue such writers as Stendhal, Baudelaire, and Nerval. "A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, our social life and our vices," Proust asserted. But the dialogue about Sainte-Beuve was not the only thing he was planning to write:

In a letter of this period he said he was planning: a study of the nobility; a Parisian novel; an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert; an essay on women; and an essay on pederasty. Other topics mentioned were gravestones, stained-glass church windows -- and an essay on the novel. What is crucial to underline is that at its very inception Proust thought of his book as several books, mostly essays. 

By June 1908 he was working on the fictional conversation with his mother on Sainte-Beuve, writing constantly, but also worrying about publishing what he was writing, which he called "obscene." The work, which had a "provisional title," Against Sainte-Beuve, Memories of a Morning, was a novel, and one of the characters was gay. It would end, he wrote to Georges de Lauris, "with a long conversation on Sainte-Beuve and aesthetics." White observes that In Search of Lost Time ends with a meditation and not a conversation on aesthetics. And that Sainte-Beuve's autobiographical theory has been countered in the novel by Vinteuil, who "is a mighty creator as a composer and a totally self-effacing wimp as a man -- the perfect counterargument to Sainte-Beuve's theory of the harmonious congruity between an individual's life and work." And that from the very beginning Proust had planned to write about homosexuality in his novel.

He was afraid he wouldn't live to complete the work: "He was so ill that he was spending about twenty thousand dollars a year for medicines." But he hadn't completely withdrawn from the world. At Cabourg, "he studied the actress Lucy Gérard and the two daughters of Viscount d'Alton" as models for the "gang of girls" in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. But he also studied "with feverish fascination" a group of boys he met on the beach, including 19-year-old Marcel Plantevignes, who visited Proust in his room until a woman warned Plantevignes about Proust's homosexuality. Proust flew into a rage when the woman told him that Plantevignes had agreed with her about the accusation, "and even challenged Plantevignes's father to a duel." Proust's own seconds thought the challenge absurd and like "a duel from an operetta by Offenbach." The duel was called off and the friendship resumed when Plantevignes and his parents assured Proust that they didn't believe he was gay. Plantevignes also claimed that he suggested the title, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur.

In mid-August 1909 Proust talked to an editor about the novel he said he had nearly finished: a novel of about 300 pages, followed by an essay, a conversation about Sainte-Beuve, of 150 pages. The editor turned it down and another decided not to publish it as a newspaper serial. Proust decided to continue work and did so for the next three years. He conceived of the novel as a story about the narrator's childhood in Combray followed by the adolescent experiences of the narrator and Gilberte Swann in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées -- the "Swann in Love" section, which is four-fifths of Swann's Way, was not part of the original conception. The section is integral to the complete Search because Swann's unreciprocated love for Odette is echoed later in the narrator's relationship with Albertine, and Swann's failure to become a writer is reflected in the experience of the narrator, who finally overcomes what is blocking his writing.

And it suggests that one reason for Swann's failure is his addiction to friendship and frivolity and especially to "idolatry," by which Proust meant the collector's love of fine furnishings, beautiful mistresses, and great paintings: the perishable Things of this world rather than the immortal ideas that lie behind them, which can be recaptured only through involuntary memory -- and which only then can be codified in great works of literary art. 

Proust had learned how to shape a novel, how to introduce a theme, drop it, and return to it later, and how to work with a narrator whose impressions of other characters changes as the story progresses: The narrator of the Search first hears of Charlus as a womanizer and assumes that he is Odette's lover, but gradually learns otherwise. The creation of the character of Charlus, White observes, "falls midway between that of Dickens and that of Henry James." Like Dickens's characters, Charlus is made up of "memorable traits" and presented in "Dickensian bold relief." But "by building up a slow composite of images through time, Proust achieves the same complexity that James had aimed at."

Dickens could draw with a firm bounding line but used so little shading he gave no sense of perspective. James was all shading and depth but (especially in his late novels) nothing vigorous distinguished the profile of one character from another. Proust succeeded in rendering characters with the same startling simplicity as Dickens but generated a lifelike subtlety and motion by giving us successive "takes" over hundreds of pages.

Proust rewrote and expanded the first volume of the Search from 1909 through 1911. He dictated to his stenographers, had the manuscript set in type, then filled the margins with changes and additions, even pasting in new pages. "In fact, if any writer would have benefited from a word processor it would have been Proust." He paid for the typesetting, which was expensive, himself. In 1910 he worked on what would become Swann's Way and The Guermantes Way, then divided the manuscript in two volume, one called Time Lost and the other Time Regained. He rarely went out, although he was present at the famously controversial opening night of the Stravinsky/Diaghilev/Nijinsky Rite of Spring. In 1911, he subscribed to Théâtrophone, which broadcast concerts over the telephone. He heard Act III of Die Meistersinger and the opera Pelléas et Mélisande this way. He preferred Wagner, and some critics have compared the Search to Parsifal: Parsifal's quest for the Grail being parallel to the narrator's search for "the secret of literature" and the "young girls in flower" to the Flower Maidens. And the name Guermantes may be an echo of the name Gurnemanz, the leader of the Grail Knights.

By 1912, Proust's manuscript had reached 1,200 pages and he began to look for a publisher. He was working with a typist named Albert Nahmias, on whom he had a crush, and who eventually lent his name to Albertine. The novel was sent in October to the publisher Fasquelle, which had published Flaubert, Zola, and the Goncourt brothers. They returned it in December with a reader's note expressing complete bewilderment. He then sent it to Gallimard, which was a new publishing house started by André Gide, Jacques Copeau and Jean Schlumberger. But the readers, led by Gide, seem not to have read the manuscript, dismissing Proust as "a socialite and a snob." In any case, "the book was much too long for a fledgling house." Gide would later express regret at the missed opportunity. Then it went to Ollendorff, where a reader protested about Proust's using "thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in his bed before falling asleep."

Finally, Proust resorted to self-publication through Bernard Grasset:

Grasset, whom Proust compared to an ebony paper-cutter, so hard and sharp and efficient was he, virtually invented modern publishing in France; he was the first to resort to massive press offensives, advertising, bribing well-known personalities to launch a good word-of-mouth campaign, and so on.