"All are sick with some form of the ideal," or, It's time again for Proust

August is waning, and the air carries a feeling that, as Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence pointed out earlier this week, Tove Jansson described perfectly in The Summer Book:

It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin.

The weather suits my annual August return to Proust, a tradition I copied from a poet friend, Carrie Olivia Adams; this year, I'm closing out my second time through the whole cycle, reading Finding Time Again in the 2002 translation by Ian Patterson.

In anticipation, I turned last week to Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise (1948), because I vaguely remembered Connolly expressing dissatisfaction with In Search of Lost Time. I was surprised at how close he comes to outright dismissal:

He exhibits, beyond all others, the defect of the Mandarin style; the failure of the writer's intellectual or emotional content to fill the elaborate frame which his talent plans for it. The honeycombs continue to develop, but fewer and fewer pollen-bags are emptied into them. There are many great passages where the complexity is worthy of the emotion expended on it, where very subtle and difficult truths are presented in language that could only express them if difficult and subtle.

Notwithstanding, now that the element of novelty and cult-snobbery has worn off, much of Proust, as of his master Ruskin, must stand condemned. He is often repetitive and feeble; the emotions of envy, jealousy, lust, and snobbishness around which his book is built, though they generate an enormous impetus, are incapable of sustaining it through twenty or thirty volumes; Swann's jealousy of Odette is enough without Proust's jealousy of Albertine, Saint-Loup's of Rachel and Charlus's of Morel and if the emotions repeat themselves, so also do the stories, the situations, the comments, parentheses, and cliches. Proust will remain a great writer, but his titles to fame my have to be reconsidered.

Few would argue that there are not parts of In Search of Lost Time that could be trimmed or tightened, but Connolly's critique is far, far too broad. In so coolly dismissing the repetitive patterns of the book, he reduces what is in reality recurrence, echo, and commentary to something akin to laziness or failure of imagination. More important, what he identifies as "envy, jealousy, lust, and snobbishness" might more productively be grouped together under the more general--and more important, for far more empathetic--concept of longing, an emotion with which one would assume the perpetually dissatisfied Connolly to be quite familiar.

Edmund Wilson is far more generous, and far closer to correct, in his treament of Proust in Axel's Castle (1931):

All [Proust's characters] alike are suffering from some form of unsatisfied longing or disappointed hope: all are sick with some form of the ideal. Legrandin wants to know the Guermantes; Vinteuil is wounded in his love for his daughter; Swann, associating the beauty of Odette with that of the women of Boticelli, ridiculously and tragically identifies his passion for her with his neglected aesthetic interests.

Connolly is much closer to the mark in his indictment of the slash-and-burn nature of Proust's satire:

He was modern enough to attack the values of this world but he had nothing to put in their place, for their values were his own, those of the narrator in the book who spends his life in going to parties and watching snobs behave but is never a snob himself. . . . [W]hat in fact he declares is that nothing changes except the small social set which he admired in his youth and which fell to pieces. . . . There was a new face with an old title in a box at the opera--but the title and the box are always there, coveted and prized by the ruling class of six or seven countries; there are no new ideas, no revolution in wisdom, no reversals of taste, nobody to declare that they never want to see an opera again.

This is a version of the common criticism of the satirist: that by destroying everything and offering nothing to replace what he's savaged, he leaves the reader feeling inclined, not to revolution or fundamental change, but to resignation. If it's all really that bad, why bother trying to change anything?

Here, too, Wilson provides a strong rebuttal. After describing some of the scenes of greatest cruelty in the novel--including the Guermantes's callous disregard of Swann's awkward confession of his impending death--Wilson first offers a more suitable and balanced assessment of the aims of Proust's satire:

Proust has destroyed, and destroyed with ferocity, the social hierarchy he has just been expounding. Its values, he tells us, are an imposture: pretending to honor and distinction, it accepts all that is vulgar and base; its pride is nothing nobler than the instinct which it shares with the woman who keeps the toilet and the elevator boy's sister, to spit upon the person whom we happen to have at a disadvantage. And whatever the social world may say to the contrary, it either ignores or seeks to kill those few impulses toward justice and beauty which make men admirable. It seems strange that so many critics should have found Proust's novel "unmoral"; the truth is that he was preoccupied with morality to the extent of tending to deal in melodrama. Proust was himself (on his mother's side) half-Jewish; and for all his Parisian sophistication, there remains in him much of the capacity for apocalyptic moral indignation of the classical Jewish prophet.

From there, he reminds us that, contrary to Connolly's assertion, Proust does offer us counter-examples:

[W]e begin to understand why Proust finds these realities so inacceptable, as we become aware of the standards by which he judges them. These standards are supplied, on the one hand, by such artists as Bergotte, the novelist, and Vinteuil, the composer; but on the other hand, by Swann and by the narrator's mother and grandmother. . . . The world is different from Combray, not merely because Combray is provincial, but because the world is the world and occupied with the things of the world. It is not really Combray itself, but the example of his mother and grandmother, with their kindness, their spiritual nobility, their rigid moral principles and their utter self-abnegation, from which Proust's narrator sets out on his ill-fated adventures among men.

Against the cynical and grasping world of society, Proust sets a conception of strength of character, of a kindness and dignity so fundamental that even when our longings make us ridiculous--as Swann's pursuit of Odette can't help but do--they can never make us cruel or small.

It is, as Wilson notes, a deeply moral vision, and while its backwards-looking, conservative vision may not be the first step towards the revolution for which Connolly seems to be asking, it unquestionably answers his charge that Proust offered no alternative to the values of the society he condemns.

And now to submit to Proust's obsessions and watch this late-summer Saturday slip away.

"However wise we are, we are only worldly wise for others."

Though he wrote extensively and astutely on novelists major and minor throughout his life, Cyril Connolly himself produced only one novel, The Rock Pool (1936), a brief satire of life among a community of expatriate bohemians and ne'er-do-wells on the Mediterranean coast. As he was wont to do in all aspects of life, Connolly made some effort at preempting the criticism he anticipated of the novel, explaining in his introductory letter to the book, addressed to his friend Peter Quennell,

If one has criticized novels for several years one is supposed to have profited from them. Actually one finds one's mind irremediably silted up with every trick and cliche, every still-born phrase and facile and second-hand expression that one has deplored in others. The easy trade of reviewing is found to have carried banality with it to the point of an occupational disease.

Connolly's worry is misguided: the language of The Rock Pool is far too careful to fall into cliche, though at the same time it is less animated than that of his critical writing. A more accurate, if too harsh, critical account is given by Jeremy Lewis in his biography of Connolly:

None of the characters comes alive; the dialogue is as stiff and awkward and unconvincing as that of a group of incompatible strangers, reluctantly introduced to one another and unlikely to take things any further; there is no sense of drama or involvement or interaction between its wooden-seeming puppets, and its ostensibly shocking subject-matter--bohemian life in the South of France, with its obligatory dashes of sex, drugs, drink and general dissipation--seems irremediably tame, lacking even the faintest whiff of brimstone or depravity.

At its best, The Rock Pool's jaded, brutal humor rivals that of the early comic novels of Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh, who ruthlessly stripped those books of any hint of sentiment or lyricism, leaving only terse, Hemingway-esque prose and a slashing, cynical wit. Connolly, however, never seems fully comfortable in that mode, alternating awkwardly between that sort of genuinely funny passage and the more lyrical, sentimental, melancholy, and self-lacerating effusions that make The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise so intimate and compelling. Those interludes do deliver the occasional gem--

I shall cultivate obscurity and practise failure, so repulsive in others, in oneself of course the only dignified thing.

[T]he habit and profession of cynicism can often exist without the requisite gold reserves of emotion to back them.

--but they draw attention to the fact that the book is neither emotionally involving enough to be a straight novel nor spare and biting enough to be a first-rate satire. It's a tough no-man's-land to attempt to hold--Dawn Powell did it, but Connolly can't quite pull it off. You can sense the difficulty he had in the writing, can instantly apprehend why, in Quennell's words, this "aesthetic idealist and . . . literary perfectionist" never wrote another novel.

Despite that, The Rock Pool is often a pleasure to read, offering some wonderfully deadpan dialogue. I particularly liked the fresh strangeness of this exchange:

At the main road Toni turned round. "You must walk back with me to my room, Rascasse--because--because--"

"Because what?"

"Because I am afraid of a ghost there."

"What kind of ghost?"

"Oh, well--she is a woman with very red hair, very cold, sometimes she is thin and sometimes she is fat. She comes very close and goes away at the same time like a pendule. She is the ghost of a mountain in Finland and she wants me to go back because I promised never to leave her."

The midnight bus from Nice could not have arrived more opportunely.

Later, Naylor chats up a drunk German blonde named Sonia:

"Ich bin so mude, so mude," she sighed and went on in labored English. "It is terrible. I get so easily drunk. Let us talk philosophy. What is your philosophy?"

"Opportunism."

"What is that?

"Making the most of my chances."

"Pah--how material."

"Well, why not?"

"But you are young. Later you can be material--now is the time to believe."

"But I do believe--I believe in opportunism."

"How silly--what about life--what is life--what is progress--what is growth?"

"But I do believe in growth and progress. I believe that one is young, then not so young, then old, then very old, then dead; timid, then bold, then cautious, then crusty, then feeble; fresh, then stale; innocent, then guilty, then totally indifferent; first generous and then mean; thin then fat; thoughtless then selfish; hairy then bald--what more can you want?"

Later, Naylor learns more about Sonia from Rascasse, a painter friend, who explains:

"I'm just a little bit in love with her."

"Is she in love with you?"

"No, but she's sorry for me, because she's a virgin and so she tries to make it up to me."

"Well, that's something."

"Yes, but she's sorry for the colonial too, because he takes her everywhere in his car."

"He finds her a virgin as well?"

Connolly also presents a couple of splendid descriptions of hangovers:

Naylor woke late, with a hang-over. It was relatively a new sensation for him, for he was proud of a certain donnish temperance. He would take two whiskies at night and suddenly round on those of his friends who had a third one. Not that he minded, only it seemed rather childish; remember the law of diminishing returns? And why make yourself sick the next day? But strangely enough he was not sick--instead he seemed to be spun up in a kind of voluptuous cocoon. The sun streamed in over the purple bougainvillea. He tottered down to the sea. Lying on his back, the curious sensation was stronger, his stomach seemed made of wool, his throat felt some rich sensual craving, his mind floated among a multitude of sensations, all his senses were slowed up to an unusual delicacy. He masticated a line of Eliot: "The notion of some infinitely tender, infinitely suffering thing." Opening his eyes, the sky and sand were grey as a photograph, his antennae played over the tiny crystals, women's brown legs passed him on the board-walk, but he could not look up. "You see in me a creature in the most refined state of intoxication," he thought, and waves of sensual and lotophagous reminiscence swept over him.

That time, one gets the sense that Naylor had the good fortune to still have some alcohol in his system when he woke, thus avoiding the worst of drink's punishment; on another day, he's not so lucky:

This time he woke up with the real thing. Somebody was tapping his skull as if it were a breakfast egg. When he moved loose flints rattled inside it. His mouth seemed full of corrosive sublimate. He had a breath like an old tyre on a smoking dump. . . . Naylor closed his eyes, opened them, and was sick. For some time after he lay like a crushed snail on a garden path.

Connolly was probably right to decide that his gifts lay in criticism rather than in fiction, but anyone whose writing on hangovers deserves to be mentioned in the same boozy breath as Kingsley Amis's has accomplished something to be proud of; if Connolly were still with us, I'd gladly stand him drink after drink on the strength of those paragraphs alone.