Among the handful of genuine classics produced in this century, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is the most oceanic -- and the least read. Publishers' sales figures in all countries confirm the latter observation. Let us begin on this bleak terrain and work back gradually to what is cornpelling and often entertaining in Proust. To ignore what impedes easy access to his work would be foolish. Proust's substantial reputation as an extreme case of something - longwindedness, psychological vivisection, the snobbery of letters, salvation by memory - rests not on wide readership but on a myth of uniqueness defended by a dedicated few. In an era when the significance and the privileged status of the work of art are being cast into doubt, this ultimate monument to the artistic vocation, banked high on all sides by interpretation and biography, refuses to sink back into the sands of time.
Obstacles and Inducements: The inordinate length of Proust's novel (3000 pages) goes a long way towardexplaining the scarcity of readers. Even Russian novelists usually limit themselves to half that length. Balzac's one-hundred-volume print-out of all French society comes in separate packages; the links between the volumes serve as a special reward for the perservering. The first two sections of Proust's novel, Combray and Swann in Love, can stand separately and have earned many admirers. Yet true believers insist that there is no substitute for the cumulative effect of the whole work. Understandably, many readers hesitate to make the investment of time and attention required to assimilate even a fraction of the whole.
Compounding the challenge of sheer magnitude, there is Proust's style. His transcontinental sentences contribute to the appearance of a motionless plot. The original French is no easier than the translations. How can one follow a story line (if there really is one) through such labyrinthine prose? Furthermore, Proust originally planned to publish his novel in two compact volumes in rapid succession. The five-year interval of war that occurred after the appearance of the first volume and the tremendous expansion of the text it led to, forced him to change his plans. Published between 1913 and 1927 in multiple installments, Search is basically divided into seven volumes of very unequal length. For a decade and a half critics tried to judge the whole from a few parts. As a result, Proust had to serve as the sole qualified guide to his own uncompleted work. Endless letters, several newspaper interviews, and over a hundred pages in his last volume are devoted to rebutting his critics and explaining how he was constructing the vast edifice. The opening sections, he insists, give a distorted impression of the whole. Everything hangs on the conclusion. Gradually, Proust's description of his work has been validated by three generations of critics. But for fifteen years his work appeared piecemeal in the face of enormous odds against comprehension. It looks almost like a conspiracy against readers.
These basic circumstances surrounding Proust's work have spawned a set of secondary misunderstandings. Many of them can be traced to remarks by early critics, some of whom were sympathetic. Edmund Wilson, the earliest and most perceptive of American critics, admired Proust's work; yet he called Search "One of the gloomiest books ever written." In this instance his critical acumen failed him. Proust's novel earns its place in literature as a great comic tale, punctuated with srniles and guffaws Henry James produced a formula that has been well received: "inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine." It is hard to read the sentence as anything but dispraise. The volume of "tributes" a dozen English writers devoted to Proust in 1923 sows even more confusion. Joseph Conrad finds intellectual analysis at its most creative, but "no reverie, no emotion ..." Three pages later, George Saintsbury insists on a "constant relapse upon -- and sometimes self-restriction to -- a sort of dream element." Had they read the same author? Arnold Bennett wrote more in outrage than in tribute and could not excuse "the clumsy centipedalian crawling of the interlninablesentences." Then there is Aldous Huxley's description (though not in this same volume) of Proust as a, "hermaphrodite, toadlike creature spooning his own tepid juice over his face and body." On the centenary of Proust's birth in 1971 The New York Times Book Review assigned its front page to the novelist William H. Gass for a discussion of Proust's work. Gass's rancorous article adds little to Bennet's comments.
"... there is no special truth in him.. . Proustwrites a careless self-indulgent prose, doesn't he? ... Epithet follows epithet like tea cakes in liutes of paper ... It is a style that endangers the identity of the self in its reckless expressions of it." - July 11, 1971
The fact that many of these critics contradict one another does notdiscredit them collectively or individ-ually. But it does mean that we must beware of incomprehension and prejudice. The most persistent negative judgments of Proust can be reduced to two. First, Proust's work is boring because of slackness in both style and construction. Second, the moral universe of Proust's work never breaks free from the attitude of a spoiled, sickly, adolescent snob born to wealth on the fringes of high culture and high society. To these criticisms I shall add two more that are less frequently voiced.
Clausewitz describes war as the continuation of policy by other means. Like many authors, Proust often treated writing as a continuation of life by other means. The word can conquer where the flesh is weak. Having discovered this path, Proust became one of the great megalomaniacs of literature, unwilling (in part because of his semi-invalid condition in later years) to relinquish any small hold he could gain over other people by writing. In his letters he often mixed honey with acid. He dominated his mother with inter-bedroom memoranda and his friends with pitiful pleas for help. He sought to hypnotize his readers and to command the world from his sickbed. This sensitive weakling sought power and won it.
The last stricture is closely related. From Proust's writings, as from an electric generator, flows a powerful current always ready to shock not only our morality but our very sense of humanity. He undermines individual character as the source of anything coherent or reliable in our behavior. Love and friendship, honesty and sexuality crumble into mockeries of human relationships. Except for Marcel's immediate family, no one in Search escapes the curses of selfishness, self-contempt, and snobbery. Few grounds for human dignity survive Proust's touch. The inhumanity of artistic creation seems to triumph over everything.
Quite deliberately I have begun with a harsh and seriously distorted version of Proust's stature. Each of the charges could be rebutted and probably disproved. But I feel it is wise not to affirm his innocence but to ask for a far more illuminating verdict: guilty -- but not as charged. For Proust had the power to modify, as he went along, the laws under which he wrote and under which he asks us to read. Neither the novel form nor "human nature" remains unchanged after he has passed. The problem is to detect and measure the shifts. Snobbery, megalomania, and instability of character do in-deed loom large in the world Proust creates. The first task of the critic is to prevent the uninitiated reader from reacting against these elements before he understands how they lit together to make a remarkably coherent work of art.
No single theory or approach will make Proust easily and quickly available to all inquiring minds. The very resistance of his work to simplification and analysis constitutes its most evident general characteristic. Beyond this feature, however, we discover endless contradictions in Search. Walt Whitman lived at peace with the fact that he contradicted himself. He said that he contained multitudes. Proust asks the next question. How much of his multitudinous self can a person be or embody at one time? The first answer is plain common sense: it all depends. It depends on many things, from chance and volition to memory and forgetting. The second answer is categorical. No matter how we go about it, we cannot be all of ourselves all at once. Narrow light beams of perception and of recollection illuminate the present and the past in vivid fragments. The clarity of those fragments is sometimes very great. They may even overlap and reinforce one another. However, to summon our entire self into simuitaneous existence lies beyond our powers. We live by synechdoche, by cycles of being. More profoundly than any other novelist, Proust perceived this state of things and worked as an economist of the personality. In himself and in others he observed its fluctuations and partial realizations. Through habit and convention we may find security in "the immobility of the things around us." Yet it affords only temporary refuge. We yield with excitement, apprehension, and a deeper sense of existence to the great wheeling motion of experience. On a single page Proust refers to that endless shifting process as both "the secret of the future" and "the darkness we can never penetrate." He also has a word for it: our lot is "intermittence," the only steady state we know.
As in life itself, the scope of action and reflection encountered in Search exceeds the capacity of one mind to hold it all together at one time. Thus the novel embodies and manifests the principle of intermittence: to live means to perceive different and often conflicting aspects of reality. This iridescence never resolves itself completely into a unitive point of view. Accordingly, it is possible to project out of Search itself a series of putative and intermittent authors. Precisely that has happened. The portraitist of an expiring society, the artist of romantic reminiscence, the narrator of the laminated "I", the classicist of formal structure - all these figures are to be found in Proust, approximately in that order of historical occurrence. All are present as discernible components of his vision and his creation. His principle of intermittence anticipates such veerings of critical emphasis. It is in the middle of a literary discussion that his Narrator observes, "On ne Se realise que successivement". It really means: one finds, not oneself, but a succession of selves. Similarly, Proust's work is still going on in our gradual discovery of it. 1
The Life of an Enfant Nerveux: If forced to make the distinction, most of us would indicate a deeper and more lasting interest in people than in works. We ascribe greatness or goodness more readily to an individual person, accountable for the actions of his whole life, than to a deed detached from its context of individual agency and motivation in a person's life. One could with good reason interpret the history of Western civilization as a sustained attempt to divert us toward a concern with good works, both ethical and artistic. Religion and esthetics have developed along curiously parallel paths. Yet fundamentally our attention directs itself toward men and women, their temperaments and their lives. Only a lifetime provides an adequate unit of significance and value. (We have also cultivated a powerful materialist doctrine: the tendency to judge a man not by what he is or does, but by what he owns.)
It is not surprising, therefore, that the biography of so curious a figure as Proust should exert a fascination equal to that of his literary work. I suspect that more readers have read through George D. Painter's biography of Proust than have reached the end of Search. Furthermore, Proust's work lies in very close proximity to his life. On two occasions toward the end of the novel, when he supplied a first name for his Narrator-hero, Proust used his own, Marcel . Writers' lives are neither holy ground nor useless appehdages. Without Some knowledge of Proust's biography, we would remain blind to a whole section of countryside Surrounding his work and lending meaning to it.
Proust's life began with the Paris Commune of 1871 and ended in fame and exhaustion four years after World War I. In those fifty-one years he lived two closely interlocking careers. Beginning very early, this sensitive, gifted young man with something slightly Middle Eastern about his soft manner and dark look, carried out a brilliant escape from his bourgeois background and from the professional career expected of the eldest son of a prominent Paris doctor. He accomp-lished this feat by ingratiating himself with the wealthy and sometimes aristocratic families of his schoolmates at the Lycee Condorcet. By the age of seventeen, exploiting his talents as a mimic and conversationalist, he was visiting literary salons and learning his way in society. In his mid-thirties, soon after the death of both his parents, his first career as a somewhat eccentric man of the world gave way to another activity: literature. Up to that point Proust's writing had served his social ambitions or had been kept hidden. He now reversed the poles of his existence. For the last fifteen years of his life, his social connections and his worldliness furnished the raw material of his writing.
It was a shift, never a clean break. Proust claimed that he wrote parts of his first book at the age of fourteen (Jean Santieul), and there is little reason to doubt him. Just a month before he died, suffering terribly and aware of how much remained to be done on the final volumes of his novel, he got out of bed to go to a party given by the Comte and Comtesse de Beaumont. The overlap of careers was extensive. Nevertheless, the general movement of Proust's life pivots on an obscure point, somewhere between 1905 and 1909, in which north and south changed places. He became a convert -- a convert to true faith in himself as the novelist of his own conversion.
Such a schematic version of Proust's life keeps things simple and clear. It glosses over minor conflicts of fact and major confficts of interpretation. There are good reasons for us to seek a closer knowledge of how Proust became a convert to his Own calling. The most systematic and the least satisfactory explanations of Proust's life are pseudomedical. Son and brother of prominent doctors, Proust was himself a contributor to this line of thought. Inevitably he had heard that the terrors and upheavals of the Commune (his father was almost shot by accident) had affected his mother's pregnancy. Sickly at birth, he nevertheless survived. Nineyears later came his first serious attack of asthma; he received all the attention he could want, and his condition stabilized during youth and early manhood. The attacks recurred in his mid-twenties, at about the time he was coming to terms with his homosexuality. Mostly from his own testimony we know that he was prone to hypochondria, voyeurism, and certain forms of sadomasochism. Psychoanalysts have produced resounding terms to apply to the roots of his condition. When Serge Behar speaks of infantile neurosis developing into coenesthopathy in the adult," he is affirming a diseased condition of the organic sensation of existence and well-being. Perhaps: but this ground is as treacherous as it is fascinating. And I wonder if the technical vocabulary really improves on the term Proust's family applied to him very early and which he cites frequently in Jean Santeuil: un enfant nerveux.
It is significant that all psychological studies of Proust accept his designation of the determining childhood scene: the goodnight kiss described near the opening of Search. But to what extent is it part of Proust's biography? To what extent is it fiction? In the earlier Jean Santeuil version of the scene, the little boy revels in the power and freedom he finds when he finally triumphs over his mother's refusal to leave her guests and come to his room to kiss him goodnight. The same scene in Search emphasizes a strong aftertaste of disappointment over the fact that his mother and father give in to his importunings. Their capitulation, the Narrator states, undermines what little will power the boy has to control his moods. No one has gone further than Proust himself in probing the complete significance of this scene. But we cannot for that reason read it unquestioningly as autobiography.2
Heredity provides another way of explaining Proust's temperament and behavior. George Painter seems to accept the "fact" of Proust's "hereditary neurasthenia" and calls attention to a similar condition in a paternal aunt who became a recluse. Andre Maurois lays great emphasis on the mingling of two parental strains French-Catholic and Jewish. One cannot readily attribute contrasting character traits to these two races or religions as true genetic strains. On the other hand, the marriage did combine two contrasting cultures. In Proust's sensibility one soon detects the jostling opposition between city and country, between cosmopolitan Paris and provincial, semipastoral Illiers/Combray. His father never lost the brusque manners of a village candlemaker's son. Dr. Proust was the first of a long line of farmers and tradesman to leave Illiers. Mme. Proust, fifteen years younger than her husband, was the highiy educated, art-loving daughter of a wealthy Stockbroker. Her brother was a bachelor and ladies' man; her mother had connections in elegant society and in the world of literature and the arts. The tidal movement of the earch arises not from a contrast of races or religions but from a geographic and intellectual exchange between city culture and country culture. We see it first in the "two ways" that polarize the child's world of Combray, and later in the contrast between Combray itself and Paris.
Whatever Proust's medical and psychological condition may have been, and whatever his heredity, he found his own path into the Parisian life of Ia belle epoque. He had a quick mind, a prodigious memory (especially for poetry), and a hypersensitive discernment of other people's feelings and reactions. Despite frequent illnesses during his teens, he was healthy enough to excel in school, especially in philosophy. The Philosophy teacher Darlu, who tutored him privately for a year, made a profound impression on him and introduced him to the idealist analysis of the contrast between appearance and reality. Very eariy, Proust fixed on reading and literature as the locus of his interests. He apparently experienced puppy love a number of times. In the most intense instance, his parents thwarted his desires for Marie de Benardaky by insisting that she was socially too far beyond his reach. Taking advantage of a law discriminating in favor of the rich and educated, Proust volunteered at eighteen for one year of rallitary service. Though he did not distinguish himself as a soldier, he made several good friends among the other privileged young men and later called that year the happiest of his life.
One of the favorite pastimes in that self-conscious society was a modified game of truth or consequences played by filling in an elegantly printed questionnaire. Some families kept albums containing these questionaires along with other momentos of their friends and relitives. In Proust's case we have two such documents, one written at thirteen and the other at twenty. Despite the artificial circumstances, Proust's answers furnish two unmatchable probes of these early years of the slow bloomer. Where possible, I quote both sets of answers.
What is for you the greatest unhappiness? To be separated from maman (13). Not to have known my mother and grandmother (20).
In what place would you like to live? In the land of the Ideal, or rather of my ideal (13). In the place where certain things I want would come to pass as if by enchantment-and where tender feelings would always be shared (20).
Your ideal of earthly happiness? To live near all my loved ones, with the charms of nature, lots of books and musical scores, and, not far away, a French theater (13). I'm afrald it isn't high enough, and I'm afrald of destroying it by telling it (20).
For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence? For the private life of geniuses (13). For those I understand (20).
Your principal fault? Not to know how, not to be able, to will something [vouloir] (20).
What would you like to be? Myself, as people I admire would like me to be (20).
Your favorite quality in a man? Intelligence, the moral sense (13).
Your favorite quality in a woman? Tenderness [douceur], naturalness, intelligence (13).
Your favorite occupation? Reading; daydreaming; poetry (13). Loving (20).
Your present state of mind? Annoyance-boredom [ennui] over having thought about myself to answer all these questions (20).
Even for the era these are precocious answers, steeped in literary attitudes, and displaying the capacity to speak the truth within certain limits of coyness and insecurity. No bumbler wrote these apothegmatic lines.
At twenty this young sensitive had to face the painfulof what he would do with himself. For close to fifteen years he temporized and spent his days and nights essentially in the provinces of his mind looking for the capital. He entered the university and took a degree in law and another in literature. He also qualified by competitive examination for an unsalaried library position, and then never started work. For several years his best efforts went into two complementary activities: writing short stories and literary sketches for the newspapers and symbolist reviews, and cultivating the elegant families of the friends he had made at school and during military service. He memorialized his success in both lines with the publication of his first collection, Pleasures and Days (1896). It was an overly elegant edition illustrated by a salon hostess, Madeleine Lemaire, with a preface by Anatole France. It looked like the work of a dilettante with powerful connections, even though it does not read that way.
The strongest presence in Proust's life at this juncture was Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezenac. Fifteen years older, he had everything Proust thought he wanted. The Count was descended from the model for D'Artagnan of Dumas' Three Musketeers and could claim European nobility as relatives by blood or marriage. Immense wealth enabled him to cultivate an esthetic manner and 'way of life remarkable enough to have already inspired one notorious book, J.K. Huysmans' A Rebours (Proust's character Baron de Charlus is based upon Montesquiou). He was also a published poet of some note and flaunted his homosexuality with enormous style. Proust fawned on him for several years before he could pull away, and the fascination never disappeared entirely. When Montesquiou mentioned his young friend once in print, Proust had to light a pistol duel with a critic who seized the occasion to ridicule him as "One of those small-time fops in literary heat." No one was hurt.
The Dreyfus Affair exploded in November 1897. Proust, aged twenty-six, was intensely committed to the Dreyfus cause from the start. He helped get Anatole France's signature for the Petition of the Intellectuals, attended every session of Zola's trial, and was active in support of Colonel Picquart, the second hero of the affair. This public behavior placed Proust in the opposite camp from both his family (his father knew practically every minister) and most of his society hostesses. He recorded the harrowing tension and the human consequences of these events in sections of a novel he had been working on in spurts and fragments for some four years. Jean Santeuil provides scenes from the sad yet charmed life of a young man who can never pull himself together and is forever protected from above. After some eight hundred pages without form or continuity, Proust abandoned the manuscript in apparent dissatisfaction.
He was still in the provinces. His next discovery was John Ruskin, the English art critic and social thinker. Between 1899 and 1905 Proust spent much of his time reading him and making "pilgrimages" to the sites in France and Italy about which Ruskin had written. He went on to translate two of Ruskin's books (with the help of his mother and an English girl friend), and to write prefaces that grew until they almost swallowed the texts they were intended to present. Proust performed a dance with Ruskin similar to the one he had performed with Montesquiou. For a time Ruskin's combination of esthetic sensitivity, scholarship, and social thought won his deep admiration. Later he found Ruskin guilty of a false idolatry of art and of a masked moralism. This long encounter with Ruskin was deeply profitable for Proust. He was able to clarify his own ideas on art and to acknowledge to himself that fiction was still his goal. In 1902, at the peak of his Ruskin absorption, he wrote to Prince Antoine Bibesco:
... a hundred characters for novels, a thousand ideas keep asking me to give them substance, like those shades that keep asking Ulysses in the Odyssey to give them blood to drink and bring them to life, and that the hero pushes aside with his sword.
At thirty, Proust was already a deeply eccentric man, and still living at home on an allowance. His preferred schedule of rising in the late afternoon and going to bed at dawn estranged him from his own family. The events of the next few years came perilously close to paralyzing him. His younger brother, a doctor following in their father's footsteps, married in 1903 and set up on his own. At the wedding Marcel was a grotesque, semi-invalid figure in several overcoats and mufflers. A few months later their father died, and Mme Proust devoted herself for two years to caring for Proust's asthma and hay fever, and helping him translate Ruskin. She also organized dinners for his friends in their apartment. Then, after a short illness, Mme Proust died in 1905. Her son lay for almost two months in sleepless seclusion in the apartment, and then spent six weeks in a private clinic. After this, his nocturnal and neurotic behavior became more pronounced than ever.
The shift I have mentioned in Proust's career took place over the next four years -- not a single event or development, but a gradual convergence of forces already at work. He began to withdraw slowly from his salon life and saw his friends in restaurants late at night. He could now have homosexual affairs by hiring young men as chauffeurs or secretaries. Writing a series of literary pastiches increased his conviction that he must find his own style and his own form. Meanwhile, his writing was becoming more and more autobiographical. In 1908 his drafts of a projected critical essay, Against Sainte-Beuve, kept turning into personal narrative whenever he let them take their course. If Proust had any revelation, it must have been the discovery that he could accommodate his irresistible autobiographical impulse in the novel form. During a lull in his writing in January 1909, he apparently had an unexpected and compelling surge of memory over a cup of tea into which he dipped a madeleine. When he described the incident in the preface he was writing for Against Sainte-Beuve, a number of similar reminiscences came to mind. Some missing element had fallen into place, and now it seemed as if he were at work on a wholly new book. Yet it was really the same one-the book begun in Pleasures and Days, tried again and laid aside in Jean Santeuil, tried once more in the anecdotal pages that open the preface to Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, carried on in Against Sainte-Beuve. Endowed with a new plan but no firm title, this transmuted work took possession of him during the spring of 1909 and filled the rest of his life. By August, he wrote proudly and optimistically to Mme Emile Strauss, one of his hostesses: "I have begun-and finished-a whole long book." About the same time he gave a few details to Alfred Vallette, a possible publisher for it. I'm finishing a book which, in spite of its provisional title, Against Sainte-Beuve: Recollection of a Morning, is a genuine novel and an indecent novel in some of its sections. The book ends with a long conversation on Sainte-Beuve and aesthetics.
We should probably be grateful that Vallette refused Proust's novel then, for it was many years and hundreds of pages away from being finished. But at least it was begun, and already getting out of control.
These developments were the signal for Proust to modify his life of indecision and distraction. In the fall of 1909 he announced to his friends a kind of withdrawal and retreat, referring mysteriously yet resolutely to the long work ahead of him. His caginess about the title and plan of his novel made it sound like a scientific discovery or a military secret. In 1910 he sealed himself into the bedroom of his new apartment by lining it with cork, and sent out irregular reports on the page count he had reached. A few close friends like Georges de Lauris and Reynaldo Hahn, sworn to confidence, were allowed to read the oilcloth covered notebooks. They gave him the encouragement he needed. Of course, Proust did not retire completely from Parisian life as he had known it. He kept up with his friends and, at intervals, muffled in outlandish clothes, dropped in on an elegant hostess just as her party was breaking up. He even went occasionally to a music hall or an art gallery, and he listened to concerts and plays by subscribing to a service that allowed members to hear live performances over the telephone. But from now until his death in 1922, his novel took precedence over everything else. The tide had turned. His forays into the outer world and the bulk of his letters were either means of obtaining information for his writings or attempts to arrange the proper publication and reception for his work. For the latter purpose he pulled every string, used every connection, and called in every outstanding debt available to him. Yet four publishing houses refused his book. After a cursory look, Andre Gide turned it down for Gallimard as too snobbish and amateurish. He soon changed his mind. Grasset, a new house, finally published it, at the author's expense, in 1913. All Proust's advance work was barely sufficient to launch this first of two projected volumes. By the time Gallimard published the second volume after the war, the manuscript had grown unsuppressibly, frighteningly, like a carnivorous vine that would finally entwine and devour its owner.
The remainder of Proust's life takes on a mythological quality. His nocturnal, bedridden, disorderly work habits seem heroic. In his private life he mixed low-grade hedonism with deliberate psychological and moral experiment. What looks degraded to some of us may be edifying to others. This man of shrewd medical insight mercilessly punished his frail body and refused proper advice, even from his brother. He followed what he told Louis de Robert was his only rule: "to yield to one's demon, to one's thought, to write on everything to the point of exhaustion." When he was awarded the prestigious Goncourt prize in 1919 for the second volume of the novel, A l'ombre des Juenes Filles en Fleurs, the event barely ruffled the waters in his special universe of nurture and devotion. His work had become a living being, making demands of its own. "For me it had turned into a son. The dying mother must still submit to the fatigue of taking care of him." He knew he had given birth.
The last decade of Proust's life displays an outward life gradually abdicated in favor of a work-both the inward process and the material product. Yet there is nothing reluctant or tragic about his abdication. It does not resemble the two great royal departures of the era, when a Spanish king bowed to republicanism and an English king chose love of a commoner over royalty. With surprising confidence Proust simply decided in favor of the dense tropical growth he felt within him. For he discovered that it was at last assuming a shape it had not exhibited earlier. Throughout his life, Proust composed in a discontinuous fashion. Except possibly in the earliest short stories, he did not start at the beginning of a narrative and follow it through to the end. Observations and incidents and characters came to him in disparate fragments direcfly based on his day-to-day experience. His notebooks seem to be in total disarray in spite of the dazzling insights they carry. In reading Jean Santeuil, still virtually a notebook, one rarely receives the sense of a direction in which events are moving. It drifts to a standstill. The prose pieces Proust wrote for the abandoned essay-novel, Against Sainte-Beuve, display this desultory quality to an even greater extent. He seems totally at sea.
But after 1909 he has a chart and a course. The "very exacting composition" Proust lays claim to in a letter to Louis de Robert in 1912 was the major new element that had entered his work and claimed his energies. In Search he holds his characters and his story in an iron grasp. Lengthy digressions and hernia-like extensions of a single scene or sentiment do not mean that be has lost track of where his characters are going and what they have already been through. Considering its length, unfinished condition, and the handicapped circumstances in which he wrote the novel, it contains extraordinarily few repetitions and inconsistencies. The over-all design and the narrative links rarely waver, a difficult feat in view of the complex strategies of divulgence and development he set for himself. Yet Proust never relished the final stage of assembling and fitting. 'Writing is easy for me," he wrote Gallimard. "But to