56
PARTISAN REVIEW
up to a devastating condemnation of their world,
eh bien!
here are
MM. Giraudoux and Morand who accept their particular world de–
bonairely.
M. Lemaltre's most irresponsible shrug occurs at the stage where
he should be discussing Gide's communism. The Russian adventures give
him a pretext to regard this as merely another neurosis like Gide's homo–
sexuality, a further mutation in a career of striving and straying. But
if fad were the motive, Gide would have found it easier to accept
Claudel's bidding to Catholicism several years before, or at least to
acquiesce more comfortably into the Soviet regime.
If
uncertainty were
the outcome, the whole history of his ethical investigations, before and
after his conversion to Marxism, would lack its inevitable complement.
Most converts already have a way of life and are seeking a set of con–
victions; Gide started with intense, if undogmatic, convictions, and is
still hoping to find a way of life. One did not need to be a Trotskyist to
foresee that Gide would make a more candid than prudent communist.
One does not need to be a Stalinist to admit that Gide would have been
wiser to remain on Pisgah.
In spite of a daring speculation as to the effect of the Commune
on the pre-natal conditioning of Proust, M. Lemaitre hardly tries to
give his book historical orientation. When his publishers mention "new
documents" they apparently refer to the fact that, along with every
other student of the subject, he has utilized Albert Feuillerat's studies
in Proust's method of composition. In reducing to his own elementary
level these highly technical researches, which lay bare the successive
strata of
A La recherche du temps perdu,
M. Lemaltre circulates the im–
pression that Proust was at cross-purposes with himself. Thus the crucial
quality of disillusion becomes incidental to the development of the
novelist, rather than organic in the conception of the novel. M. Feuil–
Ierat, by a brilliant projection of Proust's own attitude, shows him con–
tinually enlarging his design, shifting his emphasis, and sharpening his
delineation. M. Lemaitre, who has not grasped the essence of this
relativism, may misguide readers into believing that Proust's work was an
ambitious failure.
If
that be true, it is also true of the
Aeneid
and the
Canterbury Tales.
A Procrustean method involves both lopping off and stretching out
--lopping in the case of Proust and Gide, stretching in the case of
Giraudoux and Morand. Here is a fair example of stretching: "So the
material of Giraudoux's art will be found to lie precisely where his sen–
sibility meets the external world."
If
this means anything at all, it means
something that would be equally valid for any writer; but nearly every–
thing one could say about Giraudoux would be that. Again, it is not
surprising to find M. Lemaitre's account of Gide an obvious condensation
of Leon Pierre-Quint's book, but it is a shock to discover the some–
what vague and far-fetched French word
trust
translated by the taste–
less English expression "brain trust." It is a disturbing consolation to
realize that all this would sound better in French. In English,
M.
