1022
PARTISAN REVIEW
Of the biography of Marcel Proust, that
is
of the way
his
life
unfolded, of its content, and of the resurrection of its past such as it
was, there remain only, besides its formal frame, the very elements
which were not then part of it: these unfinished sensations,
this
pleasure "whose object was not felt in advance." The rest, everything
that wavered like the surroundings of Balbec, everything that made
up the texture of
his
life-he himself, so remote from life, Mme de
Villeparisis-all seemed like characters in a novel and were in fact
nothing more than waverings and dreams. And these places and these
people are thus void of reality only because they are waiting to be
endowed with a soul and three dimensions, in order to become real
places and characters in fiction, and to be received into a coherent
universe where they will have their fixed position, once they are trans–
figured and drawn out of their limbo by the grace of baptism; they
will regain their true nature; such is their vocation. This being the
case, do not try to identify them.
It
matters little to what models
Proust owes the initial stimulus of Charlus, of Saint-Loup, of the
Guermantes, or of the Verdurins. These indeterminate friends, these
encounters of Marcel Proust are not present in his work which would
lose its meaning if regarded as a sort of gallery of portraits like
those we find in any memoirs. Or if traces of them still persist, they
are those that separate them from their specific reality to display in
its pure state more general truth, the figurative and impersonal
representation of which they become. And in that way, the following
evocation of Saint-Loup, inasmuch as its point of departure is based
upon a simple observation of behavior, can be applied to any number
of friends of Marcel Proust, who poured their aristocratic ways into
the crucible from which Saint-Loup was to emerge:
At the same time my mind was distinguishing in Saint-Loup a per–
sonality more collective than his own, that of the "noble"; which like
an indwelling spirit moved his limbs, ordered his gestures and his actions;
then, at such moments, although in his company I was as much alone
as I should have been gazing at a landscape the harmony of which I
could understand. He was no more then than an object the properties
of which, in my musing contemplations, I sought to explore. The per–
petual discovery in him of the pre-existent, this aeonial creature, this
aristocrat who was just what Robert aspired not to
be,
gave me a keen
delight, but one that was intellectual and not social. . . . Sometimes I
found fault with myself for thus taking pleasure in my friend as in a
work of art, that is to say in regarding the play of all the parts of his
