BOOKS
NOTES ON PROUST
THE MAXIMS OF MARCEL PROUST. Edited , with a tra nslati on, by Justin
O 'Brien. Columbia University Press. $3 .00.
THE TWO WORLDS OF MARCEL PROUST. By Harol d Morch. University
of Pennsylvania Press. $3.50.
LETTERS OF MARCEL PROUST. Translated an d Edited, with Notes, by
Mina Curtiss. With an introdu ction by Harry Levin. Rand om House. $5.00.
Among the books on Proust recently published in this coun–
try,
Justin O'Brien's
The Maxims of Marcel Proust
has the advantage
of directing us to what he actually wrote rather than to his metaphysics
or his chauffeur. Risking the charge that he has reduced
Remembrance
of Things Past
to a bedside book, Mr. O'Brien has collected certain
of the aphoristic passages and printed them under various headings:
Man, Love, Art, Society, Time and Memory. The result is unexpectedly
attractive. Moreover, as Mr. O'Brien observes in his introduction, the
book establishes Proust's tie with the tradition of La Rochefoucauld;
'but what French tradition
doesn't
Proust recapitulate? Above all, per–
haps,
The A1axims
interests us for the skill with which it turns the
highly-charged French sentences into finely idiomatic English. For Mr.
O'Brien is more impressed than was Scott Moncri efT by the cogent ele–
ment in Proust's style. (Which is not to agree with Alfred Kazin and
others that Scott Moncrieff's was a bad job.)
Despite the spectacular eclipse of Proust's glory in France, Mr.
O ' Brien continues to admire him openly, if a little elegiacally like the
rest of us. Thus he escapes the blight that has attacked certain other
learned students of the novelist in this country. The experts are naturally
oriented towards France and French opinion; and it has been the mis–
fortune of many of them that Proust's becoming "available for research"
has coincided with his fall from grace at home. Thus one of them felt
obliged to conclude a laborious study of the extinct master with the for–
lorn remark that "as a last resort, Proust will always find a place in
the marginal anecdotes of literary history." The
marginal
ones, mind
you. And from internal evidence I gather that Mr. Harold March was
gravely hampered by the same dilemma in preparing
The Two Worlds
