BOO KS
373
One of them is a long critical essay, dating from about 1907, which
M. de Fallois published in France in 1954 with the title
Contre Sainte–
Beuve.
The other is a lengthy fragment of a novel, a sort of
ur-Swann,
which Proust worked at in the late 1890s. Edited and arranged by M.
de Fallois, this narrative was published
in
France in 1952 as
Jean
Santeuil
and is now brought to American readers in a sumptuous format
and a fair translation.
Whatever others may think of
Contre Sainte-Beuve
and
Jean
Santeuil,
M. de Fallois has no great opinion of them considered as con–
tributions to Proust's
(Euvre
or to literature. In an admirable preface
to the first-named volume, he maintains that "Proust's unpublished work
does not exist"; the author of
A la Recherche du temps perdu
is still
"the man of a single work";
Jean Santeuil
has no such independent
literary status as does Stendhal's posthumously discovered
Lucien
L euwen
nor is
Contre Sainte-Beuve
comparable in this respect to, say,
Montesquieu's
Notebooks;
and to expect to discover authentic novelties
among Proust's papers is to "defy his very genius." In short, all the
early writings, including even
L es Plaisirs et les Jours,
which Proust d id
finish and publish, were only the efforts of a man "dreaming of works
to come." M. de Fallois seems to be against any attempt to regularize
Proust by providing him with a more various
(Euvre
and a professional
apprenticeship.
His account of the matter may sound too dogmatically theoretical.
I myself would exempt
Les Plaisirs et les Jours
from M. de Fallois's
strictures.
If
Jean Santellil
is inferior Proust, the
Plaisirs
is primitive
Proust and has a charm of its own; and as M. de Fallois says, there
are many excellent things in
Contre Sainte-Beuve
and
Jean Santeuil.
For the rest he is probably right. Between a single paragraph of
La
R echerche
and anything Proust wrote earlier there is an abyss of dif–
ference. Nor do
Jean Santeuil
and
Contre Sainte-Beuve
correspond to
our usual idea of apprentice writings. Despite brilliant passages, both
seem intrinsically infeasible, and it is obvious that neither would have
seen the light of day except as post fa cto adjuncts to a masterpiece
which they do not render at all inevitable. The small immature work
which foreshadows the great mature work will at least give evidence
that it could be finished.
Jean Sant euil
(to speak here only of it) could
not in its nature be completed, for although it has numerous themes,
and they are the themes of
La Recherche
as well, it has no central
subject. More intimately autobiographical than
La Recherche, Santeuil
is the work of a man who thinks his experiences are interesting but
doesn't yet know why.
