374
PARTISAN REVIEW
"We never really know whether we have missed our true vocation,"
Proust makes Santeuil remark. "Especially in matters of work we are all
to some extent like Mr. Casaubon in
Middlemarch
who devoted the
whole of his life to labors which produced results that were merely
trivial or absurd. Still, our work does produce a few odds and ends
of beauty." No wonder he remembers the George Eliot character. Be–
tween Casaubon and the young Proust, both rich, ailing and ambitious,
there were affinities, and Proust was much given to the study of parallel
lives and exemplary cases. As Casaubon's project is a
Key to All
Mythologies, Jean Santeuil
is an attempted synthesis of literature. His–
tory, memoir, philosophy, prose poem, La Bruyere character sketch, cri–
ticism, maxim, all and more are compacted into a kind of novel. The
~ynthesis
was to work in
La Recherche;
it didn't work in
Jean Santeuil.
And if Proust's story is Casaubon's with a happy ending, it is strikingly
similar in its beginnings. In this respect
Jean Santeuil
enhances our
knowledge of his mind and life. He was not so idle all those years as
we supposed. In a sense he was worse than idle: occupied with things
that came to nothing. Work that is unfinished, unpublished, can leave
a great emptiness behind. Laboring to no purpose intensifies the
movement of time, makes the past throb like an unhealed wound. In
Proust's case the being busy, busy, busy, first at
Jean Santeuil
in his
parents' dining room, later at
Contre Sainte-Beuve
in guilty solitude,
confirmed the onrushing of the days and made remembering painful.
It
gave him, however, a subject in
A la Recherche du temps perdu,
and
brought to that work a dynamism which is not to be felt at all in
Jean
Santeuil.
The dynamism arises from a conviction that if a man is not
himself positively creative he will be done in by the negative creativity
of history, its sheer power of endless and meaningless invention. This
was for Proust the lesson of Bergson qualified by Nietzsche; it was above
all the lesson of his own experience.
But to pass up
Jean Santeuil
altogether would be ruthlessly high–
minded. A small, charming volume of selections might have been made
of it and the rest distributed to libraries on microfilm. But here it is, a
fait accompli
in 744 pages. Primarily a study for
La
Recherc~e,
with
little in it that is not done again, and done much better, in that novel,
it nevertheless has its "odds and ends of beauty." The characters are
very numerous, and scarcely have we made their acquaintance when
they wander off into the crowd, perhaps returning briefly before taking
their final leave. Proust was still at the party; he knew casually too
many people and tried too deliberately to make characters out of them.
But they are all brightly sketched at first appearance, and many of
