The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  In 1922 Joyce’s Irish colleague W. B. Yeats was named a senator in Ireland. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yeats’s fifty-seven-year career as a poet spanned many different periods, but his political engagement was of a piece with his artistic vision. An 1899 police report described him as ‘more or less of a revolutionary,’ and in 1916 he had published ‘Easter 1916,’ about the botched Irish nationalist uprising. This contained lines that, though they refer to the executed leaders of the uprising, could also serve, in the ending, as an epitaph for the entire century:

  We know their dream; enough

  To know they dreamed and are dead;

  And what if excess of love

  Bewildered them till they died?

  I write it out in a verse -

  MacDonagh and MacBride

  And Connolly and Pearse

  Now and in time to be,

  Wherever the green is worn,

  All changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.38

  Yeats recognised that he had a religious temperament at a time when science had largely destroyed that option. He believed that life was ultimately tragic, and that it is largely determined by ‘remote … unknowable realities.’39 For him the consensus of life, its very structure, will defeat us, and the search for greatness, the most noble existential cause, must involve a stripping away of the ‘mask’: ‘If mask and self could be unified, one would experience completeness of being.’40 This was not exactly Freudianism but close and, as David Perkins has shown, it led Yeats to a complicated and highly personal system of iconography and symbols in which he pitched antitheses against one another: youth and age, body and soul, passion and wisdom, beast and man, creative violence and order, revelation and civilisation, time and eternity.41

  Yeats’s career is generally seen in four phases – before 1899, 1899–1914, 1914–28, and after 1928 – but it is his third phase that marks his highest achievement. This period includes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and the prose work A Vision (1925). This latter book sets out Yeats’s occult system of signs and symbols, which were partly the result of his ‘discovery’ that his wife had psychic powers and that spirits ‘spoke through her’ in automatic writing and trances.42 In anyone else such an approach might have been merely embarrassing, but in Yeats the craftsmanship shines through to produce a poetic voice that is clear and distinctive, wholly autonomous, conveying ‘the actual thoughts of a man at a passionate moment of life.’43 Yeats the man is not at all like Bloom, but they are embarked on the same journey:

  The trees are in their autumn beauty,

  The woodland paths are dry,

  Under the October twilight the water

  Mirrors a still sky;

  Upon the brimming water among the stones

  Are nine-and-fifty swans…

  Unwearied still, lover by lover,

  They paddle in the cold

  Companionable streams or climb the air;

  Their hearts have not grown old;

  Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

  Attend upon them still.

  – ‘The Wild Swans at Coole,’ 1919

  Yeats was affected by the war and the wilderness that followed.

  Many ingenious lovely things are gone

  That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude…

  O but we dreamed to mend

  Whatever mischief seemed

  To afflict mankind, but now

  That winds of winter blow

  – ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,’ 1919

  But, like Bloom, he was really more interested in creating afresh from nature than lamenting what had gone.

  That is no country for old men. The young

  In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,

  – Those dying generations – at their song,

  Those salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

  Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

  Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

  Caught in that sensual music all neglect

  Monuments of unageing intellect.

  –‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ 1928

  Yeats had begun his career trying to put the legends of Ireland to poetic use. He never shared the modernist desire to portray the contemporary urban landscape; instead, as he grew older he recognised the central reality of ‘desire in our solitude,’ the passion of private matters, and that science had nothing worthwhile to say on the matter.44 Greatness, as Bloom realised, lay in being wiser, more courageous, more full of insight, even in little ways, especially in little ways. Amid the wasteland, Yeats saw the poet’s role as raising his game, in order to raise everybody’s. His poetry was very different from Eliot’s, but in this one aim they were united.

  Bloom is, of course, a standing reproach for the citizens of the acquisitive society. He is not short of possessions, but he doesn’t have much, or all that he might have, yet that doesn’t bother him in the slightest. His inner life is what counts. Nor does he judge other people by what they have; he just wants to get inside their heads to see how it might be different from his own, to aid his experience of the world.

  Four years after Ulysses, in 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald published his novel The Great Gatsby, which, though a much more conventional work, addresses the same theme albeit from virtually the opposite direction. Whereas Leopold Bloom is a lower-middle-class Dubliner who triumphs over small-scale adversity by redemptive wit and low-level cunning, the characters in Gatsby are either very rich or want to be, and sail through life in such a way that hardly anything touches them, inhabiting an environment that breeds a moral and intellectual emptiness that constitutes its own form of wasteland.

  The four main characters in the book are Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Nick Carraway, the narrator. The action takes place one summer on an island, West Egg, a cross between Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Long Island, but within driving distance of Manhattan. Carraway, who has rented the house next to Gatsby by accident, is a relative of Daisy. To begin with, Gatsby, who shared some biographical details with Fitzgerald, the Buchanans, and Carraway lead relatively separate lives; then they are drawn together.45 Gatsby is a mysterious figure. His home is always open for large, raucous, Jazz Age parties, but he himself is an enigmatic loner; no one really knows who he is, or how he made his money. He is often on the phone, long distance (when long distance was expensive and exotic). Gradually, however, Nick is drawn into Gatsby’s orbit. In parallel with this he learns that Tom Buchanan is having an affair with a Myrtle Wilson whose husband owns a gas station where he often refuels on his way to and from Manhattan. Daisy, the original ‘innocent,’ a 1920s bright young thing, is blissfully unaware of this. The book is barely 170 pages long, and nothing is laboured. There is an early mention of ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires, by this man Goddard,’ a reference to Lothrop Stoddard’s eugenic tract The Rising Tide of Colour. This provokes a discussion by Tom about race: ‘If we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved … it’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things…. The idea is that we’re Nordics … and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’46 The area where the fatal accident takes place, where Myrtle is killed, is known as the Valley of Ashes, based on Flushing Meadow, a swamp filled with garbage and ash. At other times, ‘breeding’ is a matter of exquisite fascination to the characters. But these points are lightly made, not forced on the reader.

  Permeating all is the doubt that surrounds Gatsby. Dark rumours abound about the way he made his fortune – liquor, drugs, gambling. It soon transpires that Gatsby wants an introduction to Daisy and asks Nick, her relative, to arrange a meeting. When he does so, it turns out that Gatsby and Daisy already know each other and were in
love before she married Tom. (Fitzgerald was worried that this was the weak point of the book: he had not explained adequately Gatsby’s earlier relations with Daisy.)47 They resume their affair. One afternoon a group of them go in two cars to Manhattan. In the city Tom accuses Gatsby and Daisy of being lovers. At Gatsby’s instigation, Daisy confesses she has never loved Tom. Angered, Tom reveals he has been checking up on Gatsby: he did go to Oxford, as he claimed; he was decorated in the war. Like Nick, the reader warms to Gatsby. We also know by now that his real name is James Gatz, that he comes from a poor background, and that fortune smiled on him as a young man when he was able to do a millionaire a favour. But Tom has amassed evidence that Gatsby is in fact now involved in a number of unwholesome, even illegal schemes: bootlegging and dealing in stolen securities. Before we can digest this, the confrontation breaks up, and the parties drive back to the island in two cars, Gatsby and Daisy in one, the rest in the other. We surmise that the confrontation will continue later. On the way, however, Gatsby’s car kills Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s lover, but doesn’t stop. Tom, Nick, and the others, travelling well behind, arrive to find the police at the scene and Mr Wilson distraught. Mr Wilson has begun to suspect that his wife is being unfaithful but doesn’t know who her lover is. He now suspects Gatsby, deciding his wife was killed to keep her quiet, so he goes to Gatsby’s house, finds him in the pool, shoots him, and then turns the gun on himself. What Wilson doesn’t know, and what Tom never finds out, is that Daisy was driving. This is kept from the police. Daisy, whose carelessness kills Myrtle, gets off scot-free. Tom’s affair, which triggers all this tragedy, is never disclosed. Tom and Daisy disappear, leaving Carraway to arrange Gatsby’s funeral. By now Gatsby’s shady business deals have been confirmed, and no one attends.48

  The last scene in the book takes place in New York, when Nick sees Tom on Fifth Avenue and refuses to shake hands. It is clear from this meeting that Tom still has no idea that Daisy was driving the car, but for Nick this innocence is irrelevant, even dangerous. It is what enchants and disfigures America: Gatsby betrays and is betrayed.49 He feels that even if Tom is unaware that Daisy was driving, their behaviour is so despicable it really makes no difference to his judgement of them. He also has some harsh words to say about Daisy, that she smashed up things, and then ‘retreated back’ into her money. In attacking her, Nick is forsaking the blood link, disallying himself from the ‘Nordics’ who have ‘produced civilisation.’ What Tom and Daisy have left behind, despite their breeding, is catastrophe. The Buchanans – and others like them – sail through life in a moral vacuum, incapable of distinguishing the significant from the trivial, obsessed with the trappings of luxury. Everywhere you turn in The Great Gatsby is a wasteland: moral, spiritual, biological, even, in the Valley of Ashes, topographical.

  James Joyce and Marcel Proust met in 1922, on 18 May, after the first night of Igor Stravinsky’s Renard, at a party for Serge Diaghilev also attended by Pablo Picasso, who had designed the sets. Afterwards Proust gave Joyce a life home in a taxi, and during the journey the drunken Irishman told Proust he had never read a single word he had written. Proust was very offended and took himself off to the Ritz, where he had an agreement that he would always be fed, however late.50

  Joyce’s insult was unbecoming. After the delay in publication of other volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu, caused by war, Proust had published four tides in fairly rapid succession. A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (which won the Prix Goncourt) was published in 1919, Le Côté de Guermantes came out the year after, and both Le Côté de Guermantes II and Sodome et Gomorrhe I were released in May 1921. Sodome et Gomorrhe II was published in May 1922, the very month Proust and Joyce met. Three more volumes – La Prisonnière, Albertine disparue, and Le temps retrouvé — all came out after Proust died in 1922.

  Despite the delay in publication, Jeunes filles and Le Coté de Guermantes take us back to Swann, the salons of Paris, the minutiae of aristocratic snobbishness, the problems associated with Swann’s love for Gilberte and Odette. But with Sodome et Gomorrhe there is a change, and Proust fixes his gaze on one of the areas singled out by Eliot and Joyce: the landscape of sex in the modern world. However, unlike those two, who wrote about sex outside marriage, outside the church, casual and meaningless sex, Proust focused his attention on homosexuality. Proust, who was himself homosexual, had suffered a double tragedy during the war years when his driver and typist, Alfred Agostinelli, with whom he had fallen in love, left him for a woman and went to live in the south of France. A short while later, Agostinelli was killed in a flying accident, and for months Proust was inconsolable.51 After this episode, homosexuality begins to make a more frank appearance in his work. Proust’s view was that homosexuality was more widespread than generally realised, that many more men were homosexual than even they knew, and that it was a malady, a kind of nervous complaint that gave men female qualities (another echo of Otto Weininger). This changed dramatically Proust’s narrative technique. It becomes apparent to the reader that a number of the male characters lead a double life. This makes their stiff, self-conscious grandeur and their snobbery more and more absurd, to the extent that Sodome et Gomorrhe finally becomes subversive of the social structure that dominates the earlier books. The most enviable life, he is showing us, is a low comedy based on deceit.

  In fact, the comedy is far from funny for the participants.52 The last books in the sequence are darker; the war makes an appearance, and there is a remarkable description of grief in Albertine disparue. Sex also continues to make its presence felt. But possibly the most poignant moment comes in the very last book, when the narrator steps on two uneven flagstones and an involuntary memory floods in on him, just as it did at the very start of the series. Proust does not bring us full circle, however. This time the narrator refuses to follow that path, preferring to keep his mind focused on the present. We are invited to think that this is a decisive change in Proust himself, a rejection of all that has gone before. He has kept the biggest surprise till the end, like the masterful storyteller that he is. But still, one cannot call it much of a climax, after so many volumes.53

  At the time of his death, Proust’s reputation was high. Now, however, some critics argue that his achievement no longer merits the enormous effort. For others, A la recherche du temps perdu is still one of the outstanding achievements of modern literature, ‘the greatest exploration of a self by anyone, including Freud.’54

  The first volume of Proust’s novel, it will be recalled, had been turned down by among others André Gide at the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). The tables were soon turned, however. Gide apologised for his error, and in 1916 Proust migrated to NRF. At Proust’s death, Gide’s great novel The Counterfeiters was barely begun. He did in fact record a dream about Proust in his journal for 15 March 1923 (Proust had died the previous November). Gide was sitting in Proust’s study and ‘found himself holding a string which was attached to two books on Proust’s shelves. Gide pulled the string, and unwound a beautiful binding of Saint-Simon’s Memoirs. Gide was inconsolable in the dream but did acknowledge later that his action may have been intentional.55

  The Counterfeiters, which had been on the author’s mind since 1914, is not really like A la recherche du temps perdu, but some similarities have been noted and are pertinent.56 ‘Gide’s novel has its own Baron de Charlus, its band of adolescents, its preoccupation with the cities of the plain. In both works the chief character is writing a novel that turns out to be, more or less, the very novel we are reading. But the most important resemblance is, that each was written with the conscious intention of writing a great novel. Gide was attempting to rival Proust on his own ground. In the dream the element of jealousy in Gide’s attitude to Proust is ‘brought to a head, confessed, and reconciled.’57 The novel, with its highly complex plot, is important for a number of reasons, one of which is that Gide also kept a journal in which he recorded his thoughts about composition. This journal is probably the most complete account of a
major literary work in formation. The main lesson to be learned is how Gide progressively changed and winnowed away at his early ideas and cut out characters. His aim was to produce a book where there is no main character but a variety of different characters, all equally important, a little bit like the paintings of Picasso, where objects are ‘seen’ not from one predominant direction but from all directions at once. In his journal he also included some newspaper cuttings, one about a band of young men passing counterfeit coins, another about a school pupil who blew his brains out in class under pressure from his friends. Gide weaves these elements into a complex plot, which includes one character, Edouard, who is writing a novel called The Counterfeiters, and in which, in essence, everyone is a counterfeiter of sorts.58 Edouard, as a writer, and the boys with the false money are the most obvious counterfeiters, but what most shocked readers was Gide’s indictment of French middle-class life, riddled with illegitimacy and homosexuality while all the time counterfeiting an attitude of respectable propriety (and not so dissimilar in subject matter from the later volumes of Proust). The complexity of the plot has its point in that, as in real life, characters are at times unaware of the consequences of their own actions, unaware of the reasons for other people’s actions, unaware even of when they are being truthful or counterfeiting. In such a milieu how can anything – especially art – be expected to work? (Here there is an overlap with Luigi Pirandello.) While it is obvious why some counterfeiting (such as passing false money) works, some episodes of life, such as a boy blowing his brains out, will always remain at some level a mystery, inexplicable. In such a world, what rules is one to live by? The Counterfeiters is perhaps the most realistic diagnosis of our times. The novel offers no prescription; it infers that none is really available. If our predicament is ultimately tragic, why don’t more people commit suicide? That too is a mystery.