The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  After the second war there was another civil war between resisters and collaborators, still raging quietly when France embarked upon its colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria. Inevitably they failed, and the generations of intellectuals described by Lévy played a part in trying to assure some sort of ‘Freedom’ for the wretched people caught up in these interminable struggles.

  After 1989 and the collapse of communism old values such as the Rights of Man asserted themselves once more, and the intellectuals, disillusioned by the failure of the students’ revolt in 1968 to effect radical change, seem to have settled down to arguing on television and writing.

  Naturally the old bitter divisions of the last war remain. Lévy’s hero is Malraux, his villains Drieu la Rochelle and Céline. Yet when the dust has finally settled, what remains is the writing. Sartre’s and Montherlant’s plays, Céline’s Voyage au bout de la Nuit, Aragon’s Semaine-Sainte, along with the Journals of Gide, Mauriac and Julien Green will be read when their politics have faded.

  Lévy’s book, well translated, may prove rather puzzling to English readers. They will be like the people in the rue du Quatre Septembre who, when asked what event had given the street its name, hadn’t the slightest idea. The word Billancourt means nothing to most of the English, and the footnote is not much help. The ‘sixth February’ is apt to pass them by. But they will enjoy some of the interviews, even if they seem rather anti-French, and perhaps congratulate themselves that our native writers are mostly fuddy duddy liberals, and not quite so furiously ‘engaged.’

  Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century, Lévy, B.-H., trans. Ceasey, R. Evening Standard (1995)

  Grief on a Front

  The pitiless, everlasting rain of Loire Atlantique is the rather gloomy setting for the petit bourgeois characters to live their lives, where nothing much happens except births, marriages and deaths.

  Jean Rouaud wrote his book in a newspaper kiosk in Paris during the slack periods, or at least so it was said when he won the Prix Goncourt in 1990. The Paris rain, and covering his wares with mackintosh aprons, must have reminded him of his home in Brittany.

  Like most first novels, this seems to be autobiographical. His grandparents and his great-aunt Marie had been born in the 1890s. Their seemingly dull world and their quiet, harmless lives had been catastrophically broken into by the Great War.

  Two brothers were killed—one of them, Joseph, suffered the torture of burned lungs in a gas attack upon the trenches, where he and his comrades lived like rats, with rats, in mud and slime. His sister Marie, who adored him, had been young at the time. Her love and her memories of him became more vivid, as in old age she lost her wits after ‘a long, secret repression of grief… her life forever thrown off course’.

  The grandfather, who also survived, and, in fact, a whole generation, were traumatized by the unbelievable horror of that war. Verdun is only the most spectacular example of the agony and senseless sacrifice they experienced. They endured and did not mutiny.

  On to the 60s, when young people knew little of either war. The grandparents, leaving the rain for a while, went to stay with a daughter in a hot, sunny vineyard. The grandfather, contentedly chain-smoking, sat day after day in a chair, watching the men at work.

  One day he disappeared and the whole neighbourhood turned out to search for him. He came back with a story of having seen exotic plants at Hyères, but in reality, mildly lecherous, he had been to see the nudist colony on the Ile de Levant.

  His old wife found the boat ticket in his pocket. She said nothing, and, when he died a year later, he thought he had taken his secret to the grave.

  In a frightful eternal recurrence, Fields of Glory ends with a young man in a cemetery on All Saints’ Day, when French graves are smothered in chrysanthemums. The date is 1940. They are at it again. France is occupied. There are no trenches, but it is terrible in another way.

  In the first war there was no choice; in the second, decisions had to be taken by individuals, the memory of which is at the back of every Frenchman’s mind. An undeclared civil war, a near anarchy.

  Perhaps Jean Rouaud will write a sequel to Fields of Glory. He could probably do it better than anyone, perceptive and subtle as he is. Not an easy book to translate, but Ralph Manheim has done it excellently.

  Fields of Glory, Rouaud, J., trans. Manheim, R. Evening Standard (1992)

  African Hell

  Drastic cutting would greatly have improved this enormous book, at half the length and half the price it would have been worthwhile. Unwieldy and repetitive, it yet contains much new information, such as Ambassador Jebb’s excellent dispatches from Paris to the Foreign Office in London. From these an authentic portrait emerges of that very curious and devious individual General de Gaulle, the loved and admired, the hated and despised dictator of France for ten years.

  His enemies thought he had thrown Algeria away unnecessarily and hypocritically, while his adherents were certain he had saved France from civil war, from communism, and totalitarian Russia, immensely powerful in the late 50s.

  The Algerian war coming immediately after France’s defeat in Indo-China was appallingly savage. The tribes of Arabs, Berbers and Kabyles had always fought each other, and their losses in the war are reckoned to have been eight times those of the Europeans. Kettle’s account of the massacres, murders, mutilations and tortures of the years when the war raged shows that for all its inhabitants Algeria was a dangerous and fractured society, and possibly in their secret hearts most of the French, Spanish, Greek and Corsican pieds noirs were fairly thankful to leave when the time came, loudly though they cried for Algérie Française. The big colons had investments outside the country, but the small farmers and shopkeepers had to leave all their possessions behind. On the whole they did brilliantly in France, where they settled, saying bitterly they had to choose ‘a valise or a coffin’. They thrived on deep hatred of de Gaulle, were sorry when bullets missed him and rejoiced when he was finally toppled. But the French army felt betrayed. Kettle ends his book after the abortive barricades, we are not given the revolt of the generals.

  It is impossible to be dull about General de Gaulle with his sybilline pronouncements, faith in himself and dismissively contemptuous attitude to everyone else; when he is on stage the book comes alive.

  Algeria remains a problem. Arabs, Berbers and Kabyles still fight each other. The economy has never flourished since independence; the land, so productive for its European owners, is nationalized, and what belongs to everybody profits nobody. Misery and poverty are the rule; as to democracy, when the Fundamentalists were winning an election there was a military coup and the army took over. Algerian immigrants pour into France and swamp the social services. They are no more liked by the French than Europeans were by the Muslims in colonial days. The whirligig of time has brought its revenge, the outlook is bleak.

  If the war killed upwards of a million people, and nobody knows the exact number, the population, owing to French medicine and dwindling infant mortality, has exploded. General de Gaulle got the Europeans out and they hate him for it. Do they regret it still?

  De Gaulle and Algeria 1940-1960, Kettle, M. Evening Standard (1993)

  A La Recherche du temps perdu

  Scott Moncrieff’s translation of A La Recherche du temps perdu was a flawed attempt at a fiendishly difficult task, but with these revisions it seems to be as right as it is ever likely to be. Three times Proust was inspired to write his masterpiece by sensations which evoked scenes from the past with startling clarity. The taste of a madeleine dipped in tisane brought back his childhood at Combray and in Paris. His adoration of his mother; family walks by the pink hawthorn bordering Swann’s park; Swann dining with his parents without his wife, who had a ‘past’; visions of Gilberte Swann, a lovely child he was not allowed to play with; the church with stained glass windows commemorating the noble Guermantes of centuries ago; a glimpse of the Duchesse de Guermantes at a village weddin
g, her gold hair, brilliant blue eyes and high-bridged nose; Françoise the cook killing a chicken, the taste evoked lost years he was searching for. He had fallen in love with Gilberte, and his heroine was Oriane de Guermantes. Neither could he approach, so that feelings intensified in his imagination.

  Later on, hearing the little shriek emitted by a porcelain coffee cup touched by a silver spoon, he was transported to the Balbec train, where a workman, banging the line with an iron hammer, had made the same sound. He was on his way to the coast, adolescent, delicate, with his grandmother. It came vividly back; the hotel flooded with light from the sea, his grandmother’s friendship with the Marquise de Villeparisis (his first Guermantes), their drives around Normandy in her barouche, his friendship with her nephew St Loup, who seemed to him the acme of manly beauty and elegance, and the troupe of young girls he longed to get to know, who ran along the beach, arms entwined, and whose loud behaviour horrified his grandmother. One of them was Albertine, who was to make him suffer appalling jealousy because of her supposed lesbianism.

  As a little boy in Paris he had dragged the unwilling Françoise all the way to the Bois de Boulogne to see the lady in pink driving in her smart equipage. She was Odette, a courtesan, with whom Swann, most fastidious of men, had fallen so deeply in love that he married her in the vain hope of possessing her completely, despite the fact that he knew his Faubourg St Germain friends, with whom he passed his time, would never receive her. Swann’s painful jealousy, watching Odette’s vulgar little house to see who was with her among the orchids and chrysanthemums, was the very same as the narrator is tortured by a generation later, when he imprisons Albertine in his flat. Love, for Proust, is agonizing jealousy; there is no room for fondness or companionship. Finally, there is disillusion and indifference, and the sorrow felt by Swann when he realises he has wasted his life pining for a woman he doesn’t even like.

  The narrator sees a poetic vision of beauty and elegance, the Guermantes and their friends framed in a box at the theatre, glistening with jewels and unattainable glamour, but already ironic laughter is not far away. When he meets them, and is invited to dinner, he soon discovers the distressing banality of the world of the rich and nobly born. It is one more disillusion. Even the celebrated wit of the Duchess herself is simply paradox spiced with malice. (For the reader, on the other hand, Oriane is one of the greatest heroines of fiction, bright and beautiful and elegant, with an unfailingly wicked tongue.) M de Charlus is a monster of another kind, another Guermantes. When the narrator blunders into a male brothel he finds M de Charlus being flogged by a sailor hired for the purpose. Many of the characters are homosexual (even in the end St Loup, which stretches credulity), and all are caricatures. Tenderness is reserved for his mother and grandmother.

  The third occasion the narrator is projected into lost time is when he treads on a loose cobblestone in a Paris courtyard. He finds himself in St Mark’s, walking on the uneven marble floor. Venice, for him, is art. Unlike love, or Paris society, art never disappoints, or disillusions. He knows he has within him a work of art waiting to be written. After one last party with his friends grown old and wrinkled, where he finds the grandees, formerly so exclusive, married to the very people they refused to receive, he shuts himself up and works until his dying day.

  Proust had moved into a cold house where the fire smoked. His brother, who like their father was an eminent doctor, implored him to move to a warm clinic, but he refused. He died aged 51.

  Proust’s is one of the greatest novels ever written. Well translated and well printed, these volumes are a publishing achievement to be proud of.

  A La Recherche du temps perdu, Proust, M., trans. by Scott Moncrieff, C.K., rev. Kilmartin, T., again rev. Enright, D.J. Evening Standard (1997)

  Simple Pleasures

  Like Hamlet, and like Faust, A La Recherche du temps perdu continues to occupy the minute attention of critics in all countries; there is even a risk that, while recognising it as the greatest achievement of imaginative literature of the first half of the twentieth century, they may spin around it such a cocoon of legend, myth and prestige that they will obscure the delights and glories of the book itself.

  Some of these critics, seeking to illumine the psychological complexities of its author, fall over themselves in their eagerness to discover a new ‘truth,’ like the American who recently announced that the name Robert de Saint-Loup derived from Proust’s brother Robert and ‘mon petit loup,’ a term of endearment used by his mother. If this critic had crossed the Atlantic he might have hit upon a simpler explanation. Among the villages and castles in Seine et Marne whose names Proust borrowed for his noble personages—Guermantes, Villeparisis, for example—is the château of Saint Loup, well known to a number of people since it has been occupied for years by a hospitable English lady. Thus, although the novel and its author are inexhaustibly interesting subjects, readers are becoming wary of some of the far-fetched and inexpert criticism to which they constantly give rise.

  Retour à Marcel Proust falls into an altogether different category; here the critic himself is one of France’s foremost writers. Biographer, historian, internationally famous authority on military matters, M. Benoist-Méchin was a minister in Pétain’s government and is a great European.

  His book is divided into two parts: the first, a long essay on ‘La Musique du temps retrouvé,’ he wrote as a young officer in the French army of occupation in the Rhineland immediately after the first war; in the second, thirty five years later, he looks back at his youthful self across the gulf of strange and tragic happenings which this troubled period represents, and at Marcel Proust. He re-read A La Recherche du temps perdu almost reluctantly, he says. He feared to break the Proustian spell, and that the enthusiasm he had formerly felt for a magnificent work of art might prove to be illusory. But the novel appeared to him once again as fresh, as intelligent and as brilliant as it had done when he read it first, and more comic than ever before. ‘Quel plaisir intense, vivace, inespéré m’a procuré cette nouvelle lecture de La Recherche du temps perdu!’ he exclaims, adding: ‘et j’ai compris alors que son oeuvre était impérissable’ [the work is indestructible].

  The theme of M. Benoist-Méchin’s first essay is the role of music throughout the whole work; Proust’s love and understanding of music were profound, and la petite phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata is the leitmotiv not only of Swann’s love for Odette but also of love itself, in all its aspects—down to the sordid antics of Vinteuil’s daughter and which, for Proust, was synonymous with tormenting jealousy. Those whose down-to-earth realism persists in discovering real men and women in all Proust’s characters have also attempted to guess the original of la petite phrase. A complete answer to such pretensions is quoted here, from a letter in which Proust himself says it may have been suggested by Saint-Saëns, or the Good Friday music in Parsifal, or César Franck, or Lohengrin, or Schubert, or possibly Fauré. In other words, by all and by none.

  If Proust were living now, a prisoner to asthma in a darkened, blanketed room, he would most likely listen to faithful recordings of his favourite music. He would probably hear so much music, repeated so often, that the intensity of the pleasure he felt in it might be dissipated, and the power of evocation lost. Instead of thinking about Beethoven’s string quartets, and writing down his thoughts, he might have played them on a gramophone. There may be too much music in the modern world. Madame de Cambremer, whose mouth watered when she heard Chopin so that she dribbled, might have learnt to listen unmoved, while Madame Verdurin could hardly have demonstrated her extreme musical sensibility by burying her head in her hands if she were obliged to do it several times a day.

  ‘La musique,’ said Proust, a few months before his death, to M. Benoist-Méchin, ‘a été une des plus grandes passions de ma vie, je dis a été, car à présent je n’ai plus guère l’occasion d’en entendre, autrement que dans mon souvenir.’ [Music was one of my greatest passions, I say ‘was’ because I am no longer able to listen t
o it other than through what I remember.] Through memory, he communicates his passion for music to the reader; M. Benoist-Méchin also possesses the power to recapture and to set down in words the deep though transitory impression that music can make on the individual and on the crowd. His description of a performance of Meistersinger at the time of the Ruhr crisis is unforgettable.

  Retour à Marcel Proust, Benoist-Méchin, B. (1957)

  Proust on the Shelf

  Proust died in 1922, but his name and his novel were so famous that Scott Moncrieff’s translation was already a classic in the 30s. Aged 51, he died of cold. He had moved to a flat in rue Hamelin where the fire smoked and gave him asthma. With no fire, he lay swathed in rugs, shawls and hot water bottles, his bed, the floor, every table and chair covered in paper: galley proofs smothered in almost illegible corrections, carnets full of writing, even scraps and envelopes. He knew he had not long to live, and was trying to finish and correct A La Recherche du temps perdu. His brother (like their father, a doctor) implored him to move to a warm clinic. He refused. Only he knew how his life’s work could be deciphered; the precious proofs and papers must not be touched. He worked until he died, and then artist friends made drawings of his thin white face, half covered in black beard. Might he have cut, or altered his work?

  The first volume, Swann’s Way, had been published at the author’s expense in 1913. The next volumes, highly praised, some published after his death, completed his enormous novel.

  Stepping on a broken cobblestone in Paris, Proust had been transported to St Mark’s, with its uneven mosaic pavement. For him, Venice was art, and in that moment he realised that only art brings no disillusion. Le Temps perdu is the novel of disillusion. Love is but jealousy, beauty fades, fashions change, friendships grow cool, art remains. Resolving to devote his life to the work of art he knew his novel could be, he turned night into day, working in the silent hours, seeing only a few old friends for an occasional midnight feast at the Ritz.