In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  As Bergotte’s place at the table was not far from mine and I could hear everything he said, I soon realized why his way of speaking had struck M. de Norpois. He did have a most singular voice. It is the fact that they have to convey thought that, more than anything else, alters the physical properties of a voice: not only the resonance of the diphthongs and the power of the labials are affected by it, so is the delivery itself. To my ear, Bergotte’s way of speaking was completely different from his way of writing; and even the things he said differed from the things that fill his books. A voice emerges from a mask; unaided, it is not up to showing us immediately a face we have glimpsed naked in a style. During conversation, at moments when Bergotte took to talking in a way which M. de Norpois was not the only one to find affected and obnoxious, it took me a long time to discover any close parallel with those parts of his books where his form became so poetic and musical. At such times, Bergotte could see in what he was saying a beauty of form unrelated to the meaning of his sentences; and as human speech is in communication with the soul, albeit not expressing it as style does, Bergotte sounded almost as though he was speaking without meaning, droning on certain words and, if he was following through a single image under the words, running them together as though they were a single sound, in a way which was fatiguing in its monotony. The fact was that a toneless, turgid and pretentious delivery was a sign of the aesthetic value of his words; it was the manifestation in his conversation of the power which gave to his books their harmonies and sequences of images. The reason why I had such difficulty in noticing this was that what he said at such moments, for the very reason that it was from Bergotte, did not seem to be by Bergotte. It was composed of a rich flow of exact ideas, quite foreign to the ‘Bergotte manner’ as misappropriated by reviewers; and that dissimilarity was probably another reflection of the fact – glimpsed vaguely through the spoken word, like something seen through smoked glass – that, when one read a page of real Bergotte, it never resembled what would have been written by any of the insipid imitators who kept touching up their prose, in newspapers and books, with pseudo-Bergottisms in imagery and ideas. This difference in style came from the fact that the real thing was first and foremost some precious, genuine element lying concealed within each object, waiting to be drawn out by the great writer with his genius; and it was this drawing-out that was the aim of the soft-voiced Bard, not to toss off a page or two in the manner of Bergotte. He did of course write in the manner of Bergotte, given that that was who he was; and also in the sense that each new touch of beauty in his work was the particle of Bergotte hidden inside a thing, which he had drawn out of it. However, though each of these beauties had something recognizable to it, something in common with the others, it kept its own special quality, like the discovery which had brought it to light; and because it was new, it remained different from the so-called ‘Bergotte manner’, that vague composite of earlier Bergottes already found, drawn out and written up by the man himself, none of which enabled men unendowed with genius to guess at what he might go on to discover in other things. All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable; it is a creation, since its object is an external thing rather than themselves, something in their minds, but not yet put into words. A memoirist trying unobtrusively to write like Saint-Simon nowadays, might well hit on a line like the opening one in the portrait of the Duc de Villars: ‘Quite a tall man, dark of complexion, and with a physiognomy which was bright, open, outgoing’ – but no determinism could possibly make him say in the next line, of this same physiognomy, ‘and in truth a trifle mad’.52 The real thing smacks of that fullness of genuine and unexpected ingredients, of the branch crammed with blue flowers dangling unexpectedly from the springtime hedge, which already looked unable to bear more blossom; whereas the purely formal replica of the real thing (one could say the same of every other feature of style) is full of vacancy and sameness, full, that is, of what least resembles the real thing and, in the hands of an imitator, can pass for the real thing only in the minds of those who have never seen it in the words of the master.

  Hence, just as the spoken manner of Bergotte might well have been pleasing if he had been some mere admirer quoting pseudo-Bergotte (whereas it was inseparable from the active workings of his mind, organically linked to it in ways which the ear did not pick up at once), so the reason why there was something too matter-of-fact and over-rich in his speech was because he applied that mind with precision to any aspect of reality which pleased him, thereby disappointing those who expected him to speak only of ‘the headlong torrent of fair forms’ and ‘Beauty’s thrilling enigma’. And then, his constant originality when he wrote became, when he spoke, a way of approaching topics that was so subtle in its avoidance of anything already familiar in them that it always sounded as though he was trying to come at it from some petty angle, taking it the wrong way on purpose, or being smart for smartness’s sake; and in this way, his ideas usually sounded confused, each of us having the habit of seeing clarity in ideas which show the same measure of confusion as our own. Besides, as anything new must first do away with the stereotype we are so used to that we have come to see it as reality itself, any new style of conversation, just like any originality in painting or music, will always seem convoluted and wearisome. We find its structuring figures so unwonted that the talker seems to be nothing more than a metaphor-monger, which fatigues the ear and hints at a lack of truthfulness. (Of course, the earlier speech-forms themselves were once images, which a listener unfamiliar with the world they described had difficulty in grasping. But they have long since come to be taken as the real world, the reliable world.) So, when one heard Bergotte say of Cottard that he was ‘a Cartesian devil forever trying to remain in equipoise’ – it seems such an unremarkable thing to say nowadays – or of Brichot that ‘He was even more concerned than Mme Swann with the care of his hair, because in his dual preoccupation with his profile and his reputation, the lie of his locks had to give him the constant appearance of being both a lion and a philosopher,’ one soon tired of it and wished for the firmer footing of something more concrete, by which one meant something one was more used to. The unrecognizable words emitted by the mask in front of me had to be attributed to the writer whom I admired, yet could not have been fitted like spare pieces of a jigsaw-puzzle into spaces in any of his books; they existed on a different plane, and required to be transposed in a way like the one I discovered on the day when, having repeated aloud some phrases which I had recently heard from Bergotte, I recognized in them the whole structure of his written style, which in spoken form had sounded so different that I had been unable to see and identify its component parts.

  A more superficial thing, the special, intense and more than punctilious pronunciation he used with certain words, certain adjectives which often recurred in his conversation, and which he slightly overemphasized, bringing out every single syllable and making the stressed one ring (as in the word ‘visage’ which he invariably used instead of ‘face’, cramming it with extra vs, ss and gs, all of which seemed to burst out of his gesturing hand as he spoke them) was the exact correlative of those fine and special places in his prose where he would set such favoured words, which were always preceded by a sort of margin, and so precisely designed within the sentence’s intricate balance that, so as to avoid spoiling the rhythm of it, one was obliged to give each of them its full quantity. However, in Bergotte’s spoken words there was no sign of that particular lighting which in his books, as in the books of some other writers, often alters the appearance of words in a written sentence. That form of light comes no doubt from great depths, and its rays cannot reach our words at those times when, by being open to others through conversation, we are partly closed to ourselves. In that sense, one could hear in his books more intonations and more accent than in his speech; for this is an accent which is unrelated to the beauty of a style, which a writer himself may not even have noti
ced, as it is inseparable from his most private self. This was the accent which always marked its rhythm in the words Bergotte wrote when he was being entirely natural, however insignificant in themselves these words might be. It is an accent which is marked by no sign on the page, indicated by nothing in the text; and yet it clings to the sentences, which cannot be spoken in any other way; it was the most ephemeral but the most profound thing in the writer, the thing which will bear definitive witness to his nature, which will enable one to tell whether, despite all the harsh things he uttered, he was a gentle man, whether despite all the sensuality, he was a man of sentiment.

  Certain idiosyncrasies of elocution which could be faintly detected in the speech of Bergotte were not peculiar to him; and when I later came to know his brothers and sisters, I noticed that their speech was much more marked by them than his was. It had something to do with a sharp, hoarse fall to the last words of a cheerful statement, or a faint and fading voice at the end of a sad one. Swann, who had known the Master as a child, once told me that in those days Bergotte’s voice was as full as his brothers’ and sisters’ of these more or less family inflections, outbursts of violent glee alternating with slow melancholy murmurs, and that when they were all together in the play-room, the young Bergotte could be heard holding his own amid a chorus scored for the deafening and the forlorn. However personal they may be, all these human sounds are transitory, and do not outlive the beings who emit them. But that was not the case with the Bergotte family pronunciation. It may be difficult to understand, even in Die Meistersinger, how any artist can ever invent music by listening to birdsong; but Bergotte had transposed and set in prose those ways of drawing out words which ring repetitively with the sounds of joy, or keep dropping away to the saddest sigh. In some of his books, there are sentence-endings in which the long-drawn-out chords resound like those dying notes of an operatic overture which, in its reluctance to close, keeps murmuring its final sublime harmonies, until the conductor at last lays down his baton, which I came to see later as a musical equivalent of the Bergotte family’s phonetic brasses. But Bergotte himself, as soon as he started to transpose them into his writing, unconsciously gave up using them in speech. His voice, from the day when he started to write (and all the more by the later time when I came to know him), had for ever lost the power to orchestrate them.

  In wit or delicacy of mind, these young Bergottes, the future writer and his brothers and sisters, were no doubt not the equals of other young people, who thought them very rowdy, and actually rather vulgar, with their irritating jokes which were typical of the household’s partly pretentious, partly puerile style. But genius, or even great talent, lies less in elements of mind and social refinement superior to those of others than in the ability to transform and transpose them. To heat a liquid with an electric torch, what is required is not the strongest possible torch, but one in which the current can be diverted from the production of light and adapted to the production of heat. To fly through the air, it is not necessary to have the most powerful motor-car, but a motor which, by turning its earth-bound horizontal line into a vertical, can convert its speed along the ground into rising force. Likewise, those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. It was when the young Bergotte became capable of showing to the world of his readers the tasteless drawing-room where he had spent his childhood, and the rather unamusing exchanges it had witnessed between himself and his brothers, that he rose above his wittier and more distinguished family friends. They could be driven home in their fine Rolls-Royces, sneering a little at the Bergottes and their vulgarities. But he, with his much less impressive flying-machine, had at last taken off and soared over their heads.

  Other features of his diction he shared not with members of his family but with certain writers of his day. Certain younger writers who were beginning to outgrow him, and who claimed to have no intellectual affinity with him, showed their debt to him unawares in their use of certain adverbs or prepositions which he was always using, in the sentences they spoke modelled on his, in the same dawdling and almost toneless manner of speech, which had been his reaction against the facile grandiloquence of a previous generation. It may be that these young men had never known Bergotte (this was certainly the case, as will be seen, with some of them). But having been inoculated with his way of thinking, they had developed those modifications of syntax and accent which bear a necessary relation to intellectual originality. This is a relation which requires some interpretation. The fact was that, though Bergotte’s way of writing owed nothing to anyone, he was indebted for his speaking style to one of his old friends, a wonderful talker who had had a great influence on him, whom he imitated unintentionally in conversation but who, being less gifted than Bergotte, had never written a book that was in any way out of the ordinary. Thus, if judged only on originality of spoken delivery, Bergotte would have been properly deemed to be a mere disciple, a purveyor of hand-me-downs; whereas, despite having been influenced in speech-habits by his friend, he had still been original and creative as a writer. His impulse to set himself apart from that previous generation, which had been too fond of grand abstractions and commonplaces, could probably also be seen in the fact that when he wanted to praise a book, the thing he would single out or quote was always a scene giving a graphic glimpse of something, a picture without thematic relevance. ‘Oh, yes, he would say. That’s pretty good. That little girl wearing the orange shawl. It’s really nice.’ Or else, ‘Yes, that’s right! That part where there’s a regiment marching through a town! Yes, that’s a good bit!’ On matters of style, he was not quite of his own period (though very much of his own country, abhorring Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ibsen and Dostoevsky); and the word one always heard from him whenever he praised a writer’s style was ‘smooth’: ‘Well, actually the Chateaubriand I prefer is the one in Atala rather than the one in Rancé – yes, he’s smoother there.’ He used the word as a doctor might to soothe a patient complaining that milk was not good for his stomach: ‘Oh, but it’s very smooth.’ And it is a fact that in his own style there was a type of harmony, the like of which made the ancients praise some of their orators in ways which seem all but inconceivable to us, accustomed as we are to our modern languages, in which no one would try for such effects.

  If anyone praised a piece of his own, he would say of it with a shy smile, ‘I think it’s all right, it’s not bad, it’s worth saying’; but this was mere modesty, after the manner of the woman who, on being told that her dress or her daughter is lovely, replies, ‘Well, it’s nice and comfortable’ or ‘Well, she’s a good-natured girl.’ But the artisan’s instinct ran too deep in Bergotte for him to be unaware that the sole proof of his having worked to good purpose, and in accord with truth, lay in the joy to be derived from his own work, by himself in the first place, and then by others. Unfortunately, many years later, when his talent had run out, whenever he wrote something that dissatisfied him, rather than scratching it out as he should have done, he talked himself into publishing it with the words he had once spoken to others: ‘Well, yes, it’s all right, it says something that’s worth saying, for the sake of my country …’ The phrases his feigned modesty had murmured for an admirer were later spoken, in the sincerity of his most secret self, to allay the misgivings of pride; the words which had been his unnecessary apology for the quality of his first works became his futile consolation for the mediocrity of his last.

  In his urge never to write anything of which he could not say, ‘It’s smooth,’ there was a kind of strictness of taste which, though it had caused him to be seen for so many years as an artist of sterile precio
sity, a finicking minimalist, was actually the secret of his strength. For habit is style-forming as well as character-forming; and the writer who, in the expression of his thought, becomes used to aiming only at a certain facility, sets bounds beyond which his talent will never go, just as surely as, by repeated recourse to a pleasure, to idleness or the fear of suffering, we pencil in, on a character which it is eventually impossible to touch up, the contours of our vices and the limits of our virtue.

  However, though I was later to note many things common both to the writer and to the man, perhaps my very first impression of Bergotte was not quite wrong, that day at Mme Swann’s, when I doubted that the person standing in front of me could be the author of so many divine books, for he himself ‘disbelieved’ it too, in the true meaning of the word. He disbelieved it each time he fawned on fashionable people (not that he was a snob), or toadied to other writers or journalists, all of whom were clearly inferior to him. By now of course he knew about his genius from the plaudits of other people; and that knowledge is something beside which social position and official recognition are negligible. He knew all about his genius; but he disbelieved in it, going on feigning deference to mediocre writers, in the hope of being elected before long to the Académie française, although neither the Académie nor the Faubourg Saint-Germain have anything more to do with that share of the eternal Spirit which writes the books of a Bergotte than they have to do with the principle of causality or the idea of God. Bergotte was aware of that too, of course; but his awareness was as ineffectual as that of the kleptomaniac who knows that stealing is wrong. Like a lord who cannot help pocketing the cutlery, the man with the goatee and the bottle-nose had to creep up on the coveted seat in the Académie, by courting the duchess who commanded several votes in each of the elections, but in such a way as to prevent anyone who might think this aim unworthy of him from noticing what he was about. In this, he was only partly successful; and when he spoke, one could always hear, in among the real Bergotte’s words, other words spoken by the self-seeker, the man of ambition who was forever trying to impress people by dropping the names of the influential, the noble or the rich, despite having depicted in the books which he wrote when he was truly himself, as limpid as a spring, the charm of the poor.