Most capital, and probably to be put at the very end when I speak about not wanting to die so as to be able to carry out my work.
During the war Odette will say (capital and if she does not appear I could say Mme de Forcheville as though retrospectively in parentheses). Perhaps this would be best at the moment of Saint-Loup's death and will make it possible to put that [illegible] in beauty and the criticism of Gregh's idea). [Mme de Forcheville who was no longer obliged to say as when she was the lady in pink "our neighbours the English" and when she was Mme Swann "our friends across the Channel" (put it at the appropriate time), but our allies the English (perhaps simply put the three phrases at the appropriate time without drawing attention to the difference between them, at most in the case of the third one "our Allies the English" as she now said), Mme de Forcheville who had been so pleased... fought alongside the English and said at first "Now Robert knows all the slang expressions of the brave "Tommies" and the most remote "dominions", and he fraternizes just as easily with the general commanding the base as with the humblest "private".]
Instead of sticking to Mme de Guermantes' humane, realistic, Mérimée
and Meilhac language, she, when told that such a death brought honour upon
her and must fill her with pride, replied: "I do not feel any sense of
honour; I feel only grief. I am only moved and only feel any pleasure when
somebody talks to me about him, when they show that they loved him deeply
and that he will not be quickly forgotten." Mme de Forcheville said about
Robert: "We should not pity him: he died in beauty". Of course such
language was naturally that of Odette de Crécy,1 but the idea
that it encompassed had been that of the greatest minds during the war. So
that I asked myself if, indeed, such a death was to be envied, if "from
the pupil it creates a master", as Barrès says and Gregh:
"What of those days, those few days more... had he lived...
What is a little more life next to such glory?"
But without thinking about it further, which I was putting off for
later, whether, from another more profound point of view, such deaths do
not have a different meaning, that aspect of over-valuing the work on
account of the heroic death of the artist and also the superiority of such
a "passage" through life, seemed to me to be terribly frivolous and
superficial. It was, in short, when applied to death, the thing that I
felt was so false in all circumstances of life, the idea that truth, which
can only be extracted by the efforts of the intellect and put down into
the work, can be fixed at whim, that there exists a possession other than
the spiritual. But the war itself demonstrated the complete opposite. The
letters, the writings2 of those who were in the trenches or had
come back wounded and who ought to have been, truth be told, automatically
placed at a higher level than the verses and writings of those who had
lived a mediocre life, were not dependent in any way on the force of
events, but on the aesthetic level at which the author found himself.
Those glorious wounded wrote the most idiotic poems with the most outmoded
imagery where it was always a case of the Great Dawn, the Dawning of
Victory, full of grammatical errors, and not a single idea truly felt,
even if the writer was a hero.3 Others, just as heroic but
more intelligent, kept marvellous diaries in the trenches, but no
different from the ones they would have kept anywhere else.4
They bring into and they compare to the war the culture that they knew
before; while standing on watch they observe the "Rembrandt-like" contrast
between light and darkness in the Bois-le Prêtre which reminds them of
some particular canvas in the Mauricehuis (check the name). Such culture
moreover is sometimes that of neutrals: "I thought of that page where
Jean-Christophe", or enemies: "I feel that I can sense the coolness of the
wonderful Nymphs' choir of the Rhinemaidens and I have
encouraged my men by singing them the sailors' chorus from the first act
of Tristan" (just as in the courtroom for the Zola trial Colonel
du Patty de Clam, before giving evidence against Pierre Quillard who had
just been brought out and whose works he knew by heart, recited in a loud
voice as he passed in front of him the first lines of La Fille aux
mains coupées (authentic fact I think concerning Pierre Quillard).
Moreover they call the army that they see a panorama and conclude by going
into raptures about the woods: "When all is said and done it is fairly
insignificant in the face of Nature, just a European war". (A point of
view that clearly might be outmoded, but all the same is superior to that
of all those young sons of bankers who have no thoughts for anything else
but what is going on around them, who take hardly any part in everyday
life and as soon as they read in the papers that millions of men are
involved think they have the souls of epic poets, and feel a dreadful
transformation in themselves caused by "the prodigious days in which we
are living".) I do not know what Saint-Loup might have been able to make
of his life, and how he would have enjoyed it, if the pleasures that
preceded his death were more profound and more beautiful. But for certain
people life is the only means, the only laboratory in which to realize
certain experiences of truth, the result of which - a work of art - will
survive the person who has realized it, is more important than his life,
but yet needed that person for it to be achieved. Certainly frivolous
people think that there is an equal balance between a man who has a fine
house, singular habits, noble friendships, who leaves behind a fine image
of himself, and the shabbily dressed writer, renting a small middle-class
apartment, and who just carries out his work. But it is because they do
not understand what the essence of truth consists of. So a "beautiful"
death is only a larger frame, more noble than a "beautiful" life, but does
not exist for the artist who has to discover his own truth. An interesting
life, that is what pleases contemporaries and even those critics of
posterity who are just as frivolous as the contemporaries and who take the
man into account, the man with the moustache who I saw in Bergotte instead
of occupying themselves only with the divine old man. That is the
perverted sort of distraction that we find in Sainte-Beuve's Lundis.
As for Barrès, it was legitimate that, like all great writers, the war was
for him (among other things) a new theme for the things that had occupied
his mind for some time. Just as Kipling has made the forest of Argonne
into a sort of jungle in which "the Boche" are differentiated from the
Allies in the same way as the Bandar-Logs, the Monkeys, are from Bagheera
the Panther, and Wells used the war as a mechanism to explore future times
and a pretext for science fiction, for Barrès it was an occasion to
develop [some text missing] and the highest spiritual forces in
the open sky of Lorraine and to depict El Grecos, The Burial of the
Count of Orgaz with the gods on high and the mortals down below,
and his Amitiés françaises. And in this he has shown the
continuity of his genius, to which the genius of France, and perhaps of
Destiny, have in part complied. Yet perhaps some excess of mildness may
have been the result of a certain excess of harshness in the early part of
his life. Because when one makes a habit of not being, out of political
passion, completely honest with oneself, or even when one is no longer
inspired by ill-will, it is too easy to believe in the lofty spirituality
of a native home that no longer provides shelter, that Racine's work is
necessarily better than that of a modern writer who might be his equal,
because of "all the noble souls whose thoughts have subsequently come
through him", and that the prose of a mediocre but heroically fallen
writer acquires from that day on a magisterial beauty (there is no need to
finish this section there. It could go after the quotation from Cahen -
opposite the Rembrandt and in parenthesis). It is only in this way that
original geniuses accommodate themselves to the themes that they have
discovered in the war etc... And when I have finished about Barrès I will
say: But when he thinks that death can - and what I say about Barrès at
the end of this section will actually be (if there was not the point of
view that I did not have to deal with yet and did not concern Time found
again which was for later) - as frivolous as those who think that a
beautiful life, etc...
Those heroes may well have seen extraordinary things, if they had a banal mind they wrote false pages about things that were true. What they had apparently endured, be it something very moving, the death of a friend or a son, they were unable to draw any truth from it. Only those minds which are incapable of drawing out that truth will find that it is there that "sensibility" lies. Phrases by the writer such as "my poor little one is sleeping down there in the absolute silence" have their effective cause not in the fact itself, but in a literature anterior to those events that the author, in his naivety, in his inability to be severe with himself (which one can divine in his conversation, in his ready-made or imitated expressions: "it is a very select chapel", "the political band of these last ten years") fails to recognize; he believes, because he adopts the form "we are not making literature"5 that what he writes is from real life, when on the contrary it is one of the most banal forms of an anterior literature not a firm rejection of literature. So his ideas are barely changed by an event such as the war, especially an event like the war, which is to say a collective event in which ideas participate more by imitation, by the contagion of feelings that have little in them that is carefully examined or personal.
Most Capital.
On Saint-Loup's first leave, the one where I run into him going to
Jupien's establishment where he loses his Croix de Guerre, I
will put everything that needs to be said about the men who are coming
back from the war in the Transvaal, relics, etc., what the wounded in
Cabourg had inspired in me on their return from the Marne and who will be
better off there than the needless Transvaal. And here I will add, or
rather insert, because this will not be the ending of it:
(I have just spotted Saint-Loup)
I approached him with a feeling of religious timidity, with that
impression of the supernatural that we feel when we are in the close
presence of a person struck down with a mortal illness and yet who is
still on his feet. It seemed to me that there was something cruel in the
"leave" that was granted to combatants and which appeared to be quite
natural because habit subtracts from the things we have done a number of
times (like [illegible] soldier on leave) the root of the
impression and the idea that gives it its real meaning. But for the first
ones we think: "They don't want to go back, they will desert".
Expressions for Norpois
when the dice are cast
if we want to win the war
there is a certain friction
the losses are severe
a gentleman who was consul several times has assured me
(this perhaps in the visit to Mme de Villeparisis)
Persons of that stamp
in the full force of the term
blusterers
Don't forget that M. de Charlus will say (because one can never predict the future exactly even the most intelligent of men) to Saint-Loup in about 1912: "Don't be in too much of a hurry, I shall apply myself to all that and I promise you as a certainty that nothing whatsoever can prevent you from becoming Erlaucht and Duke in Bavaria at the start of 1915."
1. With a slight air of finesse: it's what is called pluck and it is what the Germans don't have.
2. [crossed out] poems
3. No, it would be better if it was Saint-Loup who wrote all this, in his so-called remarkable letters that Mme de Saint-Loup told me about. Only it must have a very Saint-Loup style. He might say: "Tell Marcel"? He will also read Thus Spake Zarathustra in front of the Boche and whistle the 15th Quartet (put in the appropriate place that he is a musician and a lover of painting).
4. If he writes to me Saint-Loup could say these sorts of things to me only a little less well.
5. Say more succinctly: in a great scene they think they are talking about their own countries, but their words precede not the events that they have witnessed and from which they did not know how to extract the truth, but a literature anterior to them, a literature that they thought was true to life because it affected to disregard style.
From Un inédit de Proust en marge du Temps Retrouvé, André Ferré, Bulletin de la société des amis de Marcel Proust et des amis de Combray, No 5, 1955, pp 9-16.
Created 09.12.17