Cultural Amnesia (87 page)

JEAN PRÉVOST

Of all the casualties among the French Resistance, Jean Prévost (1901–1944) was
possibly the most damaging loss to the future of French culture. Before the war he had stood out as a journalist with a wide range of enthusiasms, and, in a startling number of them, solid
credentials: someone who could write so well had every reason to consider himself a literary figure, but his writings about sport were given additional weight by the fact that he was a
sportsman as well. He enjoyed every aspect of a productive democracy and might, had he lived, have run into trouble with the left, because his range of enjoyments suggested that a capitalist
society might be more fruitfully various, and less alienated, than Marxist theory allowed. Alas, the question of his future never arose. He joined the Resistance as an active member and was
killed in the fighting. As I try to contend in the following note, his brave death, and not his conformist history, might have been the real reason his name took so long to come back to life.
Jérôme Garcin’s
Pour Jean Prévost
is the essential, and still virtually the only, book devoted to a career short of time but
long on implication. Suggesting as it does that one of the duties of a writer
might be to place himself in danger, his life is probably fated to be more of a curiosity
than a model.

But my soul is a fire that suffers if it doesn’t burn. I
need three or four cubic feet of new ideas every day, as a steamboat needs coal.

—JEAN PRÉVOST, QUOTED
BY JÉRÔME GARCIN IN
Pour Jean Prévost
, P. 111

J
EAN
PRÉVOST WAS
forty-three years old when he was killed in battle against German troops in the Vercors on August 1, 1944. He was one of the few writers who were verifiable heroes of
the Resistance and thus he was fated to die a double death, because in the post-war period the French intellectual world’s climb back to health was long and slow and at a shallow angle.
Figures who had been compromised were found less challenging to deal with than those who had been truly admirable. The admirable, indeed, became the negligible. Neither Prévost nor Marc
Bloch was granted a tenth of the attention lavished on such flagrant collaborators as Drieu la Rochelle, Rebatet or Brasillach, whose graves were heaped with wreaths of understanding, sympathy
and, all too often, outright approval, as if to have had friendly dealings with the enemy had somehow been evidence of an adventurous commitment. I wish I was exaggerating the case, but anyone
who doubts it would only have to measure the short list of material written about Prévost against the whole shelves written about Drieu.

Before the war, Prévost had combined within himself, and seemingly without effort, two different
writing careers, one as a student of literature and the other as a journalist writing at a high level on subjects which had not previously always enjoyed the quality of attention he brought to
them. His studies of Stendhal and Baudelaire remain important to this day. (He had not yet quite finished the book about Baudelaire when he died fighting.) His journalism about cinema and
architecture was better informed than most academic opinion on the subject, and far more engagingly written. He was a champion boxer who knew sports from the inside. As Jérôme Garcin
notes in the study
that rescued Prévost’s reputation from its oubliette, “he was not pardoned for wanting to talk about everything and to be read by
everybody.” As the junior prodigy at Gallimard, as the whizz-kid of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, he was looked down on by the established
writers even when they were honest enough to admire his verve. Mauriac piously warned him against “
cette prodigeuse facilité
.” To get a
picture of Prévost’s personality, you don’t have to put together all the ways his contemporaries approved of him. All the ways they disapproved of him would do it.
Prévost was humanism reborn: its hunger, its scope, its vitality and its inner light—an inner light produced by all the aspects of life illuminating one another, in a honeycomb of
understanding. As Garcin says, for Prévost
encyclopédisme
was a way of being. Behind the relaxed good looks, his interior mood was “a
ferocious appetite nourished by a permanent anguish.” None of it would have worked without his pure heart. A passion for justice and a genuine sympathy with the common people—much of
his concern about architecture was on their behalf—ruled out any ideological commitment. After the war, pure hearts were hard to find. Sartre had the unmitigated hide to look down on
Prévost’s memory. The reason for Prévost’s “failure,” opined the all-comprehending philosopher, was that Prévost had not been confident enough to
follow his star.

Unlike his fellow Resistance hero Sartre, Prévost had been confident enough to follow his star in the direction of
the German soldiers, but Sartre left that bit out. There was a lot, after the war, that everyone wanted to leave out. The spontaneous universalism that Prévost had so ably represented in
the thirties was irrevocably passé. The division of labour once again became the rule in clerical work. What a man like Prévost had once integrated into a single joyous effort was
now broken up into separate specialities, each with its resident panel of shamans and charlatans. The once very real prospect of a widely curious humanism had decayed and separated into literary
theory, bogus philosophy and ideological special pleading on behalf of political systems which had, as their first enemy, the irreducible complexity of a living culture. The separate
practitioners in these fields all had their own reasons to forget that a man like Prévost had ever existed. But the single thing about him that everybody wanted to forget was his clear,
clean decision about fighting the Nazis. That decision had been of a
piece with the unpretentious nobility that marked all his work, including the popular journalism, which
never flattered his readers except by making them feel talented. You can see what Sartre was afraid of. First of all, Prévost really was the Resistance fighter that Sartre only pretended
to be—a pretence we could forgive him for, if he had not later on accused others of cowardice. But what must really have scared Sartre was the lingering memory of Prévost’s
literary personality: the liberal, humanist, democratic gusto which would have ensured, had he survived the war, his ascent to the status that Sartre, after the accidental death of Camus, was
able to enjoy unchallenged—the savant, the philosopher, the critic of life and literature. On that last point alone, the point of literary criticism, the books that Prévost did not
write after the war are a lost library to break the heart. As with Marc Bloch in the field of history—but even more sadly because a gift like Prévost’s is harder to come
by—a gap opens up that the imagination can’t fill. You find yourself unable to calculate the damage. Perhaps we can get an idea by trying to imagine what would have happened to
critical journalism in English if Orwell had been killed in Spain.

MARCEL PROUST

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) wrote a long book that even the most casual reader usually makes
longer by adding notes on the endpapers
. À la recherche du temps perdu
exists to be annotated. A commonplace book in the classic sense, it is,
itself, a set of annotations to all the works of art that Proust has read, looked at, listened to or otherwise enjoyed—and to everything he knows about nature, natural science, love,
sex and the workings of the mind. This book you are reading now could easily have been ten times as long if it had contained nothing else but expansions on the notes I have made from reading
Proust in several editions over the course of forty years. (In view of that threat, I have confined myself to a single short essay at this point, but you will have noticed, elsewhere in the
book, that reflections on Proust tend to creep in when other writers are under consideration: a ubiquity of relevance by which, when it is acknowledged, one of his admirers will often spot
another, whereupon they will start discussing Proust in lieu of the previous topic.) Forty years and no end in sight.
War and Peace
is big book too, but
you are through it comfortably in a week, and all set to start again one day.
À la recherche du temps perdu
is never done with, because it keeps
growing while you are
reading it. Like no other book in the world, Proust’s book leads everywhere: a building made of corridors, and the walls of the corridors are
made of doors. The student can happily find an entrance through the Modern Library’s six-volume
In Search of Lost Time
. This covetably handsome
set, bravely decorated with photographs of the author, is basically the 1920 Scott Moncrieff translation (published serially throughout the 1920s under the title of
Remembrance of Things Past
) which was revised in the 1980s and 1990s by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright. The whole enterprise took three-quarters of a century
fully to materialize in English, and no student’s bookshelf should be without it. But it might not be long before the urge arises to read the text in the original.

This urge should not be resisted. Pedants and snobs are fond of declaring that only accomplished
French speakers can catch Proust’s tone. That might be so, but the tone is only one of the things to be caught. There are whole levels of complexity that can be opened up by an
elementary knowledge of written French, and the elementary knowledge is likely to expand usefully as the
recherche
goes on. I myself learned what French
I have from reading Proust. It took me fifteen years before I could read confidently during the day without a dictionary, and even then I took home a list of words to be looked up in the
evening. (A Larousse is essential to back up an ordinary dictionary: as Pasternak said of Pushkin, Proust is full of
things
.) But the mental improvement
was well worth any feelings of inadequacy. The idea that your French needs to be perfect in the first place if you are to appreciate France’s greatest writer is as absurd as the idea
that you need to be able to read music in order to appreciate Beethoven’s late quartets. If Beethoven had thought that, he would never have written them. Similarly, with Proust, a book
entirely dependent on its language would not have interested him. When he was younger he was preoccupied with style, but always as a measure of compression and intensity; and he put the
preoccupation behind him when he matured into a freedom that was all discipline, and a discipline that was all freedom.

Even his social climbing was dedicated to his art. There can be no doubt that he found
the high life fascinating, but nothing is too mundane to get into the book, and its true aristocrats are artists. In Britain up to the present day, even in the work of such a clever critic as
John Carey, it is often assumed that the concept of high art, because it was once the property of the landed gentry, is part of a traditional mechanism to repress the common people, and
should therefore be denied its prestige. The Americans suffer less from that idea, but if it ever needed countering, the mere existence of Proust would be enough to do it. He places art
firmly in the possession of those who love it, whatever their origins might be. His gentry, in fact, are those most likely to succumb to the epidemic Philistinism of the prejudice against
Dreyfus. Zola was the most famous liberal commentator on the Dreyfus case but it was Proust who saw the matter through. In foreseeing the corrosive effects of licensed anti-Semitism on the
civil order, Proust opened yet another door, the one leading into the accumulating political disaster of France between the wars. How so frail and troubled a man could have had all this
strength and wisdom in him is a mystery. The mystery has been often explored, but George D. Painter’s two-volume biography
Marcel Proust
is still
the book to read about his life. (William C. Carter’s single hefty volume is a valuable corrective but not a replacement.) The best single critical book is Jean-François
Revel’s
Sur Proust
, if only because Revel firmly warns us off the standard wild goose chase of looking for the novel’s structure. It might
have one, but only in the sense that we think we have learned something about the structure of the universe when we are told that space is curved.