Modern Mind

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 homosexualitywas 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