Modern Mind

Proust in his journal for 15 March 1923 (Proust had died the previous November). Gide was sitting in Proust’s study and ‘found himself holding a string which was attached to two books on Proust’s shelves. Gide pulled the string, and unwound a beautiful binding of Saint-Simon’s
Memoirs.
Gide was inconsolable in the dream but did acknowledge later that his action may have been intentional. 55
    The Counterfeiters,
which had been on the author’s mind since 1914, is not really like
A la recherche du temps perdu,
but some similarities have been noted and are pertinent. 56 ‘Gide’s novel has its own Baron de Charlus, its band of adolescents, its preoccupation with the cities of the plain. In both works the chief character is writing a novel that turns out to be, more or less, the very novel we are reading. But the most important resemblance is, that each was written with the conscious intention of writing a great novel. Gide was attempting to rival Proust on his own ground. In the dream the element of jealousy in Gide’s attitude to Proust is ‘brought to a head, confessed, andreconciled.’ 57 The novel, with its highly complex plot, is important for a number of reasons, one of which is that Gide also kept a journal in which he recorded his thoughts about composition. This journal is probably the most complete account of a major literary work in formation. The main lesson to be learned is how Gide progressively changed and winnowed away at his early ideas and cut out characters. His aim was to produce a book where there is no main character but a variety of different characters, all equally important, a little bit like the paintings of Picasso, where objects are ‘seen’ not from one predominant direction but from all directions at once. In his journal he also included some newspaper cuttings, one about a band of young men passing counterfeit coins, another about a school pupil who blew his brains out in class under pressure from his friends. Gide weaves these elements into a complex plot, which includes one character, Edouard, who is writing a novel called
The Counterfeiters,
and in which, in essence, everyone is a counterfeiter of sorts. 58 Edouard, as a writer, and the boys with the false money are the most obvious counterfeiters, but what most shocked readers was Gide’s indictment of French middle-class life, riddled with illegitimacy and homosexuality while all the time counterfeiting an attitude of respectable propriety (and not so dissimilar in subject matter from the later volumes of Proust). The complexity of the plot has its point in that, as in real life, characters are at times unaware of the consequences of their own actions, unaware of the reasons for other people’s actions, unaware even of when they are being truthful or counterfeiting. In such a milieu how can anything – especially art – be expected to work? (Here there is an overlap with Luigi Pirandello.) While it is obvious why some counterfeiting (such as passing false money) works, some episodes of life, such as a boy blowing his brains out, will always remain at some level a mystery, inexplicable. In such a world, what rules is one to live by?
The Counterfeiters
is perhaps the most realistic diagnosis of our times. The novel offers no prescription; it infers that none is really available. If our predicament is ultimately tragic, why don’t more people commit suicide? That too is a mystery.
    Gide was unusually interested in English literature: William Blake, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens. But he also knew the Bloomsbury set – Gide had studied English at Cambridge, the Bloomsbury outpost, in 1918. He met Clive Bell in Paris in 1919, stayed with Lady Ottoline Morrell in Garsington in 1920, carried on a lengthy correspondence with Roger Fry (both shared a love of Nicolas Poussin), and later served on an antifascist committee of intellectuals with Virginia Woolf.
    As she was preparing her novel
Jacob’s Room,
Virginia Woolf was only too well aware that what she was trying to do was also being attempted by other authors. In her diary for 26 September 1920, she wrote, ‘I reflected how what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce.’ 59 T. S. Eliot, she knew, was in touch with James Joyce, for he kept her informed of what the Irishman was doing.
    Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 into an extremely literary family (her father was founding editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography,
and his first wifewas a