Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (40 page)

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 homosexuality
was 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.
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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.
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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 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, and
reconciled.’
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.
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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 wife
was a daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray). Although she was denied the education given to her brothers, she still had the run of the family’s considerable library and grew up much better read than most of her female contemporaries. She always wanted to be a writer and began with articles for the
Times Literary Supplement
(which had begun as a separate publication from its parent, the London
Times,
in 1902). But she didn’t publish her first novel,
The Voyage Out,
until 1915, when she was thirty-three.
⁶⁰

It was with
Jacob’s Room
that the sequence of experimental novels for which Woolf is most remembered was begun. The book tells the story of a young man, Jacob, and its central theme, as it follows his development through Cambridge, artistic and literary London, and a journey to Greece, is the description of a generation and class that led Britain into war.
⁶¹
It is a big idea; however, once again it is the form of the book which sets it apart. In her diary for early 1920 she had written, ‘I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time; no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist.’
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Jacob’s Room
is an urban novel, dealing with the anonymity and fleeting experiences of city streets, the ‘vast atomised masses scurrying across London’s bridges’, staring faces glimpsed through the windows of tea shops, either bored or bearing the marks of ‘the desperate passions of small lives, never to be known.’
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Like
Ulysses
and like Proust’s work, the book consists of a stream of consciousness – erratic at times – viewed through interior monologues, moving backward and forward in time, sliding from one character to another without warning, changing viewpoint and attitude as fast and as fleetingly as any encounter in any major urban centre you care to name.
⁶⁴
Nothing is settled in
Jacob’s Room.
There isn’t much plot in the conventional sense (Jacob’s early promise is never fulfilled, characters remain unformed, people come and go; the author is as interested in marginal figures, like a flower seller on the street, as in those who are, in theory, more central to the action), and there is no conventional narrative. Characters are simply cut off, as in an impressionist painting. ‘It is no use trying to sum people up,’ says one of the figures, who could have stepped out of Gide, One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.’
⁶⁵
Woolf is describing, and making us feel, what life is like in vast cosmopolitan cities of the modern world. This fragmentation, this dissolution of the familiar categories – psychological as well as physical – is just as much the result of World War I, she is saying, as the military/political/economic changes that have been wrought, and is arguably more fundamental.

The effect of Sigmund Freud’s psychological ideas on André Breton (1896–1966) was very direct. During World War I he stood duty as an hospital orderly at the Saint-Dizier psychiatric centre, treating victims of shell shock. And it was in Saint-Dizier that Breton first encountered the (psycho) analysis of dreams, in which – as he later put it – he did the ‘groundwork’ for surrealism. In particular, he remembered one patient who lived entirely in his own world. This man had been in the trenches but had become convinced he was invulnerable.
He thought the whole world was ‘a sham,’ played by actors who used dummy bullets and stage props. So convinced was he of this vision that he would show himself during the fighting and gesture excitedly at the explosions. The miraculous inability of the enemy to kill him only reinforced his belief.
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It was the ‘parallel world’ created by this man that had such an effect on Breton. For him the patient’s madness was in fact a rational response to a world that had gone mad, a view that was enormously influential for several decades in the middle of the century. Dreams, another parallel world, a route to the unconscious as Freud said, became for Breton the route to art. For him, art and the unconscious could form ‘a new alliance,’ realised through dreams, chance, coincidence, jokes – all the things Freud was investigating. This new reality Breton called sur-reality, a word he borrowed from Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1917 Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Léonide Massine had collaborated on a ballet,
Parade,
which the French poet had described as ‘une espèce de surréalisme.’
⁶⁷

Surrealism owed more to what its practitioners
thought
Freud meant than to what he actually wrote. Few French and Spanish surrealists could read Freud’s works, as they were still only available in German. (Psychoanalysis was not really popular in France until after World War II; in Britain the British Psychoanalytic Association was not formed until 1919.) Breton’s ideas about dreams, about neurosis as a sort of ‘ossified’ form of permanent dreaming, would almost certainly have failed to find favour with Freud, or the surrealists’ view that neurosis was ‘interesting,’ a sort of mystical, metaphysical state. It was in its way a twentieth-century form of romanticism, which subscribed to the argument that neurosis was a ‘dark side’ of the mind, the seat of dangerous new truths about ourselves.
⁶⁸

Though surrealism started as a movement of poets, led by Breton, Paul Eluard (1895–1952), and Louis Aragon (1897–1982), it was the painters who were to achieve lasting international fame. Four painters became particularly well known, and for three of them the wasteland was a common image.

Max
Ernst was the first artist to join the surrealists (in 1921). He claimed to have hallucinated often as a child, so was predisposed to this approach.
⁶⁹
His landscapes or objects are oddly familiar but subtly changed. Trees and cliffs, for example, may actually have the texture of the insides of the body’s organs; or the backside of a beast is so vast, so out of scale, that it blocks the sun. Something dreadful has either just happened or seems about to. Ernst also painted apparently cheerful scenes but gave these works long and mysterious titles that suggest something sinister:
The Inquisitor: At 7:07 Justice Shall Be Made.
⁷⁰
For example, on the surface
Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale
is cheerfully colourful. The picture consists of a bird, a clock that resembles a cuckoo clock, a garden enclosed by a wall. But then we notice that the figures in the picture are running away after an episode not shown. And the picture is actually painted on a small door, or the lid of a box, with a handle attached. If the door is opened what will be revealed? The unknown is naturally menacing.