The Henry Miller Reader

by Lawrence Durrell

  Herein lies the importance of Proust’s epic work, for here in the Albertine episode we have the problem of love and jealousy depicted in Gargantuan fashion, the malady become all-inclusive, turning in on itself through the inversion of sex. The great Shakespearean dramas were but the announcement of a disease which had just begun to run its staggering course; in Shakespeare’s time it had not yet eaten into every layer of life, it could still be made the subject of heroic drama. There was man and there was the disease, and the conflict was the material for drama. But now the toxin is in the blood. For such as us, who have been eaten away by the virus, the great dramatic themes of Shakespeare are but swash-buckling oratory and pasteboard sets. Their impression is nil. We have become inoculated. And it is in Proust that we can sense the deterioration of the heroic, the cessation of conflict, the surrender, the thing become itself.

  I repeat that we have in our midst today greater Hamlets, greater Othellos, than Shakespeare ever dreamed of. We have now the ripe fruit of the seeds planted by the masters of old. Like some marvelous unicellular organism in endless process of exfoliation these types reveal to us all the varieties of body cells which formerly entered into the making of blood, bone, muscle, hair, teeth, nails, etc. We have now the monstrous flower whose roots were watered by the Christian myth. We are living amidst the ruins of a world in collapse, amidst the husks which must rot away to make new loam.

  This formidable picture of the world-as-disease which Proust and Joyce have given us is indeed less a picture than a microscopic study which, because we see it magnified, prevents us from recognizing it as the world of everyday in which we are swimming. Just as the art of psychoanalysis could not have arisen until society was sick enough to call for this peculiar form of therapy, so we could not have had a faithful image of our time until there arose in our midst monsters so ridden with the disease that their works resemble the disease itself.

  Seizing upon the malodorous quality in Proust’s work Edmund Wilson, the American critic, is moved to doubt the authenticity of the narrative. “When Albertine finally leaves him”, he writes, “the emotional life of the book becomes progressively asphyxiated by the infernal fumes which Charlus has brought with him—until such a large percentage of the characters have tragically, gruesomely, irrevocably turned out to be homosexual that we begin for the first time to find the story a little incredible.” Of course it is incredible—from a realistic point of view! It is incredible, as are all authentic revelations of life, because it is too true. We have modulated into a higher realm of reality. It is not the author whom we should take to task, but life. The Baron de Charlus, like Albertine again, is precisely the illuminating figure on which to rivet attention. Charlus is Proust’s supreme creation, his “hero,” if this work can be said to have a hero. To call the Baron’s behavior, or that of his satellites and imitators, incredible, is to deny the validity of Proust’s whole edifice. Into the character of Charlus (derived from many accurately studied prototypes), Proust poured all that he knew of the subject of perversion, and that subject dominates the entire work—justly. Do we not know that he originally contemplated labeling the whole work by the title given to the cornerstone of his work—Sodom and Gomorrah! Sodom and Gomorrah! Do I not detect here a little of the smell of Ruskin?

  At any rate, it is indisputable that Charlus is his grand effort. Like Stavrogin for Dostoievski, Charlus was the supreme test. Like Stravrogin also, observe how the figure of Charlus permeates and dominates the atmosphere when off scene, how the poison of his being shoots its virus into the other characters, the other scenes, the other dramas, so that from the moment of his entry, or even before, the atmosphere is saturated with his noxious gases. In analyzing Charlus, in ridiculing and pillorying him Proust, like Dostoievski, was endeavoring to expose himself, to understand himself perhaps.

  When, in The Captive, Marcel and Albertine are discussing Dostoievski, Marcel feebly endeavoring to give a satisfactory response to Albertine’s questions, how little did Proust realize, I wonder, that in creating the Baron de Charlus he was giving her the answer which then he seemed incapable of. The discussion, it may be recalled, centered about Dostoievski’s propensities for depicting the ugly, the sordid, particularly his prepossession for the subject of crime. Albertine had remarked that crime was an obsession with Dostoievski, and Marcel, after venturing some rather weak remarks about the multiple nature of genius, dismisses the subject with something to the effect that that side of Dostoievski really interested him but little, that in truth he found himself incapable of understanding it.

  Nevertheless, when it came to the delineation of Charlus, Proust showed himself capable of performing a prodigious piece of creative imagination. Charlus seems so removed from Proust’s actual experience of life that people often wonder where he gathered the elements for his creation. Where? In his own soul! Dostoievski was not a criminal, not a murderer, Dostoievski never lived the life of Stavrogin. But Dostoievski was obsessed with the idea of a Stavrogin. He had to create him in order to live out his other life, his life as a creator. Little matter that he may have known a Stavrogin in the course of his manifold experiences. Little matter that Proust had under his eye the actual figure of Charlus. The originals, if not discarded, were certainly radically recast, transformed, in the light of inner truth, inner vision. In both Dostoievski and Proust there existed a Stavrogin, a Charlus, far more real than the actual figures. For Dostoievski the character of Stavrogin was bound up with the search for God. Stavrogin was the ideal image of himself which Dostoievski jealously preserved. More than that—Stavrogin was the god in him, the fullest portrait of God which Dostoievski could give.

  Between Stavrogin and Charlus, however, there is an enormous gulf. It is the difference between Dostoievski and Proust, or if you like, the difference between the man of God whose hero is himself and the modern man for whom not even God can be a hero. All of Dostoievski’s work is pregnant with conflict, heroic conflict. In an essay on Aristocracy Lawrence writes—“Being alive constitutes an aristocracy which there is no getting beyond. He who is most alive, intrinsically, is King, whether men admit it or not . . . More life! More vivid life! Not more safe cabbages, or meaningless masses of people. All creation contributes, and must contribute to this: towards the achieving of a vaster, vivider, cycle of life. That is the goal of living. He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats. Or he who, like Dostoievski, gets nearest the moon of our not-being.”

  Proust, early in life, relinquished this conflict. As did Joyce. Their art is based on submission, on surrender to the stagnant flux. The Absolute remains outside their works, dominates them, destroys them, just as in life idealism dominates and destroys the ordinary man. But Dostoievski, confronted by even greater powers of frustration, boldly set himself to grapple with the mystery; he crucified himself for this purpose. And so, wherever in his work there is chaos and confusion, it is a rich chaos, a meaningful confusion; it is positive, vital, soul-infected. It is the aura of the beyond, of the unattainable, that sheds its luster over his scenes and characters—not a dead, dire obscurity. Needless to say, with Proust and Joyce there is an obscurity of another order. With the former we enter the twilight zone of the mind, a realm shot through with dazzling splendors, but always the pale lucidity, the insufferable obsessional lucidity of the mind. With Joyce we have the night mind, a profusion even more incredible, more dazzling than with Proust, as though the last intervening barriers of the soul had been broken down. But again, a mind!

  Whereas with Dostoievski, though the mind is always there, always effective and powerfully operative, it is nevertheless a mind constantly held in leash, subordinated to the demands of the soul. It works as mind should work—that is, as machinery, and not as generative power. With Proust and Joyce the mind seems to resemble a machine set in motion by a human hand and then abandoned. It runs on perpetually, or will, until another human hand stops it. Does anybody believe that for either of these men death could be anythi
ng but an accidental interruption? When did death occur for them? Technically one is still alive. But were they not both dead before they commenced to write?

  It is in Joyce that one observes that peculiar failing of the modern artist—the inability to communicate with his audience. Not a wholly new phenomenon, admitted, but always a significant one. Endowed with a Rabelaisian ability for word invention, embittered by the domination of a church for which his intellect had no use, harassed by the lack of understanding on the part of family and friends, obsessed by the parental image against which he vainly rebels, Joyce has been seeking escape in the erection of a fortress composed of meaningless verbiage. His language is a ferocious masturbation carried on in fourteen tongues. It is a dervish dance on the periphery of meaning, an orgasm not of blood and semen, but of dead slag from the burnt-out crater of the mind. The Revolution of the Word which his work seems to have inspired in his disciples is the logical outcome of this sterile dance of death.

  Joyce’s exploration of the night world, his obsession with myth, dream, legend, all the processes of the unconscious mind, his tearing apart of the very instrument itself and the creating of his own world of fantasy, is very much akin to Proust’s dilemma. Ultracivilized products, both, we find them rejecting all question of soul; we find them skeptical of science itself, though bearing witness through their works of an unadmitted allegiance to the principle of causality, which is the very cornerstone of science. Proust, imagining himself to be making of his life a book, of his suffering a poem, exhibits through his microscopic and caustic analysis of man and society the plight of the modern artist for whom there is no faith, no meaning, no life. His work is the most triumphant monument to disillusionment that has ever been erected.

  At the root of it was his inability, confessed and repeatedly glorified, to cope with reality—the constant plaint of the modern man. As a matter of fact, his life was a living death, and it is for this reason that his case interests us. For, intensely aware of his predicament, he has given us a record of the age in which he found himself imprisoned. Proust has said that the idea of death kept him company as incessantly as the idea of his own identity. That idea relates, as we know, to that night when, as he says himself, “his parents first indulged him.” That night which “dates the decline of the will” also dates his death. Thenceforth he is incapable of living in the world—of accepting the world. From that night on he is dead to the world, except for those brief intermittent flashes which not only illuminate the dense fog which is his work but which made his work possible. By a miracle, familiar enough now to the psychiatrist, he stepped beyond the threshold of death. His work like his life, was a biological continuum punctuated by the meaningless interruption of statistical death.

  And so it is no surprise when, standing on the two uneven flagstones and re-experiencing to the ultimate degree those sensational truths which had assailed him several times during the course of his life, he proceeds with a clarity and subtlety unrivaled to develop those thoughts which contain his final and highest views of life and art—magnificent pages dedicated to a lost cause. Here, when he speaks of the artist’s instincts, his necessity to obey the small, inner voice, to eschew realism and simply to “translate” what is there ever surging upward, ever struggling for expression, here we realize with devastating intensity that for him, Proust, life was not a living, but a feasting upon sunken treasures, a life of retrospect; we realize that for him what joy remained was nothing but the joy of the archaeologist in rediscovering the relics and ruins of the past, of musing among these buried treasures and reimagining the life that had once given form to these dead things. And yet, sad as it is to contemplate the grandeur and nobility of these pages, moving as it is to observe that a great work had been built up out of suffering and disease, it is also tonic to realize that in these same passages there had been dealt the death-blow to that school of realism which, pretending to be dead, had resuscitated itself under the guise of psychologism. After all Proust was concerned with a view of life; his work has meaning and content, his characters do live, however distorted they are made to seem by his laboratory method of dissection and analysis. Proust was pre-eminently a man of the nineteenth century, with all the tastes, the ideology, and the respect for the powers of the conscious mind which dominated the men of that epoch. His work now seems like the labor of a man who has revealed to us the absolute limits of such a mind.

  The breakdown which, in the realm of painting, gave rise to the school of Impressionism is evident also in Proust’s literary method. The process of examining the medium itself, of subjecting the external world to microscopic analysis, thereby creating a new perspective and hence the illusion of a new world, has its counterpart in Proust’s technique. Weary of realism and naturalism, as were the painters, or rather finding the existent picture of reality unsatisfying, unreal, owing to the explorations of the physicists, Proust strove, through the elaborate diffraction of incident and character, to displace the psychologic realism of the day. His attitude is coincident with the emergence of the new analytical psychology. Throughout those veritably ecstatic passages in the last volume of his work—the passages on the function of art and the role of the artist—Proust finally achieves a clarity of vision which presages the finish of his own method and the birth of a wholly new kind of artist. Just as the physicists, in their exploration of the material nature of the universe, arrived at the brink of a new and mysterious realm, so Proust, pushing his powers of analysis to the utmost limits, arrived at that frontier between dream and reality which henceforth will be the domain of the truly creative artists.

  It is when we come to Joyce, who succeeds Proust by a short interval, that we notice the change in the psychologic atmosphere. Joyce, who in his early work gives us a romantic confessional account of the “I,” suddenly moves over into a new domain. Though smaller in scope, the canvas which Joyce employs gives the illusion of being even more vast than Proust’s; we lose ourselves in it, not as with Proust, in dream fashion, but as one loses himself in a strange city. Despite all the analysis, Proust’s world is still a world of nature, of monstrous yet live fauna and flora. With Joyce we enter the inorganic world—the kingdom of minerals, of fossil and ruin, of dead dodos. The difference in technique is more than remarkable—it is significant of a wholly new order of sensation. We are done now with the nineteenth-century sensibility of Proust; it is no longer through the nerves that we receive our impressions, no longer a personal and subconscious memory ejecting its images. As we read Ulysses we have the impression that the mind has become a recording machine: we are aware of a double world as we move with the author through the great labyrinth of the city. It is a perpetual daydream in which the mind of the sick scholar runs amok.

  And, just as Proust’s animus was directed against that little society which had first snubbed him, so with Joyce the satire and the bitterness is directed towards the philistine world of which he remains the eternal enemy. Joyce is not a realist, nor even a psychologist; there is no attempt to build up character—there are caricatures of humanity only, types which enable him to vent his satire, his hatred, to lampoon, to vilify. For at bottom there is in Joyce a profound hatred for humanity—the scholar’s hatred. One realizes that he has the neurotic’s fear of entering the living world, the world of men and women in which he is powerless to function. He is in revolt not against institutions, but against mankind. Man to him is pitiable, ridiculous, grotesque. And even more so are man’s ideas—not that he is without understanding of them, but that they have no validity for him; they are ideas which would connect him with a world from which he has divorced himself. His is a medieval mind born too late: he has the taste of the recluse, the morals of an anchorite, with all the masturbative machinery which such a life entrains. A Romantic who wished to embrace life realistically, an idealist whose ideals were bankrupt, he was faced with a dilemma which he was incapable of resolving. There was only one way out—to plunge into the collective realm of fantasy. As he s
pun out the fabric of his dreams he also unloaded the poison that had accumulated in his system. Ulysses is like a vomit spilled by a delicate child whose stomach has been overloaded with sweetmeats. “So rich was its delivery, its pent-up outpouring so vehement,” says Wyndham Lewis, “that it will remain eternally a cathartic, a monument like a record diarrhoea.” Despite the maze of facts, phenomena and incidents detailed there is no grasp of life, no picture of life. There is neither an organic conception, nor a vital sense of life. We have the machinery of the mind turned loose upon a dead abstraction, the city, itself the product of abstractions.