Volume 22, Number 3 · March 6, 1975
One of the Family
By John Bayley
Marcel Proust
by Roger Shattuck
Viking (Modern Masters Series), 179 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Henry James described reading Proust as 'inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine.' A bizarre judgment, but it would not perhaps have been wholly uncongenial to the great novelist. Boredom and ecstasy for Proust were not far apart, and certainly in James's sentence they could easily be switched round, transposed in the manner of a Wilde epigram (and we should not forget Proust's interest in Wilde). In fact almost any comment made about Proust can be shown to be apposite in one way or another; he is a target impossible to miss; and his obsession with what Roger Shattuck neatly calls the 'conflictingly overdetermined quality' of most impressions and events means, among other things, that it is perfectly proper to assert that he writes well, that he writes badly; that he kills his book with a system, that he is a dilettante who is not systematic enough; that he is the gloomiest and most pessimistic writer in the world, that his comic tale is one long peal of happy laughter. Proust is innocent on no count that can be brought against him. Yet as Roger Shattuck points out, the verdict on each and all would have to be 'Guilty—but not as charged.'
Review, 1556 words
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