5: 1902-1906
Tadié, chs. 9-10
348: Great scene: Reynaldo's cousin Marie Nordlinger (helping w/ Ruskin translation) and MP spending an hour in baptistery of St. Mark's in Venice in storm reading Ruskin's The Stones of Venice.
447: From an MP letter: "Irony is sometimes the deceptive sign of a deep-rooted affection."
457: "Fate would decree that just as Dante was abandoned by Virgil as they left Purgatory ('Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre'), Marcel should be deserted by Ruskin and by his mother, at the very moment that he embarked upon the novel . . . ."
476: End of mourning for Mamma marked by quietly moving into Boulevard Haussmann on 12/27/1906.
Ruskin: The Bible of Amiens (IV. "Interpretations")
348: Great scene: Reynaldo's cousin Marie Nordlinger (helping w/ Ruskin translation) and MP spending an hour in baptistery of St. Mark's in Venice in storm reading Ruskin's The Stones of Venice.
447: From an MP letter: "Irony is sometimes the deceptive sign of a deep-rooted affection."
457: "Fate would decree that just as Dante was abandoned by Virgil as they left Purgatory ('Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre'), Marcel should be deserted by Ruskin and by his mother, at the very moment that he embarked upon the novel . . . ."
476: End of mourning for Mamma marked by quietly moving into Boulevard Haussmann on 12/27/1906.
Ruskin: The Bible of Amiens (IV. "Interpretations")
--Says Amiens Cathedral, which he is reading/interpreting like a book, or Bible, is inferior in difft ways to difft other cathedrals, but still deserves its label (given by M. Viollet le Duc) "The Parthenon of Gothic Architecture"
--Gives details of figures on west front (3 porches: St Firmin, Christ, Madonna)
--Says Jesus is depicted not as crucified/dead but as living friend/prince/king: "not what He once did, nor what He once suffered, but what He is now doing--and what He requires us to do. That is the pure, joyful beautiful lesson of Christianity; and the fall from that faith, and all the corruptions of its abortive practice, may be summed up briefly as the habitual contemplation of Christ's death instead of his Life, and the substitution of His past suffering for our present duty."
--"to show Mercy is nothing--thy soul must be full of mercy; to be pure in act is nothing--thou shalt be pure in heart also" [cp. Ruskin's explanation elsewhere of his assertion that "taste is the only morality . . . tell me what you like and I'll tell you who you are"]
--Objects to purgatory and justification by faith
Ruskin: Sesame and Lilies (I. "Of Kings' Treasuries)
--Of parents regarding education as enhancing their children's "position in life": "It never seems to occur to the parents that there may be an education which, in itself, is advancement in Life; that any other than that may perhaps be advancement in Death . . ."
--What most regard as advancement means becoming conspicuous (not just achieving, but having achievements recognized); Ruskin says this is not essentially a bad thing, but consider the current focus on instant celebrity as this tendency run amok
--Good books for the hour are fine, but are really "newspapers or letters in good print"; good books for all time
--Says there is limited time to read, so why talk to own servant or maid when can converse w/ kings and queens
--Don't read for That's what I think, but for I never thought of that [I don't totally agree: sometimes gt books do affirm, but with gtr precision, our thoughts]
--Can read all books in Brit Museum and be less educated than someone who reads ten pp well
--Reading with hearts/sensation: "we are only human in so far as we are sensitive [if so, no author was ever more human than MP], and our honor is precisely in proportion to our passion." [again, as elsewhere in Ruskin, not action, but passion from which the action comes]
--"You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion. . . . For there is a true Church wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that is the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be."
ASB, "Days of Reading" (I)
MP's Preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies
207-08: Objects to Ruskin's idea of reading as conversation: ". . . reading being the reverse of conversation, consisting as it does for each one of us in receiving the communication of one another's thought while still being on our own, that is, continuing to enjoy the intellectual sway which we have in solitude and which conversation dispels instantly, and continuing to be open to inspiration, with our minds still at work hard and fruitfully on themselves."
211: "Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
213: A spiritual function of reading: "From pure solitude the lazy mind can derive nothing, since it is incapable of setting its creative activity in motion of its own accord. But the most lofty conversation and the most pressing advice are of no assistance to it either, for they cannot produce this original activity directly. What it takes then, is an intervention which, though it comes from someone else, occurs deep inside ourselves, the impulsion certainly of another mind but received in the midst of our solitude."--i.e. reading
ASB, "Days of Reading" (II)
Article published in Le Figaro in March 1907
227-29: A long, funny, moving passage about (of all things) talking on a telephone (one of the things "we" are likely to do rather than read)
MP's Preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies
207-08: Objects to Ruskin's idea of reading as conversation: ". . . reading being the reverse of conversation, consisting as it does for each one of us in receiving the communication of one another's thought while still being on our own, that is, continuing to enjoy the intellectual sway which we have in solitude and which conversation dispels instantly, and continuing to be open to inspiration, with our minds still at work hard and fruitfully on themselves."
211: "Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
213: A spiritual function of reading: "From pure solitude the lazy mind can derive nothing, since it is incapable of setting its creative activity in motion of its own accord. But the most lofty conversation and the most pressing advice are of no assistance to it either, for they cannot produce this original activity directly. What it takes then, is an intervention which, though it comes from someone else, occurs deep inside ourselves, the impulsion certainly of another mind but received in the midst of our solitude."--i.e. reading
ASB, "Days of Reading" (II)
Article published in Le Figaro in March 1907
227-29: A long, funny, moving passage about (of all things) talking on a telephone (one of the things "we" are likely to do rather than read)
6. 1907-1911
Tadié, chs.11-12
505: "It is in the context of the criticism of reading [response to Ruskin], and of critical reading [Sainte-Beuve], that his 1908 writings should be understood; through them he liberated himself from the writers who obsessed him, but not without having first stolen their secrets. The pastiche distils and reconstructs what Proust himself felt upon reading the works of his masters; criticism analyses the techniques used by these writers clearly and in such a way that the pastiches and the criticism complement each other."
520-21: Cahiers, or exercise books, bought late in 1908, "a day when the nature of Proust's work was transformed. . . . The scope of the project was linked to a return to childhood: the greatest author of our time had suddenly become a schoolboy, writing in his exercise books, just as his father and mother had once urged him to do."
531: Vinteuil merged two difft heroes, Vington (a naturalist whose brilliant work is not at first known and a daughter who performs a sadistic scene: in early version of "Combray") and Berget (famous composer: in early version of "Swann in Love"). "What better way of refuting S-B's theories than by contrasting, within the same man, the poor and unfortunate piano teacher and the brilliant creative genius?"
541: Of impact of Amer and Brit Lit on MP: "He joked about the danger he ran of being drowned like the hero of George Eliot's novel: the waters of the Seine, which had flooded that year, had in fact reached the front door and cellars of 102 Boulevard Haussmann."
The Lemoine Affair
--First published in Le Figaro in Jan 1904 and Feb-Mar 1908
--A fictional account, consisting of various pastiches, and based on circumstances (claims, trial, stock losses) around Lemoine's fraudulent claims that he could turn coal into diamonds
Author's note [written 1919]
5-Lemoine condemned on 7/6/1909 to 6 yrs in prison
I. From a Novel by Balzac
10-Of novelist Daniel d'Arthez: "Only a sublime genius or a great criminal could have walked thus. But isn't genius a kind of crime against the routine of the past that our time punishes more severely than crime itself, since scholars die in hospitals bleaker than any prison?"
--Goofy talk of how names resemble each other
II. "The Lemoine Affair" by Gustave Flaubert
18-Woman takes off hat with parrot on it--humorous nod to GF's "A Simple Heart"
19-20-[at court] "and many abandoned themselves all over again to the loveliness of the dream they had fashioned, when upon news of the discovery they had glimpsed the future, before being foiled by the swindle."
20-thinking of getaway in summer to a cooler place leads to a funny digression about, well, not to the Pole, and what about the polar bears?
III. Critique of the Novel by M. Gustave Flaubert on "The Lemoine Affair," by Sainte-Beuve, in His Column in The Constitutional
S-B reviews the opening of GF's novel, which is what we have just read
28-S-B says that Balzac is "incapable of observation" [MP's dig, of course, at S-B's foolishness]
IV. By Henri de Régnier
Mostly short sentences, about first seeing Lemoine
V. In "The Goncourt Journals"
38-News that MP has killed himself after the fall in his shares
Lucien Daudet assured Goncourts that MP is "a being who lives entirely in the enthusiasm, in the pious adoration, of certain landscapes, certain books, a person for example who is completely enamored of the novels of Léon Daudet."
38-39-Zola had done MP a favor, MP brought him to the country to dine to thank him, but Zola refused to acknowledge that no other Fr writer was as great as Léon Daudet, so MP knocked Zola on his back with two blows; they fought the next day, and there was no reconciliation
39-Japanese ambassador tells Goncourts that reading their books "was the only thing capable of tearing the natives [of Hawaii] away from the pleasures of caviar . . ."
40-Now the Goncourts learn that MP has not killed himself and feel they have lost the topic of a play [being writers of journals, they have to base their plays on face, apparently]; they say that a suicide would have been more artistic, truer, than the "too-optimistic and public outcome."
VI. "The Lemoine Affair" by Michelet
44-Anti-Semitism: says Lemoine is prob a Jew
VII. In the Weekly Theater by M. Émile Faguet
Of Henri Bernstein's play "The Lemoine Affair"
VIII. By Ernest Renan
52-ER refers to trial and Lemoine's offer to take people to his factory in a valley near Lille: "An Englishman who lived at that time, John Ruskin, whom unfortunately we read now only in the pitifully insipid translation that Marcel Proust has bequeathed to us, extols the grace of its poplars, the icy coolness of its springs."
56- Calls Human Comedy a "dull collection of implausible stories"
ER includes much natural descrip and much questioning of authorship of difft works
60-61- Wonders if poet Noailles [MP's friend in real life, of course] has been forced into exile in the country
IX. In the Memoirs of Saint-Simon
This takes up the last third of the book. Very long sentences, about the Duc d'Orléans being unsure if Lemoine is a fraud. Mentions of Proust's friends, incl Antoine Bibesco and Mme Straus, whose "admirable retorts are remembered by everyone" (85).
On and on about high society, with intentionally anticlimactic ending: "But this digression on the peculiarity of titles has taken us too far astray from the Le Moine affair."
ASB, Against Sainte-Beuve
12: the justly famous annihilation of S-B's method: "a book is the product of a self other than that which we display in our habits, in company, in our vices."
13: "How does the fact of having been a friend of Stendhal make us better able to judge him? On the contrary, it would probably be a serious hindrance. For such intimates the self which produces the works is obscured by the other self, which may be very inferior to the outward self of many other men."
44: How Baudelaire finds "unprecedented forms" for expressing sorrow and consolation: "one senses that he has felt, has understood everything, that his is the most tremulous of sensibilities, the most profound of intelligences."
68: Of Realism: "This reality according to real life of Balzac's novels means that they give a sort of literary value to countless things in life which had hitherto seemed to us too contingent."
97: Of Romain Rolland, in Jean-Christophe: "And so this art is the most superficial, the most insincere, the most materialist (even if its subject is the human spirit, because the only way for spirit to be in a book, is not for the spirit to be its subject but to have written it."
98: Wonderful!: "Do not forget: books are the creation of solitude and the children of silence. The children of silence can have nothing in common with the children of speech, those thoughts born of the wish to say something, to censure, to give an opinion. . . ."
100-01: "The writers we admire cannot serve us as guides because in us, like a magnetic needle or a homing pigeon, we have our own sense of direction. But there are times when, as we fly forward, guided by this inner instinct, and following our own path, we cast a glance to left or to right . . . and take pleasure in the anticipatory reminiscences we find there of the very idea, the very sensation, the very artistic effort we ourselves are expressing at that moment, like friendly signposts showing us that we have not gone astray. . . ."
Tadié, chs.11-12
505: "It is in the context of the criticism of reading [response to Ruskin], and of critical reading [Sainte-Beuve], that his 1908 writings should be understood; through them he liberated himself from the writers who obsessed him, but not without having first stolen their secrets. The pastiche distils and reconstructs what Proust himself felt upon reading the works of his masters; criticism analyses the techniques used by these writers clearly and in such a way that the pastiches and the criticism complement each other."
520-21: Cahiers, or exercise books, bought late in 1908, "a day when the nature of Proust's work was transformed. . . . The scope of the project was linked to a return to childhood: the greatest author of our time had suddenly become a schoolboy, writing in his exercise books, just as his father and mother had once urged him to do."
531: Vinteuil merged two difft heroes, Vington (a naturalist whose brilliant work is not at first known and a daughter who performs a sadistic scene: in early version of "Combray") and Berget (famous composer: in early version of "Swann in Love"). "What better way of refuting S-B's theories than by contrasting, within the same man, the poor and unfortunate piano teacher and the brilliant creative genius?"
541: Of impact of Amer and Brit Lit on MP: "He joked about the danger he ran of being drowned like the hero of George Eliot's novel: the waters of the Seine, which had flooded that year, had in fact reached the front door and cellars of 102 Boulevard Haussmann."
The Lemoine Affair
--First published in Le Figaro in Jan 1904 and Feb-Mar 1908
--A fictional account, consisting of various pastiches, and based on circumstances (claims, trial, stock losses) around Lemoine's fraudulent claims that he could turn coal into diamonds
Author's note [written 1919]
5-Lemoine condemned on 7/6/1909 to 6 yrs in prison
I. From a Novel by Balzac
10-Of novelist Daniel d'Arthez: "Only a sublime genius or a great criminal could have walked thus. But isn't genius a kind of crime against the routine of the past that our time punishes more severely than crime itself, since scholars die in hospitals bleaker than any prison?"
--Goofy talk of how names resemble each other
II. "The Lemoine Affair" by Gustave Flaubert
18-Woman takes off hat with parrot on it--humorous nod to GF's "A Simple Heart"
19-20-[at court] "and many abandoned themselves all over again to the loveliness of the dream they had fashioned, when upon news of the discovery they had glimpsed the future, before being foiled by the swindle."
20-thinking of getaway in summer to a cooler place leads to a funny digression about, well, not to the Pole, and what about the polar bears?
III. Critique of the Novel by M. Gustave Flaubert on "The Lemoine Affair," by Sainte-Beuve, in His Column in The Constitutional
S-B reviews the opening of GF's novel, which is what we have just read
28-S-B says that Balzac is "incapable of observation" [MP's dig, of course, at S-B's foolishness]
IV. By Henri de Régnier
Mostly short sentences, about first seeing Lemoine
V. In "The Goncourt Journals"
38-News that MP has killed himself after the fall in his shares
Lucien Daudet assured Goncourts that MP is "a being who lives entirely in the enthusiasm, in the pious adoration, of certain landscapes, certain books, a person for example who is completely enamored of the novels of Léon Daudet."
38-39-Zola had done MP a favor, MP brought him to the country to dine to thank him, but Zola refused to acknowledge that no other Fr writer was as great as Léon Daudet, so MP knocked Zola on his back with two blows; they fought the next day, and there was no reconciliation
39-Japanese ambassador tells Goncourts that reading their books "was the only thing capable of tearing the natives [of Hawaii] away from the pleasures of caviar . . ."
40-Now the Goncourts learn that MP has not killed himself and feel they have lost the topic of a play [being writers of journals, they have to base their plays on face, apparently]; they say that a suicide would have been more artistic, truer, than the "too-optimistic and public outcome."
VI. "The Lemoine Affair" by Michelet
44-Anti-Semitism: says Lemoine is prob a Jew
VII. In the Weekly Theater by M. Émile Faguet
Of Henri Bernstein's play "The Lemoine Affair"
VIII. By Ernest Renan
52-ER refers to trial and Lemoine's offer to take people to his factory in a valley near Lille: "An Englishman who lived at that time, John Ruskin, whom unfortunately we read now only in the pitifully insipid translation that Marcel Proust has bequeathed to us, extols the grace of its poplars, the icy coolness of its springs."
56- Calls Human Comedy a "dull collection of implausible stories"
ER includes much natural descrip and much questioning of authorship of difft works
60-61- Wonders if poet Noailles [MP's friend in real life, of course] has been forced into exile in the country
IX. In the Memoirs of Saint-Simon
This takes up the last third of the book. Very long sentences, about the Duc d'Orléans being unsure if Lemoine is a fraud. Mentions of Proust's friends, incl Antoine Bibesco and Mme Straus, whose "admirable retorts are remembered by everyone" (85).
On and on about high society, with intentionally anticlimactic ending: "But this digression on the peculiarity of titles has taken us too far astray from the Le Moine affair."
ASB, Against Sainte-Beuve
12: the justly famous annihilation of S-B's method: "a book is the product of a self other than that which we display in our habits, in company, in our vices."
13: "How does the fact of having been a friend of Stendhal make us better able to judge him? On the contrary, it would probably be a serious hindrance. For such intimates the self which produces the works is obscured by the other self, which may be very inferior to the outward self of many other men."
44: How Baudelaire finds "unprecedented forms" for expressing sorrow and consolation: "one senses that he has felt, has understood everything, that his is the most tremulous of sensibilities, the most profound of intelligences."
68: Of Realism: "This reality according to real life of Balzac's novels means that they give a sort of literary value to countless things in life which had hitherto seemed to us too contingent."
97: Of Romain Rolland, in Jean-Christophe: "And so this art is the most superficial, the most insincere, the most materialist (even if its subject is the human spirit, because the only way for spirit to be in a book, is not for the spirit to be its subject but to have written it."
98: Wonderful!: "Do not forget: books are the creation of solitude and the children of silence. The children of silence can have nothing in common with the children of speech, those thoughts born of the wish to say something, to censure, to give an opinion. . . ."
100-01: "The writers we admire cannot serve us as guides because in us, like a magnetic needle or a homing pigeon, we have our own sense of direction. But there are times when, as we fly forward, guided by this inner instinct, and following our own path, we cast a glance to left or to right . . . and take pleasure in the anticipatory reminiscences we find there of the very idea, the very sensation, the very artistic effort we ourselves are expressing at that moment, like friendly signposts showing us that we have not gone astray. . . ."
