“You say that because you don’t love her. But if she were real, you would love her.”
The symbolist school. The worst thing against it is its lack of curiosity toward life. With the single possible exception of Vielé-Griffin (whose verses consequently partake of a special savor),21 they were all pessimists, forsaking and resigned,
Tired of the sorry hospital22
that our country (I should say the earth)—“monotonous and undeserved,” as Laforgue said—was for them. For them poetry became a refuge, their only sanctuary from the squalor of reality; they plunged into it with the fervor of desperation.
Disenchanting life of everything they considered to be mere deception, wondering whether it was worth the trouble of “being lived,” no wonder they brought no new moral code (being satisfied with Vigny’s, which at most they dressed up in irony), but merely an æsthetic.
A character may well describe himself wonderfully while describing someone else or speaking of someone else—according to the rule that each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing himself.
Each time Édouard is called upon to outline his novel, he talks of it in a different way. In short, he is bluffing; in his heart he is afraid of never being able to finish it.
“Why try to conceal it? The form that tempts me is the epic. The epic tone alone suits me and has the power to satisfy me; it alone can free the novel from its realistic rut. For a great many years it was possible to think that Fielding and Richardson occupied opposite poles. Actually one is as realistic as the other. Until now the novel in every country has always clung to reality. Our great literary period found it possible to carry out its effort toward idealization only in the drama. La Princesse de Clèves is without a successor; when the French novel really launches out, it does so in the direction of the Roman bourgeois.” 23
28 November 1921
“These young men had a very hazy idea of the limits of their power”—this from The Idiot, which I am rereading at present. An excellent epigraph for one of the chapters.
Pontigny,24 20 August 1922
Bernard has taken for his motto:
If not you, who will do it?
If not now, then when?
He tries to work this out in Latin. And when he is thinking about getting Édouard’s suitcase out of the checkroom: “If you don’t do it now, you run the risk of letting Édouard do it.”
The charming thing about these maxims is that they are equally the key to heaven as to hell.
Cuverville, 11 October 1922
Oddly enough, my novel is taking shape in reverse. I mean to say that I am constantly discovering that this or that which has happened previously ought to be included. Thus the chapters are not added one after the other at all; but they are continually pushing back the chapter I originally conceived as the first.
28 October
Do not bring the most important characters too much into the foreground—at least not too soon. Better to hold them back, make the reader wait for them. Do not describe them, but make it necessary for the reader to imagine them, as is fitting. On the other hand, describe the various supernumeraries with precision; lead them boldly to the fore, to let them get that much ahead of the others.
In the first Luxembourg scene I have characters of no importance talking; Olivier’s monologue is unique. He must not be heard; scarcely be glimpsed; but already begin to be liked. You must associate yourself with him, wish to see and hear him. In this case feeling must precede knowledge.
All this I do by instinct. It is only later that I analyze.
1 November
Purge the novel of all elements that do not belong specifically to the novel. Nothing good ever comes from a hodgepodge. I have always had a horror of what they call “the synthesis of the arts,” which, according to Wagner, was to take place in the theater. This gave me a horror of the theater—and of Wagner. (It was in that period that symphonies were played and verses recited behind a Munkacsy landscape; that, at the Théâtre des Arts, perfumes were sprayed into the theater during the performance of The Song of Songs.) The only theater I can bear is the one that offers itself simply for what it is, and does not claim to be more than a theater.
In the seventeenth century, tragedy and comedy attained a magnificent purity (and purity, in art as elsewhere, is what matters)—and in addition almost all the genres, big and little: fables, characters, maxims, sermons, memoirs, letters. Lyric poetry, purely lyrical 25—and not the novel? (No, do not make too much of La Princesse de Clèves; it is chiefly a marvel of tact and taste.… )
As for this pure novel, no one has produced it since either—not even that admirable Stendhal, who of all novelists perhaps approached it the closest. But is it not remarkable that Balzac, possibly our greatest novelist, is beyond doubt the one who mingled with the novel, annexed to it and amalgamated with it, more heterogeneous and inherently indigestible elements than anyone else? Hence the very bulk of one of his books is simultaneously one of the most powerful, but also one of the most turgid, most imperfect, and most dross-laden things in all our literature. It is worthy of note that the English, who have never known how to purify their drama in the sense that Racine’s tragedy is purified, yet achieved at the very outset a much greater purity in the novels of Defoe, Fielding, and even Richardson.
I think all this will have to go into Édouard’s mouth—which would allow me to add that I do not grant him all these points, however judicious his remarks may be; that, as far as I am concerned, I doubt whether there could be imagined a purer novel than, for instance, Mérimée’s La double Méprise. But in order for Édouard to be stimulated to produce the pure novel he envisaged, it was necessary for him to be convinced that such a thing had never been done.
What is more, he will never succeed in writing this pure novel.
I must be careful to respect in Édouard everything that makes him unable to write his book. He understands a great many things, but he is forever pursuing himself—through everyone and everything. Real devotion is almost impossible for him. He is a dabbler, a failure.
A character all the more difficult to establish since I am lending him much of myself. I have to step back and put him at some distance from me to see him properly.
Classic art:
“You both love each other more than you think.”
(TARTUFFE) 26
Sarah says: “so as not”—a horrible mistake, so common today, that no one ever seems to denounce—“I closed the door so as not to let him out,” etc.27
Olivier took great care not to talk about things he did not know well. But since this precaution was not shared by the others of Robert’s circle, who were not in the least embarrassed at offering peremptory judgments on books they had never read, Olivier chose to think he was much more ignorant than they, when actually he was only more conscientious.
“I admire the background your friends have,” he told Robert. “I feel so ignorant in comparison that I hardly dare open my mouth. What is this book you have all just been saying such fine things about?”
“It’s a book almost none of us has read,” said Robert, laughing. “But it’s been tacitly agreed to find all those qualities in it, and to look at everyone who doesn’t recognize its merits as a fool.”
A month before, an answer like that would have made Olivier indignant. He smiled.
Annecy, 23 February
Bernard: his character still uncertain. Completely insubordinate in the beginning. Becomes motivated, limited, and defined throughout the book, thanks to his love affairs. Each love, each adoration, brings with it a devotion, a sacrifice. At first he is grieved by this, but he readily realizes that it is only by limiting his field of action that he can define it precisely.
Olivier: his character is distorted little by little. He commits actions altogether contrary to his nature and tastes—out of spite and ferocity. There follows an abominable disgust for himself. The progressive blunting of his personality?
??likewise that of his brother Vincent. (Stress the defeat of his virtue at the moment he begins to win at gambling.) I have not been able to indicate this clearly enough.
Vincent and Olivier have quite fine and noble instincts and plunge into life with a lofty concept of what they are to do—but they are weak characters and allow themselves to be deflected. Bernard, on the contrary, reacts to each influence by fighting back at it. The cards were dealt out wrong: Édouard should have adopted Olivier; it is Olivier he really loved.
Vincent gradually lets himself be permeated by the diabolic spirit. He imagines he is becoming the Devil; it is when things go best for him that he feels the most damned. He tries to warn off his brother Olivier, and every attempt to save him acts to Olivier’s prejudice and to his own profit. He actually feels he has taken sides with Satan. He feels that the more he succeeds in disbelieving in the real existence of the Evil One, the more he becomes the pawn of Satan. This is always an easy metaphorical way for him to explain things; but one theme always returns to his mind: “Why should you be afraid of me? You know very well I don’t exist.” In the end he believes in the existence of Satan as in his own; in other words, he eventually believes he is Satan.
It is this very assurance (the assurance that the Devil is backing his game) that makes him succeed in everything he undertakes. He is frightened by this; he gets to the point of almost hoping for a measure of failure; but he knows he will succeed, no matter what he undertakes. He knows that in gaining the world he is losing his own soul.
He realizes by what arguments the Devil tricked him when he first found himself with Laura in the sanatorium neither of them expected to be able to leave—he knows he took sides with him from the instant he used a sophism as the basis of argument: “Since we aren’t going to live on, and since, therefore, nothing we might do henceforth could be of any consequence …”
I am unable to admire fully the courage of the man who scorns life.
It is appropriate, in opposition to the manner of Meredith or James, to let the reader get the advantage over me—to go about it in such a way as to allow him to think he is more intelligent, more moral, more perspicacious than the author, and that he is discovering many things in the characters, and many truths in the course of the narrative, in spite of the author and, so to speak, behind the author’s back.
Annecy, 5 March 1923
Dreamed last night:
A servant in livery came with a tray to carry away the remains of the meal we had been served. I was sitting on a plain stool beside a low coffee table, almost in the center of a large, dimly lighted room. The person I was talking to, his face half hidden by the wings of a large armchair, was Marcel Proust. The attention I was paying to him was distracted by the departure of the servant, who, as I noticed, was dragging behind him a piece of string, one end of which was in my hand, while the other end led off between the books on one of the bookshelves. The bookcase covered one of the walls of the room. Proust had his back to it, and I was facing it. I pulled the string and saw two huge, old, and sumptuously bound volumes move. I pulled a little more and the books came half out of the shelf, ready to fall; I pulled still a little more and they fell. The noise of their falling made my heart pound and cut short the story that Proust was telling. I leaped to the bookcase and picked up one of the books to make sure the full morocco binding had not been bent at the corners, so I might immediately reassure my friend that the book was undamaged. But the boards were half torn from the back; the binding, in short, was in a lamentable state. I realized intuitively that Proust thought a lot of the books, this one especially. But in a tone of exquisite kindness befitting the well-bred gentleman: “It’s nothing. It’s a Saint-Simon in the edition of …” He told me the date, and I immediately recognized it to be one of the rarest and most sought-after editions. I tried to stammer excuses, but Proust cut them short and began showing me, with many a comment, some of the numerous illustrations of the book he had kept on his knees.
A moment later (I don’t know where Proust had gone) I found myself alone in the room. A sort of majordomo clad in a long green and black frock-coat came to close the shutters, like a museum attendant when it is about to strike five. I got up to leave and had to file through a series of lavish drawing-rooms at the side of the majordomo. I slipped on the polished floor, almost fell, and finally, losing my balance, fell sobbing to the floor at the feet of the majordomo. I then began to explain, with a great display of bombast and rhetoric, which I considered proper to cover the absurdity of my confession:
“I lied just now when I pretended I pulled the books down by mistake; I knew they would fall if I pulled the string, and I pulled it just the same. I could not resist.”
I had got back to my feet, and the majordomo, supporting me in his arms, slapped me on the shoulder several times in the Russian manner.
In the compartment of the Annecy train a worker, after having tried in vain to light his pipe:
“At the price matches are, it really counts when they don’t light.”
I am so afraid (and I should dislike it so much) of letting my emotions bend my thinking that it is often precisely when someone is most inclined against me that I am tempted to speak most highly of him.
Cuverville, 3 November
At the time of my reading to R. Martin du Gard (August, Pontigny), I was obliged to recognize that the best parts of my book are the parts of pure invention. If I spoiled the portrait of old La Pérouse, it was because I clung too closely to reality; I neither knew how nor was able to lose sight of my model. The narrative of that first visit will have to be done over. La Pérouse will not come to life nor shall I really visualize him until he completely displaces his original.28 Nothing so far has given me so much trouble. The difficult thing is inventing when you are encumbered by memory.
15 November
Have completely gone over this chapter; I think it is rather good now.
Certainly it is easier for me to put words into a character’s mouth than to express myself in my own name—and particularly when the character I am creating differs most from me. I have written nothing better or with more facility than Lafcadio’s monologues, or Alissa’s journal.29 In this sort of thing I forget who I am, if indeed I have ever known. I become the other person. (They try to find out my opinion; I have no interest in my own opinion. I am no longer someone, but several—whence the reproaches for my restlessness, my instability, my fickleness, my inconstancy.) Push abnegation to the point of complete self-oblivion.
(I told Claudel,30 one night when he, as a friend, was worried about the salvation of my soul: “I have lost all interest in my soul and its salvation.” “But God,” he replied, “He hasn’t lost interest in you.”)
In life as well, the thoughts and emotions of others dwell in me; my heart beats only through sympathy. This is what makes any discussion so difficult for me. I immediately abandon my point of view. I get away from myself—and so be it.
This is the key to my character and work. The critic who fails to grasp this will botch the job—and this too: I am not drawn toward what resembles me, but toward what differs from me.
Cuverville, 27 December
Jacques Rivière has just left me.31 He has been staying here for three days. I read him the first seventeen chapters of Les Faux-Monnayeurs (chapters one and two are to be completely redone).
It might be well to introduce into the very first chapter a fantastic and supernatural element—an element that will later authorize certain deviations in the plot, certain unrealities. I think it would be best to do a “poetic” description of the Luxembourg—which must be as mythical a place at the Forest of Arden in the fantasies of Shakespeare.
Cuverville, 3 January 1924
The difficulty arises from the fact that I must start anew with each chapter. Never take advantage of momentum—such is the rule of my game.
6 January
The book now seems frequently animated with its own life; it reminds one of a plant dev
eloping, and my brain is simply the earth-filled pot that contains and feeds it. It even seems to me unwise to try to “force” the plant, that it is better to let its buds swell, its stalks stretch out, its fruits ripen slowly. If you try to advance the hour of natural maturity you impair the fullness of their flavor.
In the train to Cuverville, 8 February 1924
Since they are preventing me from reading and meditating, I shall note as they come the remarks of the fat lady who, with her husband, is occupying two of the other seats in my compartment:
“Just the same, they’re convenient, these cars with exits in each compartment—in case of an accident” (our car is one with a corridor). “Look! You’d think it was a fellow on top of the roof—that weathervane. I didn’t know Amer-Picon had a factory at Batignolles.”
THE HUSBAND: “We’re in the suburbs. The suburbs, which already …”
THE WIFE: “There are a few clouds, but it won’t rain. You might as well take off your coat. La! la, la, la.”
THE HUSBAND: “Eh?”
THE WIFE: “La, la, la, la. Isn’t that Rouen over there?”
THE HUSBAND: “Oh, la, la! Two hours from here.”
THE WIFE: “Look at the shape of those chimneys.”
THE HUSBAND: “Argenteuil … asparagus.”
The lady caught my eye. She bent over toward her husband, and from that moment on they spoke only in a whisper. So much the better. Nevertheless I heard:
THE HUSBAND: “It isn’t sincere.”
THE WIFE: “Of course not. To be sincere it would have to be …”
Admirable—the person who never finishes his sentences. Mme Vedel, the pastor’s wife.
14 February
The translation of Tom Jones, the proofs of which Dent has just sent me, is most mediocre. I decline to write the introduction. After a long parley involving Rhys (Dent’s representative), Valery Larbaud,32 and myself, the Dent firm abandons the undertaking. I find myself again confronted with my Faux-Monnayeurs, but this brief plunge into Fielding has enlightened me as to the insufficiencies of my book. I am wondering whether I shouldn’t expand the text, intrude myself (in spite of what Martin du Gard says), make comments. I have lost touch.