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Proust and Dickens Appendix I A Firefly: Proust and Dickens It is to Andre Maurois that we owe Proust the devotee of Dickens. In chapter 2 of Ala recherche de Marcel Proust (1949) he evokes those Easter holidays at Illiers in the household of Proust's paternal aunt Amiot at 4, Rue du Saint Esprit. Close-by in the Pre Catalan, a small park owned by his uncle on the banks of the Loir, the adolescent Proust would loll reading. Many years afterwards, in the preface to Sesame et les lys he summoned up those distant 'journees de lecture', but Maurois com­ pounds the account with details of his own: Above all he relished the long days of reading that he spent in the Pre Catalan ... bordered by the fairest of hawthorn hedges, in the depths of which, in a bower that exists to this day, Marcel enjoyed the stillness, broken only by the golden sound of church bells. There he read George Sand, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Balzac.I Later, at the Lycee Condorcet he was, Maurois confidently states, 'a great reader of The Thousand and One Nights and, in translation, of Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Stevenson and George Eliot'.2 But the Nights too would have been in translation, presumably Galland's. And Proust himself says that his keenest reading as a child was Theophile Gautier and Augustin Thierry. Hardy and Stevenson belong, as we have already seen, to a much later period of his life. It was Proust's mother who read him George Sand. How much can we trust on this list? Undeterred, Maurois carries on. When in the 1890s Proust got to know the Daudets- Alphonse, Madame Alphonse, and the brothers Lucien and Leon - he was delighted to note in the work of the magisterial Alphonse something of 'a French Dickens'.3 He even, apparently, had aspirations to the title himself. So, we hear, the humour with which the snobbery of the narrator's relatives, the Octaves, is portrayed in Ducote de chez Swann is 'indulgent like that of Dickens'.4 M. de Norpois and the Baron de Charlus too have their pretensions mocked in the tones reminiscent of Pickwick Papers.s Nor is Proust's dialogue unaffected, the carefully placed malapropisms of the director of the Grand Hotel in Balbec recalling 'Balzac and Dickens' .6 In sum, Proust is in a direct line from Dickens, and even Arnold Bennett? This 285 286 Proust and the Vtctorians inheritance was, however, something of a back-handed compliment, since Maurois quotes Jules Lemaitre to startling effect: 'This Proust, when he is bad, is as good as Dickens, and when he's good, is an awful lot better.'8 The biographers have followed suit. George D. Painter too has Proust on his back ploughing his way through Dickens, in the same Pre Catalan. Even Terence Kilmartin, who spent so much time updating the English translation of Proust, spoke of a Dickensian vein in A la recherche. But let us examine the facts. In France Dickens had enjoyed something of a mixed press. In A rebours, Des Esseintes, in search of his own peculiar kind of vicarious experience, saturates himself in the novels of Dickens, but baulks ultimately at their moral squeamishness, like a man choking on milk. The result is to confirm him in his decadence: But these volumes produced an effect contrary to that which he expected: these chaste lovers and protesting (or Protestant) heroines, dressed to the neck, with their starry-eyed loves, forever lowering their eyes, blushing, weeping for happiness and holding hands, this exaggeration of purity drove him to an opposing frenzy. By virtue of the law of contrasts he leaped to opposite extremes, recalled vibrant and debauched episodes, dreamed of the practices of human couples: the hybrid kiss, or the columbine kiss as ecclesiastical prurience styles it, in which the tongue penetrates the lips.9 But this reaction, or perhaps over-reaction, was far from universal. The Daudets, whose Thursday gatherings Proust attended from 1894, and who must have seemed to the impressionable young man less a family than a literary clan, were Dickens fanatics. When in May of the following year Madame Alphonse Daudet published her Notes sur Londres, Marcel wrote to her appreciatively and, knowing the tastes she shared with the rest of the family, was careful to drop a reference to one passage describing Poets' Corner where 'old Chaucer, Dickens, Thackeray, Walter Scott, Shakespeare, if only in effigy, lie gloriously side by side' .tO Lucien who, Proust later wrote was 'worthy of his father, of his mother, of his brother, being despite this utterly original', had once studied in London in Whistler's studio. Through his books, immature as they were, Proust thought he could discern the tutelary spirits of Dickens and Whistler,ll but the conjunction is itself suspicious, suggesting a fog-bound aura common to both rather than knowledge of any one book. If Alphonse Daudet seemed to him a sort of French Dickens, then, it was only par for the course. But the remark was made in all innocence, for in 1897, the year of Alphonse's death, he was able to write to Lucien with disarming candour: 'What is the best of Dickens? (I know nothing of him whatsoever).'12 1897, if ever, was the year when Proust might have come to share his friend's literary tastes. He was twenty-six at the time, in the throes of Jean Santeuil and still regarding himself as some­ thing of a social realist. He was also much in need of direction. On A Firefly: Proust and Dickens 287 Lucien's advice he borrowed from Rene Peter a copy of David Copperfield and sat down to read it. This would presumably have been the three-volume set translated in 1851 by Amedee Pichot, originally as Le Neveu de ma tante. But by the second chapter, it seems, he had snapped the cover to, his eyes apparently offended by the words: 'It touches me now, although I tell it lightly, to recollect how eager I was to leave my happy home.' The following day he returned it with the curt comment that he found disgusting this urchin who 'dilates with pride because he's lost his mother'.l3 This, of course, is a highly selective reading, but it remains true, whatever the status of Peggotty, that David's story begins when he flies the parental nest. And though he seems to have picked up the tone of release while missing the postponed regret, he is not the only reader to have done so. For whatever reason, it clearly did not please him. Did he ever repair the loss? Painter repeats a late anecdote of Jacques Porel that, when he dined with the author in May 1917, the writer assured him that among his favourite novels was Bleak House.14 If this is accurate, it is somewhat surprising that three years later, on the occasion of the centenary of George Eliot, he should have reacted to a celebratory article in La Nouvelle revue fran~aise by Albert Thibaudet with an effusive rush of praise for everything English: '[Thibaudet] asks if there are any Eliotists left. Well there's me at any rate. And even more of a Hardyist (I know nothing of Dickens nor Thackeray).'l5 What reason would he have he to lie? Modesty? Then why boast about Eliot 'the worship of my adolescence' whom 'so many references in Wlanges prove just how well I know.' Where it came to personal reading, Proust was not one to hide his light. Throughout twenty volumes of corres­ pondence, not another word is breathed about Dickens, and in Proust's other works nothing that cannot be attributed to hearsay. This is itself remarkable, for about authentic enthusiasms he was nothing if not effusive, sometimes repetitively so. Can anything be made of all this? So entrenched is the myth of a Dickensian element in A la recherche, one does so want to try. The most teasing due is an account by Lucien Daudet, written many years after the event, of Proust's delight when he pointed out that the Charlus/ Morel liaison in Sodome et Gomorrhe resembled the relationship between Pip and Magwitch in Great Expectations.16 But, knowing Proust's gal­ lantry, may he not merely have been making social noises? It was in any case a not very bright remark about Dickens, nor for that matter about Proust who, especially among close friends, was invariably polite. To respond with becoming appreciation, he did not have to have read Great Expectations at all. Conscious as he must have been that among la Jamille Daudet Dickens amounted to something of a cult, may he simply have been anxious to please - so anxious as to wish to conceal that there were places where, lead as Lucien might, he was quite unwilling to follow him? It is very tempting ourselves to follow this will o' the wisp over the hawthorn hedge of the Pre Catalan to the bleak Kentish marshes. For one thing, the fact that Dickens plays down the parental while Proust 288 Proust and the VICtorians stressed it tells us much about the difference. This difference can perhaps best be explored through a contrast between Great Expectations, which Proust may or may not have read, and The Mill on the Floss, which undeniably moved him to tears.J7 Both are novels of childhood and growth, both in a sense Bildungsromans. But the debate between nature and nurture which is an almost inevitable concomitant in such a genre is one they approach from different ends.
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