The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The past is evocable, we say, by memory. But this memory is not under our control. The taste of a small cake dipped in tea, the outline of some towers against the sky—such small events reawaken in Proust a stream of memories and half-for- gotten experiences, which color his whole life. We cannot understand ourselves at any given moment, nor are we merely the static sum of ali the moments we have lived—because we are continually reliving them, and so the sum is always chang- ing. Only through a complete evocation of the past can the content of any moment be even approximated. Because this is so, reality, as we say, eludes us, and life seems sad, evanescent, and puzzling. Only art, Proust's religion, by imposing on life's mutations an orderly form, can give us consolation.

Proust's method, even the structure of his interminable sentences, flows from this conception of time, from this enthronement of subjectivism. In his book, time turns and twists upon itself like a snake, past and present merge, motifs and themes are recalled and redeveloped and answer each other in echo and counterpoint. Every critic has pointed out that the book is less like a narrative than like a symphony.

But had Proust done nothing more than incorporate a metaphysic he would not be as interesting as he is. In addition to his peculiar, neurotic sensibility and his phenomenal mem­ory, he possessed most of the gifts of any first-rate novelist. His book, for example, is a social panorama of unprecedented depth (though not of range): compare his Vanity Fair with Thackeray^ [76]. He describes the agonies and death of a whole aristocratic and upper-middle-class society. He analyzes, sometimes with intolerable exhaustiveness, the baffling and to

him frustrating nature of love, and particularly of homosexual love. He creates at least a half-dozen characters comparable to the most living in the literature of the novel. And he invents a prose, often opaque, but always, in its slow sinuosities and plangent rhythms, proper to his difficult theme. His realism is unlike that of any novelist we have so far met. It is the realism of the symbolist, not the naturalist. When he wishes, he can describe to perfection. But he omits ali details that do not rein- force his conviction that our only reality is the aspect of things remembered. This partial reality is not ali we need to know, but it is ali we do know; and that limitation is the cause of the tragedy of life.

For some this is the greatest novel in the world. For others it is unreadable. For still others it is, as one good critic wrote, "mammoth but minor." You must pass your own judgment. I will, however, in conclusion quote the considered estimate of the finest American critic of his time, Edmund Wilson: "We must recognize in Proust, it seems to me, one of the great minds and imaginations of our day, absolutely comparable in our own time, by reason both of his powers and his influence, to the Nietzsches [97], the Tolstoys [88], the Wagners and the Ibsens [89] of a previous generation. He has recreated the world of the novel from the point of view of relativity: he has supplied for the first time in literature an equivalent on the full scale for the new theory of modern physics."

C.F.

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ROBERT FROST

1874-1963 Collected Poems

Though not very near, Frost is probably the nearest thing we have to a national poet. He is constantly anthologized. Schoolchildren are regularly exposed to his simpler work. The

television screen, the lecture platform, and the college class- room made his remarkable and sometimes disquieting person- ality familiar to many Americans who do not think of them- selves as poetry lovers. A citizen of a prize-respecting country, he won the Pulitzer Prize four times. Finally, together with other talents, he possessed that of longevity. Ali these factors combined to make him a kind of unofficial poet laureate. Insofar as this has helped to raise the status of poetry in a poetry-resistant age, it is a fine thing. Insofar as it has created a fuzzy or sentimentalized or incomplete image of a great writer, it is less so.