Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [11]
His favorite professor was Alphonse Darlu, a philosopher who believed in spirituality but not Christianity (he was a follower of Tolstoy). At a time when most French thinkers remained positivists and espoused science, progress and empiricism, Darlu embraced metaphysics, idealism, and a cult of truthfulness. Proust called him in the dedication of one book the master who had most influenced his thought. Once Proust’s idealism is noticed it seems to appear in nearly every line of his great novel. For instance, at the end of Swann’s Way the Narrator, in love with Swann’s daughter Gilberte, goes in search of her in the park beside the Champs-Elysées. There he finds her at play. She suddenly throws him a ball, and, as Proust writes, “Like the idealist philosopher whose body takes account of the external world in the reality of which his intellect declines to believe, the same self which had made me greet her before I had identified her now urged me to seize the ball that she handed to me (as though she were a companion with whom I had come to play, and not a sister-soul with whom I had come to be united). . . .” Proust rejected André Gide’s more ordinary form of realism, his method of building up a character or situation through the accretion of small details, by saying that he, Proust, could be interested only in those details that pointed towards a general truth or that expressed poetic enchantment. Every page of Proust’s masterpiece piles up several “general truths” and adds to the elevated, philosophical tone. Perhaps because of this tone Proust could get away with writing about even the most scandalous subjects without ruffling his readers.
An undoctrinaire spirituality, learned from Professor Darlu, remained with Proust his whole life and informs nearly every page of his massive book. He may seldom write about God, but the natural reflex of his mind is to move from the concrete particular to the abstract principle. As he wrote a friend in 1915: “If I have no religion . . . on the other hand a religious preoccupation has never been absent for a single day from my life.” He mentions that he has just assured a grieving father that someday he may see his dead son again, but then Proust adds, “Yet the more one is religious the less one dares to move towards certainty, to go beyond what one actually believes; I don’t deny anything, I believe in the possibility of everything, while objections based on the existence of Evil, etc. strike me as absurd, since Suffering alone seems to me to have made (and to continue to make) Man a bit more than a brute. But to go from that on to certainty, even to Hope, is a long journey. I haven’t yet crossed that threshold—will I ever?”
If, as Camus once observed, Americans are the only novelists who don’t think they need to be intellectuals, one could add that European novelists are, on the contrary, those that consider themselves most under an obligation to develop a philosophy. What is certain is that Proust is the great philosophical novelist, rivaled only by George Eliot (whom he admired intensely) and, in this century, a trio of German-speaking writers he did not live long enough to read—Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil. Proust certainly thought of himself as a thinker and he once wrote a friend: “I very much wish to finish the work I’ve begun and to put in it those truths that I know will be nourished by it and that otherwise will be destroyed with me.” But if he was a philosopher, at the same time he had more faith in the senses and in memory than in the intellect to experience ultimate truths.
In 1886 the fifteen-year-old Proust responded to a questionnaire in English that one of his girlfriends