Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson Page A

focused on the present. We are invited to think that this is a decisive change in Proust himself, a rejection of all that has gone before. He has kept the biggest surprise till the end, like the masterful storyteller that he is. But still, one cannot call it much of a climax, after so many volumes. 53
    At the time of his death, Proust’s reputation was high. Now, however, some critics argue that his achievement no longer merits the enormous effort. For others,
A la recherche du temps perdu
is still one of the outstanding achievements of modern literature, ‘the greatest exploration of a self by anyone, including Freud.’ 54
    The first volume of Proust’s novel, it will be recalled, had been turned down by among others André Gide at the
Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF).
The tables were soon turned, however. Gide apologised for his error, and in 1916 Proust migrated to NRF. At Proust’s death, Gide’s great novel
The Counterfeiters
was barely begun. He did in fact record a dream about Proust in his journal for 15 March 1923 (Proust had died the previous November). Gide was sitting in Proust’s study and ‘found himself holding a string which was attached to two books on Proust’s shelves. Gide pulled the string, and unwound a beautiful binding of Saint-Simon’s
Memoirs.
Gide was inconsolable in the dream but did acknowledge later that his action may have been intentional. 55
    The Counterfeiters,
which had been on the author’s mind since 1914, is not really like
A la recherche du temps perdu,
but some similarities have been noted and are pertinent. 56 ‘Gide’s novel has its own Baron de Charlus, its band of adolescents, its preoccupation with the cities of the plain. In both works the chief character is writing a novel that turns out to be, more or less, the very novel we are reading. But the most important resemblance is, that each was written with the conscious intention of writing a great novel. Gide was attempting to rival Proust on his own ground. In the dream the element of jealousy in Gide’s attitude to Proust is ‘brought to a head, confessed, andreconciled.’ 57 The novel, with its highly complex plot, is important for a number of reasons, one of which is that Gide also kept a journal in which he recorded his thoughts about composition. This journal is probably the most complete account of a major literary work in formation. The main lesson to be learned is how Gide progressively changed and winnowed away at his early ideas and cut out characters. His aim was to produce a book where there is no main character but a variety of different characters, all equally important, a little bit like the paintings of Picasso, where objects are ‘seen’ not from one predominant direction but from all directions at once. In his journal he also included some newspaper cuttings, one about a band of young men passing counterfeit coins, another about a school pupil who blew his brains out in class under pressure from his friends. Gide weaves these elements into a complex plot, which includes one character, Edouard, who is writing a novel called
The Counterfeiters,
and in which, in essence, everyone is a counterfeiter of sorts. 58 Edouard, as a writer, and the boys with the false money are the most obvious counterfeiters, but what most shocked readers was Gide’s indictment of French middle-class life, riddled with illegitimacy and homosexuality while all the time counterfeiting an attitude of respectable propriety (and not so dissimilar in subject matter from the later volumes of Proust). The complexity of the plot has its point in that, as in real life, characters are at times unaware of the consequences of their own actions, unaware of the reasons for other people’s actions, unaware even of when they are being truthful or counterfeiting. In such a milieu how can anything – especially art – be expected to work? (Here there is an overlap with Luigi Pirandello.) While it is obvious why some counterfeiting (such