In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (19 page)

Meanwhile we had taken our places at table. By the side of my plate I found a carnation, the stalk of which was wrapped in silver paper. It embarrassed me less than
the envelope that had been handed to me in the hall, which, however, I had completely forgotten. Its use, strange as it was to me, seemed to me more intelligible when I saw all the male guests take up the similar carnations that were lying by their plates and slip them into their buttonholes. I did as they had done, with the air of naturalness that a free-thinker assumes in church when he is not familiar with the mass but rises when everyone else rises and kneels a moment after everyone else is on his knees. Another usage, equally strange to me but less ephemeral, disquieted me more. On the other side of my plate was a smaller plate, on which was heaped a blackish substance which I did not then know to be caviare. I was ignorant of what was to be done with it but firmly determined not to let it enter my mouth.

Bergotte was sitting not far from me and I could hear quite clearly everything that he said. I understood then the impression that M. de Norpois had formed of him. He had indeed a peculiar “organ”; there is nothing that so alters the material qualities of the voice as the presence of thought behind what is being said: the resonance of the diphthongs, the energy of the labials are profoundly affected—as is the diction. His seemed to me to differ entirely from his way of writing, and even the things that he said from those with which he filled his books. But the voice issues from a mask behind which it is not powerful enough to make us recognise at first sight a face which we have seen uncovered in the speaker’s literary style. At certain points in the conversation when Bergotte was in the habit of talking in a manner which not only M. de Norpois would have thought affected or unpleasant, it was a long time before I discovered an exact correspondence with the parts of his books in which his form became so poetic and so musical. At those points he could see in what he was saying a plastic beauty independent of whatever his sentences might mean, and as human speech reflects the human soul, though without expressing it as does literary style, Bergotte appeared almost to be talking nonsense, intoning certain words and, if he were pursuing, beneath them, a single image, stringing them together uninterruptedly on one continuous note, with a wearisome monotony. So that a pretentious, turgid and monotonous delivery was a sign of the rare aesthetic value of what he was saying, and an effect, in his conversation, of the same power which, in his books, produced that harmonious flow of imagery. I had had all the more difficulty in discovering this at first since what he said at such moments, precisely because it was the authentic utterance of Bergotte, did not appear to be typical Bergotte. It was a profusion of precise ideas, not included in that “Bergotte manner” which so many essayists had appropriated to themselves; and this dissimilarity was probably but another aspect—seen in a blurred way through the stream of conversation, like an image seen through smoked glass—of the fact that when one read a page of Bergotte it was never what would have been written by any of those lifeless imitators who, nevertheless, in newspapers and in books, adorned their prose with so many “Bergottish” images and ideas. This difference in style arose from the fact that what was meant by “Bergottism” was, first and foremost, a priceless element of truth hidden in the heart of each thing, whence it was extracted by that great writer by virtue of his genius, and that this extraction, rather than the perpetration of “Bergottisms,” was the aim of the gentle Bard. Though, it must be added, he continued to perpetrate them in spite of himself because he was Bergotte, and so in this sense every fresh beauty in his work was the little drop of Bergotte buried at the heart of a thing and which he had distilled from it. But if, for that reason, each of those beauties was related to all the rest and recognisable, yet each remained separate and individual, as was the act of discovery that had brought it to the light of day; new, and consequently different from what was known as the Bergotte manner, which was a loose synthesis of all the “Bergottisms” already thought up and written down by him, with no indication by which men who lacked genius might foresee what would be his next discovery. So it is with all great writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of—as opposed to thinking about themselves—and to which they have not yet given expression. An author of memoirs of our time, wishing to write without too obviously seeming to be writing like Saint-Simon, might at a pinch give us the first line of his portrait of Villars: “He was a rather tall man, dark . . . with an alert, open, expressive physiognomy,” but what law of determinism could bring him to the discovery of Saint-Simon’s next line, which begins with “and, to tell the truth, a trifle mad”? The true variety is in this abundance of real and unexpected elements, in the branch loaded with blue flowers which shoots up, against all reason, from the spring hedgerow that seemed already overcharged with blossoms, whereas the purely formal imitation of variety (and one might advance the same argument for all the other qualities of style) is but a barren uniformity, that is to say the very antithesis of variety, and cannot, in the work of imitators, give the illusion or recall the memory of it save to a reader who has not acquired the sense of it from the masters themselves.

And so—just as Bergotte’s way of speaking would no doubt have charmed the listener if he himself had been merely an amateur reciting imitation Bergotte, whereas it was attached to the thought of Bergotte, at work and in action, by vital links which the ear did not at once distinguish—so it was because Bergotte applied that thought with precision to the reality which pleased him that his language had in it something down-to-earth, something over-nourishing, which disappointed those who expected to hear him speak only of the “eternal torrent of forms” and of the “mysterious tremors of beauty.” Moreover the quality, always rare and new, of what he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so subtle a manner of approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it that was already familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an unimportant detail, to be off the point, to be indulging in paradox, so that his ideas seemed as often as not to be confused, for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. Besides, as all novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotyped attitude to which we had grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself, any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. But for a long time it has been taken to be the real universe, and is instinctively relied upon.) So when Bergotte—and his figures appear simple enough today—said of Cottard that he was a mannikin in a bottle, trying to find his balance, and of Brichot that “for him even more than for Mme Swann the arrangement of his hair was a matter for anxious deliberation, because, in his twofold preoccupation with his profile and his reputation, he had always to make sure that it was so brushed as to give him the air at once of a lion and of a philosopher,” people immediately felt the strain, and sought a foothold upon something which they called more concrete, meaning by that more usual. It was indeed to the writer whom I admired that the unrecognisable words issuing from the mask I had before my eyes must be attributed, and yet they could not have been inserted among his books like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, they were on another plane and required a transposition by means of which, one day, when I was repeating to myself certain phrases that I had heard Bergotte use, I discovered in them the whole framework of his written style, the different elements of which I was able to recognise and to name in this spoken discourse which had struck me as being so different.

From a more subsidiary point of view the special way, a little too meticulous, too intense, that he had of pronouncing certain words, certain adjectives which constantly recurred in his conversation and which he never uttered without a certain emphasis, giving to each of their syllables a separate force and intoning the last (as for instance the word
visage
which he always used in preference to
figure
and enriched with a number of superfluous v’s and s’s and g’s, which seemed all to explode from his outstretched palm at such moments), corresponded exactly to the fine passages where, in his prose, he brought out those favourite words, preceded by a sort of pause and composed in such a way in the metrical whole of the sentence that the reader was obliged, if he was not to make a false quantity, to give to each of them its full value. And yet one did not find in Bergotte’s speech a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written sentence the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because that light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed to ourselves. In this respect, there was more modulation, more stress in his books than in his talk: stress independent of beauty of style, which the author himself has possibly not perceived, since it is not separable from his most intimate personality. It was this stress which, at the moments when, in his books, Bergotte was entirely natural, gave a rhythm to the words—often at such times quite insignificant—that he wrote. This stress is not marked on the printed page, there is nothing there to indicate it, and yet it imposes itself of its own accord on the writer’s sentences, one cannot pronounce them in any other way, it is what was most ephemeral and at the same time most profound in the writer, and it is what will bear witness to his true nature, what will ultimately say whether, despite all the asperities he expressed, he was gentle, or despite all his sensualities, sentimental.

Certain peculiarities of elocution, faint traces of which were to be found in Bergotte’s conversation, were not exclusively his own; for when, later on, I came to know his brothers and sisters I found those peculiarities much more pronounced in them. There was something abrupt and harsh in the closing words of a cheerful sentence, something faint and dying at the end of a sad one. Swann, who had known the Master as a boy, told me that in those days one used to hear on his lips, just as much as on his brothers’ and sisters’, those family inflexions, shouts of violent merriment interspersed with murmurings of a long-drawn melancholy, and that in the room in which they all played together he used to perform his part, better than any of them, in their symphonies, alternately deafening and subdued. However characteristic it may be, the sound that escapes from a person’s lips is fugitive and does not survive him. But it was not so with the pronunciation of the Bergotte family. For if it is difficult ever to understand, even in the
Meistersinger
, how an artist can invent music by listening to the twittering of birds, yet Bergotte had transposed and perpetuated in his prose that manner of dwelling on words which repeat themselves in shouts of joy or fall drop by drop in melancholy sighs. There are in his books just such closing phrases where the accumulated sonorities are prolonged (as in the last chords of the overture of an opera which cannot bring itself to a close and repeats several times over its final cadence before the conductor finally lays down his baton), in which, later on, I was to find a musical equivalent for those phonetic “brasses” of the Bergotte family. But in his own case, from the moment when he transferred them to his books, he ceased instinctively to make use of them in his speech. From the day on which he had begun to write—and thus all the more markedly later, when I first knew him—his voice had abandoned this orchestration for ever.

These young Bergottes—the future writer and his brothers and sisters—were doubtless in no way superior, far from it, to other young people, more refined, more intellectual than themselves, who found the Bergottes rather noisy, not to say a trifle vulgar, irritating in their witticisms which characterised the tone, at once pretentious and asinine, of the household. But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth’s surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. The day on which the young Bergotte succeeded in showing to the world of his readers the tasteless household in which he had spent his childhood, and the not very amusing conversations between himself and his brothers, was the day on which he rose above the friends of his family, more intellectual and more distinguished than himself; they in their fine Rolls-Royces might return home expressing due contempt for the vulgarity of the Bergottes; but he, in his modest machine which had at last “taken off,” soared above their heads.