This mockery of Albertine’s verbal habits explains Proust’s particular frustration with Louis Ganderax.
Louis Ganderax was a leading early-twentieth-century man of letters and the literary editor of La Revue de Paris. In 1906 he was asked to edit the correspondence of Georges Bizet, and to write a preface for the collection. It was a great honor, and a great responsibility. Bizet, who had died some thirty years earlier, was a composer of worldwide significance, whose place in posterity was assured by his opera Carmen and his Symphony in C Major. There was understandable pressure on Ganderax to produce a preface worthy of standing at the head of a genius’s correspondence.
Georges Bizet
Unfortunately, Ganderax was something of a goldfinch, and in an attempt to sound grand—far grander than he must have thought himself naturally to be—he ended up writing a preface of enormous, almost comic pretension.
Louis Ganderax
Lying in bed reading the newspaper in the autumn of 1908, Proust came upon an extract of Ganderax’s preface, whose prose style annoyed him so much that he exorcised his feelings by writing a letter to Georges Bizet’s widow, his good friend Madame Straus. “Why, when he can write so well, does he write as he does?” wondered Proust. “Why, when one says ‘1871’, add ‘that most abominable of all years.’ Why is Paris immediately dubbed ‘the great city’ and Delaunay ‘the master painter’? Why must emotion inevitably be ‘discreet’ and goodnaturedness ‘smiling’ and bereavements ‘cruel’, and countless other fine phrases that I can’t remember?”
These phrases were of course anything but fine, they were a caricature of fineness. They were phrases that might once have been impressive in the hands of classical writers, but were pompous ornamentation when stolen by an author of a later age concerned only to suggest literary grandeur.
If Ganderax had worried about the sincerity of what he was saying, he might have resisted capping the thought that 1871 was a bad year with the melodramatic claim that it was in fact “that most abominable of all years.” Paris might have been under siege by the Prussian army at the beginning of 1871, the starving populace might have been driven to eat elephants from the Jardin des Plantes, the Prussians might have marched down the Champs-Élysées and the Commune imposed tyrannical rule, but did these experiences really stand a chance of being conveyed in an overblown, thunderous phrase like this?
But Ganderax hadn’t written nonsensical fine phrases by mistake. It was the natural outcome of his ideas on how people should express themselves. For Ganderax, the priority of good writing was to follow precedent, to follow examples of the most distinguished authors in history, while bad writing began with the arrogant belief that one could avoid paying homage to great minds and write according to one’s fancy. It was fitting that Ganderax had elsewhere awarded himself the title of “Defender of the French Language.” The language needed to be protected against the assaults of decadents who refused to follow the rules of expression dictated by tradition, leading Ganderax to complain publicly if he spotted a past participle in the wrong place or a word falsely applied in a published text.
Proust couldn’t have disagreed more with such a view of tradition, and let Madame Straus know it:
Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own “tone”…. I don’t mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer—and perhaps it’s a weakness—those who write well. But they begin to write well only on condition that they’re original, that they create their own language. Correctness, perfection of style do exist, but on the other side of originality, after having gone through all the faults, not this side. Correctness this side—“discreet emotion,” “smiling good nature,” “most abominable of all years”—doesn’t exist. The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame Straus!
Ganderax had overlooked the way that every good writer in history, a history he so strongly wished to defend, had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers. If Ganderax had been alive in Racine’s day, Proust mockingly imagined that the Defender of the Language would have told even this embodiment of classical French that he couldn’t write very well, because Racine had written slightly differently than those before him. He wondered what Ganderax would have made of Racine’s lines in Andromaque:
I loved you fickle; faithful, what might I have done?…
Why murder him? What did he? By what right?
Who told you to?
Pretty enough, but didn’t these lines break important laws of grammar? Proust pictured Ganderax delivering a rebuke to Racine:
I understand your thought; you mean that since I loved you when you were fickle, what might that love have been if you had been faithful. But it’s badly expressed. It could equally well mean that
you
would have been faithful. As official defender of the French language, I cannot let that pass
.
“I’m not making fun of your friend, Madame, I assure you,” claimed Proust, who hadn’t stopped ridiculing Ganderax since the start of his letter. “I know how intelligent and learned he is. It’s a question of ‘doctrine.’ This man who is so sceptical has grammatical certainties. Alas, Madame Straus, there are no certainties, even grammatical ones.… [O]nly that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful.”
And a personal imprint is not only more beautiful, it is also a good deal more authentic. Trying to sound like Chateaubriand or Victor Hugo when you are in fact the literary editor of La Revue de Paris implies a singular lack of concern with capturing what is distinctive about being Louis Ganderax, much as attempting to sound like the archetypal bourgeois Parisian young woman (“I don’t have money to burn”; “You really are the limit!”), when you are in fact a particular young woman called Albertine, involves flattening your identity to fit a constrained social envelope. If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.
The need to leave a personal imprint on language is rarely more evident than in the personal sphere. The better we know someone, the more the standard name they bear comes to seem inadequate, and the greater the desire to twist theirs into a new one, so as to reflect our awareness of their particularities. Proust’s name on his birth certificate was Valentin Louis Georges Eugene Marcel Proust, but because this was a dry mouthful, it was appropriate that those closest to him molded it into something more suited to who Marcel was for them. For his beloved mother, he was “mon petit jaunet” (my little yellow one), or “mon petit serin” (my little canary), or “mon petit benêt” (my little clod), or “mon petit nigaud” (my little oaf). He was also known as “mon pauvre loup” (my poor wolf), “petit pauvre loup” (poor little wolf), and “le petit loup” (the little wolf—Madame Proust called Marcel’s brother, Robert, “mon autre loup,” which gives us a sense of family priorities). To his friend Reynaldo Hahn, Proust was “Buncht” (and Reynaldo “Bunibuls”); to his friend Antoine Bibesco, Proust was “Lecram” and, when he got too friendly, “le Flagorneur” (the toady) or, when not straight enough, “le Saturnien.” At home, he wanted his maid to refer to him as “Missou” and he would call her “Plouplou.”