The last scene in the book takes place in New York, when Nick sees Tom on Fifth Avenue and refuses to shake hands. It is clear from this meeting that Tom still has no idea that Daisy was driving the car, but for Nick this innocence is irrelevant, even dangerous. It is what enchants and disfigures America: Gatsby betrays and is betrayed.49 He feels that even if Tom is unaware that Daisy was driving, their behaviour is so despicable it really makes no difference to his judgement of them. He also has some harsh words to say about Daisy, that she smashed up things, and then ‘retreated back’ into her money. In attacking her, Nick is forsaking the blood link, disallying himself from the ‘Nordics’ who have ‘produced civilisation.’ What Tom and Daisy have left behind, despite their breeding, is catastrophe. The Buchanans – and others like them – sail through life in a moral vacuum, incapable of distinguishing the significant from the trivial, obsessed with the trappings of luxury. Everywhere you turn in The Great Gatsby is a wasteland: moral, spiritual, biological, even, in the Valley of Ashes, topographical.
James Joyce and Marcel Proust met in 1922, on 18 May, after the first night of Igor Stravinsky’s Renard, at a party for Serge Diaghilev also attended by Pablo Picasso, who had designed the sets. Afterwards Proust gave Joyce a life home in a taxi, and during the journey the drunken Irishman told Proust he had never read a single word he had written. Proust was very offended and took himself off to the Ritz, where he had an agreement that he would always be fed, however late.50
Joyce’s insult was unbecoming. After the delay in publication of other volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu, caused by war, Proust had published four tides in fairly rapid succession. A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (which won the Prix Goncourt) was published in 1919, Le Côté de Guermantes came out the year after, and both Le Côté de Guermantes II and Sodome et Gomorrhe I were released in May 1921. Sodome et Gomorrhe II was published in May 1922, the very month Proust and Joyce met. Three more volumes – La Prisonnière, Albertine disparue, and Le temps retrouvé — all came out after Proust died in 1922.
Despite the delay in publication, Jeunes filles and Le Coté de Guermantes take us back to Swann, the salons of Paris, the minutiae of aristocratic snobbishness, the problems associated with Swann’s love for Gilberte and Odette. But with Sodome et Gomorrhe there is a change, and Proust fixes his gaze on one of the areas singled out by Eliot and Joyce: the landscape of sex in the modern world. However, unlike those two, who wrote about sex outside marriage, outside the church, casual and meaningless sex, Proust focused his attention on homosexuality. Proust, who was himself homosexual, had suffered a double tragedy during the war years when his driver and typist, Alfred Agostinelli, with whom he had fallen in love, left him for a woman and went to live in the south of France. A short while later, Agostinelli was killed in a flying accident, and for months Proust was inconsolable.51 After this episode, homosexuality begins to make a more frank appearance in his work. Proust’s view was that homosexuality was more widespread than generally realised, that many more men were homosexual than even they knew, and that it was a malady, a kind of nervous complaint that gave men female qualities (another echo of Otto Weininger). This changed dramatically Proust’s narrative technique. It becomes apparent to the reader that a number of the male characters lead a double life. This makes their stiff, self-conscious grandeur and their snobbery more and more absurd, to the extent that Sodome et Gomorrhe finally becomes subversive of the social structure that dominates the earlier books. The most enviable life, he is showing us, is a low comedy based on deceit.
In fact, the comedy is far from funny for the participants.52 The last books in the sequence are darker; the war makes an appearance, and there is a remarkable description of grief in Albertine disparue. Sex also continues to make its presence felt. But possibly the most poignant moment comes in the very last book, when the narrator steps on two uneven flagstones and an involuntary memory floods in on him, just as it did at the very start of the series. Proust does not bring us full circle, however. This time the narrator refuses to follow that path, preferring to keep his mind 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, and reconciled.’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 as passing false money) works, some episodes of life, such as a boy blowing his brains out, will always remain at some level a mystery, inexplicable. In such a world, what rules is one to live by? The Counterfeiters is perhaps the most realistic diagnosis of our times. The novel offers no prescription; it infers that none is really available. If our predicament is ultimately tragic, why don’t more people commit suicide? That too is a mystery.