In Search of Lost Time Vol.2: Bergotte and genius

The narrator’s first meeting with his childhood hero and favourite writer Bergotte must be one of the most interesting sequences in Within a Budding Grove, perhaps in all of In Search of Lost Time. 

“… there, in front of me, like one of those conjurers whom we see standing whole and unharmed, in their frock-coats, in the smoke of a pistol shot out of which a pigeon had just fluttered, my greeting was returned by a youngish, uncouth, thickset and myopic little man, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a goatee beard.” (Vol.2, P.1) 

We have heard of the name Bergotte in Swann’s Way, and heard M. de Norpois’s impression of him at the beginning of Within a Budding Grove, but don’t see him till the narrator finally meets him at the Swanns’. 

“… Starting from them, I should never have arrived at that snail-shell nose; but starting from the nose, which did not appear to be in the slightest degree ashamed of itself, but stood out alone there like a grotesque ornament fastened on his face, I found myself proceeding in a totally different direction from the work of Bergotte, and must arrive, it would seem, at the mentality of a busy and preoccupied engineer, of the sort who when you accost them in the street think it correct to say: “Thanks, and you?” before you have actually inquired of them how they are…” (ibid.) 

Proust is hilarious! 

Then Proust—or the narrator—spends pages writing about the differences between Bergotte the writer and Bergotte the person in real life, and analysing the nature of literary genius. 

“… 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.” (ibid.)

George Eliot is undeniably more intellectual, but I think Jane Austen and Emily Bronte are both better writers.

“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…” (ibid.) 

Part of me thinks Proust has a point, but part of me feels uneasy. 

This is how M. de Norpois describes Bergotte: 

““… Ah! there’s a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books. It would be impossible to imagine an individual who corresponded less to his—more pretentious, more pompous, more ill-bred. Vulgar at times, at others talking like a book, and not even like one of his own, but like a boring book, which his, to do them justice, are not—such is your Bergotte. He has the most confused and convoluted mind…”” (ibid.) 

We later see how ill-bred he is: 

“The malice with which Bergotte spoke thus to a stranger of the friends in whose house he had for so long been received as a welcome guest was as new to me as the almost tender tone he invariably adopted towards them in their presence.” (ibid.) 

Can a pretentious, pompous, ill-bred, vulgar, and boring person be a literary genius? The great writers I love, as far as I know (I mean, hear from other people), were not vulgar or boring. I can more readily accept a great writer being cruel and selfish in real life, than them being pompous, vulgar, or boring.

It also makes me wonder: people have often said that Bergotte is based on Anatole France, or at least the meeting is based on young Proust’s disappointing meeting with Anatole France. Are these lines about him? Was Anatole France like this? I can’t say. But if they are, Anatole France’s reputation has greatly fallen—nobody talks about him now, I doubt he’s even big in his home country—so the writer Proust calls a literary genius, in spite of dullness and lack of intellect, is not really a genius after all. 

The next part is also interesting: 

“As for those other vices to which M. de Norpois had alluded, that almost incestuous love affair, which was made still worse, people said, by a want of delicacy in the matter of money, if they contradicted in a shocking manner the trend of his latest novels […] those vices did not necessarily prove, supposing that they were fairly imputed to Bergotte, that his literature was a lie and all his sensitiveness mere play-acting.” (ibid.)

Here Proust discusses the questions that have bothered people for years: why were some writers who showed such humanity, such sensitivity and compassion and understanding in their novels such assholes in real life? 

“It is the vices (or merely the weaknesses and follies) of the circle in which they live, the meaningless conversation, the frivolous or shocking lives of their daughters, the infidelity of their wives, or their own misdeeds that writers have most often castigated in their books, without, however, thinking to alter their way of life or improve the tone of their household.” (ibid.) 

He goes further: 

“Perhaps the more the great writer developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with the beard, the more his own personal life was drowned in the flood of all the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty of imagining those other lives. But at the same time, because he imagined the feelings of others as completely as if they had been his own, whenever the occasion arose for him to have to deal with an unfortunate person, at least in a transitory way, he would do so not from his own personal standpoint but from that of the sufferer himself, a standpoint from which he would have been horrified by the language of those who continue to think of their own petty concerns in the presence of another’s grief. With the result that he gave rise everywhere to justifiable rancour and to undying gratitude.” (ibid.) 

I think he’s right.

I see this post as a starting point, so tell me your thoughts! Discuss! Argue!