Great Man's Trial Run

JEAN SANTEUIL (744 pp.)--Marcel Proust--Simon & Schuster ($5.95).

Of all literary games, few are more exacting than Proustmanship. Questions of who really wrote Shakespeare or what Joyce's Finnegans Wake means are of no interest to the devout Proustman, who spends his life, like a woodpecker on a forest giant, working his way up and down the Master's monolithic novel, Remembrance of Things Past. As the Proustman has more than a million words and hundreds of characters to examine, he has had reason to be thankful that the Master left but a single major tome behind.

Abruptly, the situation has changed. Some years ago a French graduate student named Bernard de Fallois told Proustman Andre Maurois that he was planning a thesis on Proust. De Fallois, with Maurois' help, got permission from Marcel Proust's niece to explore the Master's belongings. Seventy notebooks and "several boxes of torn and detached pages" fell into De Fallois' hands, and he managed to piece together a novel "the existence of which nobody had so much as suspected." Jean Santeuil, written between 1896 and 1900, now appears in English translation for the first time--to the stately booming of literary big shots and the high salutations of Proustian fifers.

With Cork on the Walls. "I talk about MY book as though I were never to write another," Proust wrote when he was working on Jean Santeuil. In a way, Proust was right. Jean Santeuil is primarily the trial run of Remembrance of Things Past. In it can be seen the fascinating spectacle of the great man growing in embryo--groping in the dark, exerting limbs that are still too frail to be usable, making movements that are uncertain and un controlled. Twenty years were to pass before Proust brought these beginnings to maturity (he died in 1922, before the last of Remembrance was published).

Remembrance of Things Past is just what its title suggests--a backward search through sessions of sweet, silent thought into the memories of a lifetime. Like Joyce's Ulysses, it came into being when notions regarding the womb, the trauma, the unconscious were casting something like a dream-spell upon rational thinkers. Like Ulysses in this respect. Remembrance reads like a never-ending dream. But just as Ulysses manages also to portray the life and times of Joyce's Dublin, so Remembrance seems to many the greatest portrayal ever made of Proust's turn-of-the-century France.

Jean Santeuil has no such stature. The Master is young, shy, afraid. As in Remembrance, Proust starts his novel with the hero's memories of having to go to bed as a boy--"the wretched candle must be put out and he lie there . . . abandoned . . . to the horrible, the shapeless suffering which, little by little, would grow as vast as solitude." But Proust, with youthful naivete, tried to protect his own thin skin and his mother's feelings by pretending that he was not writing autobiography. In an introduction to Jean Santeuil, he declared the book to be the posthumous work of a novelist named "C." and a faith ful record of C.'s personal experiences.

This fabricated introduction is one of the book's most revealing sections. It is a young writer's dream of what a great novelist should be. C. is a tough but highly sensitive man who has a wonderful way with women and feels at home everywhere. He frolics when it suits him with dukes and princesses, but he is happiest in the company of fishermen and peasants. He has all life at his fingertips and himself under near perfect discipline. C., in fact, is the exact opposite of what the great novelist usually is. He is the typical creation of a hypersensitive, ailing recluse who lined the walls of his room with cork to keep out the din of the world.

With Pebbles in the Mouth. The book describes Hero Jean's childhood, schooldays, first love, adolescence, and first explorations of French society and fashion. It includes long, disconnected sections about city and country life, the inexorable flow of time, shattered love, social scandal (the Dreyfus Affair). Again and again, like "a short passage on the violin," says Maurois in his introduction, themes appear which in Remembrance will be developed on a symphonic scale. Characters make their first shy bows, mere ghosts of what they will become. Many of Remembrance's greatest characters never appear at all; many of Jean Santeuil's will never appear again. Absent, too, as Maurois says, are the master themes of the later works, i.e., "the metamorphosis of a weak and nervous child into an artist . . . the decision to write in the first person, and the courage to plunge into the sulphurous abyss of Sodom" (the homosexual side of French life).

Proust loved the long, winding sentence, weaving its way like a slow bus in and out of commas and semicolons, incessantly pausing to set down and pick up, and in the end, almost miraculously, reaching its distant terminus. This method, the very essence of Proust's view of time and memory, gets its early trials in Jean Santeuil, and the trials are more touching than impressive. They are the muttering of struggling young genius, practicing with a mouthful of pebbles for the grand oratory that is yet to come.

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