Little Green Crabs

John Bayley

• Albertine gone by Marcel Proust, translated by Terence Kilmartin
  Chatto, 99 pp, £11.95, August 1989, ISBN 0 7011 3359 7
• Marcel Proust: A Biography by George Painter
  Chatto, 446 pp, £20.00, August 1989, ISBN 0 7011 3421 6
• The Book of Proust by Philippe Michel-Thiriet, translated by Jan Dalley
  Chatto, 406 pp, £25.00, August 1989, ISBN 0 7011 3360 0
• Marcel Proust. Selected Letters: Vol II, 1904-1909 edited by Philip Kolb, translated by Terence Kilmartin
  Collins, 482 pp, £25.00, September 1989, ISBN 0 00 217078 7

One of Proust’s friends is supposed to have said of him that beauty did not really interest him: it had too little to do with desire. A remark which is not entirely lacking insight. It might be said that the relation of the two fascinated Proust as they had fascinated no writer before him, and he perceived that the kinds of pleasure involved in the two concepts were indivisible. He was the brilliant analyst of sensations and experiences which the Victorians tasted and created without critical examination, and not the analyst only but the chemist who broke down this matter into its component parts, which have subsequently remained separate. A felix culpa in some ways, no doubt, but with disastrous results also, for the wholly unselfconscious energy which fused the pair in, say, the best poetry of Tennyson and Browning now becomes so well aware of what it is up to. Had he come across it, Proust would have been enchanted by Browning’s ‘Meeting at Night’, with its astonishing report of the concentration of desire: