Introduction .sx Anthony Powell .sx IN introducing Jocelyn Brooke's investigation of Proust and Joyce , I shall not pick out the plums of the essay by naming the many points which I enjoyed in it .sx These can be read in their proper place .sx There are , however , aspects of Brooke's approach to which attention should be drawn .sx In the first place , he is ( like myself ) a warm admirer of both great writers .sx His criticism is that of love , not hate .sx This makes it far more valuable .sx In the second place , he writes in a manner that is completely informal .sx The views are expressed just as if we were talking with him over the dinner table .sx To write literary criticism in this way is not as easy as it looks .sx To discuss writers in this easy , conversational style , dealing with important topics at one moment , trivial at another , is a delightful gift , and often gets to the core of a book in a way that more formal articles never manage to attain .sx I agree with almost everything Jocelyn Brooke says , except that I think I should myself place a wider gulf between the two writers , Proust seeming to me to possess greatly superior powers .sx The essential gift of a novelist is that he should be interested in people .sx Proust comes through this test with flying colours ; Joyce gets held up with his own special preoccupations .sx If Joyce does not know about anything- and vast areas of human experience are completely alien to him- he usually sneers at it .sx We may tire of Proust's determination that in the end every character he writes about should be homosexual or of his obsession with jealousy .sx In spite of these King Charles's heads , one continues to feel that everything and everybody fascinated him- perhaps at times too much .sx Gissing used to ask ~'Has he starved ?sx ' when a novelist was named , implying starvation to be a 6sine qua non of effective writing .sx Joyce did , of course , starve ; Proust did not , except when the waiters at the Ritz were inattentive .sx Indeed , Proust is a good example to prove the futility of Gissing's question .sx I myself should prefer to ask :sx 'Does he put over what he sets out to say ?sx ' Here , both Proust and Joyce must be admitted to be successful .sx How is this done ?sx Brooke maintains- and I cannot disagree- that Proust was a 'bad' novelist when it came to narrative , that Joyce had a dull mind .sx In both cases Brooke's arguments and instances are undeniable .sx At the same time no one can exactly say how certain things are 'put over' in a novel .sx There exists the mystery of art .sx If the works of Joyce and Proust were pruned of their obvious faults , would they remain of equal stature ?sx Brooke observes that both writers were regarded thirty years ago as immensely daring in their treatment of sex , as well as in their innovations of style .sx There can be no doubt at all that their fame owes something to this sexual emancipation of language .sx Indeed , one might paraphrase Nietzsche by saying that a good novel in those days justified some obscenity , but that good obscenity often justified a very bad novel in the eyes of the highbrows .sx It is interesting to consider how a novelist like Galsworthy would now be regarded , had some sudden illness or accident produced a psychological change in him , resulting in his treatment of subjects then regarded as forbidden .sx Supposing in The Forsyte Saga instead of Irene leaving Soames for Bosiney , Soames had left Irene on account of that same young architect ?sx What would have been the verdict of those who now deplore , and no doubt rightly deplore , Galsworthy's lack of psychology and his cardboard characters ?sx Would he have been hailed as a novelist who saw beneath the surface of things ?sx It is an interesting question .sx However , there we enter a world of vast speculation .sx I shall say no more than to recommend Jocelyn Brooke's trial of Proust and Joyce on the serious charge of chronic literary imperfection .sx PROUST and JOYCE .sx The case for the Prosecution .sx =1 .sx Combray and Rathmines .sx PROUST and Joyce :sx their names , even today , tend to be bracketed together , and thirty-odd years ago the conjunction was commoner still , chiefly I suppose because- for the generation which grew up in the twenties- they were without question the dominant literary figures of that period .sx To a later age , however , the association may seem surprising , for surely no two writers could , on the face of it , have been more dissimilar , either as artists or as human beings .sx If Ulysses has little in common with A la Recherche du Temps Perdu , still less has the lower middle-class Dubliner , brought up in poverty and squalor , with the rich French rentier , the prote@2ge@2 of the Faubourg Saint Germain .sx So wholly disparate do they seem , indeed , that it comes as something of a shock to remember that , on at least one occasion , the two men did actually meet in the flesh , though the encounter seems to have been anything but a success .sx Yet for all their dissimilarity , Proust and Joyce have a good deal more in common than one might suppose , and the tendency to bracket their names together is less unjustified than appears at first sight .sx Both , in the first place , were revolutionary writers , in the sense that their work revealed new aspects of the human mind and of man in relation to society .sx Both , too , were technical innovators , though in the case of Proust his innovations were mainly in the sphere of narrative and construction ( for all his stylistic complexity , he remained basically faithful to the traditions of French prose ) , whereas Joyce , after a series of incredibly ingenious and daring experiments , was compelled at last to invent a brand-new language of his own .sx Both Proust and Joyce , moreover , attempted to portray in their works the totality of human experience :sx to write , in fact , a kind of Come@2die Humaine ; though Ulysses , I suppose , is the Human Comedy seen through the wrong end of a telescope- or , as Aldous Huxley's typewriter once brilliantly expressed it , the " Human " .sx In both , however , this ambition was partially frustrated by a shared egocentricity , a neurotic self-absorption hitherto unparalleled among great writers .sx For Joyce as much as for Proust , it was the " I" , the moi , with which he was ultimately concerned :sx both were autobiographers for whom the objective world about them was largely subordinated to their own specialized and highly subjective mental attitudes .sx For both of them this intense self-absorption was to result , finally , in a kind of partial insanity , aggravated in the one case by chronic asthma , in the other by near-blindness and alcoholism .sx With Proust , this insanity took the form of a maniacal obsession with sexual jealousy ; with Joyce ( the purer artist of the two ) , his reason foundered in a morass of over-elaborated verbal techniques and private jokes .sx Both , finally , were obsessed to an inordinate degree with the past .sx With Proust , le temps perdu is the eponymous hero of his novel ; and as a human being , though remaining intellectually alert , he virtually lost contact- save on a relatively superficial level- with the outside world after the age of thirty-three .sx In Joyce's case the retreat from present reality was earlier and even more uncompromising :sx after the 16th of June , 1904 ( when he was twenty-two ) , his whole attention as an artist became concentrated , exclusively and obsessively , upon the world of Dublin in the nineties and the early nineteen-hundreds , with special reference to the naive and limited preoccupations of his own boyhood and adolescence .sx It would hardly , in fact , be going too far to say that the similarities between Proust and Joyce , considered as psychological types , outweigh their differences .sx Yet I think that the habitual bracketing of their names had , a generation ago- and perhaps has still- a more cogent and less respectable explanation :sx namely , that both writers had acquired a reputation for obscenity and " immorality .sx " To young people today this must seem scarcely credible , but it is easy to forget how profoundly the climate of moral opinion has changed during the last thirty years .sx In the case of Proust the charge of " obscenity " must seem particularly surprising , for La Recherche is seldom obscene in the crude sense of the term ; yet the fact remains that Proust was the first important novelist to deal extensively and in detail with the then forbidden subject of homosexuality , and in 1922 , even in France , the publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe was attended by something of a scandal .sx ( In England , Scott Moncrieffs' translation was delayed until 1929 , when it appeared in a limited edition , issued not by Chatto and Windus , who had published the earlier volumes , but by the more courageous American firm of Alfred Knopf .sx ) Joyce is another matter :sx it can scarcely be denied that Ulysses- judged even by the far laxer standards of today- is defiantly and in every possible sense obscene .sx Personally , if I were Home Secretary , I would impose no restrictions whatsoever in such matters , but if rules are going to be imposed at all , then Ulysses must surely top the list in any Index Expurgatorius , and the fact that it is now obtainable in this country ( and has been for a quarter of a century ) makes nonsense of the existing regulations .sx That its obscenity is aesthetically justified may be perfectly true , though I think this a doubtful point ; but obscene it undoubtedly is , within the meaning of any act which attempts to define so equivocal a term .sx On the other hand , Joyce is the least pornographic of writers :sx nobody , I should imagine , has ever been thrown into transports of sexual excitement by the " obscene " passages in Ulysses , though one can never , of course , be sure , for almost any book , however harmless by intention , is capable of provoking an erotic thrill in somebody .sx ( I know people who find Bulldog Drummond far more exciting in this respect than Lady Chatterley's Lover ; and did not Lawrence himself profess to find Jane Eyre revoltingly " pornographic" ?sx ) If Joyce , in revising Ulysses , could have been persuaded to omit the more flagrant obscenities ( most of which , after all , are incidental to the book , and do not form an integral part of it ) , we should have been left with an experimental novel of great interest , which would doubtless have created a considerable stir in avant-garde circles at the time .sx But would Joyce's reputation , in such circumstances , have survived his lifetime- and survived ( one might add ) the publication of Finnegans Wake ?sx Would Ulysses and Finnegan have provided- as in fact is the case- a perpetual and profitable stamping-ground for the writers of Ph .sx D. theses ?sx It is possible ; but I , myself , rather doubt it .sx Similarly , if Proust's treatment of sex had been as orthodox as that of , say , Galsworthy , A la Recherche du Temps Perdu would still remain a great novel ; for that matter , when one compares Swann and the Jeunes Filles- in which the theme of homosexuality remains latent- with the shoddiness of the later volumes , one is inclined to wonder whether it might not , in fact , have been even greater .sx True , it is hard to imagine A la Recherche without Charlus ; yet it is at least arguable that , if Proust had made Charlus a womanizer , and Albertine a perfectly normal heterosexual girl , the novel would have been , qua novel , neither better nor worse than it is .sx But would it , one wonders , have created quite so much stir as , in effect , it did ?sx Once again , I have my doubts .sx Both writers- no doubt lacking this adventitious appeal- would have enjoyed a certain re@2clame in literary circles , but neither , I feel , would have attained to the celebrity which each , in fact , achieved during his lifetime , and which survives to this day .sx The twenties were a period of sexual emancipation , Havelock Ellis and Freud had not done their work for nothing , and it went without saying that enlightened persons should fly , from the highest motives , to the defence of any serious writer who treated the subject of sex with greater freedom than his predecessors .sx