The Irish Proust: Cultural Crossings from Beckett to McGahern, Max McGuinness and Michael Cronin (eds) Bloomsbury Academic, 224 pp, £76.50, ISBN: ‎978-1350499348

As one of the speakers at the 2022 conference on the theme of Proust and Ireland in the MoLI (Museum of Literature Ireland), organised by Max McGuinness and Michael Cronin, I can attest to the fact that it was a stimulating couple of days. It was appropriate also that the room used for the conference was the physics theatre of the former Earlsfort Terrace campus of University College Dublin, immortalised by the scene from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which was set there.

All the essays in the collection are expanded and revised versions of papers given four years ago, two of them translated into English from French. The Irish Proust is a gem, having unearthed previously unknown links – or crossings, to use the noun employed in the title – between France and Ireland. For example, we discover how Irish writers such as Beckett, Wilde, Joyce, Mary Devenport O’Neill, Brendan Behan, McGahern and Elizabeth Bowen engaged with and were influenced by Proust’s ideas and techniques, many of which they applied to their own art. We also learn in Michael Cronin’s chapter about the importance of modern language departments in Irish universities, which are among the oldest in the world, where Proust was taught from a very early stage. It is not without significance that Irish writers of the stature of Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Mary Lavin and Seán O’Faoláin studied French at third level, a decision that enhanced their knowledge of a different language, literature and culture and nurtured their writing.

In addition to the more obvious literary angles, certain essays in the collection examine the Irish themes within Proust’s work, which were far more numerous than I would have thought – I will return to this later. Equally modernism is a common thread, which may explain why there are so many Irish authors who admitted they had been influenced by one of the leading French exponents of this genre.

Proust has always been an intriguing figure in world literature, his reputation cemented by the formidable In Search of Lost Time. As a French undergraduate in Maynooth many decades ago, I had my first introduction to Proust and was somewhat intimidated by his dense style and sentences that seemed to go on forever. I also found his array of forlorn characters and the various shenanigans they got up to in the Parisian salons frequented by writers, artists and members of high society somewhat removed from my own daily experience.

Reading Proust again in later life has been far more rewarding. I have come to appreciate the massive achievement it was for a writer whose poor health meant that he spent most of his life largely cut off from social interaction yet managed to produce an oeuvre with formidable insights into the human condition.

It should come as no surprise that Joyce, Ireland’s most famous man of letters, met Proust briefly on at least one occasion, at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris in May 1922. Nobody can say for sure what transpired during their brief encounter, but what is clear is that Proust was not keen to spend too much time in the company of someone he viewed as a rather brash Irishman. It was definitely a missed opportunity as there were so many areas of shared interest that should have brought the two foremost figures in modernist writing closer.

Thanks to Grace Neville I became aware of the French cartoonist Claire Bretécher who captured the general engouement with Proust in her renowned satirical work Les Frustrés, whose characters constantly strive to convey the impression of being sophisticates. One of the ways they do this is to remark that they are rereading Proust – very few manage to read all of Proust, let alone reread him – a task that is undoubtedly beyond the limited intellectual capacity of Bretécher’s characters. This example serves to underline Proust’s reputation as a world-renowned literary figure.

The foreword is written by Niall Burgess, Irish ambassador to France, and explains how the Irish embassy on the Rue Foch was built by the Marquis de Breteuil, who was the inspiration for Hannibal de Bréauté in À la recherche, a great friend of Swann as well as being Odette’s lover. Hannibal was also a socialite, snob, writer and art lover who was often found in the ‘most elevated of circles’, as pointed out by Burgess. The residence he built is reflective of his good taste and appreciation of architecture, as anyone who has visited the building will attest to.

Not every Irish writer was enamoured with Proust, the editors note in their introduction. George Moore, never one to lose an opportunity to take a verbal swipe, once stated that ‘reading Proust is like ploughing a field with knitting needles’. The French writer also fell foul of the Irish censorship board, which placed the final four volumes of À la recherche on the banned list, a fate suffered by virtually every writer of merit at the time. Flann O’Brien made references to Proust occasionally in his ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column in The Irish Times. In riposte to a comment by the president of University College Cork, Alfred O’Rahilly, who, referring to O’Brien, spoke of ‘a Catholic who masquerades as Myles na gCopaleen’, the latter retorted in a jeu de mots worthy of the French writer: ‘Really, I have no ecclesiastic ambitions and I never was a member of the Jesuits: I am merely a spoiled Proust.’

In addition to providing precise and insightful summaries of the chapters in the collection, the introduction also remarks that while Beckett’s first published book (which was essentially a long essay), simply entitled Proust, received much attention as a work that tells us as much about Beckett’s future artistic preoccupations as it does about Proust’s work, the latter’s broader presence within Irish letters has been largely ignored. And yet Proust seems ‘to long for the appearance of an Irish figure who would provide a vaguely romantic contrast to the contemptuous familiarity of Anglo-French interactions that resurfaces in the Recherche’s withering portrayal of Anglomania’. Later in the introduction the editors state that Proust may have considered attributing some Irish ancestry to the Guermantes family in his main work.

There are eleven chapters in the collection and all are of an exceptionally high quality. A few particularly caught my attention. The chapter ‘In Search of a Gaelic Proust’, by Max McGuinness, reveals how in Du côté de chez Swann Mme de Villeparisis is given an elevated social status by her relation to Marshal Patrice de Mac Mahon, who served as the second president of the Third Republic in 1873-1879. As one might guess from his name, Mac Mahon was of Irish descent and came from a family of exiled Catholic gentry. Proust was also intrigued by Celtic metempsychosis, the ancient belief most often associated with the Druids that the soul is immortal and passes from one body to another (human or animal) after death. McGuinness concludes: ‘… we can discern faint traces of Gaelic Ireland that epitomise both the transnational cultural framework of the Recherche and its serpentine oscillations between past and present, enchantment and disenchantment, mythos and reality’.

Barry McCrea’s contribution, ‘Revivalist Proust’, opens with the statement that Proust’s imprint is not as obvious on Irish fiction as on other European traditions. This he attributes to ‘the still undiminished dominance of Joyce in the literary imagination’, which naturally left little room for many external influences. McCrea further notes that there is an expectation within the Irish fiction tradition up to the present that practitioners demonstrate linguistic pyrotechnics and invention in an attempt to mark a clear distinction from English literary conventions.

Given his working class background and strong republican ideals, it may seem strange to many that Brendan Behan should have been so taken with Proust. However, Deirdre McMahon’s essay cogently argues that Behan was fascinated with French literature from childhood onwards and displayed an affinity with ‘his contemporary modernist confrères and forebears’. McMahon argues that the themes he explored in his work, which show a real interest in modernist techniques, made it ‘logical’ that Behan would read Proust and implement some of the same literary practices in his own oeuvre.

Richard Robinson discovers traces of Proust in McGahern’s Memoir, which regularly highlights the lapses and unreliability of memory, something that struck the Irish writer most forcibly when he consulted his sisters about certain experiences they had lived through but remembered differently from him: ‘This very admission,’ Robinson writes, ‘reveals how Memoir is pregnant with questions about what has been occluded – forcefully suppressed, unconsciously repressed – from the narrative.’ He shows how McGahern borrows almost word for word some of Proust’s ideas expressed in Days of Reading. I would add that passages from Beckett’s Proust are very close to ones that can be found in McGahern’s literary credo, ‘The Image’, with few, if any, changes. The sense of place as a trigger for involuntary memory is another aspect found in both writers’ work. For example, walking through the lanes of Leitrim in later life brings McGahern back to the time when he went to school along those same lanes hand-in-hand with his mother, with whom he was fleetingly reunited through involuntary memory. He observed in Memoir: ‘I suspect it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss.’

According to Robinson the last pages of Memoir ‘show that death and art are mutually implicative. The picking of the flowers that apotheosises the [McGahern’s] mother is at the same time a Proustian essence: the act of an artist as well as the mourning son’. Robinson’s observations show a real appreciation of both Proust and McGahern, which makes this perhaps the stand-out essay in the collection.

The two concluding essays deal with Elizabeth Bowen’s enthralment with Proust. She described him as ‘a very dangerous influence’, an observation most likely attributable to the magnetism of Proust’s style that writers sometimes end up imitating unknowingly. Reading Bowen’s last two novels, The Little Girls and Eva Trout, as illustrating good examples of a Proustian influence, Heather Ingman maintains that they both contain several examples of involuntary memory and highlight the ravages associated with the inexorable passing of time.

This selective commentary on The Irish Proust seeks to give a flavour of just how important this book is in understanding the way in which ideas are transmitted from country to country. There are many delights, such as Beckett’s declaration of his admiration of Le Temps retrouvé in a letter quoted in the fine essay by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer (the granddaughter of the Nobel Laureate François Mauriac), in which he stated it was ‘as great a piece of sustained writing as anything to be found anywhere’, adding that it was ‘more satisfactory at every reading’. That is as good a note as any to bring this review to an end.