Curtius on Du Bos

Du Bos's financial situation seemed to relieve him from the worry of choosing a profession. He came from the highest so­ cial class where both wealth and connections were inherited. 

His father was a friend of the Prince of Wales and president of the Union, one of the two most exclusive clubs in Paris. 

Charlie—as his friends called him—was naturally also voted in. What Proust would have given for such a distinction— which he could never attain. He "didn't belong." Charlie belonged, but it meant nothing to him. He was a disappointment. Only after a great deal of persuasion would he con­ descend to show up at least for the ballotting. After a few years not even then. He enjoyed his freedom from the cares of having to make a living, but he only used it to pursue his inclinations toward art, poetry, and the world of ideas. 

Baudelaire's remark, "J'ai grandi par Ie loisir" ["I have grown through leisure"] he applied in retrospect to himself. In a late entry in his Diary he happens to mention once the social type of the young man of the world who freely chooses to give up his position in society in order that he may devote his life en­ tirely to personal culture. This mondain defroqui is indebted to the sphere in which he grew up for one thing at any rate: 

from his twenty-fifth year he is definitely and radically im­ mune to any kind of snobbishness. It is true that the specious values of "society" have probably long inhibited the develop­ ment of the personality (that was how Du Bos explained his late awakening to himself). But once he has broken through to the true values, a reversal so complete takes place in him that he seizes upon truth with an earnestness unknown per­ haps, in the same degree, to others. These reflections bear an unmistakably personal stamp. For it was precisely the imper­ turbable seriousness with which he treated the greatest as well as the most negligible intellectual matters that often provoked the laughter of his friends. Even I was somewhat taken aback when, after the first greeting in Pontigny, he asked whether I had recently been studying Plotinus ("Avez-vous recem-ment pratique Plotin?"). I had never done so. But the con­ viction that all the better people reach for the Enneads on occasion, as one now and again takes up Hamlet or Faust, was a touching and ingratiating feature of that earnestness about intellectual tradition that has become rare in our day. 

From Proust's world, which touches that of Du Bos at so many points, we are acquainted with the "clubman" as a turn of the century Parisian type. At the time of his conversion to literature, Du Bos was a failed clubman. Later on he never got further than membership of the Pen Club, in which capac­ ity he spoke in London in 1923. The famous critic Sir Edmund Gosse, who was then seventy-four years old, invited him to the Marlborough and made clear to him that the Pen Club was meaningless. The Marlborough Club was something else again: the only club in London which required the king's approval for a change in the rules. In the smoking-room Charlie was presented to an old gentleman who could remem­ ber seeing his father in the salon of the Princesse de Sagan, the very one who is mentioned in Proust's novel. Gosse was high­ ly content (Du Bos less so), and now they could turn once more to literature, and in particular to Walter Pater, whom Sir Edmund had entertained thirty years earlier in those same rooms. 

The First World War had thrown Du Bos's existence off its course. Financial catastrophes plunged him into poverty and debt. He was forced to coin the exquisite treasures of his spirit into a living. That was especially hard for him as he did not have an official stamp. A professorship was out of the question; he had not taken any examinations, hence did not belong to the ranks of the university. But he didn't belong to those of literature either. He fitted no category—he was in-classable. Besides, he was completely unknown. And, in addi­ tion, of a touching ineptitude. This began with a lack of man­ ual dexterity, but it also made itself disastrously felt in his relations with publishers, journals, and the well-regulated game of the Paris vie litteraire, with its tacitly assumed com­ promises and conventions. Not only had Charlie never learned how to shave himself; he did not even know how to fill his fountain pen. So he had to carry an entire battery of pens with him and take them once a week to a stationery store for re­ filling. One was amazed that he could actually fill his beloved pipe by himself, but "he seemed even to smoke it with a slight affectation of realism," as M. Saint-Clair has so charmingly put it.8

Not only was he incapable of satisfying the most modest demands of the technical world, he was also unable to adjust himself to social and economic techniques. Once we boarded an overcrowded express and could only find seats in a first-class compartment (in which, by the way, was sitting an old friend of Charlie's, Edith Wharton, who, at once mundane and modern, wrote for the public orphaned by the death of Henry James). In an access of quite unfounded embarrass­ ment CharUe explained to me that formerly he had, of course, used only the first class, but now. . . . Then, when we got out at the Gare d'Orleans, Charlie, not without a touch of osten­ tation, obeyed a prompting of his moral scrupulosity. He managed to create a traffic jam at the gate of the track by insisting on paying the surcharge for crossing over to first class, to the great annoyance of the functionary on duty as well as of the stream of people at our heels. However, on a trip from Pontigny to Avalon, while searching for a better hotel (the room that had been reserved for him in the Chapeau Rouge faced the kitchen), he could also succumb to the dangerous allures of the Post Hotel, because the rooms on the first floor gave off an inner courtyard ("une sorte de modeste patio") that was overlooked by an open gallery, "ού avec mes incurables et nostalgiques visees claustrales, je vis un promenoir meditatif tout designe" ["where, with my in­ curable and nostalgic monastic aims, I saw a covered walk just right for meditation"]. So CharHe rents this secular monastic cell and finds out too late that it has no electric light, that in order to breathe it is necessary to leave the window open and thus to be constantly disturbed by the coming and going of the guests, and on top of that to sustain "a well-trained assault of fleas." After our early meeting in Berlin I had lost sight of him completely. When I saw him again at Pontigny in 1922 and 1924 we discovered so many admirations in common (the co­ ordinates were set by Giorgione and Walter Pater) that we soon became best friends. At that time I was still in quest of a France founded upon the assumptions of a general Euro­ pean mind. For that reason it made me happy to know that Gide could not live without Goethe, Shakespeare, Dostoev­ ski; that he loved Browning; that Larbaud was "naturalizing" Whitman and Joyce in France. But neither Gide nor Maurois nor Martin Du Gard nor Jacques Riviere (the prominent men at those "Decades") had any affinity with that which, for short, I will call "metaphysics," and which constitutes an es­ sential element in German life. Du Bos possessed it. To his mind Novalis was more exciting than Laclos, Meister Eck-hart more challenging than Stendhal. To be able to make this discovery at the time was overwhelming. But I soon no­ ticed that no one at Pontigny saw Du Bos as I did. People did not seem to know what they had in him. And yet it was a very carefully sifted, very advanced French public that Paul Desjardins (1859-1940) summoned to Pontigny. In the struggles between church and state during the Third Repub­ lic Desjardins had attracted attention as the advocate of an unecclesiastical idealism, first by his book Le devoir present4 (1892), then by founding the Union pour la νέήίέ. "Per­ haps you have never read Paul Desjardins," says a character in Proust.5 "He is now transformed, as I hear, into a kind of preacher monk, but in the old days. . . ." During a long life Desjardins had been able to make many valuable contacts and collect valuable memories: as a boy he had carried Corot's paintbox; in 1886 he had attended the cinquecenten-nial celebration of Heidelberg University and sent witty dis­ patches about it to the Paris newspapers in the late style of Renan; he had offered Tolstoy the same armchair that the visitor to his studio occupied; Proust had been his pupil, Bergson his fellow-student; he was a friend of Marshal Lyau-tey. All these experiences, in one way or another, stood theDecades at Pontigny in good stead. The intellectual elite that foregathered in the renovated Cistercian abbey under the motto of Saint Bernard (as a lay spiritualist Desjardins had had pristina nec periit pietas chiseled into the wall of the en­ trance hall), though receptive to the elegance with which Du Bos conducted the Decade on poetry and mysticism (as Andre Gide's Journal for 3 September 1922 attests), was nevertheless not prepared to admire him as I did at the time —and stated in a German periodical (Die Literatur, October 1925). The relations between Du Bos, who in conversation liked to call himself "France's last individualist," and Desjardins, who thought of the individual as "a legal fiction of the modern western world" (whose "dissolution" he believed he could detect in Proust), were strained, and this strain, though unavowed, has left traces in Du Bos's "Diaries." Was it Andre Gide who brought Du Bos to Pontigny? The two had met in March 1911, at the home of Jacques-fimile Blanche (1861-1942),6 which served as a residence for art­ ists. With its garden that resembled a park and its spacious ease it reminded the visitor of one of those English country houses from which many of Blanche's models came. A con­ nection was soon established. Their correspondence begins in May 1911. In October 1914, the friends found the relief or­ ganization Le Foyer Franco-Beige. This collaboration can seem surprising, however much it may do both of them credit. 

Neither the immoralist who had just charmed and outraged the public with his Caves du Vatican, nor the spiritual aes­ thete who entered rare moments in his unpublished journal as a composer notes down new combinations of sound, seemed to possess the qualifications for handling the administrative details of a social relief organization. Du Bos, to be sure, brought to the task a lifelong need to pry into other people's souls. To practice moral casuistry upon the Uving person, to bend confidentially over mental anguish, to receive confi­ dences and confessions—that had always attracted him. Al­ though not founded for this purpose, the Foyer Franco-Beige offered opportunities for such exchanges. Du Bos's friends have preserved a remark he is supposed to have made to a refugee from Belgium: "Madame, la complexite de votre cas me plonge dans la consternation."7 This sentence, which one recalled with a mixture of tenderness, irony, and humor, con­ tains many of Charlie's peculiarities: a certain solemnity, a certain ceremonious politeness, much stylistic gravity, and a great deal of unworldliness.

From: Essays on European Literature Μ By E. R. Curtius Translated by Michael Kowal