'Like This Little Patch of Yellow Wall'

Robert Mezey includes in his edition of The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (Modern Library, 1999) a section titled “Robinson Speaking,” which he describes as “various comments on life and the art of poetry. . . from letters and the memoirs of friends.” Sources are not otherwise identified. Most surprising is a passage from Proust’s The Captive, the 1927 English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff of La Prisonnière (1923), the fifth novel in the seven-volume sequence Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time): 

“All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—if then!—to fools.”

 

The painting is Vermeer’s View of Delft (c. 1660). Bergotte, a writer much admired by the narrator, is dying but a critic’s mention of a detail in Vermeer’s painting moves him to leave his sickbed and view the cityscape. Bergotte tells us he already knew the painting but did not remember the “patch of yellow wall.” Bergott grows dizzy and says (not quoted by Robinson): “‘That’s how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’” 

 

And here is Robinson’s comment: “That comes nearer to being one hundred per cent true than anything I have heard in a long time.” I had no idea Robinson read Proust. Scott Donaldson never mentions it in his 2007 biography of Robinson. Robinson’s approval suggests he has reached an understanding that mingled grimness and equanimity in regard to his poetry and life. Can anyone identify the source of Robinson’s observation?