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Marcel (Valentin-Louis-George-Eugene) Proust (1871-1922) |
French
novelist, best known for À la recherche du temps perdu
(Remembrance of Things Past), his autobiographical novel told mostly in
a stream-of-consciousness style. The work collected pieces from
Proust's childhood, observations of aristocratic life-style, gossip,
recollections of the closed world, where the author never found his
place. The key scene is when a madeleine cake (a small, rich
cookie-like pastry) enables the narrator to experience the past
completely as a simultaneous part of his present existence: "And suddenly the memory revealed itself: The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane." (from Remembrance of Things Past) Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil, near Paris, the son of an eminent doctor, Adrien Proust, and his wife, Jeanne Weil, who was from a well-to-do Alsatian Jewish family. The village of Auteuil, where Proust spent his holidays as a child, was described in an 1855 guidebook as "out of a comic opera." Later Auteuil and Illiers became the Combray of Remembrance of Things Past. Proust was baptized as Catholic, but he never practiced the religion. From 1882 to 1889 Proust attended the Lycée Condorcet, where he felt isolated and misunderstood. "We were rough with him," recalled one of his classmates. In spite of his severe asthma, from which he had suffered since childhood, Proust did his one year military service at Orléans. Proust studied law at the famous Sorbonne at the École des Sciences Politiques. He contributed to Symbolist magazines and frequented the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the wealthy and aristocratic area of Paris. During the late summer of 1895 he started to write Jean Santeuil, which he later abandoned. In 1896 his first books appeared: Portraits de peintres and Les plaisirs et les jours, with drawings by Madeleine Lemaire. Proust's unpublished texts from this period, Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve, an attack on the biographical criticism of Sainte-Beuve, were discovered in the 1950s. "It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence, a little below it but on the same stem, as every passion is accomplished by a predilection for that which surrounds its object, which has an affinity for it, which in its absence still speaks of it. So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books. Besides, is it not chiefly for them that they have been written; do they not disclose to them a thousand beauties, which remain hidden to the masses?" (Proust in Reading in Bed, selected and edited by Steven Gilbar, 1995) From 1895 to 1899 Proust worked on an autobiographical novel
that
remained unfinished. In 1899 he started to translate the English art
critic John Ruskin, without knowing much English. Ruskin was the only
English writer he had made the effort to read in the original. Proust
had learned English while suffering from a severe attacks of asthma. Proust's earliest love
affairs, which had been heterosexual, changed later into homosexual
affairs. Among them was Alfred Agostelli, who was married and was
killed in an air accident. According to some sources, Proust
frequented Le Cuziat's male brothel, but although these details have
fascinated his biographers, they have shed little light on his on his
literary accomplishments. André Gide, who had
been responsible for Gallimard's rejectiction of Swann's Way
in 1912, was one of the
rare people with whom Proust had conversations on the subject of
homosexuality. When the columnist and decadent novelist Jean
Lorrain, himself a homosexual, not only stated that Proust was a
homosexual but that he was having an affair with Lucien Daudet, the son of Alphonse
Daudet, he decided to challenge Lorrain to a duel. Both writers fired
shots and missed. Over the years, Proust had more than one duel. In
1920 he challenged the critic Paul Souday. To the age of 35 Proust lived the life of a snob and social climber in the salons. For a short time he worked as a lawyer and was active in the Dreyfuss affair, like Émile Zola and other artists and intellectuals. "A great part – perhaps the greatest – of Proust's writing is intended to show the havoc wrought in and round us by Time; and he succeeded amazingly not only in suggesting to the reader, but in making him actually feel, the universal decay invincibly creeping over everything and everybody with a kind of epic and horrible power." (Georges Lemaitre in Four French Novelists, 1938) Throughout his life Proust suffered from asthma. He was looked
after
by his Jewish mother, to whom the writer was – neurotically – attached.
After the death of his father in 1903 and mother in 1905, Proust
withdrew gradually from high-society circles. Until 1919 Proust lived
in a soundproof flat, at the 102 Boulevard Haussmann, where he devoted
himself to writing and introspection. From there he first moved to the
rue Laurent-Pichat, and then to 44 rue Hamelin, his final residence. When James Joyce met Proust at a midnight supper in the fashionable Majestic Hotel in May 1922, the two great innovative writers did not speak more than a few words with each other. "Of course the situation was impossible," Joyce recalled later. "Proust's day was just beginning. Mine was at an end." Proust was financially independent and free to start on his
great novel, À la recherche du temps perdu,
which was influenced by the autobiographies of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe and François Chateaubriand. Proust's first English
translator C.K. Scott Moncrieff renamed the work Remembrance of Things Past after
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
/ I summon up remembrance of things past". From 1910 Proust spent much time in his bedroom, often sleeping in the day and working at night. "For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V." The first volume of Proust's seven-part major work, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), came out in 1912. To gain publicity, he paid for the laudatory reviews on the front page of Le Figaro and the Journal des Debats. This massive story of 3 000 pages occupied the last decade of his life. As a half Jew, he knew what it is to be an outsider, the observed. As an onlooker in society, he turned his wordly experiences into inner experience. Being a Jew and a homosexual at the same time, Proust was involved in both of the most fashionable "vices" of the contemporary French society, which he, "the greatest witness of dejudaized Judaism" interconnected in the "darkest comparison which ever has been made on behalf of Western Judaism." ('Marcel Proust, Temoin du Judaisme dejudaize,' by J. E. van Praag, in Revue Juive de Geneve, 1937). Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) was printed at
Proust's own expense in November 1913, after Andre Gide advised the
Gallimard
publishing house to reject it. Swann's Way gained a modest
success. Gide made later an offer to publish the subsequent volumes.
Another famous writer, E.M. Forster, had his doubts about the whole
work: "The book is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no
external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched
internally, because it contains rhythm." (from Aspects
of the Novel, 1927)
Virginia Woolf read Proust throughout the 1920s. "Oh if I could write
like that! I cry," she said to Roger Fry. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, the
first English translator of Proust, was a homosexual. While
working as a spy for the British intelligence in Mussolini's Italy, he
translated À la recherche du temps
and works by Stendhal and Pirandello. The
second volume, À l'ombre des jeunes
filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove), which was delayed by
the WW I, came out in 1919, but
the next parts made Proust finally internationally famous. He was still
correcting the typescript on his deathbed, but did not manage to finish
the final volumes before his death on November 18, 1922. On the
suggestion of Jean Cocteau, Proust's brother Robert summoned two days
later
Man Ray to photograph the body of the writer on his deathbed. The
picture, which has been rarely reproduced, first appeared in a magazine
bearing the name of another photographer. According to the tradition,
Proust's last words, which he composed, are found in La Prisonnière (The
Captive) in the episode about the death of the writer Bergotte: "They
buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted
windows, his books arranged there by three keept watch like angels with
outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his
resurrection." Remembrance of Things Past does not have a clear and continuous plot line. The first two sections can be – and often are – read separately. Marcel, the narrator is not Proust but resembles him in many ways. Marcel is initially ignorant – only slowly does he begin to grasp the essence of the hidden reality. Through a series of loves and disillusionments he finds his true vocation in life. At the end he is preparing to write a novel which is like the one just presented to the reader. Marcel's childhood memories start to flow when he tastes a madeleine cake dipped in linden tea such as he was given as a child. "And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine." Memory takes the central role in the novel and apparently
insignificant details prove to be the most important. The first part
focuses on Marcel's childhood in Combray. Proust follows the lives of
three families, Marcel's own, the aristocratic de Guermantes, and the
family of the Jewish Bohemian dilettante Swann. Among the central
characters are the faithless cocotte Odette, whom Swann marries,
homosexual Baron de Charlus, partly modelled on Count Robert de
Montesquiou-Ferensac (1855-1921), an art critic, poet, and essayist,
Dutchess, Mme de Villeparisis, Robert Saint-Loup, and Marcel's great
love Albertine, who is perhaps lesbian and who dies in a riding
accident. The character was partly based on Alfred Agostinelli,
Proust's chauffeur, secretary and live-in companion. Proust gradually
deepens the portraits of his characters – Vinteuil, a modest piano
teacher, turns out to be a great composer. In the climax of the novel
the narrator fails to recognize many of his friends because they have
changed so much physically during the years. Marcel realizes that his
vocation as an artist is to capture the past still alive within us. And
being was for Proust the complete past, "that past which already
extended so far down and which I was bearing so painfully within me."
In the narration past and present merge, reality appears in
half-forgotten experiences, and parts of the past are felt differently
at different times. Proust is generally considered a pioneer of the modern novel. He made a clear distinction between man and work. The writer is a man of intuition. "A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, our social life and our vices," Proust wrote in his answer to the French critic Sainte-Beuve, who tried to understand writers by investigating their private life and environment. Proust's work widely influenced authors in different countries, among them Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. His style of long sentences, some of which extend to several pages in length, paved the way for Claude Simon's narrative inventions. Proust later said that he had from the beginning a fixed structure for the whole novel. In the construction he used photographs; the author himself had a penchant for being photographed in uniform. One biographer mentions that Proust liked tight underwear. Perhaps the best sandwich ever, the croque monsieur, was first mentioned in the second volume: "But, as we came out of the concert, and, on our way back to the hotel, had stopped for a moment on the front, my grandmother and I, to exchange a few words with Mme de Villeparisis who told us that she had ordered some croque-monsieurs and a dish of creamed eggs for us at the hotel, I saw, in the distance, coming in our direction, the Princesse de Luxembourg . . . " (translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff) Proust's literary criticism did not attract wide attention until 1954, when Contre Sainte-Beuve came out. He admired Vigny, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle, but Baudelaire was for him the greatest poet of the nineteenth century. Proust denied Henri Bergson's influence on his work, although they both were much occupied with time and memory, emphasizing duration – time lived every day rather than clock time. The most famous of Proust's essays is that on Flaubert's style, in which he compares Flaubert's grammatical use of tenses to Kant's revolution in philosophy. A prolific writer, Proust also was an avid letter writer. For further reading: Marcel Proust by S. Beckett (1931); Four French Novelists by Georges Lemaitre (1938); The Mind of Marcel Proust by F.C. Green (1949); Proust's Way by F. Mauriac (1950); Proust A. Maurois (1950); Nostalgia: A Psychoanalytic Study of Marcel Proust by M.L. Miller (1956); Proust and Literature by Walter A. Strauss (1957); Marcel Proust by R.H. Baker (1958); A Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust by Milton Hindus (1962); A Reading of Proust by W. Fowlie (1964); Proust's Narrative Technique by B.G. Rogers (1965); Marcel Proust: Critique littéraire by René de Chantal (1967); A Readers Handbook to Proust by P.A. Spalding (1975); Marcel Proust by G. Painter (1978, 2 vols.); A Readers Guide to Remembrance of Things Past by T. Kilmartin (1983); Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, ed. by Harold Bloom (1987); Proust: Philosophie du roman by Vincent Descombes (1992); Le Temps sensible by Julia Kristeva (1994, as Time and Sense in 1966); Marcel Proust: A Life by Jean-Yves Tadie (2000); Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter (2000); Proust: In the power of photography by Brassai (2001); A Night at the Majestic by Richard Davenport-Hines (2006); Monsieur Proust's Library by Anka Muhlstein (2012); Proust and the Arts, edited by Christie McDonald and François Proulx (2015); Desire: Flaubert, Proust, Fitzgerald, Miller, Lana Del Rey by Per Bjørnar Grande (2020) - See: Colette, Isaiah Berlin, André Maurois's The Quest for Proust. See also: Henri Bergson, whom Proust called "the first great metaphysician since Leibniz." Proust and Bergson knew each other socially. Proust's cousin on his mother's side, Louise Neuberger, married Bergson in 1892. Films: Célèste (1981), dir. by Percy Adlon, Eva Mattes, Jürgen Arndt, Norbert Wartha, based on the novel Monsieur Proust (1973) by Céleste Albaret, Proust's housekeeper. Selected works:
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