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Chapter One
In England not long ago a survey of writers and critics
revealed that the twentieth-century novelist they most
admired--and who they thought would have the most enduring
influence on the next century--was Marcel Proust.
Certainly the madeleine moistened by herbal tea has become
the most famous symbol in French literature; everyone refers
to sudden gusts of memory as "Proustian experiences." Snobs
like to point out that if the Prousts had been better-mannered
and not given to dunking, world literature would have been
the poorer for it. Even those who haven't read Proust speak of
him freely and often.
Studying him, of course, can have a disastrous effect on
a young writer, who either comes under the influence of
Proust's dangerously idiosyncratic and contagious style or
who feels that Proust has already done everything possible
in the novel form. Even Walter Benjamin, who became
Proust's German translator, wrote the philosopher Theodor
Adorno that he did not want to read one more word
by Proust than was actually necessary for him to translate
because otherwise he would become addictively dependent,
which would be an obstacle to his own production.
Graham Greene once wrote: "Proust was the greatest
novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the
nineteenth.... For those who began to write at the end of
the twenties or the beginning of the thirties, there were two
great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are
mutually complementary." Certainly Proust's fame and
prestige have eclipsed those of Joyce, Beckett, Virginia
Woolf and Faulkner, of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of
Gide and Valery and Genet, of Thomas Mann and Bertolt
Brecht, for if some of these writers are more celebrated than
Proust in their own country, Proust is the only one to have a
uniformly international reputation. The young Andrew
Holleran, who would go on to publish the most important
American gay novel of the seventies, Dancer from the Dance,
wrote a friend eight years earlier: "Robert, much has happened:
That is, I finally finished Remembrance of Things Past
and I don't know what to say--the idea that Joyce ended
the novel is so absurd; it's Proust who ended the novel,
simply by doing something so complete, monumental, perfect,
that what the fuck can you do afterwards?"
Joyce met Proust once and they exchanged scarcely a
word, even though they shared a cab together (neither had
read the other). Beckett wrote a small critical book about
Proust; Woolf admired Proust so intensely that she felt
swamped by his genius. Gide's bitterest regret was that as a
founder of a fledgling but already prestigious publishing
house, he turned down Swann's Way, the first volume of
Proust's masterpiece (he thought of Proust as a superficial
snob and a mere reporter of high-society events). Genet
began to write his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, after
reading the opening pages of Proust's Within a Budding
Grove. Genet was in prison and he arrived late in the exercise
yard for the weekly book exchange; as a result he
was forced to take the one book all the other prisoners
had rejected. And yet once he'd read the opening pages
of Proust he shut the book, wanting to savor every paragraph
over as long a period as possible. He said to himself;
"Now, I'm tranquil, I know I'm going to go from marvel to
marvel." His reading inspired him to write; he hoped to
become the Proust of the underclass.
And yet Proust was not always so appreciated, and even
his chief defenders were capable of making snide remarks
about him. Robert de Montesquiou (whose arch manners
and swooping intonations Proust loved to imitate and
whose life provided Proust with the main model for his
most memorable character, the baron de Charlus) said that
Proust's work was "a mixture of litanies and sperm" (a formula
that he considered to be a compliment). Gide accused
him of having committed "an offense against the truth"
(Gide was irritated that Proust never acknowledged his
own homosexuality in print nor ever presented homosexual
inclinations in an attractive light). Lucien Daudet, a young
writer with whom Proust had an affair (Proust liked artistic
young men with mustaches and dark eyes: that is, those
who resembled himself), at one point told Cocteau that
Proust was "an atrocious insect." Lucien's father, Alphonse
Daudet, one of the most celebrated writers of the generation
before Proust's, though now largely forgotten, announced,
"Marcel Proust is the devil!" He might well have taken
such a position, since it was Proust's seven-volume novel,
Remembrance of Things Past (in recent editions, translated
more literally as In Search of Lost Time), that surpassed--indeed,
wiped out--the fiction written in the two decades
before him. Who today reads Anatole France, Paul Bourget,
Maurice Barres, or even Alphonse Daudet? Paul Claudel,
the arch-Catholic poet and playwright, described Marcel as
"a painted old Jewess." In New York during the 1970s one
popular T-shirt, using the Yiddish word for a female gossip,
brandished the slogan "Proust Is a Yenta"!
These insults, many of them handed out by people who
on alternate days adored Proust, were neutralized by an
issue of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, France's best literary
magazine at the time, that was entirely dedicated to Proust.
It came out in 1923, just a year after Proust's death, and contained
photos of the dead master, previously unpublished
snippets from his pen, and evaluations from critics, French
but also from nations all over the world. Most touching
were the many personal testimonies. The poet Anna de
Noailles, herself a monument to egotism, praised Proust for
his ... modesty. (The duc de Gramont, one of Proust's
highest-born friends, once remarked that aristocrats invited
Proust for country weekends not because of his art but
because he and Anna de Noailles were the two funniest
people in Paris.)
Everyone had a sharp memory to share. Jean Cocteau,
the poet-playwright-impresario-filmmaker (Beauty and the
Beast), recalled Proust's voice: "Just as the voice of a ventriloquist
comes out of his chest, so Proust's emerged from
his soul." The writer Leon-Paul Fargue remembered seeing
Proust towards the end of his life, "completely pale, with his
hair down to his eyebrows, his beard, so black it was blue,
devouring his face...." Fargue noticed the long sleeves
covering frozen hands, the Persian, almond-shaped eyes.
"He looked like a man who no longer lives outdoors or by
day, a hermit who hasn't emerged from his oak tree for a
long time, with something pained about the face, the expression
of suffering that has just begun to be calmed. He
seemed possessed by a bitter goodness." A young aristocratic
woman recalled that when she was a girl she was supposed
to be presented to him at a ball, but the great writer,
"livid and bearded," wearing the collar of his overcoat
turned up, stared at her with such intensity that when they
were finally introduced she was so frightened she nearly
fainted.
One of Proust's ex-lovers and his most constant friend,
Reynaldo Hahn, the composer, recalled that soon after he
met Proust they were walking through a garden when suddenly
Proust stopped dead before a rosebush. He asked
Hahn to continue walking without him. When at last Hahn
circled back, after going around the chateau, "I found him at
the same place, staring at the roses. His head tilting forward,
his face very serious, he blinked, his eyebrows slightly furrowed
as though from a passionate act of attention, and with
his left hand he was obstinately pushing the end of his little
black mustache between his lips and nibbling on it.... How
many times I've observed Marcel in these mysterious
moments in which he was communicating totally with
nature, with art, with life, in these `deep minutes' in which
his entire being was concentrated...." Typically, Proust
also invoked this very scene, but said that inhaling the
moment was ineffectual; only the sudden, unprompted
awakenings of memory, triggered by something illogical
and unforeseen (the madeleine, for example), could invoke
the past in its entirety.
The great Colette completely failed to sense his value when
she first ran into Proust (they were both very young and just
starting out as writers). She'd even gone so far, in one of her
early Claudine novels, as to call him a "yid" (youpin), but her
husband urbanely crossed out the insult and replaced it with
"boy" (garcon). Even cleaned up, the passage doesn't make
for very pleasant reading. It states that at a literary salon, "I
was pursued, politely, all evening by a young and pretty
boy of letters." Because of her cropped hair, unusual for
the period, he kept comparing her to the young god Hermes
or to a cupid drawn by Prud'hon. "My little flatterer, excited
by his own evocations, wouldn't leave me alone for a
second.... He gazed at me with caressing, long-lashed
eyes...." At the same time, in 1895, she wrote Proust a
letter in which she acknowledged that he had recognized a
crucial truth: "The word is not a representation but a living
thing, and it is much less a mnemonic sign than a pictorial
translation."
Perhaps Colette had been initially irritated because the
young flatterer had already divined her bisexuality. By
1917, after Proust had begun to publish Remembrance of
Things Past, she could see him in another light. He was very
ill, he weighed no more than one hundred pounds, and he
seldom emerged from his cork-lined room. He had become
a martyr to art (and she herself was one of his few living
rivals as a stylist). She saw him at the Ritz during the war
with a few friends, wearing a fur coat even indoors over his
evening clothes: "He never stopped talking, trying to be
gay. Because of the cold, and making excuses, he kept his
top hat on, tilted backwards, and the fan-like lock of hair
covered his eyebrows. Full-dress uniform, but disarranged
by a furious wind, which, pouring over the nape of his hat,
rumpling the calico and the free ends of his cravat, filling in
with a grey ash the furrows of his cheeks, the hollows of his
eye-sockets and the breathless mouth, had hunted this tottering
young man of fifty to death."
These portraits already suggest the outlines of Proust's
extraordinary personality. He was attentive to his friends to
the point of seeming a flatterer, though he thought friendship
was valueless and conversation represented the death
of the mind, since he believed only passion and suffering
could sharpen the powers of observation and the only word
of any value was the written. He could stare transfixed at
a rose--or at anything else or anyone who was on his peculiar
wavelength--but though he read everything and was
deeply cultivated, he had little interest in disembodied
ideas. He wasn't an intellectual, though he was supremely
intelligent. He applied his attention to flowers and people
and paintings, but not to theories about botany nor to
psychology nor aesthetics. He never read a word of Freud,
for instance (nor did Freud ever read a word of Proust). He
was hilariously funny and entertaining, but he emanated a
calm spirituality except, perhaps, when he was doubled up
with a crazy bout of laughter (his famous choking fit of
hilarity, his fou rire, which could go on so long it struck
strangers as weird, even slightly mad). He was such a presence
that many people spoke of him as tall, but in fact he
stood just five feet six inches.
Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish
mother. He himself was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the
church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a
Catholic, but he never practiced that faith and as an adult
could best be described as a mystical atheist, someone
imbued with spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in
a personal God, much less in a savior. Although Jews trace
their religion through their mothers, Proust never considered
himself Jewish and even became vexed when a
newspaper article listed him as a Jewish author. His father
once warned him not to stay in a certain hotel since there
were "too many" Jewish guests there, and, to be sure, in
Remembrance of Things Past there are unflattering caricatures
of the members of one Jewish family, the Blochs. Jews
were still considered exotic, even "oriental," in France; in
1872 there were only eighty-six thousand Jews in the whole
country. In a typically offensive passage Proust writes that
in a French drawing room "a Jew making his entry as
though he were emerging from the desert, his body crouching
like a hyena's, his neck thrust forward, offering profound
`salaams,' completely satisfies a certain taste for the
oriental."
Proust never refers to his Jewish origins in his fiction,
although in the youthful novel he abandoned, Jean Santeuil
(first published only in 1952, thirty years after his death),
there is a very striking, if buried, reference to Judaism. The
autobiographical hero has quarreled with his parents and in
his rage deliberately smashed a piece of delicate Venetian
glass his mother had given him. When he and his mother
are reconciled, he tells her what he has done: "He expected
that she would scold him, and so revive in his mind the
memory of their quarrel. But there was no cloud upon
her tenderness. She gave him a kiss, and whispered in his
ear: `It shall be, as in the Temple, the symbol of an indestructible
union.'" This reference to the rite of smashing
a glass during the Orthodox Jewish wedding ceremony,
in this case sealing the marriage of mother to son, is not
only spontaneous but chilling. In an essay about his mother
he referred, with characteristic ambiguity, to "the beautiful
lines of her Jewish face, completely marked with Christian
sweetness and Jansenist resignation, turning her into Esther
herself"--a reference, significantly, to the heroine of the
Old Testament (and of Racine's play), who concealed her
Jewish identity until she had become the wife of King Ahasuerus
and was in a position to save her people. The apparently
gentile Proust, who had campaigned for Dreyfus and
had been baptized Catholic, was a sort of modern Esther.
Despite Proust's silences and lapses on the subject of his
mother's religion, it would be unfair, especially in light of
the rampant anti-Semitism of turn-of-the-century France,
to say that he was unique or even extreme in his prejudice
against Jews. And yet his anti-Semitism is more than
curious, given his love for his mother and given, after her
death, something very much like a religious cult that he
developed around her. His mother, out of respect for her
parents, had remained faithful to their religion, and Proust
revered her and her relatives; after her death he regretted
that he was too ill to visit her grave and the graves of her
parents and uncle in the Jewish cemetery and to mark each
visit with a stone. More important, although he had many
friends among the aristocracy whom he had assiduously
cultivated, nevertheless when he was forced to take sides
during the Dreyfus Affair, which had begun in 1894 and
erupted in 1898, he chose to sign a petition prominently
printed in a newspaper calling for a retrial.
The Dreyfus Affair is worth a short detour, since it split
French society for many years and it became a major topic
in proust's life--and in Remembrance of Things Past. Alfred
Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a Jew and a captain in the French
army. In December 1894 he was condemned by a military
court for having sold military secrets to the Germans and
was sent for life to Devil's Island. The accusation was based
on the evidence of a memorandum stolen from the German
embassy in Paris (despite the fact that the writing did not
resemble Dreyfus's) and of a dossier (which was kept classified
and secret) handed over to the military court by the
minister of war. In 1896 another French soldier, Major
Georges Picquart, proved that the memorandum had been
written not by Dreyfus but by a certain Major Marie Charles
Esterhazy. Yet Esterhazy was acquitted and Picquart was
imprisoned. Instantly a large part of the population called
for a retrial of Dreyfus. On January 13, 1898, the writer
Emile Zola published an open letter, "J'accuse," directed
against the army's general staff; Zola was tried and found
guilty of besmirching the reputation of the army. He was
forced to flee to England. Then in September 1898 it was
proved that the only piece of evidence against Dreyfus in
the secret military dossier had been faked by Joseph Henry,
who confessed his misdeed and committed suicide. At last
the government ordered a retrial of Dreyfus. Public opinion
was bitterly divided between the leftist Dreyfusards, who
demanded "justice and truth," and the anti-Dreyfusards,
who led an anti-Semitic campaign, defended the honor of
the army, and rejected the call for a retrial. The conflict
led to a virtual civil war. In 1899 Dreyfus was found guilty
again, although this time under extenuating circumstances--and
the president pardoned him. Only in 1906 was Dreyfus
fully rehabilitated, named an officer once again, and decorated
with the Legion of Honor. Interestingly, Theodor
Herzl, the Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper,
was so overwhelmed by the virulent anti-Semitism of the
Dreyfus Affair that he was inspired by the prophetic idea of
a Jewish state.
In defending Dreyfus, Proust not only angered conservative,
Catholic, pro-army aristocrats, but he also alienated
his own father. In writing about the 1890s in Remembrance of
Things Past, Proust remarks that "the Dreyfus case was
shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social
ladder." Typically, the ultraconservative Gustave Schlumberger,
a great Byzantine scholar, could give in his posthumous
memoirs as offensive a description of his old friend
Charles Haas (a model for Proust's character Swann) as
this: "The delightful Charles Haas, the most likeable and
glittering socialite, the best of friends, had nothing Jewish
about him except his origins and was not afflicted, as far
as I know, with any of the faults of his race, which makes
him an exception virtually unique." It would be misleading
to suggest that Proust took his controversial, pro-Dreyfus
stand simply because he was half-Jewish. No, he was only
obeying the dictates of his conscience, even though he lost
many highborn Catholic friends by doing so and exposed
himself to the snide anti-Semitic accusation of merely automatically
siding with his co-religionists.
Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871, to well-to-do
middle-class parents. His mother was Jeanne Weil,
a twenty-one-year-old Parisian, daughter of Nathe Weil, a
rich stockbroker. Her great-uncle Adolphe Cremieux was
a senator and received a state funeral; he was also president
of the Universal Israelite Alliance. Her mother, Adele, was
(like the Narrator's grandmother in Remembrance of Things
past) a cultured woman who loved, above all other literature,
the letters of Madame de Sevigne, one of Louis XIV's
courtiers and a woman who was almost romantically in love
with her own daughter (the one-sided Sevigne mother-daughter
relationship inspired Thornton Wilder when he
wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey). This intense intimacy
was in fact characteristic of Marcel and his own mother,
who were inseparable, who fought frequently (usually over
his laziness and lack of willpower) but always fell into each
other's arms as soon as they made up. Mother and son shared
a love of music and literature; she could speak and read
German as well as English. She had a perfect memory and
knew long passages from Racine by heart; her dying words
were a citation from La Fontaine: "If you're not a Roman, at
least act worthy of being one." Marcel inherited her taste for
memorizing poetry and knew long passages from Victor
Hugo, Racine, and Baudelaire. Most important, Marcel and
his mother both loved to laugh--gently, satirically--at the
people around them, and in her letters to him she sends up
the other guests at a spa or hotel with the same spirit of
wickedly close observation and good-natured if prickly fun
that was to inspire so many of his best pages.
Proust's father, Adrien, thirty-five years old when Marcel
was born, came from a far more humble background,
though he rose to great heights in the medical profession.
His father had been a grocer in Illiers (the name is derived
from that of Saint Hilaire), a village near the cathedral town
of Chartres, south of Paris; Marcel gave the village the name
of "Combray," and today it is known officially as Illiers-Combray
and has become a major goal for Proust pilgrims
from all over the world. (The local bakeries are all grinding
out madeleines in Proust's honor, and the house where he
and his family summered has become a museum. Perhaps in
another century the name Illiers will be dropped altogether
as life completely surrenders to the tyranny of art.)
Adrien Proust was originally intended for the priesthood
and he brought a nearly religious zeal to his work as a
doctor. It was he who made famous--and effective--the
idea of a cordon sanitaire, a "sanitary zone" circling Europe
in order to keep out cholera. In order to put his principles
to work Dr. Proust traveled to Russia, Turkey, and Persia
in 1869 and figured out the routes by which cholera in previous
epidemics had entered Russia and thereby Europe.
For this successful investigation and the resulting efficacious
sanitation and quarantine campaign Dr. Proust was
awarded the Legion of Honor. He became one of the most
celebrated professors of medicine and practicing physicians
of his day. Whereas Marcel would be willowy, artistic, asthmatic,
and obsessed with titled ladies, his father was the
very model of the solid upper-middle-class citizen, fleshy,
bearded, solemn, and, thanks to his wife's fortune, rich. He
was also, unbeknownst to his son, an inveterate ladies' man.
His extramarital adventures were never noticed by Marcel's
mother--or if she did know something about them, she was
too discreet to mention it.
In the partially autobiographical novel Jean Santeuil,
written while his parents were still alive, Marcel portrays his
father as a brute ("What a vulgar man," thinks Jean Santeuil),
someone whose peasant ways had not been amended
by a lifetime of honors. In his correspondence Marcel later
told his editor that his father had tried to cure him of his
effeminacy and neuroses by sending him to a whorehouse.
But by the time he came to write Remembrance of Things
Past, after his parents' death, he idealized both of them and
disguised his father as a wise, indulgent minister of state.
Proust's mother was pregnant with him during the
Franco-Prussian War and the difficult aftermath of France's
defeat, the period when Napoleon III was chased from the
throne and a socialist commune was briefly declared in Paris
before the Third Republic was at last established. During
the months of war and the internecine street fighting, coal
and wood supplies ran out and houses went unheated. In
Paris the starving populace ate dogs and cats, even the animals
in the zoo. As a result, Jeanne Proust was so weakened
from hunger and anxiety that when Marcel was born he was
sickly and fragile and at first not expected to live.
In this respect, as in so many others, Marcel was the
opposite of his hearty, healthy brother, Robert, born two
years later, on May 24, 1873, in more prosperous and settled
times. The two brothers were perfect companions as children
and remained very close all their lives, although it was
the robust younger brother, Robert, who often played the
role of protector to the asthmatic Marcel. Like his father,
Robert became a doctor--and a womanizer--yet the two
brothers never quarreled, and lived their whole lives in the
most complete harmony. In the 1890s both brothers were
Dreyfusards. At the end of his life Marcel asked Robert to
intervene and secure for him the Legion of Honor and, once
this honor was obtained, to confer it on him. Robert was at
Marcel's bedside when he died, and after his death it was
Robert who oversaw the publication of the last two volumes
of his masterpiece as well as his selected correspondence.
As a little boy Marcel could not go to sleep without his
mother's kiss; this necessity would become a major theme of
"Combray," the first section of Remembrance of Things Past.
Quite understandably she was worried by these signs of her
son's total dependence on her and would attempt to cure
him by refusing to indulge him in his "whims," but he
would become so hysterical if denied a kiss or his mother's
tenth "good night" visit to his bedroom that usually she
gave in--or her less rigorous husband would urge her to do
so. Not only did Proust not outgrow his dependence; it
became the template for his adult loves, since for Proust
passion was a nagging need that became only more demanding
the more it was denied. Indeed, Proust would drive
away all his lovers (in his fiction as in his life) through his
unreasonable demands.