Titans of History

PROUST

1871–1922

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was of the little piece of madeleine …

Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way,

vol. 1, 1913), translated by C.K. Scott-Moncrieff and

S. Hudson, revised by T. Kilmartin

It is said that Marcel Proust spent the first half of his life living it, and the second half writing about it. The result was À la recherche du temps perdu, a semi-autobiographical novel sequence that is perhaps the most complete evocation of a living world ever written, and also a meditation on the nature of time, the self, memory, love, sexuality, society and experience. Proust’s work was originally translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past (a quotation from Shakespeare), but a more recent translation, published in 1992, is more accurately entitled In Search of Lost Time.

In 1909 Marcel Proust, the dilettante son of a wealthy Jewish bourgeois family, ate a madeleine (a type of small sponge cake) dipped in tea and was instantly transported back to his grandfather’s house in the country, where he had spent much of his childhood. Overwhelmed by the completeness of the memory, by its sights and smells, Proust found a purpose to the writing that he had dabbled in since he was a youth. At the age of 38, Proust began the work that was to become À la recherche du temps perdu.

As Proust embarked upon his re-creation of a world long gone, he withdrew completely from the world of the present. In his youth he had used his childhood asthma as an excuse to avoid any kind of career other than that of avid socialite. But when he began À la recherche, he shut himself off from society, sealing himself up in a cork-lined room. He became an obsessive invalid, his deteriorating health exacerbated by hypochondria. He insisted that his morning post be steamed in disinfectant, and he ingested nothing but handfuls of opiates and barbiturates.

Proust’s approach baffled some: one publisher rejected his first volume, believing that an author did not need thirty pages to describe turning over in bed before going to sleep again. Discarding the notion of a plot-driven work, Proust takes his reader on an almost stream-of-consciousness journey back through his life. He digresses, for pages at a time, on some aspect of philosophy, or history, or art, in a manner that is yet incandescently beautiful, poetical and tragic but also hilarious, outrageous and frivolous. The mundane—drinking a cup of tea, lying awake at night—is just as important as the dramatic. Proust hypnotizes his readers, immersing them in a world as real as their own.

As his writing gathered pace, the neurasthenic, eccentric Proust adopted an exclusively nighttime existence. His staff had to maintain complete silence as he slept during daylight hours. He would pay calls on friends well after midnight or expect them to accompany him on early-morning visits to the cathedral of Notre Dame, dressed in a fur coat over his nightshirt.

Proust had an almost hysterical need to be the focus of attention. His invalidism was just one way of securing the attention of his mother; later on his self-enforced seclusion ensured the same concern from his friends. The desperation of the child when his mother goes out for the night in À la recherche vividly evokes Proust’s almost Oedipal love for his mother. He tried to buy affection, employing his male lovers as staff, but he drove them away with his obsessive attentions.

A brilliant conversationalist and mimic, Proust was completely without malice. His extravagance was legendary: he financed a male brothel and once hired out the entire floor of a hotel in his compulsive search for silence. His long-suffering staff were extremely well paid, and handsome waiters handsomely tipped. Even after he had sequestered himself away, he still sent food parcels to the soldiers at the front in the First World War.

Proust was, in his youth, a terrible snob. But the desperate need of this Jewish homosexual to be accepted in Parisian high society did not prevent him from demonstrating real courage in the face of that society’s virulent anti-Semitism. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, Proust stood up as a prominent supporter of the Jewish army officer wrongfully convicted of treason—a move that risked social ostracism. And while he was always afraid in life of being rejected for his sexuality, he was not afraid to approach it in his writing, asserting that he needed to be as precise about Baron Charlus’ sexual forays as the Duchesse de Guermantes’ red shoes.

He achieved his goal. Proust’s delicate, life-like descriptions are astoundingly complete. His fascination with the shifting nature of perception produced some of the most exquisite characterizations ever committed to the page. Over two thousand characters, in all their life-like ambiguity, people À la recherche. And they are described in some of the most beautiful prose ever written: every one of the novel sequence’s 8 million words seems to have been precisely chosen.

Proust was still correcting manuscripts a few hours before his death. Otherworldly in life, in death “he was totally absent,” commented one friend. But the notebooks into which Proust had poured his memory, his health and his soul seemed, to the writer Jean Cocteau, “alive, like a wristwatch still ticking on a dead soldier.”