One hundred years ago this week, Proust published Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Richard Lea ruminates on what draws Proust aficionados back to the seven-volume novel again and again:
The memories that the narrator recalls over the course of seven volumes include childhood anguish in the country, an intrigue with a courtesan, a portrait of high-society entertaining, an exploration of fin de siècle gay life, a relationship doomed by jealousy and more and more and more. It’s a novel so voluminous, so capacious, so complete you can spend weeks, months or even years submerged in its crystalline waters. When you surface – gasping a little from the spectacular dénouement – you find that the world you have just left seems big enough, mighty enough to encompass the world around you, to measure up to life itself. For about a year or so after I finished Le Temps retrouvé I couldn’t read another novel without thinking Proust had written it already. It’s a universe that you are obliged to explore at the languid pace of Proust’s serpentine prose, snaking from enumeration towards explication, from description into deviation.
If you’ve attempted to crack the novel and been turned off, you’re not alone, as Adrian Tahourdin recounts:
As is well known, André Gide turned the novel down for the [literary magazine] Nouvelle Revue Française, thinking it, on the evidence of the sections he skimmed, the work of a snobbish dilettante – a decision he was to regret for the rest of his life (and a lesson to all publishers’ readers maybe); by 1918, he was writing in his Journal of “Proust’s marvellous book, which I was rereading”, almost as if in a quest for private redemption for his earlier misjudgement.
Fortunately another publisher, Bernard Grasset, stepped in. William Carter writes in his mammoth and invaluable Marcel Proust (2002) that Grasset regarded the publication of Proust’s work as a “business deal” and had tried to read it “but found it impenetrable”. He told a friend “it’s unreadable; the author paid the publishing costs”.
Colin Marshall marks the centennial by digging up a letter from a 16-year-old Proust to his grandfather, pleading for 13 francs to cover a disappointing visit to a brothel:
I so needed to see if a woman could stop my awful masturbation habit that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But first, in my agitation, I broke a chamber pot: 3 francs; then, still agitated, I was unable to screw. So here I am, back to square one, waiting more and more as hours pass for 10 francs to relieve myself, plus 3 francs for the pot. But I dare not ask Papa for more money so soon and so I hoped you could come to my aid in a circumstance which, as you know, is not merely exceptional but also unique. It cannot happen twice in one lifetime that a person is too flustered to screw.
Also in commemoration, The Public Domain Review has assembled a collection of works of art mentioned in Swann’s Way. Previous Dish on Proust here, here, and here.
The Dish 