Simply Proust

Jack Jordan

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781943657209
• eBook ISBN: 9781943657445
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

" Simply Proust pulls off with ease the arduous task of making Marcel Proust's masterwork accessible, without sacrificing none of the complexity that makes it one of the most important novels of the 20th Century. To do this, Jack Jordan vividly paints vast the cultural, scientific, and philosophical background that fed In Search of Lost Time. Armed with this knowledge, both new and repeat readers are bound to gain fresh insights into the brilliance of Proust's novel."
—Hervé G. Picherit, Associate Professor of French, University of Texas at Austin

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was born in Paris during a time of great social and political upheaval, a ferment that is dealt with extensively in his monumental work In Search of Lost Time. He was a sickly child and spent the earlier part of his short life pursuing a variety of sometimes frivolous activities, which led to his not being taken seriously as a writer. It was not until 1909, when he was 38 years old, that he began work on the groundbreaking novel for which he is known, a task that consumed the rest of his life.

In Simply Proust, Professor Jack Louis Jordan presents an incisive, yet thoroughly accessible, introduction to Proust's landmark work, helping the reader to fully appreciate the scope of the author's achievement, as well as the fascinating process that underlay its creation. Emphasizing the fundamental role of psychology and the unconscious, Jordan shows how Proust's methodology and our understanding of his novel are connected, and how this makes for a unique and endlessly revealing literary experience.

At once philosophical, psychological, and deeply human, Simply Proust offers an invaluable entry point into a masterpiece of world literature and takes the measure of the flawed and brilliant man who transformed the material of his life into a transcendent work of art.

3

In Search of Lost Time

The year 1908 was exceptional in the genesis of Proust’s novel. Mme Straus gave Proust five notebooks, the largest of which he chose to begin making notes for several projects he had in mind that would, in retrospect, clearly lead to the creation of his novel, including topics, themes, characters, sensations, memories, and dreams. It is known as Le Carnet de 1908 (The 1908 Notebook). Along with it, he wrote a series of Pastiches (Parodies) of authors that were published in Le Figaro, and also began an essay that would eventually be known as Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against Sainte-Beuve). Taken together, these works made 1908 a good year for Proust, as he began what is now known as In Search of Lost Time.

Proust may have lost money in the casino at the Grand-Hôtel, but he was also able to meet several young men there. They were generally from middle-class families and would play varying degrees of importance in Proust’s life and in his novel. One of the most interesting was Marcel Plantevignes, whose father was a necktie manufacturer. Proust and Plantevignes (19 at the time) were to become longtime friends despite one notable incident. On a walk one day, Plantevignes stopped to speak to a lady who implied that Proust was a homosexual. Plantevignes said nothing. Word got back to Proust about this and he exploded in a way reminiscent of the way he reacted to the columnist Jean Lorrain regarding his homophobic article about Pleasures and Days. He was upset that Plantevignes had not defended him. Again, his honor was in question and, though Plantevignes was not the source, he was clearly hurt that someone he considered a close friend did not speak in his defense. Proust wrote a letter to Plantevignes that alarmed him and his father, who went to see Proust. Proust reacted by challenging him to a duel—just as he challenged Lorrain years earlier. Fortunately, there was a reconciliation between the two men.

There was also another incident involving Plantevignes but, instead of pain, it brought Proust a unique pleasure. Since it also plays such an important role in the novel, we will return to it later. Plantevignes would write an interesting book based on his first-hand knowledge of Proust, Avec Marcel Proust: Causeries-Souvenirs sur Cabourg et le Boulevard Haussmann (Marcel Proust: Conversations-Memories from Cabourg and the Boulevard Haussmann).

Proust also encountered other young men at the casino. Some of the traits for Robert de Saint-Loup and Albertine were inspired by two young engineers named Pierre Parent and Max Daireaux. Another young man named Albert Nahmias would become a particularly close friend. It is possible that this group was the inspiration for the “little band of girls” the Narrator encounters in Balbec.

Progressing with the novel

That year, 1908, Proust also faced his doubts and uncertainties directly and, by doing so, would make serious progress in creating his novel. He worried that “Laziness or doubt or impotency [was] taking refuge in the lack of certainty over the art form.” For 10 years, he had been in search of everything that Jean Santeuil lacked and the answer to the essential question: “Must I make of it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?” In facing his doubts, he found the answer to what was lacking in his earlier effort. His doubts and uncertainties would become the Narrator’s and the search for the answers would become the storyline of the novel.

In late 1908, Proust bought some more notebooks, now like the ones he used as a schoolboy. By August 1909, he had filled 10 of them with a total of 700 pages that would become Contre Sainte-Beuve. At 37 years old, Proust was on his way to achieving his goal of becoming a writer and even a novelist, as he wanted. By March 1909, he declared that he had a “full trunk in the middle of my brain [that] hampers me and I must decide whether to set off or to unpack it.” He also had a “boy” inside him who “dies instantly in the particular, and begins immediately to float and live in the general…. But while he lives his life is only ecstasy and felicity. He alone should write my books.” Perhaps the most fundamental division of Self into a plurality of identities is the division between the social self and the inner, creative self (the “boy” inside him). Fundamental oppositions are being developed. Art breaks “the ice of the habitual and the rational.” Involuntary memory takes precedence over voluntary memory as the way to free the “boy” inside. At this point, it is still just the taste of toast and tea that brings back a memory and is placed at the front of the novel. Notes in the drafts for Contre Sainte-Beuve contain what would become the decisive conclusion that “Real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence.” The broad outline of the novel would become apparent sometime between the summers of 1908 and 1909. He was writing a sort of immense novel that, as a Proust biographer William Carter said, is “perhaps the most remarkable example of a sustained narrative in the history of literature.”

Proust had planned to have his bedroom walls lined with cork in August 1909 while he was away vacationing at the Grand-Hôtel in Cabourg. Unfortunately, he had not reserved his room, was given another, and was distressed over staying in an unfamiliar room. Unsure whether he could live in a different room or might have to return to Paris early, he canceled the work with the cork. It would not be until the following year that the famous sound-proofed room at 102 boulevard Haussmann would be constructed. The building is now owned by a bank that has an office on the street level. Supposedly, one can visit Proust’s apartment on Thursday afternoons, but visits are at the discretion of the person at the front desk.

In 1910, Proust made a lot of progress on his novel. He had both the artistic, intuitive, internal self and the more rational, intellectual self that might have been in control of the regime of expressing and re-creating what he had found. He needed the time and quiet that the sound-proofed room could bring in order for him to work at night and sleep during the day. Looked at from the perspective of what came of it, it was a very practical solution to his problem. Nothing could be allowed to stop the work he was doing. Though he did go out occasionally, he also had to nurture his creative, inner self at the expense of his outer, social self and, in doing so, limit his interaction with people.

The noise was another matter. There was a flood that damaged many buildings, including Proust’s basement. Proust’s torture was not limited to the resulting construction. A huge pigeon that had gone down the chimney was making a noise in the wall. Proust’s aural perimeter was under multiple attacks. The solution to his insomnia was more drugs, including veronal and opium.

Ballets Russes

In 1910, Serge Diaghilev brought his Ballets Russes back to Paris with the production of Scheherazade from one of Proust’s favorite books, The Arabian Nights. With the Ballet, came its choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, dancer Ida Rubinstein, and composer Igor Stravinsky (who is the subject of another Simply Charly book, Simply Stravinsky). Proust loved the ballet and soon met Jean Cocteau, already making a name for himself in the art and literary world at 22. Proust’s friend, Reynaldo Hahn, was collaborating on a ballet with Cocteau and Federico de Madrazo. Cocteau and Madrazo would write the book for Hahn’s ballet, Le Dieu bleu, for the Ballets Russes. Along with the innovative Ballets Russes and all the Russian talent that accompanied the troupe, Diaghilev collaborated with some of France’s most creative minds, including composers Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, the writer André Gide, the painter Pablo Picasso, and the aforementioned Cocteau and Hahn. Proust not only attended the performances, but also had firsthand knowledge of the most modern currents in the arts in Paris at the time.

At the end of another vacation at the coast, Odilon Albaret drove Proust back to Paris, where he would begin a long and productive period of isolation. By November, he was working on “Swann in Love,” the section in Swann’s Way that follows “Combray.” It is a self-contained story in the third person because the Narrator had not yet been born and could not have observed or been part of it. This would prove helpful in Proust’s efforts to follow a family through several generations and, like Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and other naturalists, observe traits that might reappear (be they inherited or acquired). Because of the long time frame involved, it is difficult to observe several generations in the human species, but Proust did his best.

Early in 1911, Proust embraced another modern innovation, the “theatrophone,” a device allowing people to listen to live theater and opera performances over telephone lines. For a fee, Proust was connected to eight Paris theaters and concert halls through the still relatively new telephone system. The pianola brought another sound system into Proust’s closed-in world, when he bought an Aeolian player piano that he attached to his grand piano. His driver Alfred Agostinelli probably encouraged Proust to buy it and Bertrand de Fénelon pumped it for Proust as Albertine would do for the Narrator in the novel. (If you want to see and experience a pianola and some of the music it plays, there is a small pianola museum in the Jordaan area of Amsterdam, just around the corner from the Café Proust.)

Proust’s small, enclosed world was now being penetrated in a positive way, bringing indoors what he would have experienced outside, leaving his creative artistic self behind for the social self. Eventually, the former would take control and the few trips he made were in search of material for his novel. He hired a secretary and had written more than 700 pages, but he still had not created the title by which his masterpiece would be known. Soundproofing, drugs, coffee, and home theater and music systems helped make his isolation bearable and his work possible.

A voluminous manuscript

The following year, 1912, marked the expansion of his novel, unsuccessful attempts to have it published, defending it against critics who said it was an autobiography, and explaining to friends that the characters in it were creative fictions. As the manuscript grew, he wondered if it should be published as a single volume of 800 or 900 pages, or two separate books. As it kept growing to 1,400 pages, he debated whether it should be two 700-page volumes or five 300-page volumes. In a letter to Montesquiou, he wrote that he was concerned people might misunderstand his book, “which is so carefully constructed and concentric and which people will mistake for mere childhood memoirs.” After a performance at the Opéra Garnier, where he was able to observe two particular dresses that expressed the finest among women’s fashions of the Belle Epoque, he wrote that “the two women whom I shall dress up in their clothes—like two mannequins—have no connection with them, my novel has no key.”

Proust wanted la Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) to publish his novel and offered to pay as much as they desired. During negotiations, he continued working and came up with two titles: Lost Time (Le Temps perdu) and Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé). Although the overall title was not yet complete, the circular nature of the novel was already apparent and the grounds for the search for something lost and eventually rediscovered was established. He also tried to have Fasquelle publish his manuscripts. While the NRF was more respectable, Fasquelle could reach a wider audience, “the sort of people who buy badly printed volumes before catching a train.” Proust’s goal was never to write a novel for the elite few. However, both publishers rejected his novel. The rejection of the editor at a third publisher, Ollendorf, is quoted in the book’s Introduction.

In 1913, Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann) was published at Grasset, at Proust’s expense. He even limited his part of the share of any profits so that the volumes might be sold at a cheaper price in the hopes that it would be read by more people. Money was not his motive. Rather, it was “the infiltration of my ideas into the greatest number of brains susceptible of receiving them.” The importance to Proust of a receptive reader is apparent from the beginning of the first year of publication. In the same year, 1913, he also decided on Le Côté de Guermantes and the overall title took its final French form, À la recherche du temps perdu.

As the novel kept growing, Proust told Jacques Copeau, a French theater director, that “by reading myself I’ve discovered after the event some of the constituent elements of my own unconscious.” Responding to concerns about the homosexuality and sadism that appear in his novel, he defended their inclusion as one of scientific objectivity: “I obey a general truth which forbids me to appeal to sympathetic souls any more than to antipathetic ones … it cannot alter the terms in which I probe the truth and which are not determined by my personal whim.” He wrote about what he saw in himself and in others without the filters that social norms would impose, restricting and altering his observations. Not to have done so would have invalidated his search for the laws that govern man, ending his quest for the essence of man and world.

There were also changes in his household personnel that would prove decisive, both in Proust’s life and in his novel. Alfred Agostinelli had lost his job as a driver, so Proust hired him as his secretary. Proust was extremely generous with Agostinelli, paying for his flying lessons. He had his other driver, Odilon, drive Agostinelli to Buc, where Roland Garros (the first person to fly across the Mediterranean) had an aviation school. Apparently tired of typing and moving about in the small, enclosed world of his employer, he thought of going to a flying school on the Riviera. The “artisan of my voyage” in 1907 had now become the “companion of my captivity,” and Proust may have offered Agostinelli a Rolls-Royce or an airplane if he would stay with him in Paris. Odilon married a young woman from his village named Céleste Gineste. In November, Céleste started coming regularly to Proust’s home to work from nine to five, while Proust slept. Due to bad investments, the expenses incurred during the process of publishing Du côté de chez Swann, and lavish presents for Agostinelli, Proust’s wealth and health both declined.

Critiques and praise

Proust was still haunted by some of the critiques that followed his publication of Pleasures and Days. The adjectives that were often used, “delicate” and “sensitive,” were particularly distasteful to Proust, and the publication of Swann’s Way deserved “living and true” instead. He was already afraid that the length of the novel might be a barrier to some readers but explained that “it is the invisible substance of time that I have tried to isolate, and it meant that the experiment had to last over a long period.” It is not only distance the reader must traverse in the world Proust had created, she or he must also travel in time. Swann’s Way was also quickly seen as a masterpiece by many critics and writers, including Jean Cocteau, who wrote that it “resembles nothing I know and everything that I admire.” Other French writers also praised the work. Lucien Daudet wrote: “Never, I believe, has the analysis of everything that constitutes our existence been carried so far.” Francis Jammes called Proust “the equal of Shakespeare and Balzac.” Maurice Rostand published a review in which he referred to Swann’s Way as “a soul in the guise of a book.” But where Cocteau saw an original composition, others only saw decomposition, lacking plot and structure, and not belonging to any particular genre. Proust referred to his fictional musical composer and genius, Vinteuil, when writing to a critic, “Isn’t that composition?” Jazz must have sounded like that to those who were only used to classical music. When Proust wrote one of his long sentences in his long book or reintroduced a character, theme, or thought, unexpected, underlying patterns wou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Praise for Simply Proust
• Other Great Lives
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time)
• Marcel Proust’s Early Days
• Out and About
• In Search of Lost Time
• Final Years
• The Narrator: Travels in the Space-Time Continuum
• A Search for Certainty
• Transportation
• Proust and the Human Sciences
• Proust the Naturalist
• Three Types of Observation
• The Reader: Riding the Proust Wave
• Sources
• Suggested Reading
• About the Author
• A Word from the Publisher