The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (126 page)

Ruskin’s passion for architecture captivated Proust, for architecture, exhibiting the power of stone, was Ruskin’s arena for his recapture of time. Proust recounted how, on the very day of Ruskin’s death in 1900, he happened to be rereading the passage in
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849) where Ruskin described in the cathedral of Rouen a curious little stone figure “vexed and puzzled in his malice; his hand is pressed hard against his cheek-bone, and the flesh of the cheek is
wrinkled
under the eye by the pressure.” “I was seized by the desire to see the little man of whom Ruskin speaks, and I went to Rouen as if he had bequeathed to the care of his readers the insignificant creature whom he had, by speaking of him, restored to life.” So Proust led his friends to Rouen on what seemed a futile quest among the countless figures adorning the vast cathedral. They
searched together until his sculptor companion with a practiced eye exclaimed at a six-inch likeness: “There’s one that looks just like him!” And this small rediscovery was the triumph of their day. “I was moved to find him still there, because I realized then that nothing dies that once has lived, neither the sculptor’s thought, nor Ruskin’s.” Ruskin challenged the twenty-nine-year-old Proust to recapture his past in words, just as the medieval sculptors had captured theirs in stone.

When Proust and his mother went to Venice, on the train coming in his mother was reading to him Ruskin’s
Stones of Venice
(three volumes, 1851–53). Naturally they stayed at the fashionable Hotel Danieli, where Ruskin had stayed before them. “I found,” Proust recalled, “that my dream had become—incredibly but quite simply—my address!” As they sat eating granita at Florian’s café on the Piazza San Marco, Proust’s transforming imagination made him exclaim, “Pigeons are the lilacs of the animal kingdom!” Though Proust knew very little English, he enthusiastically “translated” Ruskin by simply polishing a rough draft provided by others. Exhilarated by Ruskin’s “religion of Beauty,” his adoration of Nature and the Gothic, even through an alien language Proust felt an affinity that helped him discover the world in himself. Proust’s half-dozen years as an acolyte of Ruskin left a permanent imprint. “The universe suddenly regained an infinite value in my eyes,” he recalled even after his first enthusiasm had passed, “and my admiration for Ruskin gave such importance to the things he had made me love that they seemed charged with something more precious than life itself.” Had it not been for Ruskin, Proust declared, he would have lacked “any understanding of the Middle Ages, a sense of history, and the feeling of a sort of natural sympathy for all things that have grown dim with age, and an awareness of their continuing presence.”

Proust’s enthusiasm for the living past was also a by-product of his infirmities, his loneliness, and his self-exile. A frail infant, at the age of nine he had a first attack of the asthma that threatened and confined him all the rest of his life. An overprotected child coddled and doted on by his mother and grandmother, after their death he doted on and coddled himself. After his years at the university, in his late twenties his health worsened, and he withdrew from the salon circuit. His father died in 1903, his mother in 1905, leaving him at thirty-four feeling bereft and lonely, for he had been living with them. After fifteen months he moved into a flat at 102 Boulevard Haussmann owned by the widow of his mother’s uncle, for “I could not reconcile myself to the idea of moving straight away into a house that Mama had never known.”

Now secure financially, he organized and fortified himself, with the little table beside his bed that he called his “pinnace” for the voyage to recapture
his past. Piled round were notebooks, papers, fountain pens, and the apparatus for the frequent medicinal fumigations that filled the room with a yellow mist and purifying odors. When his neighbor, a M. Sauphar, began construction, Proust complained, “ ‘Sauphar’ is the name of the kind of loud trumpet that used to be sounded in the Synagogue to wake the dead for judgment. There is not much difference between these Sauphars of old and the Sauphars of today.” To improve his insulation from the outer world he had all four walls of his bedroom lined with cork. There the occasional visitors saw him thickly enveloped in woolen pullovers.

It was in that bizarre self-exile that Proust, sometime after 1905, began to write his novel. We do not know exactly when or how he decided to write this book of his life. But in the new preface to his revised
Contre Sainte-Beuve
(1908–9), still oscillating between fiction and the essay, he hinted his direction. “Every day I attach less and less importance to the intellect. Every day I realize more that it is only by other means that a writer can regain something of our impressions, reach, that is, a particle of himself, the only material of art. What the intellect restores to us under the name of the past is not the past.…”

Proust’s “past” was a world of the involuntary memory, the welling up from the self in a force beyond his understanding. About January 1, 1909, he experienced an epiphany. This sudden manifestation of meaning was his first revelation of the flowing depths of the self that his whole eight volumes would report from a re-created world inaccessible to the conscious intellect. The occasion of his famous epiphany was not a momentous event. In the most familiar passage of
Swann’s Way:

By now, it seems, Proust had determined to write a novel as long as
The Arabian Nights
, which would require a strength and courage he had not yet shown. “I had lived a life of idleness and dissipation, of sickness, invalidism, and eccentricity. I was embarking on my work when already near to death, and I knew nothing of my trade.” He later declared that his early indisposition was good luck, for it prevented him from trying his great work prematurely.

Now reborn in the vision of involuntary memory, he set about reworking his outline. And so began the lonely writing years in his cork-lined bedroom, preserved in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. For his work of memory Proust dared not rely on his memory. According to Samuel Beckett, Proust had a bad memory, which, Beckett explained, may have been fortunate, for “The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything.” Proust seldom went out of his apartment, using letters and messengers to secure the scrupulous details for the passage he was writing at the moment. Every little thing—music, costume, flowers, trees—had to be just right. He wrote his friend Madame Straus for advice about fox furs, because he said he wanted to buy a fur as a present. The “lady” for whom he wanted these furs was the Albertine in his novel.

When he did go out, it was at odd hours in interludes of writing and for a specific purpose. At half-past eleven one evening he suddenly dropped in on his old friends the Caillavets. He explained that it had been many years since he had seen their young daughter. “Madame, what I ask of you now is that I should be permitted to see Mlle. Simone tonight?” He needed to confirm his impressions of her so he could describe Mlle. de Saint-Loup in the role in which he had cast Simone, as the daughter of the woman whom the narrator had once loved. Though she had long since gone to bed, they obliged by bringing her down from her bedroom. Somehow the impressions of “involuntary memory” had to be verified. Anyone who has seen the manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris can attest to his endless revisions to perfect his unconscious.

By September 1912 Proust had completed the first draft of
Swann’s Way
. He sent samples to the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, where André Gide turned
it down. When the prosperous Fasquelle also refused to publish it, Proust was ready to give up the effort and print it at his own expense, for he hoped to reach beyond his literary coterie to “the kind of people who take a book with them on a railway journey.” Still, he ventured one more try, with the successful Ollendorff firm, which promptly replied, “Dear friend: I may be thicker skinned than most, but I just can’t understand why anyone should take thirty pages to describe how he tosses about in bed because he can’t get to sleep. I clutched my head.…” Yet just this passage would become the classic “overture” that, in the authorized translation by C.K.M. Scott-Moncrieff (1889–1930) invited generations to their long voyage through Proust’s memories:

Self-imprisoned in his bedroom, Proust was not well situated to negotiate with other possible publishers.

Proust finally arranged for publication at his own expense by an enterprising young publisher, Bernard Grasset. The publisher would take a percentage of the published price and the author would pay for publicity. These were hardly “negotiations,” for Proust insisted on giving the publisher better terms than were offered, including a share of the translation rights. They planned a first printing of 1,200 copies, soon increased to 1,750. As Proust worked over the manuscript for publication the book expanded to some eight hundred pages. The publisher objected that it could not all be put in one volume and the public would not buy such a long book. Proust finally divided his work into three volumes, and began by publishing only a first volume. Later the plan would be further expanded, and the last three parts of
Remembrance of Things Past
would be published posthumously without the author’s final revisions. As Proust sent
Swann’s Way
(
Du côté de chez Swann
) to the press he had mutilated the galleys with insertions and corrections all around. “I’ve written a whole new book on the proofs,” he
told his friend, and he was heavily charged for excess corrections. When the book was well received on publication on November 14, 1913 (English translation, 1922), now André Gide offered to take over the novel, but Proust remained loyal to Grasset.

The remainder of the manuscript for
Swann’s Way
that Proust had already prepared might have been published soon, and the whole
Remembrance
might have remained inchoate had not the most melodramatic of Proust’s frustrated love affairs intervened. The ill-starred object of his passion was Alfred Agostinelli, an affable young man of twenty-five who had been his chauffeur in Cabourg back in 1907. This anguished interlude would have the effect of interrupting and eventually expanding Proust’s
Remembrance
. A native of Monaco, and of Italian extraction, Agostinelli had himself been one of those who had fallen in love with the automobile in its early days, and he sped Proust breathlessly across the Normandy landscape. “May the steering-wheel of my young mechanic,” prayed Proust, “remain forever the symbol of his talent, rather than the prefiguration of his martyrdom.”

In January 1913 Agostinelli, whom he had not seen for five years, walked into his apartment asking to be taken on again as his chauffeur. Proust already had a chauffeur, another holdover from the Cabourg days. In an unlucky moment he took on Agostinelli as his secretary, to type the second half of his novel. Proust found Agostinelli’s devoted wife, Anna, unattractive, and she disliked him. But he put them both on a luxurious allowance, which they spent recklessly. He went on courting them by gifts and still-larger allowances. Anna became his rival as he nourished his consuming passion for Agostinelli, which proved less invigorating than paralyzing. With Agostinelli, in that summer of 1913, he drove to Cabourg, the Channel resort, bringing some printer’s proofs to work on. There he seems to have declared his passion to Agostinelli, though he was still torn by love for a young girl in Paris whom he had thought he was going to marry. Unaccountably and impetuously Proust hastened back to Paris, where he completed revising the final proofs of
Swann’s Way
.