Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871 in Auteuil, then a leafy district on the western edge of Paris, in the home of his great-uncle ^[1]. The timing mattered: France had just lost the Franco-Prussian War, and the violence of the Paris Commune had ended only weeks before his birth. His father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent physician and epidemiologist who advised governments on cholera control and helped shape the idea of the cordon sanitaire ^[2]. His mother, Jeanne Weil, came from a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace, and she gave her son a deep grounding in French and English literature along with an attachment that lasted until her death ^[1].

Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith but never practiced any religion seriously, and his mixed background later sharpened his sensitivity to the antisemitism that surfaced during the Dreyfus affair ^[3]. At the age of nine he suffered his first severe asthma attack, an event that fixed the pattern of his life. Illness kept him out of school for long stretches, made him dependent on his mother's care, and pushed him toward books, observation and the long family holidays at Illiers, the small town near Chartres that he later transformed into the fictional Combray ^[1].

Despite frequent absences, he did well at the Lycée Condorcet, where he wrote for student reviews and formed friendships with boys from the upper reaches of Parisian society. After a year of voluntary military service at Orléans in 1889 and 1890, he studied law and political science, took a degree in literature at the Sorbonne, and attended lectures by the philosopher Henri Bergson, a cousin by marriage whose ideas about time and memory ran close to the questions Proust would spend his life exploring ^[2].

Nothing about the young Proust suggested a major writer. In the 1890s he was best known as a social climber, a witty and flattering presence in the aristocratic salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he studied duchesses, hostesses and hangers-on with an attention his hosts mistook for mere snobbery ^[3]. He contributed sketches and reviews to the short-lived magazine Le Banquet and to La Revue Blanche, and in 1896 he collected his early pieces in Les Plaisirs et les Jours, an elegant volume with a preface by Anatole France that critics treated as the hobby of a dilettante ^[1].

Between roughly 1895 and 1899 he worked on a long autobiographical novel, published only in 1952 under the title Jean Santeuil. He abandoned it unfinished, apparently unable to find a structure that could hold his material together ^[2]. Instead he turned to the English art critic John Ruskin, whose belief in the moral seriousness of art gave Proust a working method. Although his English was weak, he translated Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906) with help from his mother and the English-born Marie Nordlinger, adding prefaces and notes that amount to his first sustained statements about aesthetics ^[4].

The decisive turn came through loss. His father died in 1903 and his mother in 1905, a blow that left Proust grief-stricken, financially independent and free of the one judgment he feared. After a stay in a sanatorium for his nervous condition, he withdrew step by step from society. Around 1908 and 1909 he wrote the essays and narrative fragments published posthumously as Contre Sainte-Beuve, in which he argued that a writer's books come from a deeper self than the person friends and biographers can see ^[4]. Out of that argument the great novel began to grow.

Proust's reputation rests on a single immense work: À la recherche du temps perdu, known in English as In Search of Lost Time and, in an earlier translation, Remembrance of Things Past. Written between about 1909 and his death, it runs to seven volumes and roughly 3,000 pages, and it follows an unnamed narrator from childhood in Combray through Parisian high society, love affairs, the Dreyfus affair and the First World War, until he discovers his vocation as a writer ^[1]. Its most celebrated episode comes early: the taste of a madeleine soaked in lime-flower tea restores the narrator's childhood entire, an experience of involuntary memory that became the emblem of the whole book ^[2].

Getting it into print was a struggle and belongs high on any list of Marcel Proust achievements. Several publishers rejected the first volume, including the Nouvelle Revue Française, where André Gide turned it down after a cursory look, a decision he later called one of the gravest errors of his life ^[3]. Proust finally paid Bernard Grasset to publish Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) in November 1913. The war delayed the sequel, and Proust used the interruption to expand the novel far beyond its planned dimensions. In 1919 the second volume, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, published now by Gallimard, won the Prix Goncourt, France's leading literary prize, and made him famous ^[1].

Three further volumes appeared in his lifetime: Le Côté de Guermantes, and Sodome et Gomorrhe in two parts, the latter containing some of the earliest extended treatment of homosexuality in mainstream European fiction ^[3]. The final three, La Prisonnière, Albertine disparue and Le Temps retrouvé, were edited from his manuscripts by his brother Robert and appeared between 1923 and 1927. Alongside the novel, his essays, his Ruskin translations and the posthumous Contre Sainte-Beuve secured his standing as a critic of unusual power ^[4].

The basic Marcel Proust facts of daily existence were shaped by sickness and money. Severe asthma, allergies and insomnia governed his schedule; for much of his adult life he slept by day and worked by night, fortified by coffee and, at times, by drugs to make him sleep or keep him awake ^[2]. The fortune he inherited from his parents meant he never needed a profession, although he held an unpaid and almost entirely nominal post at the Bibliothèque Mazarine for years, perpetually on sick leave ^[1].

Proust was homosexual, a fact he never acknowledged publicly and denied when challenged, at one point fighting a pistol duel in 1897 with the writer Jean Lorrain over a review that hinted at his relationship with Lucien Daudet ^[3]. Both men fired wide. His deepest attachment was probably to Alfred Agostinelli, a young chauffeur he had first employed in 1907 and later took into his household as a secretary. Agostinelli fled Paris in 1913 and died in 1914 when the aeroplane he was piloting crashed into the sea near Antibes. The loss devastated Proust and left visible traces in the character of Albertine, the narrator's captive and fugitive love ^[4].

In society he was famous for extravagant tips, elaborate courtesy and letters of baroque flattery, and his friends coined the adjective 'proustifier' for his manner. Behind the performance sat a ruthless observer. Aristocrats such as Robert de Montesquiou, the model for the Baron de Charlus, discovered too late how closely they had been studied ^[3]. From 1914 his household was run by Céleste Albaret, the wife of his driver, who served as housekeeper, courier and confidante until his death and whose memoir, Monsieur Proust, remains a primary witness to his working life ^[5].

From 1919 Proust lived at 44 rue Hamelin in the 16th arrondissement, having been forced out of the flat on the boulevard Haussmann where he had famously lined his bedroom with cork to shut out noise and pollen ^[1]. He rarely left his bed except for occasional late-night appearances at the Ritz, wrapped in fur even in summer, gathering final observations of the social world he was recording. Nearly all his energy went into the novel: revising proofs, dictating to Céleste Albaret, and pasting long handwritten additions, his 'paperoles', onto the margins of his notebooks ^[5].

He knew he was racing his own body. Weakened by decades of asthma and by a regimen of fumigations, caffeine and sedatives, he caught a cold in the autumn of 1922 that developed into bronchitis and then pneumonia. Refusing most medical treatment, including the care urged on him by his brother Robert, he continued to dictate corrections to the deathbed scene of his character Bergotte almost until the end ^[2]. He died in his apartment on November 18, 1922, at the age of 51, and was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris beside his parents ^[1].

At his death the last section of the novel existed in manuscript with the word 'Fin' written at the end, a completion he had announced with pride to Céleste Albaret some months earlier, though the text still awaited the layers of revision he gave every page ^[5]. His brother and the editors at Gallimard, including Jacques Rivière and later Jean Paulhan, prepared the remaining volumes for publication, and scholars have argued about the editing of Albertine disparue ever since ^[4].

Few novels have had the afterlife of In Search of Lost Time. Writers as different as Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene acknowledged its force, and Beckett's first published book was a 1931 essay on Proust ^[2]. The novel's central discoveries, that the self is plural and unstable, that time destroys and memory partially restores, that art can fix what life loses, fed directly into literary modernism and continue to shape fiction, film and philosophy. Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes and many later theorists built substantial work on Proustian foundations ^[4].

The book reached the English-speaking world quickly through C. K. Scott Moncrieff, whose translation, begun in 1922 under the Shakespearean title Remembrance of Things Past, became a classic in its own right; revised and fresh translations have followed, including the revision by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright and a multi-translator Penguin edition ^[6]. In France, the Pléiade critical editions of the novel and the twenty-one volumes of Proust's collected correspondence edited by Philip Kolb turned Proust studies into a scholarly industry, and biographies by George Painter, Jean-Yves Tadié and William C. Carter mapped the life in ever finer detail ^[7].

His traces are physical as well as literary. The family holiday town of Illiers officially renamed itself Illiers-Combray in 1971, taking the name of its fictional double, and his aunt's house there is preserved as a museum ^[1]. His cork-lined room is reconstructed at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, and in 2018 the Bibliothèque nationale de France paid a record price at auction for corrected proofs of Swann's Way. A century after his death, any serious Marcel Proust biography must reckon with a paradox he would have relished: the invalid who barely left his bed became the writer through whom millions of readers learned to see their own past.