Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [0]
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I
IN ENGLAND not long ago a survey of writers and critics revealed that the twentieth-century novelist they most admired—and who they thought would have the most enduring influence on the next century—was Marcel Proust. Certainly the madeleine moistened by herbal tea has become the most famous symbol in French literature; everyone refers to sudden gusts of memory as “Proustian experiences.” Snobs like to point out that if the Prousts had been better-mannered and not given to dunking, world literature would have been the poorer for it. Even those who haven’t read Proust speak of him freely and often.
Studying him, of course, can have a disastrous effect on a young writer, who either comes under the influence of Proust’s dangerously idiosyncratic and contagious style or who feels that Proust has already done everything possible in the novel form. Even Walter Benjamin, who became Proust’s German translator, wrote the philosopher Theodor Adorno that he did not want to read one more word by Proust than was actually necessary for him to translate because otherwise he would become addictively dependent, which would be an obstacle to his own production.
Graham Greene once wrote: “Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth. . . . For those who began to write at the end of the twenties or the beginning of the thirties, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary.” Certainly Proust’s fame and prestige have eclipsed those of Joyce, Beckett, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner, of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of Gide and Valéry and Genet, of Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, for if some of these writers are more celebrated than Proust in their own country, Proust is the only one to have a uniformly international reputation. The young Andrew Holleran, who would go on to publish the most important American gay novel of the seventies, Dancer from the Dance, wrote a friend eight years earlier: “Robert, much has happened: That is, I finally finished Remembrance of Things Past and I don’t know what to say—the idea that Joyce ended the novel is so absurd; it’s Proust who ended the novel, simply by doing something so complete, monumental, perfect, that what the fuck can you do afterwards?”
Joyce met Proust once and they exchanged scarcely a word, even though they shared a cab together (neither had read the other). Beckett wrote a small critical book about Proust; Woolf admired Proust so intensely that she felt swamped by his genius. Gide’s bitterest regret was that as a founder of a fledgling but already prestigious publishing house, he turned down Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s masterpiece (he thought of Proust as a superficial snob and a mere reporter of high-society events). Genet began to write his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, after reading the opening pages of Proust’s Within a Budding Grove. Genet was in prison and he arrived late in the exercise yard for the weekly book exchange; as a result he was forced to take the one book all the other prisoners had rejected. And yet once he’d read the opening pages of Proust he shut the book, wanting to savor every paragraph over as long a period as possible. He said to himself: “Now, I’m tranquil, I know I’m going to go from marvel to marvel.” His reading inspired him to write; he hoped to become the Proust of the underclass.
And yet Proust was not always so appreciated, and even his chief defenders were capable of making snide remarks about him. Robert de Montesquiou (whose arch manners and swooping intonations Proust loved to imitate and whose life provided Proust with the main model for his