Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [16]
This verbal miming had its counterpart in Proust’s love of writing pastiches, which he considered a kind of “criticism in action” (when he was feeling positive) and an “imbecile exercise” (when he was fed up with his addiction to this form). To write “in the manner of” a famous novelist or essayist of the past was something that Proust mastered early and continued to do all his life. He even published a volume containing his pastiches. He avoided writers such as Mérimée and Voltaire, since a simple, straightforward style like theirs was difficult to parody (just as drag queens avoid “doing” unadorned beauties such as Audrey Hepburn and are inspired by highly constructed women such as Mae West or Barbra Streisand). Proust also enjoyed imitating writers whose style he admired excessively (such as Balzac and Flaubert) so that he could be in conscious control of their influence on him and, in a sense, “exorcise” their impact on his prose. As he put it, “Do a voluntary pastiche in order to become original again afterwards and not produce involuntary pastiches the rest of one’s life.” Much later, after writing his pastiche of Flaubert, Proust composed a critical essay on the same master, explaining: “Our mind is never satisfied if it has not been able to give a clear analysis of what it first unconsciously produced, or a living recreation of what it had first patiently analyzed.”
Proust was not just an irritating imitator. He must have had a wonderfully ingratiating personality as well, since long before he began to publish fiction of lasting importance he was already able to attract some of the most sought-after people of his day, including the writers Anatole France and Maurice Barrès. In his early twenties he became a member of Princess Mathilde’s salon. She was Napoleon’s niece, an old lady who’d survived an unhappy marriage to the psychopathic Prince Demidov, nephew of Czar Nicholas I, and who had outlived the members of her brilliant literary coterie, which had included Dumas fils, author of La Dame aux camélias, on which the opera La Traviata is based; Flaubert, who may have been her lover; Mérimée, author of the story from which the opera Carmen is drawn; the historian Taine; the critic Sainte-Beuve, whose ideas Proust would devote several years to demolishing; and the outstanding diarists of the nineteenth century, the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules. By the time Proust came along, only Edmond de Goncourt was still alive (in Remembrance of Things Past Proust creates a pastiche of the Goncourt journal). But Proust was so excited at meeting Princess Mathilde, who represented a conjunction of literary and dynastic legends, that he later made her a character in his novel under her own name.
People often say, casually and not altogether accurately, that Proust’s thinking was deeply affected by his encounter at this time with the most influential French philosopher of the turn of the century, Henri Bergson, who in 1892 married Proust’s cousin Louise Neuburger. But in fact the two men never had a serious conversation except once, after World War I, when they discussed the nature of sleep, a debate that gets replayed in Sodom and Gomorrah. Bergson subscribed to ideas similar to Freud’s, that the function of dreams is to explain away inner conflicts and external stimuli (noises, drafts, disagreeable thoughts) that might trouble a peaceful sleep, whereas Proust saw dreaming as its own province, with its own system of time, and for him the challenge in awakening was precisely how to insert sleep