Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [19]
The present princesse de Caraman-Chimay once told me that when Proust died, her great-uncle Comte Henri Greffulhe (the main model for the duc de Guermantes), found his butler sobbing. “But why are you grieving? Did you know Monsieur Proust?” “Oh, yes,” the butler replied, “every time there would be a ball here, Monsieur Proust would come by the next day and quiz me about who had come, what they said, how they were related to one another and so on. Such a nice man—and he always left such a generous tip!” Proust’s relationship to society is encapsulated in this story—the indirect information gleaned from a knowledgeable and observant butler, the kindness to servants, the prizing and preserving of anecdotes which the hosts themselves quickly forget . . . even the big tip.
Proust began with Remembrance of Things Past one of the major trends of the century—to confound autobiography and fiction—yet the originality of his formal innovations was not immediately apparent to his contemporaries because his work was rooted in the aristocratic past, and because his style was not lean, oblique, modern, pregnant with omissions and silence, but rather a fully saturated style, reminiscent of no writer in the French past except the seventeenth-century diarist the duc de Saint-Simon, one of Louis XIV’s disgruntled courtiers, a gifted gossip and a master at word portraits. If the world of aristocratic salons provided Proust with his most compelling subject matter, that same subject alienated many of his potential readers. After he became famous—and especially after his death—many of the serious intellectuals and artists who’d dismissed him earlier as a hanger-on, a society parasite, a gossip columnist (for Proust wrote accounts of salons for the newspaper Le Figaro) suddenly had to scratch their heads and re-evaluate him. Perhaps because he was known to be gay (at least to an inner circle), his contemporaries couldn’t imagine that such a popinjay could turn out to be the greatest novelist of the new century.
V
In 1892 AND 1893 PROUST, who was in his early twenties, and four of his friends (including Daniel Halévy, Robert Dreyfus, and Fernand Gregh) founded a literary magazine called Le Banquet (the French name for Plato’s Symposium). In it Proust published critical articles and short stories that he would later collect in his first published book, Pleasures and Days. (The title is a frivolous variation on the sober title of another ancient Greek classic, Hesiod’s Works and Days.) When Le Banquet folded in 1893, Proust began to publish fiction in La Revue Blanche, including a sketch, “Before the Night,” the confession of a lesbian: “It is no less moral—or rather not more immoral—that a woman should find pleasure with another woman rather than with a being of the opposite sex.” Elsewhere, the female speaker asks, “How can we be indignant about habits that Socrates (he was referring to men, but isn’t it the same thing), he who drank hemlock rather than commit an injustice, cheerfully approved in his favorite male friends?”
Fernand Gregh, his co-editor on Le Banquet, left an intriguing evaluation of Proust at this time. Gregh wrote that Proust was so determined to be loved he was willing to risk being scorned; he was handsome, especially when he spoke and his eyes glowed; he appeared to be passive but he was really active: “He creates the impression of giving, and he takes.”
In 1893 Proust met Robert de Montesquiou at the house of the hostess-painter Madeleine Lemaire, of whom the younger Dumas said she had created more roses than God. (Proust, the flatterer, went Dumas one better by starting a sonnet to Madame Lemaire with these words: “You do more than God—an eternal springtime.”) Montesquiou—a monster of egotism who needed constant praise as exaggerated