Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [31]
Just before she died, Madame Proust had reluctantly allowed herself to be photographed; in Remembrance of Things Past the Narrator’s grandmother makes a similar gesture, in order to leave behind a last image of herself for a grieving grandson. Indeed, in his vast novel Proust assigns to the character of the mother the feelings his real mother had had of disappointment with her son’s lack of self-discipline; whereas to the figure of the fictional grandmother he lends his real mother’s tenderness, her unconditional love for him in spite of all his failings. As Proust himself viewed the matter, “the lack of will power which prevents a man from resisting any vice in particular” is “that greatest of all vices.” He would often look at the photo of his mother; indeed, he studied his collection of photos all the time whenever he wrote.
Perhaps the strangest drama in Proust’s life is the transformation of little Marcel—the dandy and partygoer, the time waster who at age thirty-four had managed to do little more than write a slim volume of short stories and two translations of Ruskin—into the great Proust, who wrote one of the longest and most remarkable novels of all time. One psychological clue to Proust’s endless stalling before beginning his novel is provided near the end of that very book: “No doubt, my idleness having given me the habit, when it was a question of work, of putting it off from one day to another, I imagined that death too might be postponed in the same fashion.” Like the man who superstitiously refuses to write a will out of an unacknowledged fear that by doing so he will be signing his death warrant, in the same way Proust fancied that so long as he failed to begin his life’s work, his life would go on.
The artistic reason for his long delay was that his ambition was so great—a desire to write a book that would rival Balzac’s panorama of Parisian society, and to combine that scope with an intimate history of a young man’s artistic and spiritual evolution. This ambition required so many technical skills as a writer—everything from a traditional, Dickensian knack at rendering eccentrics to a psychological penetration worthy of the great Russians—that Proust could never have begun to forge them into a flowing, viable style before his late thirties. Meanwhile, the circumstances of his life were conspiring to prepare him, for if his innate sociability gave him the knowledge of the world he needed for the panoramic aspects of his book, his endless hours of suffering as a solitary invalid provided him with the depth and introspection he needed for the masterful pages that anatomize the passions. Proust was one of the few twentieth-century writers who possessed both a grasp of how society works and a sufficient distance from it to view it objectively and then to write about it. Moreover, he had the necessary drive to write an unprecedentedly long and comprehensive book, since only by doing so could he prove that his endless dithering and fruitless preparations had paid off.
He also had a large enough fortune to buy the freedom necessary to undertake such a vast and uncertain project. While his parents were still alive he had been kept on a very tight financial leash. They begrudged him the lavish expenses of every dinner he gave and provided him with such a small allowance that he was unable to move out of the family apartment. In his letters to his mother from a health resort he would calculate the cost of every meal, every bouquet offered to a lady, every cab ride, and part of the solitude of these years was due not so much to ill health as to straitened circumstances; as a young man he’d made the occasional splashy gesture (inviting Madame Straus and her son to the opera, for instance) but had sacrificed to it all the small, normal outings that nourish most friendships.
Three and a half months after his mother’s death Proust discovered that he had inherited the equivalent of about $6 million of our money today,