Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [33]
It was in this unpromising new apartment, however, that Proust wrote most of Remembrance of Things Past. The mammoth book began, appropriately enough, as a sort of Platonic dialogue with his mother on the subject of Sainte-Beuve, the nineteenth-century literary critic, whose ideas and writing galled Proust. He had begun to think about Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve with renewed intensity at the end of 1904 and the beginning of 1905, when everyone was celebrating the centennial of the critic’s birth (December 23, 1804). In gushing terms contemporary eulogists assured their readers that Sainte-Beuve’s reputation was now unassailable—a claim that doubly irritated a dissenting Proust.
Sainte-Beuve was the founder of the “biographical” method; he believed that one could not even begin to read Balzac, for instance, much less evaluate his work, if one did not first know everything available about his life, based on his letters, journals, and the accounts of his friends and acquaintances. Sainte-Beuve wanted to know an author’s religious views, his response to nature, his behavior with women, with money, with the rich and the poor. “What was his routine, the style of his daily life?” Sainte-Beuve asked. “What were his vices; his weaknesses? None of the answers to these questions is irrelevant in judging the author of a book and the book itself. . . .” What Proust objected to right away was the fact that by using this method Sainte-Beuve had seriously underestimated, even dismissed, three of the greatest writers of his era: Stendhal, Baudelaire, and Nerval.
Because Sainte-Beuve had known Stendhal personally, he assured his readers that Henri Beyle (to use Stendhal’s real name) would have been the first to be astonished by his present fame. This urbane nonsense, based on Sainte-Beuve’s earnest misreading of Beyle’s modesty, made Proust chortle cruelly. For Proust the most important sign of a critic’s skill was his or her evaluation of contemporaries, given that everyone agreed about the relative importance of the writers of the past. Secondly, Proust believed that housed within the same artist was a social being—someone who went to parties, paid calls on ladies, hobnobbed with critics—and a creative being, the one who invented music, poetry, painting, or prose. And Proust was convinced that there was very little relationship between these two separate beings: “A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, our social life and our vices.” But if Proust thought the life could not explain the work, he was nonetheless fascinated by the biographies of artists. He didn’t object to biography as a form; he was only against biographical criticism.
With his usual procrastination, Proust, while lying in his sickbed and inhaling his fumigations, thought out the various aspects of his attack on Sainte-Beuve, but as yet committed nothing to paper. As he wrote Lucien Daudet, “When I read myself and especially when I write—(for I never read myself)—(it’s also true that I never write anymore either) . . . I find that I have no talent, that I haven’t known how, for many different reasons, to turn my gifts into talent, and my style has gone rotten without ever ripening.”
In fact, he was far too ill to work. Sometimes he would have as many as ten asthma attacks a day, and usually he was too weak even to walk from one room to another. As late as December 1908 he wrote his friend Georges de Lauris, “I’m going to