Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [34]
In a letter of this period he said he was planning: a study of the nobility; a Parisian novel; an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert; an essay on women; and an essay on pederasty. Other topics mentioned were gravestones, stained-glass church windows—and an essay on the novel. What is crucial to underline is that at its very inception Proust thought of his book as several books, mostly essays. Only gradually did he see that he could bind all these diverse subjects together into a single work and that he could call it neither a memoir, nor an essay, nor a pastiche, but rather a novel. Proust had always been drawn to writers who had confused genres: he was thinking admiringly, for instance, of Baudelaire’s prose poems, or of the autobiographical side of Flaubert’s novel A Sentimental Education. But where Proust differed from all his predecessors was in the gigantism of his project, a first-person narrative that would be not only the most penetrating analysis of several psyches but also a vast panorama of society—a book, in short, that would be as deep as it was wide.
VIII
BY JUNE 1908, Proust was in the full flood of composition. By July he wrote another friend, his school chum Robert Dreyfus, “It’s been sixty hours since—I won’t say slept, but since I’ve turned off the electric lights.” He had obviously rejected the traditional essay on Sainte-Beuve he had proposed and was working instead on the fictional version of a morning devoted to discussing Sainte-Beuve with his mother. Even when he went to Cabourg at the end of August he spent most of his day shut up in his hotel room writing. At the same time he was already stewing about the problem of publishing such a manuscript, which he judged “obscene.” Obviously the novel had gone far beyond a polite literary discussion with his mother. As he told Georges de Lauris in a letter labeled “Confidential and rather urgent”: “I am finishing a novel that despite its provisional title, Against Sainte-Beuve, Memories of a Morning, is a real novel, and a novel extremely immodest in certain parts. One of the main characters is a homosexual. The name of Sainte-Beuve is not introduced casually. The book ends with a long conversation on Sainte-Beuve and aesthetics.” In fact, Remembrance of Things Past does indeed end with a long meditation (not conversation) on aesthetics, but Sainte-Beuve had long since been absorbed into the very texture of Proust’s narrative: the character Vinteuil is a mighty creator as a composer and a totally self-effacing wimp as a man—the perfect counterargument to Sainte-Beuve’s theory of the harmonious congruity between an individual’s life and work. What is equally interesting is that homosexuality ( including lesbianism), to which Proust would devote nearly a quarter of Remembrance of Things Past, was part of his conception from the very beginning, and that from the beginning he recognized this subject might make the whole book unpublishable.
Although he was only thirty-eight, Proust feared he might soon be dead. He was so ill that he was spending about twenty thousand dollars a year for medicines. He wrote: “One no longer considers oneself to be more than the trustee, who can vanish at any moment, of intellectual secrets, which will vanish too, and one would like to check the inertia that proceeds from one’s previous lethargy by obeying Christ’s beautiful commandment in St. John: ‘Work while ye have the light.’” Everything he would write over the next fourteen years would be indited under the sign of imminent mortality.
But Proust had not yet withdrawn from