Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [36]
By mid-August 1909 Proust was proposing to an editor a book he’d nearly finished and which he called a novel—and which he described in a way that resembles some aspects of Remembrance of Things Past, though it was far shorter and contained only a few of the incidents and themes developed at such length in the finished book. At this time he was talking of a novel of about 300 pages (instead of the eventual 4,300), which he said would be followed by a 150-page conversation about Sainte-Beuve.
Fortunately the editor refused the novel-essay that Proust proposed in 1909. Then, after a second editor failed to serialize the book in a newspaper, Proust became less frantic and worked quietly on his novel for the next three years. When he had first conceived his novel, the entire “Swann in Love” section which makes up four-fifths of the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past had not yet been thought up. Originally the story had proceeded directly from “Combray,” the story of the Narrator’s childhood summers in a village with his father’s relatives, to a description of his play with Gilberte Swann in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées and his adolescent love for her. But when the volume Swann’s Way was finally published in November 1913, most of it was devoted to a story that took place before the Narrator’s birth and during his childhood. Charles Swann, who like Proust is Jewish and an aesthete brilliantly connected socially, takes up with a kept woman, Odette. At first Swann is almost indifferent to Odette, but gradually he comes to prize her—in his best aesthetic style—because he recognizes her resemblance to a figure in a Botticelli painting, and because he associates her with the hypnotic “little phrase” he hears in a sonata by the ( fictional) composer Vinteuil. His passion, however, is ignited only one night when he fails to find her (in the scene that recalls Proust’s own frantic search for Reynaldo Hahn).
The love affair between Swann and Odette is played out against a social backdrop, the salon of Madame Verdurin, a rich middle-class woman who pretends she is so sensitive that the sound of beautiful music makes her physically ill, and who brands all those aristocrats who she knows would never accept her invitations as “bores.” In many ways Madame Verdurin resembles the equally tyrannical and artistic Madame Lemaire, who years before had taken such a benign attitude towards Proust’s affair with Hahn.
The “Swann in Love” section introduces the idea that love is never reciprocated, a theme that later in the book is replayed in the Narrator’s tormented affair with Albertine. It contrasts comic scenes about society with moments of intensely private introspection, which will characterize the entire seven volumes. It plays Swann, a failed writer, against the Narrator, who, though his vocation is long delayed, eventually becomes a fulfilled writer—the very genius who has written the masterpiece we are now reading. And it suggests that one reason for Swann’s failure is his addiction to friendship and frivolity and especially to “idolatry,” by which Proust meant the collector’s love of fine furnishings, beautiful mistresses, and great paintings: the perishable Things of this world rather than the immortal ideas that lie behind them, which can be recaptured only through involuntary memory—and which only then can be codified in great works of literary art.
What Proust had discovered since writing Jean Santeuil was how to take up themes, let them drop, then come back to them, though each time the theme was exposed to a different light. No longer did Proust feel that he had to say everything at once or to set in stone his opinions on every character and topic. Now the