Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [38]
In 1910 Proust toiled on what would become Swann’s Way and The Guermantes Way. The next year he organized his book into two volumes, one of which would be entitled Time Lost and the other Time Regained. As he became more and more obsessed with his novel, he wrote fewer articles and hardly went out at all. His fascination with all the arts, however, would occasionally tempt him to attend a concert, see a ballet or opera, or visit a gallery; in these years he was especially intrigued by the Ballets Russes, directed by the greatest impresario of the day, Sergei Diaghilev, and starring the dancer Nijinsky, Diaghilev’s lover. On the opening night of The Rite of Spring, Proust saw the revolutionary ballet and afterwards, according to a letter he wrote at the time, dined with Diaghilev and Nijinsky as well as with the composer, Stravinsky, and Proust’s new friend the very young and brilliant writer Jean Cocteau. When Diaghilev commissioned Reynaldo Hahn to write a score for a ballet, Le Dieu bleu, Proust wept with pride.
In 1911 Proust became a subscriber to Théâtrophone, a service that held a telephone receiver up at a concert, which allowed people to stay at home and hear live music on their receivers. Thanks to this novel system, Proust was able to listen to Wagner (on February 20, 1911, for instance, he heard Act III of Die Meistersinger) and to Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande (with Maggie Teyte as Mélisande). As the years of composition of his great epic went by, years when Proust was discouraged and afraid that he would never finish it, he would compare it to a Gothic church always expanding but left incomplete, or to the long and ambitious four-opera Ring cycle by Wagner. Proust preferred Wagner to Debussy, the fully developed score to the hints and sketches of Pelléas et Mélisande.
Proust esteemed Wagner’s way of “spitting out everything he knew about a subject, everything close or distant, easy or difficult.” This sort of fullness and explicitness he obviously preferred in literature as well, an amplitude he contrasted favorably to the pared-back reticence of the neoclassical style, as it was practiced by Anatole France or even André Gide. Still more important, Wagner’s opera Parsifal has been designated by some critics as the very template for Remembrance of Things Past, since both works trace the quest of a young man—in Parsifal, for the Holy Grail; and in Proust’s book, for the secret of literature. Proust’s “young girls in flower” may be compared to the Flower Maidens in Parsifal, the Guermantes clan (with distant origins in Germany) to Wagner’s Guernemanz, head of the Holy Grail Knights, and so on.
By 1912 Proust had written some 1,200 pages and was ready to submit the Swann’s Way that we know to various editors. This first part, some 712 pages in length, had been typed by a young man named Albert Nahmias, an intelligent secretary who did not hesitate to make marginal comments about the scenes he was transcribing from Proust’s endless notebooks. Proust was so fond of the handsome Nahmias that he wrote him: “If I could only change my sex, face and age and take on the looks of a young and pretty woman so that I could kiss you with all my heart.” Albert Nahmias contributed his name to the character Albertine, though when someone asked him if he had been the model for that character, he responded modestly, “There were several of us.” Proust himself wrote that there had been many models for Albertine, including some he had forgotten, since “a book is a great cemetery in which one can no longer read the names on most of the tombs.” In fact the numerous originals for Albertine may explain why the character is so vague, despite the fact that more pages are devoted to her than to any other character