Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [39]
Proust was becoming so immersed in his writing that soon his life was imitating his work. When Albert Nahmias stood Proust up one evening in 1912 at Cabourg (Proust did not know the reason—a car accident), Proust wrote him a letter that directly echoed Swann’s declarations to Odette: “I have a lively affection for you that sometimes makes me want to yawn, sometimes to weep, sometimes to drown myself.” Before long, however, the friendship was patched up and Nahmias and a young English secretary were working again on the typescript, first in Cabourg, then in Paris.
On October 28, 1912, Proust’s novel was submitted through powerful intermediaries to the Parisian publisher Fasquelle—a strange choice, since it was the house that had published the naturalists Flaubert, Zola, and the Goncourt brothers. Proust justified the choice of such a big, commercial publisher by saying rather airily that he hoped thereby to reach “people who take trains and before boarding them buy a badly printed volume.” On December 24 the manuscript was returned, the reader’s report declaring, “After 712 pages of this manuscript . . . one has no notion, no notion at all of what it’s all about. . . . What does all this mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it! Impossible to say anything about it!”
Even before Fasquelle had turned him down, Proust was already making overtures to a new publishing house which put out the distinguished literary magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française and which would eventually come to be known as Gallimard. The house had been started by André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Jean Schlumberger, three brilliant literary lights, with its business affairs handled by Gaston Gallimard. Proust had been a subscriber to the magazine since 1911 and admired many of its writers, such as Valéry Larbaud (James Joyce’s first French translator and a sophisticated, accomplished prose stylist in his own right) and Paul Claudel (the arch-Catholic playwright and diplomat). Proust even went so far as to offer to underwrite the expenses of publishing his book. He explained to the sensitive, patrician Gallimard that in the second volume—which at the time Proust thought would be the last—a pederast would be introduced: “I think the character is rather an original one,” Proust said, “he’s the virile pederast, in love with virility, loathing effeminate young men, in fact loathing all young men, just as a man who has suffered through women becomes a misogynist.” Although Proust hastened to assure Gallimard that “a metaphysical and moral viewpoint is maintained throughout . . . nevertheless, the old gentleman seduces a male concierge and keeps a pianist.” To be sure, the pianist became a violinist and the concierge a tailor, but otherwise Proust was being perfectly accurate about a character who would eventually be called Charlus, but who at the time was still identified as Monsieur de Fleurus or de Guray.
Once again Proust met with disappointment. The committee of readers, led by Gide, seems not even to have read the manuscript, much less to have prepared a report. They were put off by Proust’s reputation as a socialite and snob, a friend of duchesses, as well as by his endless, flowery sentences. If we compare Proust’s style with Gide’s we can immediately see what the committee objected to. In Gide’s The Immoralist, a 130-page novel finished in 1901, the writing is very pared back: “Toward the end of January, the weather suddenly changed for the worse; a cold wind began blowing, and my health immediately showed the effects. . . . I spent those mournful days beside the fire,