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dejected, angrily struggling against the illness which, in this bad weather, triumphed. Gloomy days: I could neither read nor work; the slightest effort made me break out into a nasty sweat; to focus my attention exhausted me; the moment I stopped controlling each breath, I began choking for air.” For Proust, obviously, illness and medicine are capital subjects, which he treats with more unsparing and copious detail than the minimalist Gide. Here’s a typical passage from Proust: “We went into the sickroom. Bent in a semicircle on the bed, a creature other than my grandmother, a sort of beast that had put on her hair and crouched among her bedclothes, lay panting, whimpering, making the blankets heave with its convulsions. The eyelids were closed, and it was because they did not shut properly rather than because they opened that they disclosed a chink of eyeball, blurred, rheumy, reflecting the dimness of an organic vision and of an inward pain. All this agitation was not addressed to us, whom she neither saw nor knew.” One cannot accuse Proust of long-windedness, only of an excessively detailed fascination with his subject. Whereas Gide suggests, Proust spells everything out.

But even if the committee had liked the prose, the book was much too long for a fledgling house. Gide, ever the guilty Protestant, was eager later on to assume all the blame. He claimed that he had just dipped into the book here and there and had been struck by the sordidness of the description of Aunt Léonie’s medicines and offended by the peculiar mention of the “vertebrae” showing through her nearly transparent forehead. He had met Proust twenty years earlier in a salon and thought of him as no more than a right-winger and flatterer. At the end of his life Gide was still worrying about his misjudgment, asking himself, “Would I have been able to recognize right away the obvious value of Baudelaire, of Rimbaud? Wouldn’t I have dismissed Lautréamont at first as a madman?”

Another member of the committee tried to absolve Gide retrospectively by making the blame collective. Jean Schlumberger wrote: “I maintain that no one, neither Gide nor Gaston nor Copeau nor I, had read the manuscript. At the most we’d all just pecked at it, here and there, just a few paragraphs in which the writing seemed unpromising. We refused the work because of its enormous size and because of Proust’s reputation as a snob.” Later Gallimard would turn down another French masterpiece of the century, Céline’s Journey to the End of Night.

The extraordinary thing is that not once was Proust’s faith in his writing shaken. He might wail that the book had been easy to write but was so difficult to publish. He might feel irritated that no one took him seriously enough to hear out his explanations of where the whole long work was headed or to grasp his ideas about the symphonic construction of his epic or the role of involuntary memory. No one would take the time to see that he’d written the consummate Bildungsroman, the apprenticeship novel in which the hero learns about painting, music, and literature from, respectively, the characters known as Elstir (based partially on Whistler), Vinteuil, and Bergotte. Nor had they read enough to see that the love of the Narrator for Albertine would echo Swann’s for Odette, and that passion is always a disappointment in Proust’s world and family love the only form of affection that endures. But despite his frustration, Proust remained coolly adamant that his book was something of lasting merit.

Proust made another effort. His book was submitted to a publishing house called Ollendorff. The director, a man named Humblot, replied, “I may be narrow-minded but I can’t understand how a gentleman can use thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in his bed before falling asleep.” Proust commented: “Here’s a man . . . who has had in his hands 700 pages in which you can easily see that so much moral experience, thought and pain have been concentrated, not diluted, and that’s the manner he uses to brush the book aside.”

With marvelous resourcefulness