Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [44]
As it turned out, that second volume he was supposed to be correcting would not be published until five years later, in a very different form and under the aegis of a different publishing house. What Proust could not have predicted when he began Remembrance of Things Past were two catastrophes that would completely change the shape of his book: the First World War, which broke out in 1914, and the death of Agostinelli. German air attacks on Paris became an important backdrop for the later action of the book, just as the frontline conflict kills some of the major characters and the upheaval of the war radically metamorphoses the old social order, by ruining some of the old aristocratic families and advancing certain middle-class people to positions of prominence. Proust writes movingly of the sight of a nearly deserted Paris in 1914 under the “unchanged antique splendor of a moon cruelly, mysteriously serene, which poured the useless beauty of its light on monuments that were still intact.”
Even more crucially, the loss of Agostinelli led to the elevation of Albertine to the level of principal character, to the amplification of Within a Budding Grove as a separate volume, replete with scenes of the young girls who surround Albertine, and to the invention of the two volumes devoted entirely to Albertine’s life with the Narrator, flight, and death, The Captive and The Fugitive. Rather than distorting the proportions of the whole book, as some critics have complained, the introduction of Albertine actually fills an immense void, “since little dalliances without importance and fleeting flirtations are replaced by the violent, tragic grandeur of a Racinian passion,” as Proust’s best and most recent biographer, Jean-Yves Tadié, writes. “And a new theme will be introduced, which was lacking in the original plans if not in Pleasures and Days, the theme of female homosexuality: Gomorrah will now be a true adjunct to Sodom.” In the eight years following Agostinelli’s death Proust’s book doubled in volume.
La Nouvelle Revue Française realized the mistake that had been made in rejecting Swann’s Way. Jacques Rivière, a sickly, brilliant young man whom Proust came to consider the best critic of his generation, was the first of the NRF team to read the published book all the way through and to announce to his colleagues their disastrous oversight. André Gide wrote to Proust in 1914, “The refusal of this book will remain the most serious mistake of the N.R.F.—and (since I’m ashamed to be largely responsible) one of the most bitter regrets and causes of remorse in my life.”
But Proust graciously responded, “I’ve often felt that certain great pleasures require that we first must be deprived of a pleasure of a lesser sort. . . .” The NRF was more than a commercial venture; it was a consecration by Proust’s peers. But he could not bring himself to break with Grasset right away, out of timidity and halfhearted loyalty, and only after many complex maneuverings did he change from one house to the other. Even so, no books were being published during the war, and Proust had to wait until 1919 for the appearance in print of Within a Budding Grove.
The only compensation Proust found for the loss of Agostinelli was in Ernst Forssgren, a six-foot-four blond Swedish Adonis, whom he engaged as a valet and soon promoted to the status of