Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [52]
In September 1922 Proust’s health began to deteriorate rapidly, but on the eighteenth he still plucked up the courage to go to a hotel where his former Swedish valet, Forssgren, was to grant him an assignation. Proust waited in vain from eleven in the evening till three in the morning at the Hôtel Riviera. When Proust died soon after, his brother, Robert, asked, “What person could have been so dear to him that he would knowingly have sacrificed his health to him?”
Proust had developed pneumonia, which went untreated and turned into bronchitis and finally an abscess on the lungs. For a year he had been speaking of his own death; perhaps he was proud that he had hung on so long, to fifty-one, the age at which his prolific predecessor Balzac had died. On the morning of November 18, 1922, Proust saw a fat woman in black whom no one else could see, though Céleste dutifully promised to chase her away. Robert Proust bled him (the common treatment for lowering a fever) by applying suction cups to his back, but to no effect save for the extra pain caused by this procedure. Then, between five and six in the evening, Proust died. The American surrealist Man Ray photographed him, the society priest Mugnier prayed, and two painters drew his inanimate features. Four days later Marcel Proust was buried at Père-Lachaise, where he lies under black marble with other members of his family. The magisterial father, Professor Proust, who died long before his ne’er-do-well son began to publish his masterpiece, might have been surprised to see that the most prominent name on the monument is not “Adrien” but rather “Marcel.”
No matter how strange Proust’s life might have been, it has been subsumed, as he hoped, into the radiant vision of it that he presented in his writing. Nevertheless, the intensely intimate (if not always personal) quality of Proust’s novel makes him more and more popular in this age of memoirs. Whereas other modernists (Stein, Joyce, Pound) rejected confession in favor of formal experiment, Proust was a literary cyclops, if that means he was a creature with a single great “I” at the center of his consciousness (no matter that the first-person Narrator is only occasionally the literal Marcel Proust). Every page of Proust is the transcript of a mind thinking—not the pell-mell stream of consciousness of a Molly Bloom or a Stephen Dedalus, each a dramatic character with a unique vocabulary and an individuating range of preoccupations, but rather the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice: the sovereign intellect.
Proust may be more available to readers today than in the past because as his life recedes in time and the history of his period goes out of focus, he is read more as a fabulist than a chronicler, as a maker of myths rather than the valedictorian of the Belle Epoque. Under this new dispensation, Proust emerges as the supreme symphonist of the spirit. We no longer measure his accounts against a reality we know. Instead, we read his fables of caste and lust, of family virtue and social vice, of the depredations of jealousy and the consolations of art not as reports but as fairy tales. He is our Scheherazade.
Of course Proust is also popular because he writes about glamour—rich people, nobles, artists. And he wrote about love. It doesn’t seem to matter that he came to despise love, that he exploded it, reduced it to its shabbiest, most mechanical, even hydraulic terms, by which I mean he not only demystified love, he also dehumanized it, turning it into something merely Pavlovian. The