Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [56]
I especially enjoyed Trente Ans de dîners en ville by Gabriel Louis Pringué, published in 1948, since he repeats many of the witticisms that circulated in Parisian society, often in a sharper version than the one Proust quotes, which only goes to show, as Gertrude Stein contended, that literature is not anecdotes.
Painter gives a full bibliography of memoirs about Proust. The most moving one, of course, is Céleste Albaret’s Monsieur Proust, since it was written by his maid, who lived with him, night and day, for ten years and provides us with the most intimate portrait that we have of this generous, selfish man, this strong weakling, this compassionate snob. It was translated and published in English in 1976.
Of the hundreds of critical books available, I owe a debt to Gilles Deleuze for his Proust and Signs, translated in 1973. I used this semiotic text extensively in a course I taught on Proust at Columbia in 1981 at the School of the Arts. Howard Moss, an old friend and the poetry editor of The New Yorker, published The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust in 1963, the sort of belletristic appreciation that never gets published today, alas; his was one of the first books about Proust I ever read.
All of the greatest minds from every country have been trained sooner or later on Proust. The Irish writer Samuel Beckett wrote a concise study of Proust. In Germany, Walter Benjamin. In Spain, José Ortega y Gasset, who in an essay called “Time, Distance and Form in the Art of Proust” asserts that Proust invented a new proximity between us and things, so that “nearly all literary production before him takes on an aspect of bird’s-eye literature, crudely panoramic, compared to this deliciously myopic genius.” In Italy, Pietro Citati. In France, everyone from Gérard Genette to Michel Leiris, from Julia Kristeva to Roland Barthes. In a short essay that was published in a special Proust issue of Magazine Littéraire, Barthes speculates that Proust went from being an incompetent writer of fragments to a great novelist in 1909, once he had come upon four discoveries: a peculiar way of narrating in the first person so that the “I” shifts seamlessly from the author to the Narrator to the hero; a poetic choice of evocative names for his characters after years of vacillation; a decision to “think big” and to give his book a much larger scale; and finally a novelistic sense of growth and repetition, based on what Proust called Balzac’s “admirable invention of keeping the same characters in all his novels.”
There are many lighter books about Proust that amused and informed me, including Alain de Botton’s recent How Proust Can Change Your Life, a half-funny, half-serious attempt to apply Proust’s moral and philosophical principles to one’s own daily existence and amorous or career qualms. A big recent picture book, Les Promenades de Marcel Proust, enabled me to envision the places Proust was thinking of while writing, as did Henri Raczymow’s Le Paris littéraire et intime de Marcel Proust, Ottaviani’s and Poulain’s Le Paris de Marcel Proust, and the mixture of period pictures and paragraphs from old memoirs in Le Grand Livre de Proust, published by Les Belles Lettres.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Marcel Proust
A Viking Book / published by arrangement with the author
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Copyright © 1999 by Edmund White
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