The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [10]
Sleeping (or trying to sleep) during the day and working all night, buoyed up against asthma and fatigue by medicines and stimulants had long been Proust’s modus vivendi and it was how he set about constructing his novel. By 1909 he had a fragmentary draft, although its boundaries were decidedly indeterminate. The cork lining, insulation from the ills of the outside world, went up in boulevard Haussmann whilst Proust was in Cabourg in July 1910. The following summer he wrote that his novel was ‘an extremely considerable work, at least in terms of its mad length’ and that in order to finish it, he should like the assistance of a secretary ‘for two or three months’.5 Eleven years later Proust would die before his final revisions to this most ‘considerable work’ were complete.
In October 1912 the overall working title was Les Intermittences du cœur [The Intermittencies of the Heart] and the work was to consist of two volumes, Le Temps perdu and Le Temps retrouvé. After refusals from a number of publishers, including the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), whose decision fell to André Gide, who may not have bothered to read the manuscript, Proust finally decided to publish at his own expense. Terms were agreed with Grasset in March 1913, and Proust soon set about revising the proofs. Finally, in November 1913 Swann’s Way was published, announced as the first of three volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu, the second and third advertised as Le Côté de Guermantes and Le Temps retrouvé.
The novel never ceased to swell between its inception and the publication of the first volume; so it continued to grow organically for nine more years until Proust’s death in 1922 and beyond to September 1927 when the publication of Time Regained, by then the seventh volume of the Search, closed the loop of this sui generis publishing adventure. Swann’s Way received mixed reviews, but soon some of those who had earlier knocked Proust’s project, or had prejudged it because of his reputation, were avowing their admiration, among them Gide, who went some way towards atoning for his prior lapse by suggesting that the NRF publish the rest of the Search. The contract was finalized in 1916 and the publication of the novel was resumed, between NRF covers, in 1919.
It was just a month after the publication of Swann that Agostinelli disappeared from Proust’s apartment. This traumatic chapter in Proust’s personal life diluted the joy that publication should have brought. Agostinelli’s death the following summer struck another body-blow to Proust’s already weak frame. The Guermantes Way, the second volume announced at the time of the publication of Swann, should have been published in 1915 but Bernard Grasset was mobilized and his publishing house closed down (Proust’s ill health kept him out of active service, although the fear of medical checks and the possibility of enlistment kept him constantly on edge). As a result this volume also swelled in 1914–15, cleaving into what we now know as A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs [Within a Budding Grove] and The Guermantes Way.
As Proust’s novel hypertrophied from half a million words before the war to around one-and-a-quarter million words after it, violent conflict was destroying human life on an unprecedented scale. Proust followed the developments of the war in their minutest details, reading seven newspapers a day. He was critical of what he viewed as expressions of jingoistic nationalism from many writers of the time such as Montesquiou and Léon Daudet, elder brother of Lucien. His health was poor, the hours he kept were unconventional, but he continued to write huge numbers of letters and to go out periodically