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to the contexts or currents that fed into its production we become more aware of his tendency towards multiplication. Private events are lived through, then they come back, remembered. Real individuals lend character traits to fictional ones then go on to appear all the same alongside them in the fiction. References to real paintings, symphonies and poems spill out of the novel yet still there is space in it for imagined memoirs, paintings that have hung on no wall and musical phrases all the more haunting for their never having been inked on to a score. This proliferation is found at the level of language too, of course: characterizing the Search in 1929, Walter Benjamin wrote of ‘the Nile of language, which here overflows and fructifies the regions of truth’.18 On our low days as readers we might well wish for drought, or wish our author had been rather more parsimonious in his planning and plotting. But this is not gratuitous volume for volume’s sake. Proust’s was the age of mechanical reproduction yet there is nothing mechanistic about the proliferation we find in his novel. As Chapter Four will show, the dimensions of the novel and the material it draws within its compass are commensurate with its ambition – and ultimately its success – in charting the Narrator’s long and uncertain passage towards his vocation.

Chapter 3 Early works and late essays

Pleasures and Days

Jean Santeuil

Against Sainte-Beuve

Late essays

Running counter to Proust’s tendency towards proliferation, popular conceptions of the man and his work are often decidedly reductive. ‘Proust’ more often than not means madeleines, means memory, means In Search of Lost Time or, in its older, Shakespearean guise, Remembrance of Things Past. The Search, of course, is Proust’s magnum opus, his major contribution to world literature and to European literary culture, and it is quite right that he should be remembered for it. Voluminous, even encyclopaedic, as it is, however, the Search is not Proust’s only work. He committed the last fourteen years of his life to it, the summa of a lifetime’s thinking, but its outline did not materialize from nowhere. This chapter offers an overview of Proust’s works before the Search, showing how his sensibilities developed as a writer and how his early writings bear traces of interests and preoccupations that develop more fully in the Search. I keep in focus Proust’s near-constant vacillation between different literary forms in his early years, his many experiments with literary style and his tireless scrutiny (and often scathing analysis) of society life. The main works are surveyed in chronological order of their composition.

Pleasures and Days

Proust’s first book was neither a commercial nor a critical success. Its title was suggestive of dilettantism and idle leisure, in contrast to Hesiod’s Works and Days on which it riffs; it was a luxury edition, whose price was four times the average cost of a book at the time; and its presentation – prefaced somewhat enigmatically by Anatole France, illustrated by society hostess Madeleine Lemaire and including four pieces for piano by Reynaldo Hahn – meant that the audience to whom it appealed was small from the start. Proust’s decision to send dedicated copies to many individuals who might otherwise have bought it meant that sales were even lower than he might have hoped.

Although many of the pieces in the collection had already been published in Le Banquet, La Revue blanche and elsewhere, Pleasures and Days is far more than a ‘collected juvenilia’.1 It has a subtle architecture: there are carefully orchestrated shifts between the serious (the tale of a dying man wracked by jealousy, ‘The Death of Baldassare Silvande’, opens the collection), the light-hearted (such as the ‘Fragments from Italian Comedy’ that draw implicit parallels between the Commedia dell’arte and the role-play of the Parisian social scene) and the downright funny (see the pastiche ‘Bouvard and Pécuchet on Society and Music’, where Flaubert’s fictional copyists ponder entering society). We