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pages of draft prefatory material are a case in point and are fascinating, highly recommended reading. Here we find the description of a succession of moments of involuntary memory that will become pivotal in the Search (at this stage toast, rather than madeleine, is dunked in tea). They are worked through in support of the crucial reflection that sensation is to be prized over intellect, since memories conjured by contingent sensory stimuli can put us in touch with ‘the intimate essence of ourselves’ (ASB, 7; CSB, 215) in a way that active intellectual endeavour cannot. Proust recognizes the problem of setting out this position in writing, itself reliant on the intelligence, but he maintains that humility and the highest artistic achievements will come from intelligently acknowledging the inferiority of the intelligence. The prefatory notes, like several of the other pieces in the collection, are only loosely related to Sainte-Beuve but are directly concerned with setting out Proust’s own theory of literature.

The piece entitled ‘Sainte-Beuve’s Method’ is vital for our understanding what Proust’s projected essay was responding to. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69), one of the nineteenth century’s most influential critics, believed that in order best to understand and appreciate a writer it was necessary to inform oneself about his (Sainte-Beuve’s subjects were predominantly male) behaviour in society, his finances, his diet, his vices, his daily routine. Proust argues, however, that ‘such a method fails to recognize what any more than merely superficial acquaintance with ourselves teaches us: that a book is the product of a self other than that which we display in our habits, in company, in our vices’ (ASB, 12; CSB, 221–2). That Sainte-Beuve should chose to judge writers on the basis of their social selves, which bear no relation to the deeper selves that produce their art, is proof for Proust that the revered critic lacked a true understanding of artistic creativity – of literature itself – which he placed on the same plane as conversation. Sainte-Beuve’s weekly column in Le Constitutionnel was entitled ‘Causeries’ (talk or chatter), something quite opposed to the silence and withdrawal Proust believed to be necessary for the production of art.

Proust’s own skills as a gifted and sensitive close reader are greatly in evidence in his critical pieces on Nerval, Balzac, Flaubert and Baudelaire; they do offer, however, a rather unusual reading experience because of their hybridity. In the essay ‘Sainte-Beuve and Balzac’, for instance, we find a sudden switch from the critical discussion to a fictional scenario played out in support of the point being made. Proust argues that ‘We come closer to an understanding of the great men of antiquity if we understand them as Balzac did than if we understand them like Sainte-Beuve’; two lines later he writes:

Balzac … like other novelists … had an audience of readers who did not ask that his novels should be works of literature, merely ones interesting for their imaginings and observations. What held them was not his faults of style but rather his virtues and his researches. In the little library on the second floor whither, on Sundays, M. de Guermantes hurried to take refuge at the first ring of the doorbell from his wife’s callers … he had the whole of Balzac, bound in gilded calf with labels of green leather. (ASB, 70–1; CSB, 278–9)

This sort of unannounced shift shows us quite how intermingled were Proust’s various projects announced as ‘under way’ in mid 1908. In August 1909 he approached the editor Alfred Vallette, telling him that he was

finishing a book which, despite its provisional title, Contre Sainte-Beuve: souvenir d’une matinée [Against Sainte-Beuve, Memory of a Morning], is a real novel and one which is extremely indecent in places. One of the main characters is a homosexual … The book ends with a long conversation on Sainte-Beuve and on aesthetics … and when you finish it, you’ll see, I hope, that the whole novel is but a putting into action of the principles