The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [8]
Proust achieved his ‘licence’ degree in Philosophy in 1895 and in June 1896 a collection of his writings, Les Plaisirs et les jours [Pleasures and Days], was published in a luxury edition illustrated by Madeleine Lemaire. The book did little to change Proust’s public image as a dilettante, a social climber and a snob. The following month, however, his article ‘Contre l’obscurité’ [Against Obscurity] was published. In it he takes issue directly with the aesthetics of symbolists such as Mallarmé. Proust begins to set out his own artistic agenda, writing forcefully in reaction to an influential current of the time: the article offers a glimpse of the writer, hitherto sheltered under the carapace of the socialite, who has thought deeply on the role of art and the function of the artist in his age.
From June 1895 Proust had a post working in the Mazarine library; or he would have done had his evasions (citing health problems) and nepotistic string-pulling not permitted him to take repeated leaves of absence. His leave was made permanent in 1900. During these years Proust spent time in Dieppe, Belle-Île and Beg Meil in Brittany, in Kreuznach in Germany with his mother, and in Fontainebleau. The sketches and notes for a novelistic project, never finished, posthumously known as Jean Santeuil, were drafted during this time. From his letters we know that Proust was also working his way through a substantial collection of European writers: Rousseau’s Confessions, Balzac and Sainte-Beuve in large doses, Shakespeare, Goethe and George Eliot. His reading at Fontainebleau in October 1896 alone (Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Wilhelm Meister, Middlemarch) represents a remarkable sweep of tales of love, ambition, deception and self-exploration, all concerns that take their place in Proust’s later writings.
The second half of the 1890s witnessed a waning in Proust and Hahn’s closeness; Proust’s affections were growing for Lucien Daudet, younger son of renowned writer Alphonse Daudet (1840–97). In February 1897 Jean Lorrain, a novelist and journalist whose voluble homophobia was as notorious as his closeted homosexuality, published an article mocking Pleasures and Days and casting aspersions about the nature of Proust and Daudet’s relationship. At the time, a public insinuation of homosexuality, however accurate it may have been, was perceived as an affront to the integrity of the accused and to the honour of his family name. The oddity of this situation – a known homosexual publicly deriding another – is characteristic of the attitudes of the period to same-sex relations. What Lorrain reviled (and what he perceived between Proust and Daudet) was homosexuality taking the form of effeminacy, un-manly behaviour. Strictures of form in society dictated that same-sex preference and practices should be expressed and satisfied discreetly and in private: the acceptable face of masculinity was a virile one and so Proust, fearful of the impact Lorrain’s affront might have on his parents, challenged him to a duel with pistols. Shots were fired on 6 February, neither man was injured and the matter was deemed resolved.
Some time in 1897 Proust discovered the work of the English art historian and critic John Ruskin (1819–1900). For several years Proust absorbed himself in Ruskin’s œuvre, collaborating closely with his mother and Hahn’s English cousin Marie Nordlinger to translate two of Ruskin’s well-known works, The Bible of Amiens (1885) and Sesame and Lilies (1865): the translations were published, respectively, in 1904 and 1906. In 1900 Proust visited several of the French cathedrals Ruskin had studied, as well as Venice and Padua. In 1901, after these trips