Proust Himself
ONLY the outer picture of Marcel Proust’s life is here drawn. The representation of his work and his accomplishment would require more space and more time. But I take this opportunity to urge you to refer to the extraordinary biography of Léon Pierre Quints, which with unusual clearness and objectivity, and at the same time with the most intimate knowledge, treats of the work of Marcel Proust. From it the main facts of this sketch are taken.
I
Proust was born at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, on July 10, 1871, in Paris, the son of a celebrated doctor, of a rich, very rich, middleclass family. But neither the skill of his father nor the fortune of his mother was able to save his childhood. At nine years of age the boy ceased forever to have good health. Returning from a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, he was overcome by an asthmatic spasm, and these dreadful attacks stifled him all his life until he drew his last breath.
Nearly everything is forbidden the child after his ninth year — travel, lively games, exercise, high spirits, everything that means childhood. At an early age he becomes an observer, delicate, high-strung, easily irritated, a being of unheard-of sensitiveness of nerves and perceptions.
He loves the country, but only seldom can he see it, and never in spring, for the fine dust pollen, the sultriness and fertility of nature, affect too painfully his sensitive organism. He loves flowers passionately, but cannot go near them. Even when a friend with a carnation in his buttonhole comes into the room, he is compelled to ask him to remove it, and a visit to a drawing-room where flowers are on a table sends him to bed for days. Sometimes he goes driving in a closed carriage, in order to see from behind glass windows the colors and living blossoms he loves; and always he takes with him books, books, books, so that he may read about travel, about the unattainable countries. Once he gets as far as Venice, a few times he reaches the ocean; but each of the trips takes too great a toll of his strength, and finally he confines himself almost exclusively to Paris.
All the more keen becomes his perception of everything human — the inflection of voices in a conversation, the ornaments in a woman’s hair, the manner in which someone sits down at a table and gets up from it. All the tinsel ornaments of social life fasten themselves firmly in his memory. His ever-watchful eye catches between flickers of the lid the most minute details; all restraints, variations, meanderings, and hesitations in a conversation — every vibration reaches his ears unchanged. Therefore he is able in his novel to remember for one hundred and fifty pages the conversation of Count Norpois — no breath is lacking, no casual motion, no hesitation, no period. His eye is awake and active to make up for his bodily weakness.
Originally his parents intended that he should devote himself to study and diplomacy, but all plans are upset by his poor health. After all, there is no hurry. His parents are rich; his mother idolizes him. And so be wastes his time at parties and in drawing-rooms, and until his thirty-fifth year leads the most ridiculous, useless, senseless existence ever led by a great artist. He snobbishly takes part in the pastimes of the idle rich, — called society, — goes everywhere and is received everywhere. For fifteen years, night after night, one can find in any drawingroom, even the most inaccessible, this delicate, shy young man, always overawed by society leaders, always chatting, always courteous, amused or bored. Everywhere one sees him standing in a corner, breaking into a conversation; and, strange to relate, the high aristocracy of the Faubourg St.-Germain tolerates this nameless intruder.
This is really his greatest triumph, for outwardly young Marcel Proust has no special attractions. He is not particularly good-looking, not especially elegant; he is not of noble birth, and is even the son of a Jewess. Also his literary work does not identify him, for this, a little volume entitled Les Plaisirs et les jours, in spite of a polite preface by Anatole France, has neither weight nor success. What makes him beloved is his generosity alone. He showers all women with rare flowers, overwhelms everybody with unexpected gifts, entertains everybody, racks his brain thinking how to be polite and sympathetic to the most insignificant society fool. At the Ritz Hotel he is famous for his parties and his fantastic tips. He gives ten times as much as American millionaires, and he needs only to enter the hall for all caps to fly off. His entertainments are fantastically extravagant and epicurean; from the different shops of the city he secures all delicacies — grapes from a store on the Rive Gauche, capons from the Carlton, rare wines from Nice. And so he continually binds and obligates tout Paris by good behavior and courtesies, without ever asking anything in return.
But what identifies him still more than his willing and extravagant expenditure of money in this kind of society is his almost morbid reverence for its ritual, his slavish worship of etiquette, the exaggerated importance which he attaches to society and all the absurdities of fashion. As holy writ he worships the unwritten Cortegiano of aristocratic manners. The problem of the order of seating guests at a dinner table occupies him for days — why Princess X places Count L at the foot of the table and Baron R at the head. Every bit of gossip, every passing scandal, excites him as if it were an event of world-wide importance; he questions fifteen people in turn to discover the secret order of the Princess M’s invitations, or why the Baroness B has asked Mr. F to her box. And through this passion, this serious regard for mere nothings, which later also dominates his books, he himself acquires a reputation as master of ceremonies in the midst of this trifling, fantastic world.
For fifteen years this great mind, one of the strongest figures of our time, leads a perfectly futile existence between idleness and ambition. During the day, exhausted and feverish, he lies in bed. At night he rushes from function to function in evening clothes, wasting his time with invitations and letters and social engagements — the most superfluous person in this daily round of vanities, everywhere gladly seen, nowhere really noticed, actually only a dress suit and white tie in the midst of other dress suits and white ties.
Only one little trait differentiates him from the others. Every evening when he gets home and goes to bed, unable to sleep, he writes page after page of notes on what he has observed, seen, and heard. Gradually they become piles which he preserves in portfolios. And like Saint-Simon, apparently a mere courtier of the King, who became in secret the representative and judge of a whole epoch, so every night Marcel Proust catalogues everything futile and passing in tout Paris in notes, records, and sketches, in order perhaps eventually to transform the ephemeral into something lasting.
II
Now a question for the psychologist: What is the real motive? Does Marcel Proust, sick, and incapable of a normal existence, lead this foolish, senseless life of a snob for fifteen years simply for his own satisfaction, and are these notes merely an incident similar to the afterglow of the too quickly passing society game? Or does he enter a drawing-room as a chemist enters a laboratory or a botanist crosses a field, so that he may collect material unobtrusively for a projected great work? Does he disguise himself, or is he genuine? Is he a fellow combatant in the army of time-killers, or only a spy from another, higher realm? Does he loaf from pleasure or from premeditation? Is this almost insane passion for the psychology of etiquette a necessity of life to him, or only the disguise of a passionate analyst?
Probably both elements were so ingeniously and magically blended in him that the pure nature of the artist would never have found expression had not the hard hand of Fate suddenly torn him from the lazy, make-believe world of conversation and placed him in the sphere of his own world, which was darkly hung and only occasionally illumined by an inner light.
Suddenly the scene changes. In 1903 his mother dies; and, shortly after, the doctors declare his disease, which is continually growing worse, incurable. With one jerk Marcel Proust changes his whole life. He locks himself up hermetically in his cell on the Boulevard Haussmann; overnight this bored, lazy loafer becomes one of the most relentless, tireless workers that this century has to admire in the literary world; overnight he turns from the most distracting sociability to the most undisturbed solitude.
A tragic picture of this great writer: he is always in bed, all day long; he is always cold — his thin, cough-racked body, shaken by spasms, is continually shivering. He wears three shirts in bed, one pulled on over the other. Wadded pads are on his chest, thick gloves on his hands, and still he freezes. A fire burns on the hearth; the window is never opened, for even the few miserable chestnut trees in the centre of the street torment him with their faint odor, which affects no other human chest in Paris but his. Like a corpse he lies always in bed, breathing painfully the heavy, surcharged air, poisoned with medicines. Only late in the evening does he pull himself together in order to see a little light, a little brightness, his beloved sphere of elegance, a few aristocratic faces. His servant forces him into his evening clothes, wraps him in shawls, and even in spring envelops him in three thicknesses of fur. Then he drives to the Ritz to talk to a few people and see his idolized sphere, Luxury. His cab waits at the door all night to drive the deadtired man back to bed.
Marcel Proust never goes into society again — but yes, just once! He needs for his novel the details of the behavior of an aristocrat. And so, to the amazement of all, he drags himself to a salon in order to see how the Duke von Sagen manages his monocle. Again, once at night he drives to the house of a famous prostitute, to ask whether she still has a hat which she wore twenty years ago in the Bois de Boulogne, for he needs it in his portrayal of Odette; and he is terribly disappointed to hear, as she makes fun of him, that she gave it to her servant long ago.
The cab brings the mortally tired man home. His night clothes always hang before the warm stove. For a long time he has been unable to bear the cold linen against his body. The servant wraps him up, leads him to bed. And there, his tablet resting flat in front of him, he writes his novel, Ā la recherche du temps perdu. Twenty dossiers are already tightly packed with drafts. The chairs and tables beside his bed, even the bed itself, are white with slips and pages of paper.
And so he writes, day and night he writes; every waking hour, with fever in his blood, his gloved hands trembling with cold, he writes on and on. Sometimes a friend visits him. Proust questions him eagerly about all the particulars of society; dying, he gropes still with all the antennæ of curiosity into the lost, the fashionable, world. He urges his friends on like hounds that they may acquaint him with this and that scandal, inform him of the most intimate details of this and that personality. And everything that is brought to him he notes with nervous eagerness.
His sickness increases. This poor, fever-racked piece of humanity, Marcel Proust, fails and grows weaker and weaker; and ever more the great conception, his novel, — or, rather, series of novels, — Ā la recherche du temps perdu, broadens and grows.
III
The work was begun in 1905; in 1912 Proust considered it completed. In extent it seemed to be three volumes, but, owing to expansion during the printing, it became no less than ten.
Now he is bothered by the question of its reception on publication. Marcel Proust, the forty-year-old man, is absolutely unknown; no, worse than unknown— that is, in a literary sense, he has a bad reputation. Marcel Proust? Why, he is that society snob, that fashionable ‘ writerette ’ who here and there in the Figaro spreads social gossip! The evil-minded public refuses to read anything but Marcel Provost for Marcel Proust. Nothing good can come from him.
He can expect nothing by direct means. And so friends try to sponsor the publication of his work socially. A true aristocrat invites André Gide, the manager of the Nouvelle Revue Française, to call on him and hands him the manuscript, but the Nouvelle Revue Française (the same publication that later made hundreds of thousands of francs out of the work) refuses it outright; likewise the Mercure de France and Ollendorf. Finally a new and courageous publisher is found who is willing to take the risk, but even so two years more pass and it is 1913 before the first volume of the great work appears. And, just as success is about to spread its wings, the war comes and beats them down.
After the war, when nearly five of the volumes have already appeared, France, then Europe, begins to notice this unique epic work of our time. But what fame loudly acclaims as Marcel Proust has been for a long time only a worn, feverish, restless fragment of humanity, a twitching shadow, a poor sick man, who gathers his whole strength together only that he may live long enough to see the publication of his work. In the evening he still drags himself to the Rritz, and there at a dining table or in the porter’s lodge he corrects the last proofs; for at home, in bed, he already feels himself in his grave. Only here where he again sees his beloved fashionable world shining before his eyes does he feel a last little strength, while at home he drops down exhausted, at times quieting himself with narcotics, at others stimulating himself with caffeine for a short talk with friends or for more work.
His disease grows rapidly worse. Ever faster, ever more eagerly works the man who has dawdled too long, trying now to outstrip death. He no longer wishes to see doctors. They have tortured him too long and have never helped him. So he defends himself alone, and finally dies on November 18, 1922.
Even in his last days, already dying, he faces the inevitable with the only weapon of the artist — observation. Heroically conscious to the last hour, he analyzes his own condition, so that these notes may serve to make the death of his hero, Bergotte, yet more plastic, more realistic; he attempts to add some of the most intimate details, those last which the mere writer could not know, which only the dying man knows. Even his last moment is observation. On the bedside table of the dead, stained with medicine, were found on a scarcely legible slip of paper the last words which he had written with his half-chilled hand — notes for a new volume which would have taken years, while to him only minutes belonged. And so he slaps Death in the face — the last, most splendid gesture of the artist, who conquers the fear of death while observing.