Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (/pruːst/PROOST;[1]French:[maʁsɛlpʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was aFrenchnovelist,literary critic, andessayist best known for his novelÀ la recherche du temps perdu (translated in English asRemembrance of Things Past orIn Search of Lost Time), which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century.[2][3]
Proust was born in theAuteuil quarter of Paris, to a wealthy bourgeois family. His father,Adrien Proust, was a prominentpathologist and epidemiologist who studiedcholera. His mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was from a prosperous Jewish family. Proust was raised in his father'sCatholic faith, though he later became an atheist.[citation needed] From a young age, he struggled with severeasthma attacks which caused him to have a disrupted education. As a young man, Proust cultivated interests in literature and writing while moving in elite Parisian high society salons frequented by aristocrats and the upper bourgeoisie. These social connections provided inspiration and material for his later novel. His first works, including the collection of storiesLes plaisirs et les jours, were published in the 1890s to little public success.
In 1908, Proust began work onÀ la recherche du temps perdu. The novel consists of seven volumes totaling around 1.25 million words. It explores themes of memory, art, love, High Society and the human experience through the narrator's recollections. Begun when Proust was 38, the novel was partially published in his lifetime, with the initial sections appearing in 1913. The remaining volumes were revised and published posthumously by his brother Robert based on drafts and proofs.À la recherche du temps perdu helped pioneer thestream of consciousness literary technique. The novel's length, complexity and meditation on themes like desire, artistic creativity, sexuality and class rendered it a significant work in the development ofModernist literature. The work was translated into English byC. K. Scott Moncrieff and others.
Despite spending the last three years of his life confined by illness, Proust was able to complete the Princeton[further explanation needed] portions of his novel. He died of pneumonia and pulmonary problems in 1922, aged 51, and was buried in thePère Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Proust's sexuality and relationships with men were an open secret among his social circles, though the author himself never publicly acknowledged beinghomosexual.
Proust was born on 10 July 1871 at the home of his great-uncle in the Paris Borough ofAuteuil (the south-western sector of the then-rustic16th arrondissement), two months after theTreaty of Frankfurt formally ended theFranco-Prussian War. His birth coincided with the beginning of theFrench Third Republic,[4] during the violence that surrounded the suppression of theParis Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the Republic. Much ofIn Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes, that occurred in France during thefin de siècle.
Proust's father,Adrien Proust, was a prominent Frenchpathologist andepidemiologist, who studiedcholera in Europe and Asia. He wrote numerous articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence (née Weil), was the daughter of a wealthyGerman–Jewish family fromAlsace.[5] Literate and well-read, she demonstrated a well-developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of theEnglish language was sufficient to help with her son's translations ofJohn Ruskin.[6] Proust was raised in his father'sCatholic faith.[7] He was baptized on 5 August 1871 at theChurch of Saint-Louis-d'Antin and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practised that faith. He later became anatheist and was something of amystic.[8][9]
By the age of nine, Proust had had his first seriousasthma attack, and thereafter was considered a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village ofIlliers. This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle's house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes ofIn Search of Lost Time take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray in 1971 on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.)
In 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at theLycée Condorcet; however, his education was disrupted by his illness. Despite this, he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year. Thanks to his classmates, he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upperbourgeoisie, providing him with copious material forIn Search of Lost Time.[10]
In spite of his poor health, Proust served a year (1889–90) in the French army, stationed at Coligny Barracks inOrléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode inThe Guermantes' Way, part three of his novel. As a young man, Proust was adilettante and asocial climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of self-discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with gettingSwann's Way, the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913. At this time, he attended thesalons ofMme Straus, widow ofGeorges Bizet and mother of Proust's childhood friend Jacques Bizet, ofMadeleine Lemaire and ofMme Arman de Caillavet, one of the models for Madame Verdurin, and mother of his friendGaston Arman de Caillavet, with whose fiancée (Jeanne Pouquet) he was in love. It is through Mme Arman de Caillavet, he made the acquaintance ofAnatole France, her lover.
Proust had a close relationship with his mother. To appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, Proust obtained a volunteer position atBibliothèque Mazarine in the summer of 1896. After exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave that extended for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did not move from his parents' apartment until after both were dead.[6]
His life and family circle changed markedly between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother,Robert Proust, married and left the family home. His father died in November of the same year.[11] Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905. She left him a considerable inheritance. His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate.
Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his bedroom of his apartment 44 rue Hamelin[12][13] (inChaillot), sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel.[14] He died ofpneumonia and apulmonary abscess in 1922.Man Ray took the photograph of Proust on his deathbed.[15] He was buried in thePère Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.[16]
Proust is known to have beenhomosexual; his sexuality andrelationships with men are often discussed by his biographers.[17] Although his housekeeper,Céleste Albaret, denies this aspect of Proust's sexuality in her memoirs,[18] her denial runs contrary to the statements of many of Proust's friends and contemporaries, including his fellow writerAndré Gide[19] as well as hisvalet Ernest A. Forssgren.[20]
Proust never openly disclosed his homosexuality, though his family and close friends either knew or suspected it. In 1897, he fought aduel with writerJean Lorrain, who publicly questioned the nature of Proust's relationship with Proust's lover[21]Lucien Daudet; both duellists survived.[22] Despite Proust's public denials, his romantic relationship with composerReynaldo Hahn[23] and his infatuation with his chauffeur and secretary, Alfred Agostinelli, are well-documented.[24] On the night of 11 January 1918, Proust was one of the men identified by police in a raid on a malebrothel run by Albert Le Cuziat.[25] Proust's friendPaul Morand openly teased Proust about his visits tomale prostitutes. In his journal, Morand refers to Proust, as well as Gide, as "constantly hunting, never satiated by their adventures ... eternal prowlers, tireless sexual adventurers."[26]
The exact influence of Proust's sexuality on his writing is a topic of debate.[27] However,In Search of Lost Time discusses homosexuality at length and features several principal characters, both men and women, who are either homosexual orbisexual: the Baron de Charlus, Robert de Saint-Loup, Odette de Crécy, and Albertine Simonet.[28] Homosexuality also appears as a theme inLes plaisirs et les jours and his unfinished novel,Jean Santeuil.
Proust inherited much of his mother's political outlook, which was supportive of theFrench Third Republic and near theliberalcentre of French politics.[29] In an 1892 article published inLe Banquet entitled "L'Irréligion d'État", Proust condemned extremeanti-clerical measures such as the expulsion of monks, observing that "one might just be surprised that the negation of religion should bring in its wake the samefanaticism, intolerance, and persecution as religion itself."[29][30] He argued thatsocialism posed a greater threat to society than the Church.[29] He was equally critical of the right, lambasting "the insanity of the conservatives," whom he deemed "as dumb and ungrateful as underCharles X," and referring toPope Pius X's obstinacy as foolish.[31] Proust always rejected the bigoted and illiberal views harbored by many priests at the time, but believed that the most enlightened clerics could be just as progressive as the most enlightened secularists, and that both could serve the cause of "the advanced liberal Republic".[32] He approved of the more moderate stance taken in 1906 byAristide Briand, whom he described as "admirable".[31]
Proust was among the earliestDreyfusards, even attendingÉmile Zola's trial and proudly claiming to have been the one who askedAnatole France to sign the petition in support ofAlfred Dreyfus's innocence.[33] In 1919, when representatives of the right-wingAction Française published a manifesto upholdingFrench colonialism and theCatholic Church as the embodiment of civilised values, Proust rejected their nationalistic and chauvinistic views in favor of aliberalpluralist vision which acknowledgedChristianity'scultural legacy in France.[29]Julien Benda commended Proust inLa Trahison des clercs as a writer who distinguished himself from his generation by avoiding the twin traps of nationalism and class sectarianism.[29]
Because of his allergies and frequent asthma attacks, and the misunderstanding of the disease at the time,[34] Proust was considered ahypochondriac by his doctors. His correspondence provides some clues on his symptoms.[clarification needed] According to Yellowlees Douglas, Proust suffered from thevascular subtype of Ehlers–Danlos Syndrome.[35]
Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated, and in which he published while at school (La Revue verte andLa Revue lilas), from 1890 to 1891 he published a regular society column in the journalLe Mensuel.[6] In 1892, he was involved in founding a literary review calledLe Banquet (also the French title ofPlato'sSymposium), and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigiousLa Revue Blanche.
In 1896Les plaisirs et les jours, a compendium of many of these early pieces, was published. The book included a foreword byAnatole France, drawings by MmeLemaire in whosesalon Proust was a frequent guest, and who inspired Proust's Mme Verdurin. She invited him andReynaldo Hahn to herchâteau de Réveillon (the model for Mme Verdurin's La Raspelière) in summer 1894, and for three weeks in 1895. Despite the contents being well received, the book sold poorly due to its high price, which was widely ridiculed.[36] The price was due to the fact that the book was so sumptuously produced.[citation needed]
That year Proust also began working on a novel, which was eventually published in 1952 and titledJean Santeuil by his posthumous editors. Many of the themes later developed inIn Search of Lost Time find their first articulation in this unfinished work, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection; several sections ofIn Search of Lost Time can be read in the first draft inJean Santeuil. The portrait of the parents inJean Santeuil is quite harsh, in marked contrast to the adoration with which the parents are painted in Proust's masterpiece. Following the poor reception ofLes Plaisirs et les Jours, and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust gradually abandonedJean Santeuil in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by 1899.
Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years readingThomas Carlyle,Ralph Waldo Emerson, andJohn Ruskin. Through this reading, he refined his theories ofart and the role of the artist in society. Also, inTime Regained Proust's universal protagonist recalls having translated Ruskin'sSesame and Lilies. The artist's responsibility is to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, includingThe Seven Lamps of Architecture,The Bible of Amiens, andPraeterita.[6]
Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French, but was hampered by an imperfect command of English. To compensate for this he made his translations a group affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime lover[23]Reynaldo Hahn, then finally polished by Proust. Questioned about his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin".[6][37]The Bible of Amiens, with Proust's extended introduction, was published in French in 1904. Both the translation and the introduction were well-reviewed;Henri Bergson called Proust's introduction "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin", and had similar praise for the translation.[6] At the time of this publication, Proust was already translating Ruskin'sSesame and Lilies, which he completed in June 1905, just before his mother's death, and published in 1906. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that, apart from Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences includedBalzac,Saint-Simon,Montaigne,Stendhal,Flaubert,George Eliot,Fyodor Dostoyevsky, andLeo Tolstoy.[citation needed]
In Proust’s 1904 article "La mort des cathédrales" (The Death of Cathedrals) published inLe Figaro, Proust calledGothic cathedrals “probably the highest, and unquestionably the most original expression of French genius”.[38]
1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer. During the first part of the year he published in various journalspastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation may have allowed Proust to solidify his own style. In addition, in the spring and summer of the year Proust began work on several essays in imitation of various styles that would later collect under the titlePastiches et mélanges. The subject of these pieces wasHenri Lemoine, a fraudster who had convinced several members of high society, including the diamond magnateJulius Wernher and Proust himself, that he had discovered the secret of creating diamonds. Proust also began to write a more ambitious book of essays, later published asContre Sainte-Beuve. Proust described his efforts in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay onSainte-Beuve andFlaubert, an essay on women, an essay onpederasty (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel".[6]
From these disparate fragments Proust began to shape a novel on which he worked continually during this period. The rough outline of the work centred on afirst-person narrator, unable to sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child for his mother to come to him in the morning. The novel was to have ended with a critical examination of Sainte-Beuve and a refutation of his theory that biography was the most important tool for understanding an artist's work. Present in the unfinished manuscript notebooks are many elements that correspond to parts of theRecherche, in particular, to the "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Volume 1, and to the final section of Volume 7. Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that still contained many of the same themes and elements. By 1910 he was at work onÀ la recherche du temps perdu.
Begun in 1909, when Proust was 38 years old,À la recherche du temps perdu consists of seven volumes totaling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 inThe Modern Library's translation).Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just asTolstoy was of the nineteenth"[39] andW. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date".[40]André Gide was initially not so taken with his work. The first volume was refused by the publisher Gallimard on Gide's advice. He later wrote to Proust apologizing for his part in the refusal and calling it one of the most serious mistakes of his life.[41] Finally, the book was published at the author's expense byGrasset and Proust paid critics to speak favorably about it.[42]
Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brotherRobert. The book was translated into English byC. K. Scott Moncrieff, appearing under the titleRemembrance of Things Past between 1922 and 1931. Scott Moncrieff translated volumes one through six of the seven volumes, dying before completing the last. This last volume was rendered by other translators at different times. When Scott Moncrieff's translation was later revised (first byTerence Kilmartin, then byD. J. Enright) the title of the novel was changed to the more literalIn Search of Lost Time.
^Edmund White (2009). Marcel Proust: A Life. Penguin.ISBN9780143114987. "Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother. He himself was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and laterconfirmed as a Roman Catholic, but he never practised that faith and as an adult could best be described as a mystical atheist, someone imbued with spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in a personal God, much less in a savior."
^Proust, Marcel (1999). The Oxford dictionary of quotations. Oxford University Press. p. 594.ISBN978-0-19-860173-9. "...the highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator."
^Painter, George D. (1959)Marcel Proust: a biography; Vols. 1 & 2. London: Chatto & Windus
^Wilson, Scott.Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 38123-38124). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
^Painter (1959), White (1998), Tadié (2000), Carter (2002 and 2006)
^Murat, Laure (May 2005). "Proust, Marcel, 46 ans, rentier: Un individu 'aux allures de pédéraste' fiche à la police",La Revue littéraire 14: 82–93; Carter (2006)
^Morand, Paul.Journal inutile, tome 2: 1973 – 1976, ed. Laurent Boyer and Véronique Boyer. Paris: Gallimard, 2001; Carter (2006)
^abcdeHughes, Edward J. (2011).Proust, Class, and Nation. Oxford University Press. pp. 19–46.
^Carter, William C. (2013).Marcel Proust: A Life, with a New Preface by the Author. Yale University Press. p. 346.
^abWatson, D. R. (1968). "Sixteen Letters of Marcel Proust to Joseph Reinach".The Modern Language Review.63 (3):587–599.doi:10.2307/3722199.JSTOR3722199.
^Sprinker, Michael (1998).History and Ideology in Proust: A la Recherche Du Temps Perdu and the Third French Republic. Verso. pp. 45–46.
