Introduction to Proust by Leon Derrick;

Author:Leon, Derrick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

CHAPTER I

DOI: 10.4324/9781315694818-16

The third part of Sodome et Gomorrhe—La Prisonnière—was published in 1923; Albertine Disparue in 1925 and Le Temps Retrouvé in 1927. Not until five years after his death was it possible to assess Proust's work in its entirety. Nevertheless, no sooner was he dead than he became an almost legendary figure, and the real man was completely obscured by exaggerated tales of the fur cloak, the cork-lined room and the magnificent dinners at the Ritz. All sorts of wild rumours that had been rife immediately after he had won the Prix Goncourt were revived and repeated; and, while there were a number of eminent critics, both French and English, to do him honour, his novel enjoyed a temporary and spurious popularity which was soon succeeded by an inevitable reaction. Many people bought his books; women got their portraits painted with them displayed prominently in their hands, or placed them with conspicuous negligence upon the tables of their drawing-rooms; yet though even the popular novelists of the day took care to see that their heroines were following the fashion, comparatively few people actually read them, and even among those who did, the essential meaning and significance of his work was but little understood.1

1 It is possible to find, even in books published as late as 1935, caustic references to Proust's "veronal, his padded cell, and bis black philosophy." It is impossible to arrive at a fair estimation of Proust, either as a man or as a writer, unless all his novels are considered together as one work. "I ignore the purely worldly opinion," wrote Proust in one of his most interesting letters to Sidney Schiff, "that you prefer the man to his book. . . . Between what a man says in company, and the truths he extracts from his inmost being when he is alone, there is a world of difference." And indeed, the real man is to be found less in those many vivid and expressive portraits which his friends have left us, less in the most spontaneous and extravagant passages of his correspondence, than in the book the writing of which was his vocation, and which will stand as his abiding monument.

After all, those unexpected and excessive protestations of affection in his letters, did they really mean so very much? Surely, in most cases, they were little more than the effervescence of a few transient moments of intoxication? Who, better than himself, realized the impermanence, the unreliability of all human feelings? Very few of his friends really understood him, and no one realized this more poignantly than Proust himself. His greatest tragedy was not so much his illness as his essential loneliness; and his loneliness was the result rather of an unusual intellectual stature than of any external conditions of his life. It was the loneliness of the man who, head and shoulders above the people about him, was forced eternally to try to communicate with the generations to come, in the hope that among

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