Marcel Proust by William C. Carter

Author:William C. Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2000-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

I Am a Novelist

A sure indication that Proust had begun writing the Search is his July 17, 1909, letter to Hahn. Marcel first told Reynaldo some harmless gossip about Comtesse Greffulhe and asked him not to repeat it. The thought of offending the countess made Proust consider an even larger problem that he would face when his novel appeared, as he explained to Reynaldo in a rhymed couplet:

Nicens,

I rather fear my novel on Sainte-Veuve

May not be very pleasing to the Beuve

His transposition of Sainte-Beuve and Veuve was an obvious reference to the “Widow,” Madeleine Lemaire. Proust insisted that Reynaldo return the incriminating letter: “Mum’s the word. I unbosom myself to you as I did to Mama. But she gave nothing away.”66

Why would Mme Lemaire be displeased with his novel? Proust had taken her as the primary model for a major character, Mme Verdurin, one of the Search’s great comic figures, the tyrannical society hostess who makes virtual prisoners of the “faithful” members of her salon and frequently behaves in a pretentious, ridiculous manner. His fear of Mme Lemaire’s wrath, on the day when she would settle into a comfortable chair and open his book, did not deter him from his caricature. Lemaire’s persistent painting of roses would be given—complete with Dumas’s quip about her having created more roses than anyone except God—to another character, Mme de Villeparisis.

In early July, Proust had begun to think about possible publishers for the novel he believed he would complete within a few months. He asked Lauris, “Where did Gide’s novella appear?” André Gide’s third novel, La Porte étroite, had been published in three successive issues of the recently founded Nouvelle Revue française, soon to become Europe’s most influential literary journal.67 Gide, one of the review’s founders and its guiding spirit, had little esteem for Proust. The group at the NRF, as the review was known, had also created a publishing house that would become equally distinguished and eventually take the name of its director Gallimard.68 Proust and Gide, two of France’s most celebrated twentieth-century authors, were on a collision course for one of the most memorable misunderstandings in the history of literature.

In August, Marcel told Georges that he would consider Calmann-Lévy as a publisher “if my book were not obscene. But it is and that’s impossible.”69 Fearing that his depiction of male and female homosexuals would discourage most publishers, he decided to try Alfred Vallette, publisher of his Ruskin translations, who might be less apprehensive about the book’s nature. Vallette’s wife, Marguerite, using the pseudonym Rachilde, had published three novels with homosexual overtones: Madame Adonis, Monsieur Vénus, and Les Hors nature (Unnatural beings). Proust did not know that Vallette had since changed his attitude and now censored daring passages.70

The letter Proust sent Vallette in August, offering his book for publication, provides the fullest description we have of its status in the summer of 1909. Proust had outlined his plot and sketched many of his characters. The author emphasized that whether or not Vallette accepted

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