Marcel Proust: A Life by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary Studies, Amazon.com
ISBN: 0786515422
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

VII

WHEN PROUST BEGAN his translations of Ruskin and his essays on him, the closed, stable world of his family and domestic routine was still intact, but by the time he had concluded them everything had changed catastrophically. On February 2, 1903, his brother, Robert, married Marthe Dubois-Amiot. Later the same year, on November 26, Proust’s father died, a day after the birth of Robert Proust’s daughter Suzy. Two years later, on September 26, 1905, his beloved mother would die of nephritis after a long, painful illness. She was just fifty-six. As Proust wrote at the time, “My life has now lost its only goal, its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation.” Later he would add, “In dying, Maman took with her her little Marcel.” The sentence can be interpreted, if the emphasis is placed on “little,” to mean that the ineffectual, dandified, immature Marcel died at her death, to be reborn as the determined, wise, ascetic Proust.

For the rest of his life he would mourn her with extra intensity on the anniversary of her death—even on monthly anniversaries of the fatal day. And yet Proust was also capable of later writing, “In this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.” Despite this clearsightedness, Proust became a master of the consoling (or at least wonderfully understanding) condolence letter—always pouring into each one something of that dark, crippling grief he had felt at the death of his parents.

Just before she died, Madame Proust had reluctantly allowed herself to be photographed; in Remembrance of Things Past the Narrator’s grandmother makes a similar gesture, in order to leave behind a last image of herself for a grieving grandson. Indeed, in his vast novel Proust assigns to the character of the mother the feelings his real mother had had of disappointment with her son’s lack of self-discipline; whereas to the figure of the fictional grandmother he lends his real mother’s tenderness, her unconditional love for him in spite of all his failings. As Proust himself viewed the matter, “the lack of will power which prevents a man from resisting any vice in particular” is “that greatest of all vices.” He would often look at the photo of his mother; indeed, he studied his collection of photos all the time whenever he wrote.

Perhaps the strangest drama in Proust’s life is the transformation of little Marcel—the dandy and partygoer, the time waster who at age thirty-four had managed to do little more than write a slim volume of short stories and two translations of Ruskin—into the great Proust, who wrote one of the longest and most remarkable novels of all time. One psychological clue to Proust’s endless stalling before beginning his novel is provided near the end of that very book: “No doubt, my idleness having given me the habit, when it was a question of work, of putting it off from one day to another, I imagined that death too might be postponed in the same fashion.

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