Proust by Benjamin Taylor

Author:Benjamin Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Marcel had meanwhile been a reckless steward of his large inheritance, speculating in stocks he liked the names of: Tanganyika Railway, Pins des Landes, Australian Gold Mines, Rio Tinto, Tramways de Mexico. When Lionel Hauser, his theosophist financial adviser (sound in money judgment despite vaporous religious views), warned that he would not act as agent for such long-shot investments, Marcel simply sneaked off to other brokers.

In May he questioned Lauris about a name—Guermantes—and “whether it is entirely extinct and available to an author.” On July 7, 1909, he wrote to Robert Dreyfus that he had worked at Contre Sainte-Beuve for sixty hours without a rest. Before departing for Normandy in mid-August he wrote a letter to Alfred Vallette, editor at Mercure de France, describing the contents of Contre Sainte-Beuve: “I am finishing a book which, despite its provisional title, ‘Against Sainte-Beuve: Recollection of a Morning,’ is a genuine novel and an extremely indecent one in places. One of the main characters is a homosexual…. The name Sainte-Beuve is not there by chance. The book does end with a long conversation about Sainte-Beuve and about aesthetics … and when one has finished the book, one will see (I hope) that the entire novel is nothing but the implementation of the artistic principles expressed in this final part, a sort of introduction, if you like, inserted at the end…. It is a book that chronicles events, and the reflection that events have on one another over intervals of years.”21 Sight unseen, Vallette turned it down. Proust then approached Calmette of the Figaro, who expressed only tentative interest in publishing an excerpt.

Before the journey to Cabourg in August he arranged for his bedroom to be lined with cork, but then canceled the plan for fear of not being away long enough. An all-important letter to Mme Straus from this moment makes the following declaration: “I’ve just begun—and finished—the whole of a long book”—by which he means “Combray” plus much of the second half of what will be Time Regained—in other words, the two ends of his great bridge. Proust’s claim that he wrote the conclusion of the Search before the beginning turns out to be more nearly true than people have supposed.

The big book announced to Mme Straus—referred to as Contre Sainte-Beuve but not the miscellany published posthumously in the 1950s under that title—would fill twenty-one composition books and a hoard of loose sheets and consume virtually every waking hour between the end of 1908 and the end of 1909.22 The novel was conceived as the narrative of a grasse matinée, a leisurely morning in bed. First the Narrator is seen tossing and turning and waiting for daybreak and his mother. He remembers a place called Combray where he passed holidays in his childhood, exploring its two different paths, and got to know a man named Swann. He also remembers Querqueville (later Balbec), a seaside retreat where he and his mother met her old school friend Mme de Villeparisis and her nephew Montargis (later Saint-Loup).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.