ONE OF THE LAST LETTERS PROUST wrote in 1920 was to the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. He praised a letter he had received from her, comparing it to a painting by Watteau and a poem by Verlaine, both of whom had treated the subject of a fête galante—an old-fashioned aristocratic garden party.1 It is evident that Mme de Clermont-Tonnerre was one of several society women with whom Marcel enjoyed sharing gossip and anecdotes about homosexuals in Paris society. The mention of Verlaine in such a context reminded Proust of handsome blond footmen wearing liveries of blue panne. This set off a series of comments about such footmen recruited by Prince Constantin Radziwill, who, though married, was a notorious homosexual, of whom Montesquiou had poetically remarked, “To speak of women would be uncivil / In the house of Constantin Radziwill.” Of Polish origin and immensely wealthy, the prince kept a staff of twelve handsome valets, to each of whom he gave a pearl necklace.2 As Proust reminisced about such characters with the duchess, he recalled the occasion when a new, uninitiated valet, angered by the prince’s advances, attempted to throw his employer out the window. The prince’s wife intervened, scolding the “recalcitrant valet, ‘If you didn’t want to do that, you had only to refuse. But you shouldn’t try to kill people over such matters.’ A maxim that would prevent many wars.” Proust recalled another occasion when Lady Pirbright was caught performing fellatio on the energetic Prince Constantin. Marcel also evoked Ernest Forssgren, a handsome blond valet who had been in his own employ. Proust quickly added that the young Swiss was not kept for the same purposes as those who worked for Prince Constantin.
The duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, flattered in her literary ambition by Proust’s high praise of her letter, requested its return. Upon sending back the “masterpiece so rightly reclaimed,” he asked her to destroy his letter containing comments about handsome blond footmen.3 This request must have given him pause as he remembered all the other letters whose recipients he had asked to burn or return them. Few had heeded his instructions. Céleste remembered Proust’s fears regarding his correspondence: “I shall hardly be cold and everyone will start publishing my letters.” He sought advice from such friends as Henry Bernstein, Horace Finaly, and Émile Straus, but uncertain of what measures to take, he did nothing to prohibit publication of his letters.4
On January 11 Proust sent Gallimard a thoughtful letter about his circumstances and the work remaining. Since the beginning of the year he had been suffering from bronchitis and a high fever, and he could barely speak. He managed to get up from time to time so that Céleste and Marie could clean his room. As for his novel, there remained four “colossally long” volumes, which Proust referred to as Sodom and Gomorrah, parts 2, 3, and 4, and Time Regained. He hoped that these volumes, which would succeed each other at fairly long intervals—“If God gives me life”—would give Gallimard “an idea of my talent that will make you not regret having chosen me as one of your authors.” As a first step, he needed the proofs for Sodom and Gomorrah, part 1, which had to be published with the remainder of The Guermantes Way. He urged Gallimard to do everything possible to hasten the printer’s work. Next, Proust broached the matter of royalties. The ten thousand-franc check of last summer had been only a partial payment; the balance had been promised by mid-September at the latest. Nearly half a year had passed and he had not “received a sou.” Nor had Gallimard paid any royalties from the deluxe edition, although there were a fair number of subscribers. Gaston was woefully behind on payments to his most famous author.5 By the summer he would owe Proust fifty thousand francs, a large sum by any measure.
Gaston immediately sent Proust another partial payment of 7,500 francs.6 Proust offered to lend 3,000 francs back to Gallimard if he needed it.7 The publisher explained that his real difficulty was in collecting more than half a million francs due him from bookstores. He promised to send Proust 2,500 francs a month, beginning on February 15, as installments on royalties past due. Regarding titles for the forthcoming volumes, Gallimard feared that readers would be confused if the title Sodom and Gomorrah appeared on different volumes.8 Proust eventually recognized this danger and created different titles for parts 3 (The Captive) and 4 (The Fugitive).9
Proust spent all night Friday, January 14, correcting the proofs of “Un baiser” (A kiss), an excerpt Rivière needed for his February issue. The following morning he wrote Rivière that he felt well enough to correct many proofs, if only he had them.10 Producing the Search one volume at a time had become a full-time job not only for the novelist himself but for Gallimard, his staff, and the printer. Writing, typing, setting, proofreading, revising, reprinting, and correcting the three thousand pages of complex Proustian prose became one of the most demanding productions in the history of publishing.
In mid-February, Henri Bergson asked Proust to grant an interview to Algot Ruhe, a Swedish gentleman who had written an essay on Swann. After the interview with Ruhe, Proust was inspired to create a minor character, a Norwegian philosopher, who makes a brief, essentially comic appearance as a guest of the Verdurins at La Raspelière.11 The Norwegian philosopher pops up again briefly to quote Bergson—the Narrator says that he cannot vouch for the accuracy of the attribution— about memory, including all those forgotten moments of our past, and its implications for the immortality of the soul. The Narrator’s own conclusion is that the immortality of a soul makes no more sense than possessing memories one cannot recall: “The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.”12 As he revised the final portions of his book, Proust found that minor characters like the Norwegian philosopher could easily be appended to his vast panoramic—and often satirical—view of Parisian society.
Rivière informed Proust in February that the “chorus of praises rising around ‘An Agony’ is becoming prodigious.” This excerpt, an account of the grandmother’s death, published in the January issue of the NRF, had put new life into the review; subscriptions were pouring in.13 Jacques also made a request: he wanted Proust to read his novel Aimée, written in 1915 in a single burst during his internment as a prisoner of war.14 Proust obliged without delay and soon advised Jacques to publish his “masterpiece,” after changing a few details. On the same day, Rivière wrote Proust that he should soon receive the proofs for The Guermantes Way, part 2. As for Sodom and Gomorrah, part 1, the printer was working without respite; the delay had been caused by the preparation of a typescript.15
Proust had given a third excerpt from The Guermantes Way, part 2, to the Revue hebdomadaire. On February 26 the review published “Une soirée de brouillard” (A foggy evening) with a brief introductory essay, “The Art of Marcel Proust,” by the novelist François Mauriac. Mauriac praised Proust’s novel for having renewed the genre and said that the Search, of all contemporary works of literature, was the most likely to survive. What some critics mistakenly called Proust’s snobbishness was “only curiosity about these imperceptible differences of status.” Noting the writer’s ability to render finely nuanced differences among all the social classes, including the subdivisions within each, Mauriac considered the Search to be a remarkable “summa of contemporary sensitivity.”16 Proust, obviously pleased with Mauriac’s appraisal, invited him to a bedside dinner in the presence of Henri Rochat. Afterward he presented Mauriac with an autographed copy of Pleasures and Days.17
By the evening of March 6, Proust had finished a “colossal” task, and he sent an “important, urgent” message to Gallimard, along with the packet containing all of The Guermantes Way, part 2. Working “against wind and tide,” Proust was ready to “take the plunge” and publish the second part of the Guermantes volume and the opening pages of Sodom and Gomorrah, which Tronche already had.18 Given Proust’s nearly constant state of intoxication, the arduous work that he performed over the next year and a half, requiring tremendous concentration and presence of mind, seems extraordinary. But it became increasingly clear that the work and the drugs were taking a toll.
That spring, not only did he continue to write and revise, he attempted to orchestrate publicity and reviews. Proust wanted to prepare readers and critics for the opening pages of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he asked Boulenger to quote Mauriac, a fervent Catholic whose morals were beyond reproach. On March 12 Boulenger alerted readers of the Opinion that the forthcoming volume would “depict audacious, bold, daring scenes, but in the case of M. Marcel Proust the question of morality or immorality does not arise.” Then he cited Mauriac: “The examination of one’s conscience is the basis of all moral life, and Proust projects a terrible light on our inner depths.”19 Curious readers had to wait another two months before they could see how Proust illuminated their inner beings.
In a short time Proust wrote Gallimard to convey some important information: “Sodom and Gomorrah, Part II. . . is the only volume which requires a true reshaping.” As for the remaining volumes, “if I were to die they could appear as they are or nearly so. It is thus highly desirable that while I am able (?) still to work that I receive without delay the proofs for Sodom and Gomorrah, Part II.”20 Gallimard assured Proust that he was doing everything possible to speed up the printer; he had ordered his personnel, as their first duty every morning, to phone the printer and keep him moving.21
Meanwhile, Proust and Hauser exchanged letters about the author’s regimen. Hauser observed that Proust’s behavior was self-destructive. The two elements most necessary for good health, he wrote, were sun and pure air, both of which Proust shunned. It was wrong to use drugs, like morphine, which soothed pain and nerves but did not cure, and which had to be taken in increasingly larger and more dangerous doses: “The only thing for which I bitterly reproach you is your fierce determination to commit suicide.”22 Proust not only disregarded Hauser’s advice, he seemed not to have read it. In April he wrote Hauser and listed the most recent medicines his “excellent doctor was using on his body” to relieve a painful flare-up of rheumatism. Among the drugs prescribed were morphine and adrenaline. “The result,” Proust reported, was “negligible, except for a great soddenness.”23
Montesquiou and Proust exchanged testy letters, each taking offense where none was intended. When the count’s copy of The Guermantes Way, part 1, finally arrived, he wrote that he had received the “somewhat mutilated, not at all timely, edition, in no sense rare, of your book that you gave everyone else six months ago. If this is an example of what you call deference, I no longer know what the word means and I prefer not to know in this topsy-turvy world. You were always so kind to me that I cannot at all understand this sudden change and this new manner. The only explanation that I can see is the entry in the lower house of your zodiac, of a sign that could well be named Cancer.” Proust, less conversant with astrology than the count, was offended that Montesquiou thought him terminally ill with cancer. The count explained then that the novelist’s sign was entering a period that alienated friends. Montesquiou revealed that he was under observation in a medical facility, the Clinique Vieux jardin, in Lilas.24 He promised to send Proust his latest books when he returned home: Les Délices de Capharnaüm (The delights of Capharnaum) and Diptyque de Flandre, triptyque de France (Diptych of Flanders, triptych of France). In the postscript, he told Marcel that “instead of a nurse I have your book, which is acquitting itself well.”25
Proust occasionally consulted Mme Straus about drugs and now wrote her that he felt intoxicated from taking too much Veronal. Mme Straus, who had become as reclusive as he, revealed that by “swallowing a quantity of various poisons” she had been able to wean herself from Veronal. Then she had tried taking nothing, “which was leading me to consider suicide. Then I replaced Veronal with Dial Ciba... and I am staying with that. Only I take too much of it.” She suggested that he try two barbiturates, Dial and Didial, “but not daily.” She admitted that she was once again in a crisis of melancholy and anxiety. “Adieu, mon petit cher Marcel. How sad it is not to be able to laugh together—at everything that is sad!”26 One of the saddest cases, which she did not mention to Marcel, was her son Jacques’s state of acute depression. Addicted to morphine and alcohol, his second marriage falling apart, Jacques, like his mother, fought suicidal impulses.
It seems unlikely that Proust made a serious effort to reduce his drug intake or seek a less intoxicating combination. In the last two years of his life Proust suffered a number of mishaps due to his increasingly shaky condition. In April he had an accident while boiling milk to take with his Veronal. He made a clumsy movement and knocked over the kettle, spilling scalding milk on himself and his bedclothes. His skin was burned and his sweaters and bed soaked, which made the bed too cold afterward and brought back his sore throat.27
Gallimard informed Proust that he, Rivière, and another editor, Jean Paulhan, were rereading the proofs of The Guermantes Way, part 2, sheet by sheet as the pages became available, every day until the last hour. To gain more time Gallimard took the corrected sheets back to the printers in the evening for final corrections.28 Proust, touched by this “revision,” of which he had known nothing, thanked Gallimard for being “too nice.”29 This gratitude did not last long.
Montesquiou, eager to identify the models for various Proustian characters, kept pressing Marcel for answers. Proust adopted the strategy of giving the count just enough information to satisfy his curiosity, while steering him away from identifying himself with the baron de Charlus. Proust was especially eager to obscure this connection in light of the volume that was about to appear. When the count wrote that he had identified the “likable and impatient Robert [de Saint-Loup],” Proust acknowledged that there were at most “two or three keys” for the entire novel, and even they “opened for only an instant.” Yes, he had thought of Bertrand de Fénelon for the scene in the restaurant where Saint-Loup runs to bring the shivering Narrator a borrowed coat. But for the remainder of the novel, Saint-Loup bore none of Bertrand’s traits. Many of Proust’s friends, he told the count, equated Saint-Loup with Albufera, but he claimed never to have thought of his former friend while creating that character. “I suppose he believes it himself; that is the only explanation I can think of for his break with me.”30
Proust knew that a more direct reason was Albufera’s furor over the depiction of his family in the Saint-Simon pastiche, but he thought that Albu’s erroneous self-identification in the novel might be exemplary for Montesquiou. To throw Montesquiou off the scent, Proust admitted that in the scene where the baron de Charlus “stares at me . . . near the Casino, I thought for an instant of the late Baron Doäzan, an habitué of the Aubernon salon and very much the type. But I dropped him afterward and constructed a Charlus that is much more vast, entirely invented.”31 As for Montesquiou’s notion that Proust was enjoying newfound celebrity and prosperity, the novelist asked: “What pleasure is there for someone who can no longer pronounce words?” He related a recent incident in a restaurant, where he asked for mineral water and had to repeat the word Contrexéville more than ten times before making himself understood.
Although Proust was uncertain about the nature and seriousness of the count’s illness, he felt compassion. The tone of his letters became more affectionate and deferential, as of old. That spring Boulenger received a letter from Proust, urging him to ask Montesquiou to contribute articles to the Opinion. He said that the count, “the best art critic of our epoch,” was unjustly neglected because no one asked him for articles. In the summer Proust informed Montesquiou that he had spoken to Boulenger several times about how welcomed and “useful” articles by the count would be. Proust had praised Montesquiou to Boulenger as “a marvelous essayist” whose style was unequaled when writing about “a painter or sculptor he loves.”32 But when Boulenger approached Montesquiou about writing for the newspaper, the count replied with a “terrible letter” attacking the critic. Montesquiou’s legendary irascibility spoiled the opportunity.33
By April, Proust had decided to write an article on his favorite poet, Charles Baudelaire, for the June 1 NRF, in part because he found it scandalous that the “NRF alone had remained silent” on the centennial of the poet’s birth.34 He worked “double time” to redress the lack of a commemorative article. Although he had obtained the authoritative Crépet edition of Baudelaire’s poems, he told Rivière that he was quoting from memory, as he had when writing the essay on Flaubert.35 He placed Baudelaire in the same category as Dostoyevsky—that is, writers whose neuroses inspire them to far surpass others and to renew literature. He found in the poet a distinguished successor to Racine: “nothing is so Baudelairian as Phèdre, nothing so worthy of Racine . . . as Les Fleurs du mal.”36 He praised the poet for conveying with such intimacy, sincerity, and conviction the sentiments of “suffering, death, and humble fraternity” among men.
On April 21 Proust, no longer feeling fraternal, sent Gallimard a letter that read like an indictment. Saying that he was in a black mood because he wondered whether he had not been the “cuckold” of the NRF for some years, Proust raised the issue of hiring an arbiter or breaking altogether with Gallimard. He was furious about several matters that he found detrimental to the publication of his book. Having told Gallimard that Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, was the only part of the novel that needed reshaping, he had not yet received a single page proof. He had concluded that it would be impossible, at the current pace, to bring out the remainder of Sodom and Gomorrah before May 1922.37 In fact, Proust had returned the corrected typescript to Gallimard on April 8, less than two weeks earlier. True, Proust had been insisting since January on the need to work as rapidly as possible to allow him time for the needed modifications, but it is difficult to see how, given the complexity and scope of the manuscript, the work could have gone at a faster pace. Another sore spot with Proust was that The Guermantes Way, part 2, and Sodom and Gomorrah, part 1, scheduled for publication in early May, had not been announced in the April issue of the NRF. Scolding Gallimard for this neglect, Proust complained that Pastiches et mélanges and the deluxe edition of Within a Budding Grove had been “sabotaged in the same way.” Gallimard had not acted quickly enough to publicize the current volume. The publication of The Guermantes Way, part 2, and Sodom and Gomorrah, part 1, was to be announced on page 4 of the NRF’s May 1 issue.38
Proust’s letters, containing such accusations and the threat to withdraw his books, shook Gallimard and Rivière. Rivière informed Proust of the consternation Gaston had experienced on receiving his complaints. Rivière underscored their many fruitless attempts to move the printer. So devoted was everyone at the NRF to Proust’s work that the previous week all other work had been put aside to check his proofs. Rivière had not even worked on the review or his personal correspondence during those five days. This was not a lament, because he had never before performed “such an absorbing task.”39 Gallimard wrote Proust that the charges dismayed him and that rather than seeing himself as the NRF’s “cuckold [cocu]” Proust should think of himself as its “heart [cœur].”40
If Proust needed additional proof of where he stood with the founders of the NRF, Gide provided it. Gide was generous and sincere in his public praise of Proust. In an NRF column he wrote that Proust’s style was “so disconcerting in its suppleness that any other style appears stilted, dull, imprecise, sketchy, lifeless. Should I admit that when I plunge again into this lake of delights, for many days afterward I remain afraid to pick up the pen, no longer believing myself capable—as happens during the time a masterpiece holds us in its sway—of writing well, seeing in what you call the ‘purity’ of my style only ‘poverty.’”41
Since early February, Antoine Bibesco and his wife had been in Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the Romanian delegation. When Antoine read Gide’s comments about Proust’s novel, he wrote from Washington: “AT LAST. The simple truth. And to think the NRF refused the manuscript [of Swann] that Emmanuel delivered to them.”42
Proust wrote to the critic Fernand Vandérem in late April, just a week before the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 1, to explain his intentions. Vandérem should not think that the author had “wanted to strike sodomites with all his might.” If that was the impression he had created, he was “terribly sorry.” He had aimed for objectivity, intending not to write a “speech for the defense” or a “condemnation,” but rather to give a “frank, unadorned depiction,” an “impartial one without the intervention of the moral element, which has no business here.”43
Proust’s attitude about sex had not changed since “Avant la nuit.” In expressing physical love one must be true to one’s own sexual nature, which might evolve during a lifetime. What some critics failed to appreciate was that in the case of Charlus’s obsession with Morel, Proust was condemning not homosexuality but a jealous obsession that is as destructive, in that it diverts one from higher purposes, and as pointless as Swann’s infatuation with Odette.
On May 2 The Guermantes Way, part 2, and Sodom and Gomorrah, part 1, appeared in bookstores.44 Their publication coincided with a worsening of Proust’s condition. Intoxicated by his excessive use of drugs, he found it impossible to go from his bed to the door without falling.45 A week later, feeling well enough to go out for the first time in more than a month, he sent word to Gaston to meet him at the Ritz for dinner. After waiting in vain for Gaston to appear, Proust concluded that his publisher chose to neglect him. As soon as Gallimard learned what had happened, he expressed his “infinite” regrets: he had never received Marcel’s message.46 Proust’s vexation broke through when he inscribed a book for Gallimard: “To you, my dear Gaston, whom I love with all my heart (although you sometimes think the opposite is true!) and with whom it would be so nice to spend long and cheerful evenings.” Then came the reproaches that showed why Gallimard might well doubt such declarations: “But you never take the initiative.” He accused his publisher of remaining as aloof as “during the time when you refused Swann. Your very grateful and very faithful and very affectionate friend.”47
Proust made yet another plea to Gallimard for the proofs of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, stressing the urgency of his request because this volume would also be long and difficult to reshape. Because he wanted to leave Gallimard his “work in its entirety,” he broached the question of the rights to Pleasures and Days.48 A short time later Proust contacted Calmann-Lévy, who reminded him that no contract existed for Pleasures and Days. Calmann-Lévy would be happy to cooperate and make it possible for Gallimard to republish Proust’s first book.49 Proust hesitated about whether or not to proceed.
The recent recipient of honors himself, Proust decided to give an award. When he inscribed Céleste’s volume, he bestowed upon her a number of distinguished crosses for extraordinary service and friendship: “To my faithful friend of eight years, but in reality so united with my thoughts that I would be closer to the truth in calling her my friend of always, not being able to imagine a time when I did not know her... to Céleste the War Cross because she tolerated Gothas and Berthas, to Céleste who has borne the cross of my temperament, to Céleste the Cross of Honor, Her friend Marcel.”50
Proust did not have to wait long for the reactions of friends and critics to Sodom and Gomorrah.51 Gide was one of the first to express his displeasure. Proust’s depiction of homosexuals appalled him, but for reasons that differed from those of other disapproving readers. Gide blamed Proust for having made his homosexuals so unappealing. Jupien and Charlus, two aging and effeminate inverts, were the opposite of the virile type Gide celebrated in his unpublished Corydon. Proust first learned of Gide’s disapproval in a letter of May 3. Although he had no intention of criticizing Proust publicly, Gide told him what he would have said in a review. Although Proust had adopted an “impartial point of view, that of a true naturalist,” he had given of this particular “‘vice’ a portrait that was far more stigmatizing than all invectives”; he has “branded this subject with a red-hot iron that served conventional morality far more effectively than the most emphatic moral treatises.” In the postscript Gide added that “a pederast (in the full Greek sense of the word), would never consent to recognize himself in the portrait you give of homosexuals.”52 In spite of Gide’s misgivings, he saw that Proust’s book was the talk of Paris. A few weeks after its publication he wrote Proust: “Wherever I go everyone talks of nothing but you. Princesse Murat reads certain passages about Charlus” to friends “over the telephone!”53
In mid-May, Gide visited Proust several times to discuss homosexuality. On the first visit, he brought a copy of Corydon and left it for Proust to read, asking him not to talk to anyone about the book. Four days later Proust, feeling somewhat better, sent Odilon to return Gide’s copy of Corydon and to bring Gide back to rue Hamelin for a visit.54 Gide came and spent the entire evening talking with Proust.
Gide recorded in his diary his impressions and a summary of these conversations with Proust. Gide was shown into a room that was suffocatingly hot but where Marcel was shaking with cold. Proust complained that his life had become a slow agony. Gide noticed that Proust looked “fat or rather bloated,” resembling Jean Lorrain, Proust’s ancient nemesis and dueling opponent. Almost immediately, Proust began talking about homosexuality, occasionally interrupting himself to ask his visitor about Christ’s teachings. Proust gave Gide the impression that he hoped to find in Christ’s words some relief from his “atrocious” ills. His frankness in talking about homosexuality amazed Gide, who noted that “far from hiding his homosexuality, he exposes it and I could almost say prides himself on it.”
Proust confided that he had “never liked women except platonically and had only known love with men.” This admission surprised Gide, who had never thought that Proust was exclusively homosexual.55 In order to depict the attractive features of the girls of the little band, of which Albertine is the most important representative, Proust told Gide, he drew upon memories of homosexual experience. Having given all the attributes that were tender, graceful, and charming to the girls, he had nothing left for his homosexual portraits but “mean and grotesque qualities.” Proust apparently did not reveal Saint-Loup’s evolution as a homosexual who dies a hero on the battlefield, a portrait that seems to meet all of Gide’s positive criteria.
When Gide said that the stigmatization of homosexuals in the Search seemed intentional, Proust became upset and protested. Gide finally understood “that what we find ignoble, derisive or disgusting, does not seem to him so repulsive.” When Gide asked Proust whether “we will ever see this Eros in types that are young and handsome,” Proust replied that “what attracts him is almost never beauty, and he thinks beauty has little to do with desire.”56
After the interviews with Gide, Proust wrote Boulenger that Sodom and Gomorrah had “angered many homosexuals.” He deeply regretted this reaction, but “it’s not my fault if M. de Charlus is an old gentleman. I could not suddenly give him the appearance of a Sicilian shepherd such as one finds in engravings from Taormina.” Proust later told Boulenger that Gide was “a very difficult man” to whom he should not even mention Sodom and Gomorrah, for it had caused their friendship “to cool.”57
Among those whose ire was raised by Sodom and Gomorrah was the nationalist and militarist Binet-Valmer, who scolded Proust for using his “admirable, prodigious analytical qualities to create abnormal, antisocial” types rather than depicting those “true sons of France . . . that gave our army its most humble but most virile chiefs.” Léon Daudet explained to Proust that, given his newspaper’s readership, he could not even mention the title Sodom and Gomorrah. Daudet promised to compensate for this omission “in a more serious form.” His strategy would be to praise Proust’s novel in general terms, thus avoiding references to the title. Even sympathetic critics like Jacques Boulenger feared public reaction. Late in the year Boulenger told Proust that it would be impossible to write an article on Sodom and Gomorrah for the Opinion without causing massive cancellations. He suggested an interview instead.58
Many friends and writers congratulated Proust on his courage and his achievement. Blanche praised him for having treated the subject with such thoroughness and dignity. Proust had endowed the subject of homosexuality with “a tragic nobility” that derived from its author’s being such a “learned” and “profound moraliste.” In early July, Proust heard from Colette, to whom he had sent a copy of Sodom and Gomorrah. “No one in the world has written pages such as these on homosexuals, no one!” She particularly admired the Charlus-Jupien encounter, but found it all “magnificent.”59
Antoine Bibesco had been so eager to read the remainder of The Guermantes Way and begin Sodom and Gomorrah that, rather than wait for his inscribed copy to arrive, he purchased one at the French bookstore in Washington. He wrote Marcel that the “sound effects” of Charlus and Jupien’s lovemaking were somewhat shocking, but the section on the grandmother’s death was “the most sublime of all.” Antoine asked Marcel to send him the proofs for the last volumes; it was unbearable to have to wait for “these slices . . . when one is so hungry” for more.60
Mauriac also praised the description of the agony and death of the Narrator’s grandmother. There was “not a line that did not captivate me.” Regarding the opening pages of Sodom and Gomorrah, however, Mauriac had experienced the “most contradictory feelings: admiration, repulsion, terror, disgust,” but he believed in the “fate of a work of art: It was impossible for you not to bear this terrible fruit. It had to fall to you and not to another to assume the role of the angel who makes the accursed cities rise from their ashes.” The younger writer trembled “at the thought of all those who closed their eyes” in order not to recognize themselves and “whose secret and shameful wound you probe with a brutal finger.”61
When Proust inscribed his copy to Geneviève and Émile Straus, he entreated them to read the episode about the duchesse de Guermantes’s red shoes, “which I came one evening to find” so long before. Proust had sought inspiration for the scene from a stunning red dress and matching shoes that he had remembered Mme Straus wearing years earlier. This episode, which concludes The Guermantes Way, reveals Oriane de Guermantes’s vain, shallow nature.62 Late for a grand dinner party, which she and her husband pretend that they must attend out of social duty, but which they would rather die than miss, the couple hurries to their carriage, accompanied by Swann, who had stopped by unannounced for a brief visit. When Oriane invites him, her oldest and dearest friend, to accompany them to Italy the next spring, he declines. Swann resists answering her questions as to why he cannot come, but finally, after she insists, he admits that it is because he will be dead by then. He has an inoperable tumor. Swann urges Oriane to hurry on to the party, “because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence over the death of a friend, and he put himself in their place thanks to his instinctive politeness. But that of the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner-party to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death.” Oriane is about to abandon, with much regret, the dinner party until the duke insists that she come along. They must not arrive late. Just as she is getting into the carriage, the duke notices that she is wearing black shoes instead of red and orders her to go back and put on shoes that match. Not only is a dinner party more important than staying with a close friend who has just announced his impending death, but so are appearances. This scene, one of the most bitterly satirical in the novel, shows that Proust, far from being in thrall to high society, sees it for the vain and sterile world he knew it to be.63
Mme Straus thanked Marcel for his “audacious and magnificent book.” As for the portrayal of homosexuality, she was “not at all scandalized” and remembered that “we used to talk about it when you called in the evening.”64
On April 21 an exhibition of old and modern Dutch masters opened in the Jeu de Paume.65 Morand, who knew how delighted Proust would be, had used his influence as a diplomat to insist that the Dutch organizers of the exhibition include Vermeer’s View of Delft. A short while after the exhibition opened, Morand asked whether Proust had gone to see the painting. “If not, you will have to get up and go. Are you better at this moment?”66
Proust decided that he might see two exhibitions on the same outing: the Vermeer exhibition and another of works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres at the Hôtel des Antiquaires et des Beaux-Arts.67 On May 9 Proust sent Étienne de Beaumont a word of thanks for trying to arrange for a special pass to visit the Ingres exhibition one evening after hours. On those rare occasions when Proust planned a daytime excursion, he simply did not go to bed the night before. This was the solution he adopted in order to see the two exhibitions. One morning in the latter part of May, he sent a note to the art critic Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, inviting him to come along. Just after the exhibition opened, Proust had read and admired Vaudoyer’s article on the “mysterious” Vermeer and knew that he would be an ideal companion.68
On the morning that Proust felt well enough to attend the exhibitions, he waited until the last minute to send a note to Vaudoyer, asking whether he would be willing to lead to the exhibitions “the dead man I am and who will lean on your arm. I will be alone, except perhaps for Morand. If you say yes I will send for you around 9:15 (later in the day I will be too tired).”69
That day someone photographed Proust standing on the terrace next to the Jeu de Paume. These were to be the last photographs of Proust’s life.70 His demeanor is both proud and slightly confused, as he squints against the bright sunlight. He looks pale and puffy, and not altogether healthy, but he is impeccably dressed and, posing for the camera, superbly erect and dignified.
The scene of Bergotte’s death in The Captive was long thought to have been inspired by Proust’s visit to the Vermeer exhibition. This myth apparently originated with Robert Proust, who had read the passage and, knowing that his brother had not been well around the time of the museum visit, believed that Marcel had attributed his own malaise that day to the fatal attack Bergotte suffers at the same exhibition.71
It had been almost twenty years since Proust had last seen “the most beautiful painting in the world.” In the scene preceding Bergotte’s death, the painting plays a vital part in the narration. Staring in awed admiration at the painting, Bergotte suffers the awful realization that, despite a highly successful career and his reputation as a distinguished writer, he is a failure as an artist. Admiring Vermeer’s brushstrokes and use of color, Bergotte sees that his own books were far too intellectual. “His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze . . . on the precious little patch of wall. ‘That’s how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’” As Bergotte begins to faint, he has a vision: “In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. ‘All the same,’ he said to himself, ‘I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.’” As Bergotte sinks down onto the settee in the museum room, he keeps repeating to himself, “Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.” He rolls to the floor and dies.
In this scene, Proust reprises the theme of death and survival through art. He comes as close as he ever did in the novel or in life to declaring his belief in some sort of afterlife when the Narrator asks of Bergotte:
Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful... nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over and over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness . . . self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only... to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable.
After Bergotte’s burial, “all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.”72 The symbol but not the certainty. Proust was unable to account for the nobility of human striving in the face of an unjust, absurd world, but he always left the ultimate question unanswered. Dead forever? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
By June, Rochat had at last made preparations to leave for a far country. Proust had asked his banking friend Horace Finaly to find a position for the young man. On June 4 Rochat embarked for Argentina, where he was to work at the Buenos Aires branch of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas.73 Before he left, Rochat, who had become mean and mendacious in his conduct toward his fiancée, finally broke off his engagement, a despicable act that Proust used for his character Morel. In a letter to Schiff, Proust said he feared that after the estrangement, Rochat would become bored at rue Hamelin. It was that concern, the writer said, that inspired him to secure a “good situation” for Rochat in South America.74
The day after Rochat’s departure, Proust dictated a letter to Céleste for his publisher. He complained that he still had no proofs for Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, despite having given Gallimard the manuscript four months earlier. “I have spent many fertile weeks without working because I have no material, and since Rochat left yesterday for several years my work . . . will necessarily be slower.”75 This last remark was probably an exaggeration, but it justified his having kept Rochat on for so long and might make Gallimard more concerned about additional delays. Gallimard answered that he had been hounding the printer to send the proofs, but the delay was due to a shortage of lead. The printer had promised to produce a considerable number of pages during the first third of June. Still searching for ways to speed up the process, Gallimard said that he would adopt Proust’s suggestion of having a blank page glued onto each proof sheet for his revisions and additions.76
This delay was not Proust’s only frustration. He was annoyed by what he considered Mme de Chevigné’s ungrateful reaction on noticing aspects of her appearance and lineage in the attractive, elegant, and socially prominent duchesse de Guermantes. Writing to Guiche, Proust had nothing but insults for Mme de Chevigné, whom he continued to envisage as a fowl: the duchesse de Guermantes “resembles somewhat the tough old hen I once took for a bird of Paradise and who could only answer me like a parrot, ‘Fitz James is waiting for me,’ when I tried to capture her under the trees along the avenue Gabriel. By making her a powerful Vulture, I have at least prevented her being taken for an old magpie.”77 Marcel made similar complaints to Mme de Chevigné’s neighbor Jean Cocteau. He even suggested that Cocteau read passages from his novel to the lady to make her see that instead of being offended, she should be flattered. Cocteau made an amusing and appropriate observation: “Marcel, that would be like Mr. Audubon asking the birds to take an interest in what he had written about them.”78
Montesquiou sent a letter expressing his admiration for the latest volume. Proust, knowing how many traits, rejoinders, gestures, and attitudes he had borrowed from Montesquiou to create Charlus, stressed again his creation of composites. Even when describing “inanimate objects (or so called), I extract a generality from a thousand unconscious reminiscences. I can’t tell you how many churches ‘posed’ for my church of Combray in Swann’s Way. The characters are even more invented, the monuments each having brought . . . one its steeple, another its dome.”79 He signed the letter, “Au revoir, cher Monsieur, I hope you are completely cured and that your entire resurrection will come at the same time as my death, that is to say soon. Your affectionate and grateful admirer. Marcel Proust.”
Montesquiou wrote again in early June, avoiding even a hint that he saw himself as the principal model for Charlus. He did recognize himself as the object of a remark made by that character who refers to “the test that the one eminent man of our world has ingeniously named the test of untoward kindness, and which he rightly declares to be the most terrible of all, the only one that can separate the wheat from the chaff.” The count often applied this test to a friend or someone who wanted to be friends by treating the candidate with excessive kindness. Then when the person on probation invariably failed to meet Montesquiou’s impossible standards, the count dismissed the “chaff,” often in public. Montesquiou, pretending to be flattered, called Charlus’s allusion to him—“the one eminent man”—and his test “fine praise, which compromises or satisfies no one since it is anonymous.”80
A week later Montesquiou returned to his favorite topic: the keys for characters. He did not know Albufera, but he thought Guiche had posed for Saint-Loup, and he liked Charles Haas much better than Charles Ephrussi as the model for Swann. As for the due and duchesse de Guermantes, it seemed so obvious; surely they were inspired by the Greffulhes. Then, again without betraying any sign that he saw himself in Charlus, the count acknowledged Proust’s role as a pioneer in bringing onto center stage a cast of characters who were homosexual or bisexual: “You wanted to widen the field of literature and open it to the immense space of inversion, which has been forbidden until now, and which can provide... beautiful and perilous works.” Would Proust succeed? Montesquiou thought it “possible, but not certain. The adversary is strong.” To Proust’s annoyance, the count also recognized the androgynous nature of Proust’s seaside girls from Within a Budding Grove.81
Montesquiou may have been uncertain how he should confront Proust on this issue. To other friends he expressed his anger and his vexation. If he succeeded in convincing himself and Proust that he did not see himself caricatured in Charlus, he apparently fooled no one else. Anna de Noailles, whose imitation of Montesquiou’s voice rivaled Proust’s earlier mimickry, began reciting Charlus’s tirades at after-dinner parties. Those who arrived late and heard her voice as they climbed the stairs “thought for a moment that Montesquiou had emerged from his hermitage.” In spite of dissimilarities between him and Charlus, in particular the baron’s corpulence, Montesquiou knew that he would forever be identified with Proust’s character. “He confided to a friend: ‘I am in bed, ill from the publication of three volumes which have bowled me over.’” The count was indeed ill, although he himself did not yet appreciate to what degree. He asked Mme de Clermont-Tonnerre, in desperation: “Will I be reduced to calling myself Montesproust?”82
Montesquiou hid his anger and distress from Proust, to whom the count began to send extremely kind letters. Proust denied to Boulenger—calling the idea “absurd”—that it had been his intention to portray Montesquiou as a homosexual. Had such a portrayal been voluntary, that would be “even worse, because, if I have known in society an enormous number of homosexuals whom no one suspected of being that way, in all the years I’ve known Montesquiou, I have never seen him, at home or in a crowd or anywhere, give the slightest indication of that. Despite that, I think (?) he believes that I intended to portray him. Since he is infinitely intelligent, far from seeming to believe it, he was the first to write me the warmest letters on Guermantes and Sodom. But I still think he believes it. And so the kindness of his letters torments me.” Proust described Montesquiou as a “mean man who through madness made many of his relatives suffer.” Now that Montesquiou was sixty-six, and Marcel saw him in “his sad old age in which he is deprived of the glory that he believed was rightly his . . . it breaks my heart.” Proust’s professed pity soon turned to fear as he contemplated how Montesquiou’s memoirs would depict him.83
In September, Marcel fell in his room. Dr. Babinski gave him another examination, about which little is known; presumably, the consultation differed little from the first. Proust told Hauser that the doctor asked him to pronounce certain sentences, so apparently he still had difficulty speaking. Marcel had one wish: “If only I could finish my books. Ars longa, vita brevis.”84 Proust had corrected only the first chapter of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, and offered to send it to Gaston if that would speed the process. Gallimard replied that he was eager to have those 160 pages and the entire next volume, if it was completely ready. If he could have the copy for both volumes, he would hire another printer and produce them simultaneously. He and Rivière would correct the proofs. Once all the Search was in print, Gallimard intended to proceed immediately with Proust’s Selected Writings.85 Gallimard’s ambitions for Proust’s work appealed to the novelist, who was working hard to finish revising Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2; only then could he begin to reshape the volume that was to become The Captive.
Jacques Boulenger had told Proust in July about the recently founded Les Œuvres libres. Arthème Fayard had created the review to specialize in publishing new novels in an affordable format. Each issue contained several works. When Proust considered selling a long segment from the cycle about Albertine, he told Boulenger that he thought Gallimard would “take to his bed” if he published “anywhere else other than the NRF.”86 By early September, Proust received Fayard’s offer to pay two francs per line for an unpublished novel of five thousand lines, for a total of 10,000 francs.87 Proust, always short of cash, and annoyed that Gallimard had failed to pay his monthly installments of 2,500 francs on royalties past due, found the proposition very tempting.
Meanwhile, Proust heard from Rivière, who had taken with him to Cenon the manuscript of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2. Jacques had been unable to put it down because it was “so admirable, of such powerful and profound beauty! especially the return to Balbec and the grief over the grandmother’s death.” The Narrator had never really felt the deep and true loss of his grandmother until he returned to the seaside hotel where they had stayed in adjoining rooms. Because of his inability to undo his own boots each evening, his grandmother would bend over to unlace and remove them. On the second visit to Balbec, when the Narrator returns to his hotel room and makes the same gesture to take off his boots, he suddenly feels the full weight of his loss. This passage, “The Intermittencies of the Heart,” on grieving and forgetting, is one of the novel’s most poignant. Rivière begged Proust to give it to him for the October issue, saying it was the natural complement to the account of the grandmother’s death that had appeared in the NRF’s January issue.88
Proust wrote to Rivière, not revealing that his reluctance to give Rivière excerpts was due to his fear of undermining the negotiations with Les Œuvres libres. Rivière continued to press his case: the NRF was planning a brochure to be sent out in thousands of copies that would attract new readers; if Proust’s pages appeared anywhere else, it would be a “catastrophe.” The public would not understand; Proust must appear when he was expected, where he would be read. Jacques asked Proust, when making his selection for the review, to “avoid anecdotes of which M. de Charlus is the hero. I have been reproached a lot for the growing licentiousness of the review.” Apparently, these reproaches came from Paul Claudel, a rather stern and conservative author also published by Gallimard. Rivière soon regretted having made this restriction and rescinded it.89
On September 8 Gallimard spent the entire evening, from six o’clock until one in the morning, talking with Proust. The novelist extracted from Gaston permission to publish a long section from the next volume in Les Œuvres libres. Gallimard tried to hide his dismay over Proust’s betrayal, because he did not want to spoil the fine evening. Earlier that day Proust, having decided to accept Fayard’s offer, sent Jean Paulhan the pages Rivière wanted for his October issue. Two days later Proust sent Rivière a telegram, telling him not to worry: Proust would give him “The Intermittencies of the Heart.”90
The morning after his long visit with Proust, Gallimard, who had spent a sleepless night, wrote and asked the novelist never to reach such an agreement with another publisher.91 Gallimard called the publication in Les Œuvres libres a book in disguise: same format, same appearance, same price, and same distribution. Fayard might print as many as forty thousand copies, but if Proust calculated his fee, he would see that Fayard was paying him a mere twenty-five centimes per copy. Gallimard’s royalties on the same number of copies would be twenty-five thousand francs, compared with Fayard’s ten thousand. Gallimard, who wanted to make certain he never found himself in the same situation again, offered to pay the same amount as Fayard or anyone else. He would even pay any difference that forgoing such an opportunity would cost Proust. In the present case, he asked Proust to give Fayard the fewest pages possible, with a special title, and to include the mention that these pages were an excerpt from a volume to be published by the Editions of the NRF.92
Proust gave his word and reminded Gallimard that the authorization was for only this one time. True, he was unhappy over renouncing any future proposals, but he did not want to vex Gallimard. He did point out that Gallimard owed him a large sum of money, approximately sixty thousand francs.93 As he kept giving the NRF new books, the amount Gallimard owed him would increase. Proust said that he did not intend this observation as criticism or a request for money, but he did regret that Gallimard would not let others compensate somewhat for the NRF’s inability to pay him in a timely fashion.94
That evening Proust wrote Henri Duvernois, Fayard’s editor, relating his discussions with Gallimard. Proust was as accommodating with Duvernois as he had been cool with Gaston. Duvernois could send him the initial payment in a month or two; “I don’t need money.” Proust scoffed at Gallimard’s request that Les Œuvres libres notify its readers that his contribution was excerpted from a forthcoming NRF volume. He told Duvernois: “Don’t commit such a folly . . . to which I moreover am opposed.” Two days later, Fayard sent Proust a check for ten thousand francs.95 In November, Les Œuvres libres published 150 pages entitled Jalousie (Jealousy) as “a new and complete novel.”96
On September 13 Paulhan wrote Proust that he would receive the proofs of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, within a week.97 In the meantime, Rivière, unaware that Proust had sent additional pages for “The Intermittencies of the Heart” directly to Paulhan, wrote to inquire why Proust had not provided enough copy. Upset and annoyed over the confusion, Proust wrote Rivière, “Your letter made me absolutely crazy. I gave you everything you wanted, more than you wanted.”98 Paulhan, seeking to gain time, had forwarded the pages directly to the printer rather than to Rivière. Once Jacques realized his error, he apologized for the trouble he had caused.
The grievances continued. On September 19 Proust sent Gallimard a long list of complaints, many of which might have been meant to disguise his own despicable behavior and guilt over having betrayed his publisher.99 He began by relating a recent accident: he had fallen in his room, and in trying to catch hold of the door had bruised himself as he crashed to the floor. Proust claimed that to torment him, the NRF had two directors: Rivière, who kept hounding him for copy, and Gallimard, who was always absent or unreachable. He even accused Gallimard of having his secretary deny that he was in when Proust called. This suspicion revived the memory of the rejection of Swann, after which Proust had naïvely phoned three times a day, expecting to talk to someone. He regretted having sold the excerpt to Les Œuvres libres, but that, too, was Gallimard’s fault. The publisher had not been available when he tried to consult him: “You didn’t even answer my letter.” Fearing retaliation, he attributed to Gaston the base intention of promoting the next volume halfheartedly to prove the detrimental effects of publishing in Les Œuvres libres. Proust wanted Gallimard to work even harder to launch this volume—“(or two volumes, it’s very long)”—to efface the wrong that publication in Les Œuvres libres might do and to “compensate me for my sacrifice since I henceforth refuse their collaboration,” a gesture Proust thought was “extremely nice . . . dear prior, because our contract contains no vow of celibacy, chastity, poverty.”
Gallimard had heard enough about his having refused Swann’s Way, a decision in which he had no part, and he asked Proust to drop that charge. The publisher assured Proust that everything owed him would be paid; if the writer wanted the money immediately, Gallimard would arrange for him to receive it. Inasmuch as Proust had referred to their contract, Gaston reminded him of clause 6, which stipulated that authorization to reproduce any text must be agreed to by both parties. Furthermore, any money Proust earned from such publications was to be divided equally between the author and the NRF. Gaston repeated that he mentioned the contract only because Marcel had; he preferred to base their understandings on mutual affection—an indication that he understood Proust’s psychology perfectly. If Proust was tempted by other offers, Gaston would pay him all money owed by January. It was as a “friend” that he had asked to pay monthly installments. If bookstores had paid him the approximately six hundred thousand francs they owed, he would not have delayed payment. He brushed aside the innuendo that he “could have the petty intention” of not properly launching the next volume. Gallimard had for Proust’s novel a “jealous affection: therefore demand of me, brutally, what you want and I will use all my strength never to disappoint you.” In the postscript he reminded Proust of his eagerness to publish Selected Writings and reprint Pleasures and Days.100 Gallimard’s forgiveness, generosity—even selfabasement—made Proust’s behavior look even more contemptible.
Proust answered that Gallimard should not worry about immediate payment. He did not need any money, for his life was reduced to “consultations” with Gallimard and Babinski.101 Proust offered to drop his own peculiar interpretation of clause 6 in their contract, saying that his desire was “to do only what you wish.” The clause in question was a standard one that protected copyright and clearly prohibited such publications as the one in Les Œuvres libres without the NRF’s permission. Proust had contended, rather ridiculously, that because the pages he sold to Les Œuvres libres had never been published anywhere, their publication did not constitute a “reproduction.” Although it had been just two weeks since he had received Fayard’s check, Proust already regretted the decision, telling Gallimard that “despite the extraordinary kindness of Duvernois and the vertiginous and honest rapidity of Fayard”—clearly an invitation to Gallimard to compare his own way of doing business and paying his authors—he wished that he had not “embarked on this slave-ship.” Proust had failed to calculate that he would receive a mountain of proofs from Fayard, which would require “secretaries, and the profit would be zero.” In the postscript he thanked Gaston for the 2,500-franc check and urged that regular payments be made.102
Gallimard feared, based on what Proust said about length, that Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, would not be ready for several months. “I, therefore, insist that you allow me to publish a new edition of Pleasures and Days. It could be ready in several weeks and would require no proofs to correct.”103 Proust replied that although the next volume was long, he was working on it constantly and exclusively and would have it ready for May publication. He intended to give Gallimard the entire revised manuscript in a month or a month and a half. Regarding Pleasures and Days, Proust opposed immediate publication because he feared that readers would be confused by the appearance of a separate and unrelated volume “in the midst of the long convoy that is already so difficult to follow.” Once the Search was finished, he hoped that Pleasures and Days would find new readers and “live to an old age.”104
When Rivière requested an essay for Dostoyevsky’s centennial, Proust refused to be distracted from revising his manuscript. Although he admired “the great Russian passionately,” he knew his works “imperfectly.” The necessary reading and rereading would interrupt his own work for months. “I can only answer as did the prophet Nehemiah (I believe), who from his perch on a ladder” said to someone who called him: “I cannot come down, I am finishing a great task.”105
Proust, who respected Rivière’s judgment and knew him to be candid, asked for his opinion about Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2. Jacques, who had already told him how “admirable” it was, observed that “no human work is perfect.” Listing what he saw as the defects of Saint-Simon, Balzac, and Stendhal, Rivière asked, “Yet what do we have that is greater (with Racine)?... I put you with those four.” Proust, like the others, did “not avoid imperfection.” It was difficult for Rivière to define Proust’s shortcoming, but “I suspect it must be there.” Perhaps “such and such a sentence might be clearer, or a particular articulation in the story might be more accentuated, or a digression” such as “Brichot’s etymologies” could have been somewhat shorter. “But what does that matter next to the continuous sublimeness of the book?” He congratulated Proust on being “the creator of a society as complete and complex as the Comédie humaine. You have the additional merit over Balzac of not having just presented and described it, but explored it and explained it.” Rivière said that “personally,” he thought Proust’s most “amazing” faculty was his “extraordinary analytical ability.” This succinct assessment, given before Rivière or anyone had read the complete novel, seems fair and accurate. Proust must have found it so, for he did not contest any of Rivière’s reservations concerning style and content.
On October 13, the day of Rivière’s letter, Proust suffered a terrible accidental poisoning. His own drug abuse was the underlying cause, but the direct blame fell on the pharmacist, who had mislabeled the medication. Proust described the incident in a letter to Gallimard. Thinking that he was taking seven Veronal cachets of “one-tenth gram” each, Proust had swallowed “seven one-gram doses.” When he tried to stand, he “suffered terrible vertigo, etc. I could have died from it.”106
Proust seems to have recovered fairly quickly. A few days later he answered a survey for André Lang that was published in Les Annales politiques et littéraires the following February.107 Among Lang’s questions was the following: “When someone makes a distinction between an analytical novel and an adventure novel, does that mean anything, according to you, and if so what?” Proust, who knew that it would be several years before the publication of his concluding volume, Time Regained, which contains his literary credo, seized this opportunity to explain to readers his (and the Narrator’s) ideas about literature. What he sought was not the analysis of minutiae, but the truth, the laws that govern human behavior and the universe. This was why he did not like the expression “analytical novel,” which had come to mean “study under the microscope.” His preferred instrument was the telescope. “But I had the misfortune of beginning a book by the word ‘I’ and immediately everyone thought that instead of seeking to discover general laws, I ‘was analyzing myself’ in the private and detestable meaning of the word. I would replace ‘analytical novel’ by the ‘novel of introspection.’”108 In his novel, Proust urges readers to engage in introspection. He viewed reading, as he had in the 1905 essay on the subject, as the beginning of self-knowledge. Toward the end of the Search, when the Narrator anticipates his future novel, he recognizes the reader’s independence and duty to himself: “For it is only out of habit, a habit contracted from the insincere language of prefaces and dedications, that the writer speaks of ‘my reader.’ In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.”109
On October 20 Proust gave Rivière an excerpt from Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, for the December NRF.110 The episode describes the train rides of the Narrator and Albertine from Balbec to visit the Verdurins, who had rented the villa La Raspelière. While they are there, Charlus makes an entry in which his homosexual nature is apparent to the Narrator. Proust described Charlus as seeming “ladylike” and embodying the soul of a female relative.111 After sending these pages to Jacques, Proust wrote Gaston, saying that he wanted to finish the volume as quickly as possible and then rest for three or four days, which he “had not done since 1915.” Then he would begin to perfect Sodom and Gomorrah, part 3 (The Captive).
In November, Proust received a letter from Bernard Fay, a historian and biographer who spent his winters at Columbia University, where he lectured on contemporary French authors.112 Fay was about to return to New York, and Proust was to be the topic of one of his first lectures. The scholar expressed his desire to meet Proust and discuss the lecture. “Your work is greatly admired in certain American intellectual circles and is beginning to be more widely known” to the general public. “Last year at Columbia University several of my students (male and female) showed an interest in studying and writing... dissertations on you.” Fay wanted to consult Proust about how to encourage these students and which of his works the author would like to see translated. In his reply, Proust explained his bizarre hours to the professor, whom he invited to dine at his bedside. Fay agreed and spent his last night in Paris listening to the strange genius, upon whose works the professor would soon be expounding to students at Columbia.113 Those students, like everyone else, had to wait six more years before all the Search was published.
At the end of the month Proust heard from Binet-Valmer that with Christmas approaching, there were, in the aftermath of the war, “100,000 children living in the ruins of France who are counting on me and I am working like a ditch digger.” Proust sent two thousand francs for the children, for whom he would have liked to write something, but his high fever made that impossible. He told Binet-Valmer that he had taken three adrenaline shots just to summon the energy to write this short letter.114
Proust sent Gallimard his recommendations for the division and titles of the next installments: “Sodom and Gomorrah, Part II will fill two volumes published together.” Part 3, on which he was ready to begin working hard, would be called The Captive, “a brief volume of dramatic action.” This was the first hint that the writer was seriously considering making a large cut in the original manuscript.115 He expressed to Gallimard his outrage that a satirical newspaper had announced a new pen called “Swan’s Way Proust Stylograph, manufactured by Marcel Proust.” Should he not write the newspaper a stern letter of protest, something he had never done before?116 Proust raised one more issue of concern: Morand had told Proust that a German firm’s efforts to secure translation rights to the Search had fallen through because the NRF’s demands were too high.117
Gallimard, who disliked Morand for his loose tongue, replied that the fees he sought for Proust’s works were “never any higher than those obtained for other writers whose reputations are far from the equal of yours.” It was “certain that sooner or later In Search of Lost Time will be translated into all languages.” As for answering those satirical journals, he advised against it, saying that they were of “no importance. They would publish your answers while ridiculing them.”118
A week later Gaston informed Proust that he had sent the corrected manuscript to the printer and was certain Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, could appear May 1. He agreed to use a larger font but reminded Proust that the price of the book would rise. To increase the type size the volume had to be completely reset and that cost reabsorbed. Gaston refused to let the author pay.119 Marcel replied with an economical proposal. He suggested making only a typescript for Sodom and Gomorrah, part 3. That would be the definitive text, and there would be no proofs or typesetting to pay for. He would hire a typist and have all the work done at rue Hamelin. “Am I not an accommodating author? (which will compensate somewhat since you say, it appears, that I am an expensive author.)”120 Gallimard accepted Proust’s suggestion, telling him, “You are, it is true, a very accommodating author, and I have never said that you were an expensive author.” He informed Marcel that only nine copies remained of the deluxe edition of Within a Budding Grove.121 Proust hired another member of Céleste’s family, Odilon’s young niece Yvonne Albaret, as a secretary. During her first stay, Yvonne was to prepare the typescripts of The Captive and The Fugitive.122
On December 8 Proust wrote Berry that after “seven months in bed,” he had gone at midnight to the Ritz, where he had asked the “good Olivier” if he might dine. In a sentimental mood after downing a bottle of Porto 345, Proust had thought how “sweet” was the time when he used to “come to the Ritz with M. Berry! And I asked myself: ‘Have I passed the age of loving?’ (La Fontaine without any Charlus).” The port had made him “only slightly drunk,” but Berry should not “attribute his tender effusions solely to the ‘345.’... Is there no way before dying (I am talking about me) to see each other again, to tell each other those things whose seeds will perhaps sprout in Eternity?” Remembering Fay’s visit, Proust said that Berry’s countrymen were kind to request so many lectures on the Search. This reminded Proust of an amusing letter he had recently received from an American woman living in Rome whose name he had already forgotten. After assuring him that she remained very beautiful at twenty-seven, she confessed that for three years she had done nothing night and day except read his books. That sounded fine until he reached the end of her letter, which was “humiliating,” because the woman expressed her utter perplexity: “I don’t understand a word, absolutely nothing. Dear Marcel Proust, stop playing the poseur, come down for once from your empyrean. Tell me in two lines what you meant.” Proust thought it “pointless to reply,” since “she had not understood in 2,000 lines.”123
Berry was also eager to see his old friend: “When you go out, even at eleven, why not have Céleste phone me, and we will go and empty together a flacon of 345?” Regarding the American lady, Berry knew a hundred like her. He said that whenever one of them asked him if he “liked your books, I would answer: ‘Yes, but they have a grave defect: they are so short.’ And the poor lady would walk away dumbfounded. I should have added they have an even more serious defect: after having read them, one cannot read books by others.”124
On December 16 Parisians received confirmation of Montesquiou’s death at Menton, five days earlier. At sixty-six, “The Sovereign of Transitory Things” had succumbed to uremia. The next day Marcel, who had not gotten out of bed for days, “dragged himself to the dining room” to await the duc de Guiche, whom he had invited to relate “the details of Montesquiou’s death.”125 Guiche had other obligations that kept him away, but Berry, who was free, came and dined with Proust.
Writing to Guiche’s wife the following day, Proust said that he could fill volumes for her on Montesquiou, “the subject is so inexhaustible.” He remembered all the times that Montesquiou, “with a smile,” had allowed Proust “to reproach him for the way he had treated so many people.” As for his own relationship with the count, Proust said, there had never been a “cloud,” which he certainly would have known, because Montesquiou “was not a man to ignore clouds, but [one] whose manner was rather to hurl thunderbolts.” Montesquiou’s memoirs, which Proust secretly dreaded, “would settle the matter.” Proust saw a great injustice in the “small success of my books and the appalling obscurity where his have been forgotten.” Proust refused, however, to believe that the count was “literally” dead.126 Montesquiou, who had always seemed larger than life, would surely surprise them all by turning up alive and well.
Montesquiou’s intense dislike of his family survived him. He left everything to his secretary, Henri Pinard, except for certain legacies, some of which went to the library at Versailles, in memory of Yturri. Only a handful of friends attended the service in the small chapel dedicated to Sainte-Élisabeth at Versailles, where Montesquiou was laid to rest beside Yturri under the watchful Angel of Silence.127
A week before Christmas, Gallimard informed Proust that he had received the unbound pages, for the author’s inspection, of the English translation of Swann’s Way. He reminded Proust that Chatto and Windus could not publish it without the author’s approval: “Would you like to see it?” Proust regretted not having asked earlier for two or three sample pages, but if the job was done, he might as well accept it sight unseen.128 When the English translation appeared nine months later, Proust did not remember giving his consent.129
Between Christmas and New Year’s, Proust received urgent requests from Daniel Halévy, now editing a Grasset series called the Cahiers verts. Daniel wanted to publish a long section from one of Proust’s forthcoming volumes. Proust declined, having just been through the contretemps with Gallimard over Les Œuvres libres. He told Halévy that his contract prohibited such a publication. He distinguished between Les Œuvres libres, which appeared as a review, with each issue containing “four or five things,” and Cahiers verts, each number of which was a volume by a single author. It was unfortunate that Daniel had not asked him earlier, before he became aware of Gallimard’s “intransigence,” because he would have given “A Case of Jealousy” to the Cahiers verts instead of Fayard, “because of you and Grasset to whom I owe so much.”130
On December 28 Proust wrote Gallimard about two preoccupations. The first was the lamentable state of his health, which was so bad that he “regretted not having any cyanide” to swallow. The second was whether or not he could, without delaying Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, “make a few minor additions.” Proust even considered going to the printer at Abbeville. Given the rapid decline in his health, such a dangerous excursion tempted him as a way out of “my hell.”131 Gallimard replied that Proust should put his health first. Gaston, who thought it unlikely Proust would actually rest, given his determination to finish, offered to come to his bedside every evening for a month and assist him, if he wished. As for Marcel’s going to Abbeville, that was out of the question; Gallimard offered to retrieve the proofs and bring them to him.132
Although he alluded to suicide, Proust felt well enough to attend the Beaumonts’ lavish New Year’s Eve costume party. He wrote well before Christmas to inquire how late he could come without inconveniencing the hosts, and whether the house would be warm. Proust liked to arrive late, after the other guests had “warmed” the room, “which is delicious (according to my taste).” On New Year’s Eve, he dictated to Céleste a note for Comte Beaumont, warning that he, “the most boring of guests,” would attend. In preparation, he had taken “such large quantities of drugs” that his hosts would be receiving “a man half-aphasic and especially unsteady on his legs due to vertigo.” He had two requests: first, on arriving, “a cup of tea . . . so boiling hot that it burns your throat”; second, “not to meet too many intellectual and tiresome ladies.”133 The Beaumonts must have met his requirements, because Paris’s most famous nocturnal creature stayed at the party all night.