Any details of the lives of men whose opinions have had a marked influence upon mankind, or from whose works we have derived pleasure or profit, cannot but be interesting.—Edward John Trelawny
IN 2013, THIS CENTENNIAL YEAR of Swann’s Way, I am glad to have the opportunity to publish a new edition of this biography, which first appeared in 2000. A number of corrections have been made in this edition. I have not incorporated fresh material because I had the opportunity to provide and discuss what I consider to be important new information about Proust’s life in two subsequent books, both published by Yale University Press in 2006: Proust in Love and The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren.
In Proust in Love, we learn that Proust suffered the humiliation and indignity of being swept up in a police raid while visiting a male brothel that he helped finance and furnish. Proust’s sexual proclivities and his rather bizarre, sadistic manner of arousing himself have long been known. He had even confessed them to André Gide, knowing no doubt that Gide would record them, as indeed he did, in his voluminous diary that covers the years 1889–1949. But we did not know, prior to research done by the French scholar Laure Murat, that one of Proust’s worst fears had been realized: that of being arrested in such a raid and exposed publicly as a homosexual. Apparently, the affair was kept quiet. How this was managed we do not know. Like most homosexuals of his day, Proust feared not only public exposure but also the threat of blackmail. As a young man he had fought a duel to protect his honor after a journalist insinuated that he was homosexual.
In writing Proust in Love, I gleaned new information from Paul Morand’s posthumously published private diary, Le Journal inutile, which remains available only in the French edition. A novelist and diplomat, Morand was well acquainted with Proust and his circle and recorded many previously unknown details about him, such as his modus operandi when attempting to seduce young men from the servant class. This extensive diary, published in two volumes, along with other sources, increased our knowledge of the information Proust used to depict a variety of sexual types, particularly homosexuals and bisexuals. With such additional material, I was able to focus on the links between Proust’s amorous relationships and their transposition into the Narrator’s often frustrated erotic longings. Proust makes the comprehension and resolution of such longings a pivotal moment in his protagonist’s long quest to comprehend the meaning of his life’s experience and the discovery of his vocation as a writer.
The memoirs of Ernest Forssgren and related documents, including previously unknown Proust autograph items, came into my possession through a generous gift from Marilyn Gordon, whose family became a friend of Forssgren’s many years after he immigrated to the United States. The memoirs bring to light many details about Proust’s trip in September 1914, just after the outbreak of World War I, to the Grand-Hôtel in Cabourg. Proust was accompanied by his housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, and his newly hired valet, Ernest Forssgren. Because of the war, this was to be the author’s last visit to this beloved seaside resort, which is the model for Balbec in In Search of Lost Time. Before the publication of Forssgren’s recollections, Céleste’s first-person account in her memoirs, Monsieur Proust, was the only record available of that difficult and dangerous trip. On comparing her memories with Forssgren’s, we find that, for certain important details, his memory served him better. For example, she insists that there were no wounded soldiers billeted at the Grand-Hôtel during Proust’s stay, whereas Forssgren states otherwise and provides a number of details. Proust’s own letters, published years after both servants wrote their memoirs, demonstrate that Forssgren remembered correctly.
The Forssgren material includes a telegram that Proust sent to him only a few months before the author died. This information allowed us to correct earlier inadvertent misrepresentations in scholarly journals and biographies, including my own, about the sequence of events involving Forssgren that preceded Proust’s death on November 18, 1922. In 1975, excerpts from Forssgren’s memoirs were published in French in the Cahiers Marcel Proust, n.s. 7, Études proustiennes, II, 119–42. Neither the source nor the translator’s name was given. Now that we have the original memoirs, it is evident that the French editors were given only an inaccurate translation and did not see the original document. The published portion led biographers to believe that early in the fall of 1922, Proust waited for hours outside Forssgren’s hotel room in Paris, hoping in vain to see the young man who had returned to France for a brief visit. Not only that: Forssgren maintained that Proust caught the cold that led to his death while waiting in the drafty “hallway.” We now know that the unknown translator changed “lobby,” which is where one would expect Proust to wait, to “hallway.” But there is more. The complete original memoirs and the previously unknown telegram dated September 1 show that the sequence of events laid out by Forssgren is impossible. Forssgren does not refer to the evidence of the telegram in his possession when creating his version in the memoirs of the sequence of events leading up to Proust’s death. My research shows that Forssgren left Paris too early for the missed rendezvous at the hotel to have been a factor. The sailing and immigration manifests show that Forssgren arrived in New York harbor aboard the Majestic on October 2, 1922, well before Proust became ill with the cold that led to pneumonia and his death.
Along with the memoirs, Marilyn Gordon gave me Forssgren’s copy of George D. Painter’s 1965 biography of Proust. In it one finds marginal notations made by Forssgren refuting some of Painter’s assertions. These too are published in The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren, along with a short document that Forssgren entitled “Summary” of Painter’s biography that is more revealing about Proust’s private life than the memoirs, which do not mention homosexuality and Le Cuziat’s brothel. All of the material donated by Marilyn Gordon is now part of the Proust collection at the Mervyn H. Sterne Library of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Since the publication of this biography in 2000, I have received many letters and emails from readers around the globe whose kind and encouraging remarks have been indeed gratifying. I have always considered it a privilege to belong to the community of Proust readers who, like me, find it impossible to exhaust the many fascinating aspects of the fictional world created by this author. New editions, translations, and adaptations of In Search of Lost Time continue to proliferate as we approach the centennial year. How is this novel able to speak to generation after generation in a voice that remains fresh and vigorous? Far from being the culminating opus of decadent literature, as some early critics believed, In Search of Lost Time constitutes one of the most dynamic texts ever written. It fulfills Proust’s own belief, as stated in Time Regained, that such works generate a tremendously rejuvenating force. All its narrative elements—plot, characters, and style—create, as Iris Murdoch said of its effect, “the most intense pleasure one does find in great art.”
To keep in touch with Proust’s readers, Nicolas Drogoul and I have created a website and an online course. To obtain information about these, please visit us at Proust Ink (http://www.proust-ink.com/).