Unblinking Eye

The theme of the story of art, unlike that of the sciences, is not, whatever else it may be, one of progress. In science, discovery builds on discovery, achievement on achievement. “If I have seen further,” said Isaac Newton, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” In art there are merely—some merely—discrete geniuses, who arrive without predecessors and depart without successors. Marcel Proust is a case in highly italicized point: No one could have predicted that this dilettantish young social climber would write the novel that Benjamin Taylor, in this study of Proust in the Yale Jewish Lives series, calls the “culmination of European literature.”

Taylor’s Proust: The Search is a work of admirable concision, covering Marcel Proust’s life, interests, oddity, and the arc of his career, all in relatively brief compass. Relying on the work of Proust’s biographers—William C. Carter and Jean-Yves Tadié especially—but also through his own penetrating reading of Proust’s writing, he has brought out what it is about Proust that commands our interest and, for those Proustolaters among us, our devotion.

Proust’s father was a physician, an expert in cholera, himself the son of a provincial Roman Catholic grocer. His mother was Jewish, a Weil, daughter of a successful Parisian stockbroker, with an uncle, Adolphe Crémieux, who was a staunch defender of Jewish rights in France. The marriage, as Taylor characterizes it, joined “ambition to money.” Each may have felt him- or herself superior to the other. Their first child, Marcel, was born in 1871; a second son, Robert, who like his father would become a physician, was born roughly two years later. No effort was made, Taylor notes, to force a conversion on the part of Jeanne Proust, who continued to think herself Jewish.

Marcel Proust was the greatest mama’s boy in all of literature. An asthmatic all his life, his mother, upon whose affection he counted preternaturally, was also something akin to his caregiver. A social butterfly, of highly exotic coloring, the young Marcel Proust dithered and dallied and did not get down to serious work until his mid-thirties. He felt he had betrayed his father, remarking that “I am well aware that I was always the dark spot in his life.” On his mother’s death, which occurred when he was 34, Proust wrote: “She takes away my life with her, as Papa had taken away hers.” This major subtraction from his life, as Taylor notes, turned his thoughts to suicide. He replaced his mother with work on his great novel.

How Jewish Proust felt himself—though anyone born to a Jewish mother under the Israeli Law of Return technically qualifies as Jewish—is a complicated matter. Taylor writes that “Proust saw himself as what he was: the non-Jewish son of a Jewish mother.” But then, a Jew, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder, and Proust, though baptized, was nonetheless often taken for Jewish. In his Diaries Harold Nicolson described Proust as “very Hebrew.” Earlier, Colette put a character modeled on Proust in one of her novels, describing him as “a young kike of letters.” François Mauriac, describing in his diary a visit to Proust, wrote: “sheets none too clean, the stench of the furnished flat, his Jewish features, with his ten-day growth of beard, sinking back into ancestral filth.” A man who served on a literary prize committee with Proust described him as “despite the moustache, [having] the look of a sixty-year-old Jewish lady who might have been beautiful.”

Proust understood that Jewishness is a club from which it would be dishonorable to drop out, even though his being Jewish in those days may have prevented him from joining other clubs. Antisemitism was one of the favorite indoor sports of the French literati: The Goncourts, Maurice Barrès, Alphonse Daudet, Paul Bourget, and others engaged freely in it. Benjamin Taylor quotes a letter from Proust to Robert de Montesquiou, one of the people on whom Proust’s character Baron de Charlus is based, apropos of his antisemitism. In this letter Proust remarks that, though himself Catholic, his mother is Jewish, and this is “enough for me to refrain from such discussions”—adding, ambiguously, that he “was not free to have the ideas I might otherwise have on the subject.”

Yet Proust had no difficulty aligning himself with Jewish causes. In the Dreyfus Affair, in which the Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely charged with treason and sent off to Devil’s Island, Proust signed petitions on behalf of Dreyfus. He was able to persuade Anatole France, then possessed of a much grander name than his own, to sign Zola’s famous J’accuse article against the injustice done to Dreyfus that appeared in 1898 in the French paper L’Aurore. Charles Swann, the most sympathetic character in In Search of Lost Time, is a Jew.

Fame did not come quickly to Proust. In his mid-twenties he published Pleasures and Days, a lightish collection of feuilletons and parodies. He worked on Jean Santeuil, a longish autobiographical novel that he abandoned. With the aid of his mother, whose English was superior to his own, he turned out a translation of John Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens. He also wrote an important collection of essays, Contre Sainte-Beuve, arguing against what he took to be the biographical fallacy in judging fiction.

Even Proust’s great literary achievement, In Search of Lost Time, his pass-key to immortality, did not find ready acceptance. The first portion of what would eventually be a seven-volume novel was rejected at the publishing house of Nouvelle Revue Française, in one of the monumentally foolish decisions in literary history, and by no less a figure than André Gide. Some say Gide read only a few scant sentences before rejecting the 1,500-page manuscript, some that he never opened the package in which it was sent. Two other publishing houses turned the book down. Eventually it was published by Bernard Grasset, with Proust paying the cost of the printing. Grasset, meanwhile, told friends that the book was unreadable. So much for the literary acumen of publishers. But then, Reynaldo Hahn, the composer, friend, and (for a time) lover of Proust, claimed that no one predicted or detected the prospect of genius in Marcel Proust.

Benjamin Taylor is excellent on the psychology behind Proust’s homosexuality. He notes Proust’s “habit of confessing his homosexual desires, then denying them. . . . This pattern of admitting and retracting was to last for the rest of Proust’s life.” Proust, Taylor writes, “never in his life wanted women. He only wanted to want them”—a nice but crucial distinction. Perhaps because of this, of his never being altogether at ease with his own homosexuality, Proust was a profound analyst and chronicler of the homosexual life of his time. “Invert” is the—in our day thoroughly unacceptable—word he frequently uses in place of homosexual. His most trenchant comments on the subject appear in the fourth book of his novel, Cities of the Plain—originally Sodom and Gomorrah, a title thought too outré for its day—where Proust provides insights into the homosexual life that are an odd mixture of sympathy and condemnation.

Proust describes homosexuals as “a race upon which a curse is laid and which must live in falsehood and perjury because it knows that its desire, that which constitutes life’s dearest pleasure, is held to be punishable, shameful, an inadmissible thing” (Baron de Charlus, Proust’s most memorable and richly complex character, is homosexual, and as such hostage to his desires.) He writes about the love of homosexuals for men who “cannot love them in return,” and so “their desire would be forever unappeased did not their money procure for them real men, and their imagination end by making them take for real men the inverts to whom they have prostituted themselves.” (Proust himself patronized male bordellos, where he indulged tastes too kinky to be detailed here.) He eschews any notion that homosexuality is a special gift, despite homosexuals “taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of them, as the Jews claim that Jesus was one of them.” Nor does he hold with those who “regard homosexuality as the appurtenance of genius.” He compares homosexuals to Jews and to Negroes—never, no matter how well connected, allowed to be entirely at ease in the society into which they are born.

A homosexual who was a subtle analyst of homosexuality, a snob who was snobbery’s greatest chronicler, Marcel Proust is perhaps the stellar example of the adage that it takes one to know one. As the narrator of In Search of Lost Time writes, his direct experience put him above “the social novelists who analyze mercilessly from the outside the actions of a snob or supposed snob, but never place themselves inside his skin.” As a young man, Proust’s snobbery took the form of social climbing. He was an upward-aspiring rather than a downward-disparaging snob. His youthful letters, off-puttingly lubricous in their buttering-up social betters, are for this reason disappointing.

Yet the snob in Proust, however subconsciously, was all along disguising the astute student of snobbery, the young man upon whom, in the social realm, very little was lost. “If I went to a dinner party,” the narrator of In Search of Lost Time writes, “I did not see the guests; when I thought I was looking at them, I was in fact examining them with X-rays.” This is the writer who noticed, for example, that “the more dubious titles are, the more prominently coronets are displayed upon wine glasses, silver, note-paper and luggage.” This same young man knew that “snobbishness in changing its subject does not change its accent.” As for change itself, Proust notes, in Time Regained, the final book in his novel, that “there must in art, as in medicine and fashion, be new names,” an aperçu that accounts for the not-infrequent rise of the mediocre to fame in these realms in our, and every other, day.

Proust was both fascinated and appalled by the intricacy and cruelty of social distinctions, so many of which, on the part of all social classes, from maids to dukes, he registers in his novel. No one who has read Proust will forget the scene, occurring in The Guermantes Way, in which Charles Swann, who has ardently cultivated the Duc and Duchesse of Guermantes, tells them that he cannot join them on a trip to Venice because he is dying and is likely to be dead well before they depart. The Duc gainsays this information, perfunctorily telling Charles he will outlive them all, and concentrates instead on telling his wife that she cannot possibly wear black shoes with the red dress she is wearing, and sends her back up to their apartment to put on her red shoes. Eager to get on to the party and an assignation with a mistress, the Duc says to Swann and the narrator: “Off you go before Oriane comes down again. . . . If she finds you here she’ll start talking again.”

Benjamin Taylor notes Proust’s lack of concern about money, which was impressive. Owing to his inheritance upon his mother’s death, he was, essentially, out of the financial wars. But even with the ample funds available to him, the interest on which I have seen estimated at $16,000 a month, he is said to have tipped waiters at the Ritz 120 percent. Taylor mentions but does not have the space to elaborate upon the most amusing bit of financial extravagance I know, which is Proust’s arranging to have the Poulet String Quartet play the César Franck Quartet in D and other of his favorite music for him in private audience in his apartment at 102 boulevard Haussmann. According to Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust’s most thorough biographer, he did this time and again, in each instance rewarding the group amply. All this was done late at night, for Proust worked nights and slept days in his cork-lined (to ensure silence) bedroom. On one occasion, when Proust arrived to pick them up for another private concert, the musicians found him in the back of his chauffeur-driven car, under an eiderdown quilt, eating from a soup tureen containing mashed potatoes.

Proust set to work on In Search of Lost Time in his 37th year. He worked on it for the last 14 years of his life. (He died in 1922, at 51.) The novel was finally unfinished, in the sense that its author was still making corrections, mostly in the form of additions, up to the time of his death. “Less is more” is not an aesthetic apothegm in which Proust believed. The work that we have is roughly a million-and-a-half words long. Samuel Johnson said of Paradise Lost that no one wished it were longer. Daunting as Proust’s seven volumes may seem to beginners, the same cannot be said of Proustolaters, for whom, like Proust, more is even better.

In Search of Lost Time is about many things, desire not least among them. Taylor quotes Proust on the strange quality of desire—”Desire makes all things flourish, possession withers them”—that may be said to be at the heart of The Captive and The Fugitive, the volumes about the narrator’s elusive lover Albertine. Yet, Proust writes, “nothing is more limited than pleasure and vice.” The vice of snobbery plays throughout the book.

Proust’s “method,” as Benjamin Taylor puts it, is one of “slow revelation, everything the reader thinks he knows giving way to a wisdom hitherto unimaginable.” In the novel, time mediates all and everything: “The creation of the world did not begin at the beginning of time,” Proust writes, “it occurs every day.” One of the great sad lessons of time, according to Proust, is that all true paradises are lost paradises, which is another way of saying that we do not recognize we are living in paradise until we have left it.

Many bookish, even highly literary, people find In Search of Lost Time tough sledding. The novel is not everybody’s cup of tea, even with the famous madeleine biscuit added. No great novel ever began more slowly, with the child Marcel in bed, agonizingly awaiting his mother’s appearance in his room to kiss him goodnight. Great events occur in the novel—the Dreyfus Affair, World War I, the lush social brocade of the Belle Époque much of the time serving as background—while characters, both admirable and deplorable, all of great fascination, appear and reappear. Yet in Proust, analysis everywhere outweighs action, percipience overshadows plot. But what analysis! What percipience! Nothing of the same high order appeared in fiction before or since.

On nearly any page an insight awaits, some small but nonetheless fascinating. Past the age of 40, Proust notes, a woman can retain either her figure or her face; she cannot have both. Encountering an aged face in the final pages of the novel, Proust describes it as “one of the masks in the collection of Time,” which is reminiscent of Marguerite Yourcenar calling Time “that mighty sculptor.” At one point the Baron de Charlus remarks: “I have always honored the defenders of grammar and logic. We realize fifty years later that they have averted serious dangers.” In Time Regained, the final volume in the novel, the narrator and his friend Robert Saint-Loup are discussing the war (World War I) when Saint-Loup remarks upon the likeness of the military commander to the literary artist: “A general,” he tells the narrator, “is a like writer who sets out to write a certain play, a certain book, and then the book itself, with the unexpected potentialities which it reveals here, the impassable objects which it presents there, makes him deviate to an enormous degree from his preconceived plan.” Who hitherto would have thought of this brilliant connection? Doubtless no general, nor any novelist apart from Marcel Proust.

Benjamin Taylor quotes Proust’s friend the diplomat Robert de Billy, who claimed Proust’s writing taught him “la joie de penser autrement que par principes.” That is to say, he taught him the pleas-ures of thinking without resorting, as Taylor has it, to “categories and abstractions,” adding: “Can there be a better definition of artistic thinking?”

As it happens, there is, and—no surprise here—Marcel Proust has supplied it. In his most famous aphorism, Pascal wrote, “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.” Proust supplements this splendidly when he writes

Thus does the mind become subservient to the heart, which has reasons that reason by itself cannot hope to know.

Great patience is required in reading Marcel Proust, the strictest attention needs to be paid to his every sentence. That patience and that attention are handsomely rewarded. A work so dense in observation of society, so rich in analysis of character as In Search of Lost Time can never finally be mastered, which means that—an added bonus here—it can be read and reread, over and over again, with undiminished pleasure.

Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor, is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming Frozen in Time: Twenty Stories.