Marcel Proust

:"Proust" redirects here. If you are looking for another person named Proust, see Proust (disambiguation).

Early Writing

Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated,and in which he published, while in school, La revue vert and La Revue lilas, from 1890-1891 Proust published a regular society column in the journal Le Mensuel.(Tadie) In 1892 he was involved in founding a literary review called Le Banquet (also the French title of Plato's Symposium), and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious La Revue Blanche.

Related Topics:
Plato - Symposium

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In 1896 Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a compendium of many of these early pieces, was published. The book included a foreword by Anatole France, drawings by Mme. Lemaire, and was so sumptuously produced that it cost twice the normal price of a book its size. It was reviewed anemically.

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That year Proust also began working on a novel which was eventually published in 1954 and titled Jean Santeuil by his posthumous editors. Many of the themes later developed in In Search of Lost Time find their first articulation in this unfinished work, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection; several sections of In Search of Lost Time can be read in first draft in Jean Santeuil. The portrait of the parents in Jean Santeuil is quite harsh, in marked contrast to the adoration with which the parents are painted in Proust's masterpiece. Following the poor reception of Les Plaisirs et les Jours, and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust gradually abandoned Jean Santeuil in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by 1899.

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Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Carlyle, Emerson and John Ruskin. Through this reading Proust began to refine his own theories of art and the role of the artist in society. The artist's responsiblity is to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, including The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Bible of Amiens, and Praeterita (Tadié 350). Despite his poor command of English, Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French.

Related Topics:
Carlyle - Emerson - John Ruskin

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Proust's plans to translate Ruskin were hampered by his lack of a firm command of English. In order to compensate for this his translations were a group affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his lover Reynaldo Hahn, and then finally polished by Proust again. When confronted by an editor about his method, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin" (Tadié). The translated The Bible of Amiens was published in 1904, with Proust's extended introduction. Both the translation and the introduction were very well reviewed; Henri Bergson called Proust's introduction, "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin," and had similar praise for the translation (Tadié 433). At the time of this publication, Proust was already at work on translating Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, which he completed in June 1905, just prior to his mother's death, and published in 1906.

Related Topics:
Reynaldo Hahn - Henri Bergson

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1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer. During the first part of the year he wrote, and had published in various journals, pastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation allowed Proust to solidify his own style by exorcising the styles of writers he admired. In addition, in the spring and summer of the year Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that would later coalesce under the working title of Contre Saint-Beuve. Proust described what he was working on in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on Women, and essay on Pederasty (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel" (Tadié 513).

Related Topics:
Sainte-Beuve - Flaubert

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From these disparate fragments Proust began to shape a novel on which he worked continuously during this period. The rough outline of the work was centered around a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who during the night remembers incidents from childhood as he waits for his mother to come to him in the morning. The novel was to have ended with a critical examination of Sainte-Beuve, and a refutation of his theory that biography was the most important tool for understanding an artist's work. Present in the unfinished manuscript notebooks are sections that correspond to "Combray," "Swann in Love," portions of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Sodom and Gomorrah and Finding Time Again. Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that still contained many of the same themes and elements. By 1910 he was at work on À la recherche du temps perdu.

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