French Honor Writer : Proust Boom--Revival of Things Past

Just last Oct. 5, the most important work by the great French novelist Marcel Proust fell out of copyright protection and into the public domain. The event was treated as a momentous one in France. One literary magazine proclaimed to its readers, “Proust belongs to you.”

The headline exaggerated. Proust really belongs now not to the people of France but to publishers who want to put out his works. Any publisher can now print copies of his monumental novel, “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, “ (known in English as “Remembrance of Things Past,”) without paying a cent to his descendants.

But the change in legal status of Proust’s work has set off a new boom in Proust. He has probably never been as celebrated in France as in these last few months. He and his books seem to be everywhere now, even in the Paris Metro.

Subway TV Clips

In the last few weeks, the closed-circuit television screens that entertain Parisians while they wait on the Metro platforms for subway trains have featured a five-minute “cultural clip” about the writer and his world at the turn of the century.

Narrator and creator Gonzague Saint Bris describes Proust in the clip as “the lord of images” who “organized his resistance to past time” and succeeded in building “an immense edifice of memory.”

A comic strip-like drawing of Proust, coughing “Keuf, keuf” from chronic asthma, is also featured in a new game carried by the video-text receivers that are connected to millions of French telephones.

Four new publishers have put out editions of some or all of the seven books of “Remembrance of Things Past.” His old publisher, Gallimard, has issued the first volume of a newly edited, luxury-bound set.

3,360-Page Edition

One publisher, Robert Laffont, has even included what the French call a quid of Marcel Proust in its three-volume, 3,360-page edition of “Remembrance of Things Past.”

A quid is an incredibly detailed miscellany of facts, and the 312-page quid of Proust includes all the salient biographical, literary and family facts about the writer, plus such odd information as his nicknames, his doctors, his important teachers, his school grades and exam scores, his addresses, his servants, his culinary and drinking tastes, his major social engagements over the years, his friends and lovers, the models for his main characters, even the stamps issued in his honor.

A careful reader of the quid discovers that Proust heard Arthur Rubinstein, then 18, play the piano at the home of the Countess de Castellane in Paris on the evening of June 8, 1905. Albertine, whose name appears 2,360 times in the novel and is the main love of the novel’s hero, is modeled, according to the quid, after Alfred Agostinelli, Proust’s chauffeur and love-interest.

The publishing house Grasset is even putting out a new version of the next-to-last book of the novel, known in English as “The Fugitive.” Proust died before the book was published, and it seems now that the editors did not have the final typescript. Writer Claude Mauriac, who married into the Proust family, found this typescript, with Proust’s handwritten corrections, in 1986 in an old carton stuffed with magazines. The new version even has a new title, “Vanished Albertine.”

Unfolding of Memory

The whole novel, one of the most celebrated works of the 20th Century, is a luxuriant unfolding of memory by a narrator of exquisite sensitivity. Although its publishers in English struck on a phrase from a Shakespearean sonnet, “remembrance of things past,” as a title to attract attention, a direct translation of its title in French, “In Search of Lost Time,” reflects the mood of the book far better.

As he searches into his past, the narrator dissects the foibles and loves and politics of a high society that did not start to disappear in France until World War I. Proust seems to look on this society, from which he came, with both loving care and a satiric eye. The results are often funny, often beautiful, often breathtaking--and often slow.

Since Proust calls his narrator Marcel and describes many of the sites of his life with detailed care, many readers regard the novel as autobiographical. But that is not wholly true. Proust, for example, was homosexual, and his narrator Marcel is not. The novel is a work of literary art, not biography.

The admiration for Proust is now unrestrained in France. But that has not always been so. In 1912, Andre Gide, working as an editor for a distinguished magazine and publishing house, rejected “Swann’s Way,” the first book of the novel. After reading only a few pages, Gide, who later won the Nobel Prize in literature, pronounced the book too full of duchesses. He considered Proust “a snob, a literary amateur, the worst possible thing for our magazine.”

‘Agonizing Remorse’

Gide later apologized to Proust, calling the rejection a grave error, for which he had felt “some of the most agonizing remorse of my life.”

Although the book, when published later at Proust’s expense, was hardly a best-seller, it did establish his literary reputation. Proust, in fact, won the prestigious Goncourt Prize for a later book of the novel in 1919.

Gallimard publishers, in the 70 years that it held rights to the novel, sold 5 million copies of the various books of the work. But the sales were uneven. A large number of French bought the first book but not the others.

The reception of Proust in France has been uneven in another way. For three decades after his death in 1922, Proust’s reputation waned in France. His work seemed out of date and out of step with modern trends.

“Surrealism, Marxism, the engaged novel, psychoanalysis and existentialism succeeded in burying it for 30 years,” said the French critic Gilles Barbedette recently.

‘Proust Is Dead, Well Dead’

In 1937, a leftist magazine wrote, “Proust is dead, well dead, as far from us as one can be.” In 1947, Jean Paul Sartre, who later was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature but declined it, denounced Proust as a reactionary.

In 1949, a critic, in an analysis of modern French literature, said: “If I do not mention Proust, it is not because I am ignorant of him or am opposed to him. It is simply that his work is far removed from us, not only because of its date but because of its nature.”

In the 1950s, however, as the fashion in French literary circles turned from politics to art, the revival of Proust began, a revival that seems ever growing, rushed along this year by the rash of new editions.

Oddly, while Proust’s reputation declined in France from the 1920s to the 1950s, it never declined outside France. British and American scholars have long looked on him as a master of the 20th Century. The best biography of Proust and some of the best critical studies, in fact, have been written in English.

Proust was born in a suburb of Paris on July 10, 1871, the son of wealthy bourgeois parents. His father was a doctor; his mother, the daughter of a Jewish stockbroker. A sickly child, suffering mainly from asthma, Proust was nurtured closely by a protective mother.

A Cork-Lined Room

Proust published an unpromising book of short fiction and poems at age 25 and later contributed articles to the newspaper Le Figaro and other periodicals. But he was known in Paris mainly as a wealthy socialite who frequented the salons of aristocrats. In 1910, with his health weakening, he retired to a vast, high room, lined with cork to keep out noise, in his apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. He worked there on his great novel, mostly at night, writing in bed, sometimes until 7 in the morning. His commitment to the novel and his odd working hours diminished his social life but did not end it.

Proust died Nov. 18, 1922, at the age of 51. He had published nothing in his lifetime but the early book, the newspaper and magazine articles and the first books of his novel. The final books were not published until after his death, the last in 1927.

An admirer of Proust can find much in France to awaken memories of the novel. In 1971, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Proust, the village of Illiers, near Chartres, 75 miles southwest of Paris, changed its name to Illiers-Combray in honor of the novelist. Proust’s father came from Illiers and, as a boy, Proust would spend summers and other vacations there. From those experiences, he modeled the village of Combray in his novel.

A trip to Illiers-Combray is probably the most sentimental journey an admirer can make. The memories of the novel begin to unfold in Combray. The narrator Marcel tastes a piece of the French madeleine cake dipped in tea and remembers the taste of the tea-dipped madeleine that his Aunt Leonie used to give him as a boy in Combray. The time of the past flows on from this.

Aunt Elizabeth’s House

The Society of the Friends of Marcel Proust now keeps up the house of Proust’s Aunt Elisabeth, the model for Aunt Leonie, and opens it to the public as a setting for some of the loveliest moments in “Remembrance of Things Past.”

Rene Compere, the 84-year-old retired principal of the Lycee Marcel Proust in Illiers, acts as a kind of caretaker for the house and likes to show visitors through it as if he were guiding them through the first pages of the novel.

“This is the staircase that his mother took to come up and kiss him,” he said on a recent Saturday afternoon. “This is the long hall he had to go down to reach his bedroom.”

The atmosphere of the novel--and presumably the atmosphere of Proust’s childhood--is so closely kept in the house that a madeleine lies on a plate next to a teapot by the bed of Proust’s aunt.

Although a sign at the entry of the village notes that it is “the Combray of Marcel Proust” and the little bakery in the square by the church sells “Proustian madeleines,” Illiers-Combray is not trying to cash in on Proust in any crass way. There is no schlock tourism. Compere estimates that no more than 4,000 visitors come to “the house of Aunt Leonie” every year.

Turn-of-the-Century Look

Illiers-Combray looks much like it did at the turn of the century, a village of a few thousand people in small homes dominated by a medieval church.

“This town has not lost its physiognomy of the past,” said Compere.

A Proust admirer, of course, does not have to leave Paris to find mementos of Proust. Almost all his papers, including the rough draft of “Remembrance of Things Past,” the typed versions and the corrected proofs, are housed in the French National Library in Paris. It is one of the library’s greatest scholarly troves. Much of the material is now being transferred onto microfilm to prevent its destruction from the handling of scholars.

Also, Paris is crowded with the places that excited the life of the writer and his novel. Modern Paris was built in the latter part of the 19th Century, and the city still has the look of the years when Proust wrote his novel.

It is easy to find the house where he was born (96 Rue la Fontaine in the suburb of Auteuil) and his high school, the Lycee Concordet (8 Rue Havre) and the building, now a bank, where he lived on the first floor in the cork-lined room and wrote “Remembrance of Things Past” and the gardens of the Champs Elysees where he liked to stroll and the Ritz Hotel where he liked to entertain (on the Place Vendome) and the house in which he died (44 Rue Hamelin).

But, though the facades remain, the world of Parisian society described by Proust disappeared long ago, except, of course, in the pages of his wondrous book.