Proust’s Deadline
by Christine M. Cano
University of Illinois Press
160 pages, $35.
CHRISTINE M. CANO begins her fascinating book on just how Proust’s novel was published with a remark by Anatole France that seems doubly cruel, considering that Proust had once considered France his mentor: “Life is too short, and Proust is too long.” However, that is how many people regarded In Search of Lost Time when Proust tried to find a publisher for his enormous manuscript in the fall of 1912. One editor famously groused that he did not see how anyone could write so many pages about a man trying to fall asleep at night. Gide turned it down. Proust was finally forced to pay for publication himself.
Even then, however, he ran into a problem: how to publish a book that big. Proust did not want to break it up into separate volumes. He was afraid people would read only the first one (Swann’s Way) and thus miss the point of his novel—which was to set up characters and impressions only so he could contradict, and reverse, them later on. One would only understand In Search of Lost Time if one read the whole thing, Proust insisted. But publishing so huge a manuscript in one volume was out of the question, and Proust did not want to serialize the book. So the problem became how to publish a multi-volume work that the reader would keep reading to the end. “One must link each part to the preceding part,” he told Bernard Faÿ, “announce what is to come while preserving an effect of surprise. I spend hours on it and wear out my mind with it!”
The publisher insisted that when each volume appeared, the next should be announced, and promised, on a certain date. Yet Proust could never say when he would finish the next portion. Then the First World War began. If work expands to fill the time allotted to it, Proust’s novel grew enormously during the publishing hiatus induced by the conflict. The years between 1913 (Swann’s Way) and 1922 (when Proust died) only gave him more material. At one point, Proust was thinking of four books, not one, called “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
During the war, Proust was both revising page proofs of the volumes already typeset and writing new material. But Proust (famous for his page proof revisions) only lived long enough to revise part of his book. When he died—after exhausting himself correcting proofs the previous night—he had only made revisions up to the section called “Albertine Disparue.” So the rest of the book we have today contains inconsistencies he surely would have corrected.
The last third of Cano’s book is devoted to the critical debate that erupted over a manuscript that, being unfinished, was vulnerable to critics. From the start there were those who felt the publishing hiatus caused by the War had allowed Proust to expand the middle of his novel in a way that threw the rest of his book out of whack. Critics of the time believed that a great work of art must be “organic.” But, some said, the accidental death of Alfred Agostinelli—the chauffeur with whom Proust was in love (and who, even then, was said to be the real Albertine)—and the pages it inspired had deformed the proportions of the book with the “tumors” and “excrescences” of homosexuality and obsessive love. Cano shows, in her blissfully jargon-free study, that no such thing occurred: Proust had planned the Albertine section from the start and considered it the heart of his novel.
Running through all this is the question of whether Proust, had he lived longer, would have been able to freeze this seemingly organic, living thing into one final version. In 1986, this question reared its head, like a mummy in a horror film, when a new typescript that cut 250 pages from the already published version of “Albertine Disparue” was discovered among Proust’s niece’s papers. The debate over the text of Proust’s novel only sharpened when his works fell into the public domain the following year. Today one may choose among several editions of Proust’s work, though some sort of consensus seems to have been reached about the novel. Yet, reading Cano, it appears that not even Proust was able to finish it, in the strictest sense of the word.
One wonders if Proust wanted to finish. While he believed art was based on selection, he seems to have created a form so elastic that he could add whatever he wanted without harming the original design—and so he did, inserting, for example, his grief over Agostinelli’s death and his visits to a male brothel during the black-outs in Paris during the War. He could add because he knew where he was going, where he would always end up. (Proust claimed that he wrote the last chapter of his book immediately after finishing the first; and that all that remained was to write the in-between.)
It is indeed eerie to come upon the phrase “as the reader shall see later on” in the middle of a scene, as one often does, deep in Proust, but this is further proof that the author held the entirety of this enormous work in his mind, at every moment of the writing, down to the smallest detail. Like the Gothic cathedral to which A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is often compared, one more window, one more gargoyle, one more buttress did not matter, the structure would bear it—which is why the novel remains today a unique mix of meditation, narrative, aphorism, and drama, that no one has been able to surpass.
A final note: we assume that a novel like Swann’s Way (the first volume) was possible in 1913 because there were no television shows, no movies, to distract people from books; but from Cano we learn of a crise de la librarie (1880–1900) when reading fell off because of alternative leisure occupations like “photography, bicycling, and motorism.” In other words, consumer clutter had already begun. The problem was how to divide this enormous novel into pieces that the public would keep reading.
