‘Stalactites of the Past’
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cutting one book of his multi-volume novel by two-thirds. In another recent book, Proust and the Visual, Watt has an essay showing how Swann in Love ends the way it does only because Proust grafted a passage from his second volume onto the first after the publisher insisted that he shorten the first volume. In fact, Proust was able to correct and proofread only half of In Search of Lost Time before he died; and he had so much trouble getting it published that he had to pay for the first volume himself. (“It’s impossible to make head or tale of it!” an early reader reported. “What we have here is in fact a clearly defined pathological case.”)

This story has been told many times before, but Watt’s selection of detail makes it new. For instance, there’s the shrapnel Proust’s servant found in his hat after Proust walked home from a concert, when his taxi broke down during a bombing raid in World War One. Watt has a shrewd eye for golden nuggets, such as the alternative titles Proust was considering for his work (“The Stalactites of the Past”; “Reflections in the Patina”; “Mirrors of the Dream”), and the fact that “Lucien Daudet confirmed years later that in order to complete “a magnificent page of Sodom and Gomorrah” Proust read the entirety of Darwin’s The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), evidence for what Daudet called Proust’s yearning “not to leave anything to chance.”

That Proust’s labor was a heroic one Watt makes plain, especially in the last chapter, when it seems as if the writer, whose father and brother were both prominent physicians but who considered doctors little more than quacks, seems to have self-medicated himself to death with what Watt calls “uppers and downers” in order to complete his novel. Before that happens, however, we are reminded why Proust is as great a character as any in his book. “I truly loved Alfred,” Proust wrote to his first lover, Reynaldo Hahn, after the accidental death of Alfred Agostinelli, a servant with whom Proust was obsessed. “It’s not enough to say that I loved him, I adored him. And I don’t know why I am writing this in the past tense. I still love him.” (At the same time, this enormously sociable Parisian could write: “I am only myself when I am alone, and I only profit from others in so far as they permit me discoveries within myself.”) By the time Proust was hiring musicians during the War to come to his room and play Beethoven, Fauré, and Franck while he lay on his bed with his eyes closed, one may be amazed that this story can pull one in yet again; but in Watt’s expert hands it does.