Monsieur Proust’s Library
by Anka Muhlstein
Other Press. 141 pages, $19.95
MONSIEUR Proust’s Library is based on a talk that the author, Anka Juhlstein, was asked to give at the New York Society Library in 2011. “How did Proust read?” it begins. “As a child, like all of us: for the plot and characters. But even at a very young age, reading was for him a very serious business, and he was outraged by the fact that it could be considered by grownups as something one did to amuse oneself.” It was such a serious business that by the time he was a schoolboy, friends said that Proust had read everything and forgotten nothing. Reading, Proust felt, was a far richer experience than mere social life.
His chief interest, Muhlstein believes, was in French writers of the l7th century (Madame de Sévigné, the Duke of Saint Simon, Chateaubriand, Racine) and the l9th (Balzac and Baudelaire). But he also admired Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Emerson, and Ruskin, whose Bible of Amiens Proust spent five years translating—though he knew little English—with the help of his mother, who was fluent. Ruskin was one of those great writers Proust digested, and then moved beyond (something he felt a writer must do in order to forge a style of his own). Muhlstein says Proust even memorized The Bible of Amiens.
Ruskin, Racine, and Baudelaire are the writers Muhlstein spends the most time on. Of the three, Racine meant the most to Proust. There are good readers and bad readers in Proust’s novel, she suggests: the good readers admire Racine, the bad readers do not. But it wasn’t only Racine whom Proust used to shed light on his characters. It’s during a talk with the narrator’s beloved grandmother about her favorite writer, Madame de Sévigné, that Proust’s often irascible homosexual hero, the Baron de Charlus, reveals his kind and feminine side.
Balzac, one is surprised to learn, was not a writer Proust praised much, though the idea of tracing the same characters through different books lies behind In Search of Lost Time. Moreover, the Baron de Charlus was modeled, Muhlstein says, in part on Vautrin, the sinister pederast in Balzac’s novels Lost Illusions and Père Goriot. Vautrin (a master criminal who ends up head of the Paris police) supplied Proust with a model for a virile homosexual. But there’s a difference, Muhlstein points out: Vautrin is indifferent to opinion, beyond middle-class morality, whereas Charlus, for all his aristocratic hauteur, is terrified that the middle-class Verdurins will discover what he imagines is his secret. It’s a sort of literary regression, at least in terms of gay pride.
But it was an earlier writer whom Proust used even more directly. There was more truth in one work of Racine, Proust wrote to a friend, than in all the novels of Victor Hugo, and Muhlstein takes pains to trace the ways Proust rearranged plot elements from Phèdre and Esther in his own novel. Not so admired were the Goncourt Brothers, who kept a gossipy and malicious journal starring the famous l9th-century writers they met in the salons. Their diary, says Muhlstein, was both a valuable record of the past—which Proust mined for his own characters (whose stories stretch back before the narrator of his novel was born)—and a lesson, for Proust, in how not to write. The Goncourts, along with Sainte-Beuve, the literary critic, subscribed to a theory Proust detested, a dislike so intense it led him to write an essay, Against Sainte-Beuve, that evolved into his own novel: the idea that we may use an author’s personal life in judging his work. Proust said the person who writes the novel is not the same person who goes out to parties, and we must never confuse the two.
The last chapter in Monsieur Proust’s Library concerns the great writers in Proust’s own work. Bergotte is thought to have been modeled on Anatole France, an older writer who showed kindness to the young Proust and helped him to publish his first book, Pleasures and Days. But that is not the only source for this character, Muhlstein shows: as Proust approached the end of his own life, he began investing Bergotte with his own sense of mortality, and his hope that a writer’s work will provide him with a kind of immortality (a hope Proust rejects elsewhere in his novel, when he says that even great works of art are eventually forgotten).
In all of this there is perhaps two hours of very pleasant reading; one learns things one did not know. (It’s startling to read that Proust admired Dostoyevsky above all and, when pressed by a correspondent to name his favorite book, chose The Idiot). But much, alas, is unexplained. For instance: early on, Muhlstein quotes a passage from one of Proust’s letters in which he cites Ruskin on the importance of describing in clear language what we see; later on, we read that Proust held the Goncourts in contempt for doing just that—for merely recording remarks and gestures and not the reality beneath them. Proust had an enormous appetite for learning just the way things were done—the way hustlers beat their clients, or diplomats like Harold Nicolson, whom he interrogated at a dinner party, negotiated treaties. Yet what he took from Emerson was the idea that behind mere facts there lies a deeper, poetic reality. What’s amazing, in the end, is how cerebral was this writer who dismissed the intellect’s role in the creation of art. (A novel of ideas, Proust said, is like an object from which the price tag has not been removed.)
John Updike wrote that we read literary biographies to see how the writer “did it”—i.e., wrote his book—but read all you want, it is really impossible to find how Proust created his novel. Muhlstein’s book is an example of very close reading; she finds allusions to other writers that only the most subtle reader could get. And these other writers are crucial to Proust: “This genius could not have so gloriously entered the twentieth century had he not proudly stood on the shoulders of giants.” There is much more in Jean-Yves Tadié’s biography, Marcel Proust: A Life (2000), about the writers this phenomenal reader used to become an artist, this novelist who wrote pastiches of predecessors like Saint-Simon and Flaubert simply to get them out of his system. But Muhlstein has ideas of her own about the way in which Proust not only dealt with the anxieties of influence but also brought to a head a long and rich tradition—something one can scarcely imagine a writer doing today.
Andrew Holleran’s latest book is Chronicles of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath.
