November 16: Marcel
Proust's Swann's Way was published on
this day in 1913. Declined by a handful of publishers, this first volume of In Search of Lost Time was
author-financed, but in the literary community at least, the book's rise to
fame began almost immediately. Just a few months after he had rejected the book
for his literary magazine, Nouvelle Revue
Française, André Gide wrote Proust to apologize: "For several days I
have been unable to put your book down…. The rejection of the book will remain
the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF and, since I bear the shame of
being very much responsible for it, one of the most stinging and remorseful
regrets of my life."
By the time Proust died just a little over a decade later
(November 18, 1922), he was the envy of even those modernists engaged in
similar stylistic experiments. "Proust so titillates my own desire for
expression that I can hardly set out the sentence," wrote Virginia Woolf. "Oh
if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing
vibration and saturation that he procures—there's something sexual in it—that I
feel I can write like that, and seize
my pen and then I can't write like
that…." Several months after Proust's death, John Middleton Murray noted
in the Times Literary Supplement that
literary conversation was dominated by "that odd king over the water, M.
Proust":
The vogue has risen into a cult; and the cult, embracing the
cultured masses, has deepened into a wave; until the whole of our literary
taste is threatened by the towering line of this tidal, this positively Marcel,
wave.
James Joyce observed Proust's funeral procession through the
streets of Paris. The two had met six months earlier, at the legendary dinner
party held at the Majestic Hotel, Paris, attended by Stravinsky, Diaghilev,
Picasso and others. Accounts of the conversation between Proust and Joyce vary,
though all versions indicate that the two giants of modernism had little to say
to each other, perhaps because Joyce was drunk. Later comments show that Joyce
envied Proust his cork-lined solitude and his independent means, and did not
think that he had "any special talent."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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