Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1

605 Pages·1992·1.73 MB·English

by  Marcel Proust

MARCEL PROUST

Marcel Proust was born in the Parisian suburb of
Auteuil on July 10, 1871. His father, Adrien Proust, was a
doctor celebrated for his work in epidemiology; his
mother, Jeanne Weil, was a stockbroker’s daughter of
Jewish descent. He lived as a child in the family home on
Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, but spent vacations with
his aunt and uncle in the town of Illiers near Chartres,
where the Prousts had lived for generations and which
became the model for the Combray of his great novel. (In
recent years it was officially renamed Illiers-Combray.)
Sickly from birth, Marcel was subject from the age of nine
to violent attacks of asthma, and although he did a year of
military service as a young man and studied law and
political science, his invalidism disqualified him from an
active professional life.
During the 1890s Proust contributed sketches to Le
Figaro and to a short-lived magazine, Le Banquet,
founded by some of his school friends in 1892. Pleasures
and Days, a collection of his stories, essays, and poems,
was published in 1896. In his youth Proust led an active
social life, penetrating the highest circles of wealth and
aristocracy. Artistically and intellectually, his influences
included the aesthetic criticism of John Ruskin, the
philosophy of Henri Bergson, the music of Wagner, and
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the fiction of Anatole France (on whom he modeled his
character Bergotte). An affair begun in 1894 with the
composer and pianist Reynaldo Hahn marked the
beginning of Proust’s often anguished acknowledgment of
his homosexuality. Following the publication of Emile
Zola’s letter in defense of Colonel Dreyfus in 1898, Proust
became “the first Dreyfusard,” as he later phrased it. By
the time Dreyfus was finally vindicated of charges of
treason, Proust’s social circles had been torn apart by the
anti-Semitism and political hatreds stirred up by the affair.
Proust was very attached to his mother, and after her
death in 1905 he spent some time in a sanitorium. His
health worsened progressively, and he withdrew almost
completely from society and devoted himself to writing.
Proust’s early work had done nothing to establish his
reputation as a major writer. In an unfinished novel, Jean
Santeuil (not published until 1952), he laid some of the
groundwork for In Search of Lost Time, and in Against
Sainte-Beuve, written in 1908-09, he stated as his aesthetic
credo: “A book is the product of a different self from the
one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we
mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost
depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the
quest can be achieved.” He appears to have begun work on
his long masterpiece sometime around 1908, and the first
volume, Swann’s Way, was published in 1913. In 1919 the
second volume, Within a Budding Grove, won the
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