Marcel Proust was an early 20th-century French novelist. His reputation, which derives almost exclusively from the importance of his multivolume novel Remembrance of Things Past, also translated as In Search of Lost Time, is that of a dazzling stylist, analytical thinker, and social observer.
Background
Ethnicity:
Proust's mother was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace.
Marcel Proust was born as Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust on the 10th of July 1871, in Neuilly-Auteuil-Passy, France. He was the first son of bourgeois parents, Adrien Proust and Jeanne Clémence Weil. Marcel's only sibling, Robert, was born in 1873.
His father was a noted physician who had distinguished himself in his efforts to combat the spread of cholera from Persia, and Proust's mother was a highly educated Jewish woman known for her charm and humor. As a child, Proust enjoyed significant attention and affection from his mother, and more than one biographer has remarked on their seeming inseparability. Aside from sharing similar interests such as reading and taking walks, Proust and his mother were bound by consideration for his tenuous health. Young Proust, moody and obsessive, learned to manipulate his parents, particularly his mother, with his health problems, exploiting their reluctance to administer punishment for tantrums or defiant behavior. His childhood holidays were spent at Illiers and Auteuil, which together became the Combray of his novel or at seaside resorts in Normandy with his maternal grandmother.
Education
Marcel Proust studied at the Lycée Condorcet (now Lycée Général Condorcet) from 1882 to 1889. He graduated from the Lycée Condorcet with distinctions in composition and classical languages. He distinguished himself with honors despite his often poor health. He also attended the School of Political Sciences (now the Paris Institute of Political Studies or Sciences Po), where he took licenses in law in 1893 and in literature in 1895.
Career
In 1892 and 1893 Proust contributed a number of critical notes and sketches and two short stories to the ephemeral journal Le Banquet and to La Revue blanche. He published his first work in 1896, a collection of short stories. His work Les Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days) received cursory notice in the press despite its preface by Anatole France.
In 1895, even before he published Les Plaisirs et les jours, Proust had made a first attempt at a major work. Unable to handle his material satisfactorily, unsure of himself, and unclear about the manner of achieving the goals he had set, Proust abandoned the work in 1899. It appeared, under the title of Jean Santeuil, only in 1952. ean Santeuil is Proust's first attempt to come to grips with material that later yielded so much in À la recherche du temps perdu.
After abandoning Jean Santeuil, Proust returned to his studies. Although he read widely in other literatures, he was limited to translations. During 1899 he became interested in the works of John Ruskin, and after Ruskin's death (January 20, 1900), Proust published an obituary of the English critic in La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité (January 27, 1900) that established him as a Ruskin scholar. Proust's Pélerinages ruskiniens en France appeared in Le Figaro and was followed by several more articles on Ruskin in Le Mercure de France and in La Gazette des beaux-arts. With the help of an English-speaking friend, Marie Nordlinger, and his mother, Proust translated Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906).
In 1903 Proust's father died. His own health, deteriorating since 1899, suffered an even greater shock following the death of his mother in September 1905. These setbacks forced Proust into the sanatorium of Dr. Paul Sollier (in December 1905), where he entertained hopes of curing his asthma. Undoubtedly preferring his illness to any cure, Proust left, "fantastically ill," in less than 2 months. After more than 2 years of seclusion, he emerged once again into society and into print with a series of articles and pastiches published in Le Figaro during 1907 and 1908. From 1905 to 1908 Proust had been mysteriously working on a novel; he abandoned it, too, in favor of a new one he had begun to plan when he realized the necessity of still another dress rehearsal. He wrote pastiches of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Charles Sainte-Beuve, and others (February-March 1908), and this activity led Proust inadvertently to problems of literary criticism and to a clearer formulation of a literary work as an art object.
By November 1908 Proust was planning his Contre Sainte-Beuve (published in 1954; On Art and Literature), a rebuttal of Sainte-Beuve, the recognized master of historical literary criticism. By reacting to Sainte-Beuve, Proust formulated, in terms applicable to the artist as well as to the reader, the notion that lies at the heart of A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust finished Contre Sainte-Beuve during the summer of 1909 and began almost immediately to compose his great novel.
Although Proust had, by 1909, accumulated and reworked most of the material that was to become A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), he still had not fully grasped the focal point that would enable him to structure and to orchestrate his vast material. Proust began his novel in July 1909, and he worked furiously on it until death interrupted his corrections, revisions, and additions. In 1913, after several rejections, he found in Grasset a publisher who would produce, at the author's expense, the first of three projected volumes (Du Côté de chez Swann, Le Côté de Guermantes, and Le Temps retrouvé; Swann's Way, The Guermantes Way, and Time Regained). After the appearance of the first volume, André Gide, who had earlier rejected Proust's manuscript on behalf of Gallimard, changed his mind and in 1916 obtained the rights to publish the subsequent volumes. Meanwhile, World War I interrupted publication but not Proust's continued expansion of his work. A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Within a Budding Grove), originally only a chapter title, appeared late in 1918 as the second volume.
As volumes appeared, Proust continually expanded his material, inserting long sections as close to publication as the galley stage. Le Côté deGuermantes appeared in 1920; Sodome et Gomorrhe (Cities of the Plain), Part 1, appeared in 1921 and the two volumes of Part 2 in 1922. Feeling his end approaching, Proust finished drafting his novel and began revising and correcting proofs, expanding the text as he went along with what he called "supernourishment." Proust had completed revisions of La Prisonnière (The Captive) and had begun reworking Albertine disparue (The Sweet Cheat Gone) when, on November 18, 1922, he died of bronchitis and pneumonia contracted after a series of violent asthma attacks.
Religion
Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. He was baptized (on 5 August 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practiced that faith. He later became an atheist and was something of a mystic.
Politics
Proust argued against the separation of church and state, declaring that socialism posed a greater threat to society than the Church and emphasizing the latter's role in sustaining a cultural and educational tradition.
Views
Quotations:
"Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
"Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life."
"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."
"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."
"Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination."
"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us."
"My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing."
"Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude."
"The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost."
"It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for."
"If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time."
"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full."
"Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way."
"Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade."
"People do not die for us immediately but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad."
"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book"
"Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them."
"Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance."
"Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces."
"It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused."
"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory."
"Love is not vain because it is frustrating, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we possess them."
"People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus."
"Love is space and time measured by the heart."
"The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans and that death may come this evening."
"It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person."
Personality
As a child Proust was hypersensitive, nervous, and frail. When a student, Proust was creating a name for himself in high society as a brilliant conversationalist with an ear for speech patterns that enabled him to mimic others with devastating ease and accuracy. His verve, dark features, pale complexion, and elegant taste fascinated the hosts of the smart Parisian set that he eagerly courted. Although he soon earned the reputation of a snob and social climber, Proust's intimate friends saw him as generous, extremely intelligent, capable of serious thinking, and as an excellent intellectual companion. But he irritated through his eagerness to please, his intensity of emotion, and his indecisiveness. Proust was not indecisive, however, about his commitment to writing.
Proust was homosexual, and his sexuality and relationships with men are often discussed by his biographers.
Physical Characteristics:
By the age of nine, Proust had had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child. The disease greatly influenced his life and nearly suffocated him. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers. This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle's house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray in 1971 on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.)
Quotes from others about the person
"Proust has moved from avant-garde to mainstream, perhaps because he pioneered in the exploration of questions that have come to preoccupy our culture, childhood effect, social deception, sexual obsession, sadomasochism, possessive jealousy, the wiles of memory and the ways in which these all lead to a passionate quest to know. It's not at present Proust the aesthete that engages us so much as Proust the anguished exponent of the drives and frustrations of love." - Peter Brooks
"Proust, like Shakespeare, had plumbed the extremes of human misery but, like Shakespeare, found serenity in Time Regained." - André Maurois
