"Marcel Proust’s Tragic Life Course", by Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig
Encounters and Destinies
Marcel Proust’s Tragic Life Course
HE IS BORN in the dying days of the war on 10th July 1871, in Paris, son of a distinguished physician, from a wealthy, very wealthy bourgeois family. But neither the art of the father nor the immense fortune of the mother is able to rescue his childhood: at the age of nine, little Marcel loses his robust health for ever. Returning from a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, he is attacked by an asthmatic convulsion, and these terrible seizures crush his chest for the remainder of his life, right up to his final breath. Beyond his ninth year almost everything has been forbidden: travel, carefree games, acts of agility, high spirits, everything that is childhood. Thus he becomes an observer early on, sensitive, with heightened nerves, easily unsettled, a being with an acute irritability of the senses. He passionately loves the landscape, but rarely can he lay eyes on it, and never in spring: the fine dust of the pollen, the oppressiveness and gravidity of nature are too painful for his inflamed nerves. He loves flowers with a passion but he is not permitted to approach them. Even when a friend enters the room with a carnation in his buttonhole he is requested to remove it, and a visit to a salon where the table is adorned with bouquets forces him to retire to his bed for days on end. Sometimes he drives out in a closed car to see the cherished colours, the breathing calyxes from behind glass. And he takes books, books, books, to read about travel, of the landscapes he can never reach. Once he makes it to Venice, a handful of times the sea; but each of these trips costs him dearly in strength. So he finds himself virtually a prisoner in Paris.
His perception of all that is human becomes ever more delicate. The voice of a conversation, the clasp in a woman’s hair, the way one sits at a table and stands up, all the finest ornaments of the social milieu affix to his memory with incomparable exactitude. The meticulous detail captures his ever-wakeful eye between blinks, all the connections, twists and turns, snaking around and pauses in a conversation remain lodged in his ears with their vibrations undisturbed. Thus, in his novel he can later keep up Count Norpois’s conversation for one hundred and fifty pages and there is no pause for breath, no hesitation and no transition: his eye is alert and active on behalf of all the other exhausted organs.
Originally the parents decided that study and diplomacy would be the best course for him, but all intentions fail due to his ill health. But there is no immediate rush, his parents are well off, his mother adores him — so he squanders his years in society affairs and salons and until the age of thirty-five leads, in fact, the most absurd, foolish, futile, most aimless existence that has ever preceded a great artist, propelling himself as a snob through all the events of those wealthy idlers known as society, appearing everywhere and being received everywhere. For fifteen long years, night after night, he is to be found in every salon, even the most inaccessible, tender, reserved, always showing deference before the sophisticated set, always chatting politely, currying favour, amused or bored. Everywhere he is seen leaning in a corner, inveigling his way into a conversation and, strangely enough, the aristocracy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain tolerate the nameless interloper; and for him this represents the greatest triumph. Because outwardly the young Marcel Proust has no evident qualities. He is hardly good-looking or even elegant, he does not issue from the nobility and is to boot the son of a Jewess. Even his literary merit cuts no cloth, because his modest volume The Pleasures and the Games carries no weight and achieves no success, despite the backing of Anatole France. What makes him popular is solely his generosity: he drowns all the ladies with precious flowers, overwhelms everyone with surprise gifts, sends invites to all, pulls out all the stops to be complaisant and sympathetic even to the trivial elements of society. At the Hôtel Ritz he is known for his invitations and generous tips. He gives ten times more than American billionaires, and when he enters the hall all caps fly off heads submissively. His invitations are an excuse for fantastic extravagance and culinary sophistication, from all the stores of the city he gathers specialities — grapes from a shop on the left bank, spring chickens from the Carlton, fruit and vegetables specially shipped in from Nice. And he brings together tout Paris in an uninterrupted connection through courtesy and favours, without ever claiming a single one himself.
But what gladdens him even more than lavishly spending money within this society is his almost morbid reverence for its rites, his slavish idolatry of etiquette, the overwhelming importance he attaches to all the society people, all the nonsense around the fashionable set. Like a sacred text, he worships the unwritten Cortegiano of aristocratic custom; for days on end he might be consumed by the problems posed by a particular table arrangement, why Princess X had Count L placed at the bottom of the table and Baron R at the head. Every crumb of gossip, every fleeting scandal breaks on him like a world-shattering catastrophe; he asks fifteen different people to enquire about the hidden order of Princess M’s invitations, or why that other aristocrat in her theatre box has received Mr F. And through this passion, through this seriousness applied to nothingness, which later also dominates his books, he gains the rank of master of ceremonies at the heart of this ridiculous and distractionobsessed world. For fifteen years such a superior mind, one of the most powerful creators of our epoch, leads this inconsequential life among loafers and arrivistes, exhausted and febrile during the day, dashing between society events in the evenings, frittering away his time with invitations, letters and arrangements, the most superfluous man in this daily dance of the vanities: everywhere gladly seen, nowhere particularly noticed, in truth just a tailcoat and white tie in the midst of so many other tailcoats and white ties.
Only one element makes him stand out from those around him. Each night when he returns home and goes to bed, unable to sleep, he scribbles down notes upon notes, endless notes on all he observes, sees, hears. Suddenly they are whole batches of notes which he then groups in folders. And, just like Saint-Simon, seemingly a shallow courtier at the king’s court, secretly he becomes the actor and judge of an entire epoch, every night Marcel Proust lists all the trivial and fugitive details of this tout Paris in notes and annotations and sketches, so that perhaps one day the ephemeral, the fleeting might be made permanent.
A question now for the psychologist: what is the primary cause here ? Does Marcel Proust, a sick man poorly adapted to life, foolishly and vainly lead a snob’s life for fifteen years for some inner pleasure, and are these notes purely incidental, a kind of after-indulgence of the all-too-soon-faded parlour game ? Or does he enter the salons like a chemist the lab, like a botanist the meadow, inconspicuously gleaning material for the great one-off work ? Is he faking it, or is he the real thing ? Is he just another combatant in the army of day’s time-wasters, or a spy from some other higher domain ? If he is a flâneur out of joy or pure calculation, is this almost absurd passion for the psychology of etiquette his whole life and need, or just the grandiose pretence of an impassioned analyst !
Probably both found inspiration within him, magically conjoined as they were; for perhaps the pure nature of the artist would never have been able to express itself through him had not fate, with firm hand, snatched him from the airy game world of conversation and into the overcast, dark sphere of his own world, illuminated only from time to time by its inner light. For suddenly the scene changes. In 1903 his mother dies, and shortly thereafter the doctors determine the incurable state of his malady, which becomes ever more serious. With a sudden jolt, Marcel Proust pulls his life around. He remains cloistered like a hermit in his cell on the boulevard Haussmann, and from one day to the next the most bored flâneur and serial loafer transforms into the most embittered, dogged worker this literary century has marvelled at. Overnight he transforms himself from the most carefree sociability into the most draconian solitude. Tragic image of this great writer: always prostrate in bed, lying there the whole day, always complaining of cold, his thin body coughing, shaken by convulsions. In bed he wears three shirts, one on top of the other, ties cravats in a sort of wadding over his chest, on his hands thick gloves, yet still he is frozen, frozen. The hearth blazes, the window is never opened, because even the few wretched chestnut trees rooted in the asphalt wound him with their faint odour (which no other chest in Paris senses quite like his). Like a contorted corpse he lies in bed, always in bed, laboriously breathing the thick, over-congested, medicaments-poisoned air. It is not until late evening that he rallies himself to get up and see a little light, a little gloss, his beloved world of elegance, a handful of aristocratic faces. The servant helps him into his tails, enshrouds him in shawls and wraps his body, already three layers deep, in furs. So he sets off to the Ritz to converse with a few people, to revisit his deified sphere, luxury. Outside his door the driver waits, waits the whole night, and then takes the dead-tired man back to his bed. Marcel Proust no more attends society gatherings; only once does he do so, because he requires a certain detail concerning the precise bearing of a distinguished aristocrat. So he drags himself, to general astonishment, to a salon to observe the Duke of Sagan in order to discern just how he wears his monocle. And one night he visits a famous cocotte to ask her if she still has the hat she wore twenty years ago in the Bois de Boulogne, which he now needs to observe in order to furnish a proper description of Odette. He is downcast as she mocks him, saying she long ago made a gift of it to her maid.
From the Ritz they bring the exhausted man home. His nightgowns and cravats are draped over the ever-warm stove; he has for years now been unable to tolerate cold clothes. The servant wraps him up and leads him to bed. And there, holding the tray flat before him, he writes his wide-meshed novel In Search of Lost Time. Twenty dossiers are already filed along with drafts, the armchairs and tables before his bed and the bed itself are lavishly blanketed with slips and leaves of paper. And so he writes, writes day and night, every waking hour, fever in the blood, his gloved hands trembling from the cold, on, on, on.
Sometimes a friend pays him a visit, he eagerly implores him for nuggets of society gossip, and, though fading away, he gropes with all his senses towards this lost world of sophistication. His friends become his hunting pack, informing him about this or that scandal, so he is kept up to the minute on this and that personality, and with nervous avarice he notes all they bring. And the fever becomes more intense. Increasingly, this poor, feverish being, Marcel Proust, decays and weakens, but the work on a grand scale, the
novel, or rather the series of novels In Search of Lost Time, grows in strength.
The work was begun in 1905, and by 1912 he considers it complete. It runs to three volumes (but, thanks to expansion during printing, this swells to no fewer than ten). Now he is tormented by the question of publication. The forty-year-old Marcel Proust is completely unknown — no, worse than unknown, he has a poor reputation in the literary sense : Marcel Proust is that snob of the salons, the fashionable writer whose anecdotes about the salons appear from time to time in the newspaper Le Figaro (the reading public, scanning it quickly, inevitably mistake Marcel Proust for one Marcel Prévost). It doesn’t bode well. There is little to hope for by taking the traditional route. So friends try another way, through social contacts. A well-positioned aristocrat invites André Gide, the head of the Nouvelle Revue française, the same which later will mak hundreds of thousands of francs from the work, to view the manuscript. Gide rejects it out of hand, as does the Mercure de France and then Ollendorf. Finally, a new, courageous publisher emerges who is willing to take it on, but it still takes two more years to come to fruition in 1913, when the first volume of the monumental work sees the light of day. And just as success prepares to flex its wings, so war arrives and shatters them.
After the war, when five volumes have already appeared, France begins, Europe begins to sit up and take note of this most singular epic work of our time. And what glittering fame now surrounds the name of Marcel Proust, who for so long has been only a wasted, feverish, restless fragment of a man, a twitching shadow, a pitiful invalid, whose entire remaining strength is dedicated to seeing his work appear in print. He still drags himself to the Ritz in the evening. There, at the set table, or in the porter’s lodge, he refines the corrections on the last printed sheets, for at home, in bed, he already senses the grave. Only here, when he sees his beloved sphere of sophistication shimmering before his eyes once more, does he feel a flaring of strength, while at home he collapses, brokenwinged, soon fatigued by anaesthetics, sometimes reviving himself with caffeine for brief conversation with friends or to recommence work. His suffering only deepens and the pace of decline quickens, and he, for so long indolent, labours at a frantic pace in a desperate bid to outpace death. He no longer cares to see doctors, they have tortured him for too long and they never really made a difference. Thus he prepares to mount a final defence alone, and finally, on 18th November 1922, he dies. In the last days, already entirely given over to destruction, he makes a stand against the inevitable with the artist’s only weapon to hand : observation.
Heroically awake, he analyses his own state right up to the final hour, and these notes are intended to make the death of his hero Bergotte still more vivid, even more faithful to truth, to try and embellish the proofs with some intimate detail, details the writer cannot know, only one dying knows. His ultimate movement, then, is observation. And on the bedside table of the dead man, soiled by overturned medicines, one finds on barely legible notes the last words which he has already penned with half-cold hand. Notes for a new book that would have taken years, while only minutes were left to him. So he strikes death a blow across the face: the last magnificent gesture of the artist, who overcomes the fear of dying by listening in on it.
(1925)