On Marcel Proust’s 150th anniversary, A N Wilson praises his masterpiece, an exquisite comedy with no parallel
The book that changed the world
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hose of us who survived lockdown might not have been aware that the idea for it was invented by a Parisian professor of medicine, who coined the phrase cordon sanitaire to fight the typhoid that devastated 19th-century European cities. It was Dr Adrien Proust whom we have to thank for the containment and eventual elimination of this terrible plague. In À la recherche du temps perdu, we realise that the narrator’s father is a distinguished man of medicine, but of far more interest is the fact that his family apartment is next door to that of the Duchesse de Guermantes. Proust is, without any rival, the greatest novelist of the twentieth century and we can all rejoice in his existence. It is 150 years since he was born on 10th July 1871. If you have never read him, do so. Some people are deterred by the length of his novel, but if you put all the Bertie Wooster stories end to end they would take up more room on the shelf. Proust is as funny as Wodehouse. He is the classic example of art being the philosopher’s stone which turns all to gold. If you had met this prickly, vain little man, you might well have found him tiresome, snobbish and camp. When Harold Nicolson met him, Proust asked, ‘Give me an imitation of an English duchess. She is standing at the top of a staircase welcoming her guests. How does she display, with some subtle flicker of eyelash, some tone of voice, that she recognises that some of her guests are Jewish; some are commoner than others?’ Nicolson primly, and surely inaccurately, replied that no English lady would allow such distinctions to 22 The Oldie July 2021
‘show’ in her social behaviour. Proust incredulously squealed, ‘Vous vous moquez de moi!’ Yet the funny little (five-foot-six) snob, who, until he reached middle age, had accomplished very little except his national service in the army (which he had greatly enjoyed – all those gorgeous vicomtes in uniform) and the composition of articles for Le Figaro in purplish prose, was carrying within him, like the Madonna at the Visitation, a world-changing phenomenon: a book without any parallels or rivals. By the autumn of 1907, when he was 36, all the ingredients were in place to allow Proust to begin writing his masterpiece, with which he had been toying for years. He had undergone a deep bereavement – the death of his mother. He had plunged into the depths of despair, and suffered appallingly from debilitating asthma. He had become disillusioned with lovers, and was determined, whatever chance sexual encounters he might have, with waiters, clerks and bellboys, not to waste time on any more romantic friendships with young aristocrats. He was just ill enough to need constantly to cosset himself, and just well enough to be able, occasionally, to surface for some jolly social life. Even this, for the most part, however, was now behind him. He was in search of a Gothic town in northern France where he could reconstruct some childhood
Proust is, without any rival, the greatest novelist of the twentieth century
‘memories’. And, for the purpose, he had found a faithful chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who whizzed him about in the back of a car, scattering rabbits from the hedgerows and lacily coiffed old peasant women from their street corners, as Combray, and the childhood of his narrator began to take shape. Moreover, the newspapers were full of a bizarre scandal which, in its way, attracted Proust’s imagination even more vividly than the two great cases of the 1890s that were of such scalding private significance to him – the trials of Oscar Wilde and Captain Dreyfus. A fundamental of Proust’s art was concealment. Though there was no secret that his mother was Jewish, the narrator of his ‘autobiographical’ novel is not, and the way in which the Dreyfus affair revealed so many fault lines in French society is one of the grand themes of À la recherche. Another, of course, is the fact that nearly all the males in the story, with the mysterious exception of the narrator, turn out to be homosexual, many of them promiscuously so. The 1907-8 case that Proust found so imaginatively suggestive was that of Prince Philipp von Eulenberg, an intimate of the German Emperor, who sued a journalist for the imputation that he was an ‘invert’. The subsequent trial, in which the journalist produced as witnesses a boatman and a milkman who had experienced intimacy with the Prince, revealed the peculiarity of homosexuality, and high society’s hidden world. The Emperor himself (Kaiser Willy) was probably the only person in the Court who did not notice that he had surrounded himself by what was called a circle of Knights of the Round Table.
