Proust changed the

On Marcel Proust’s 150th anniversary, A N Wilson praises his masterpiece, an exquisite comedy with no parallel

Proust is, without any rival, the greatest novelist of the twentieth century

The book that changed the world

Those 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 ‘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 ‘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.

Marcel Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu is a great moral education

This was the finishing touch to what began as Proust’s portrait of his friend the aristocratic poet Robert de Montesquiou, but was to grow into one of the most magnificent comic creations in all literature, the Baron de Charlus. We first meet him as the lover of Odette, the wife of M Swann; and the narrator’s innocent, middle-class family at Combray all speak of Charlus as an incurable ladies’ man. By the end of the great sequence, we know better.

We know that when Charlus is seen looking melancholy in the corner of grand salons in the Faubourg St Germain, and when the society hostesses believe he is pining with love for one of them, he is in fact yearning with heartfelt adoration for a tram conductor, or secretly impatient to take off to the brothel where he is known to the proprietors as ‘the man in chains’.

Every time we meet Charlus, we are treated to further layers of complexity in his fascinating character, his pride in the ancient lineage of the Guermantes, his devotion to St Michael the Archangel and his yearning – when the First World War breaks out – for the victory of the more aristocratic Germany over the sordid, Jew-infested bourgeoisie of France. These are all master touches.

And Charlus is only one of the many, many characters Proust creates. The more we know of his life, the more we realise that À la recherche is truly a construct and not, as might be naively supposed, a mere transcription of experience.

Yes, we can see who, among his enormous acquaintance, he might have ‘used’ in his depiction of the socialclimbing pretentious hostess Mme Verdurin, the painter Elstir, the novelist Bergotte and the ludicrously incompetent medical professor Cottard.

But the care with which each character is built up and constructed and the exquisite comedy were the result of a marvellous, instinctive gift.

At the beginning of the book, in the childhood section which takes its title from the village where his grandparents originated, we read the entire novel in miniature and meet, or hear about, nearly all the characters who will be fleshed out for us in the later story.

The joke, in which we are allowed by the narrator to share, is that his family of innocents get everything wrong. They pity poor Swann, with his unsuitable wife, and have no idea that Swann enjoys a life in Paris where he is at the highest social peak, friends with the Prince of Wales and any other grandee you could name.

Likewise, Odette, when she first gets to know him, feels sorry for him living among such shabby old things, not realising that he is one of the greatest aesthetes of the age with a priceless collection of paintings and furniture.

As the story unfolds, however, we realise that all judgements formed of another human being have an only partial hope of being correct, that all impressions of life need to be revised. À la recherche therefore becomes, for the reader, not merely one of the richest comic experiences imaginable. It is also a great moral education.

Proust was still rewriting and rewriting the book in his final, gasping asthma attacks, the last of which, on 18th November 1922, at 44 rue Hamelin, killed him. His beloved servant, Céleste Albaret, had been feeding him warm chips and hot milk through the small hours for weeks as, in the cork-lined bedroom, the masterpiece progressed.

When the seriousness of his illness was clear, the 51-year-old told Céleste that, after his death, she should wait half an hour before summoning the Abbé Mugnier; and that, before the priest arrived, she should place a chapelet between his fingers. Every year thereafter, until all the friends died out, Mugnier would celebrate a requiem for Proust, and invite the originals of Charlus, or the Duchesse de Guermantes, to pray for their departed friend.

Perhaps this was superfluous. Had not Proust himself, by fashioning his circle into art, performed his own act of requiem by making them, together with himself, immortal?