Chapter 3 - Early works and late essays

Summary

Running counter to Proust's tendency towards proliferation, popular conceptions of the man and his work are often decidedly reductive. ‘Proust’ more often than not means madeleines, means memory, means In Search of Lost Time or, in its older, Shakespearean guise, Remembrance of Things Past. The Search, of course, is Proust's magnum opus, his major contribution to world literature and to European literary culture, and it is quite right that he should be remembered for it. Voluminous, even encyclopaedic, as it is, however, the Search is not Proust's only work. He committed the last fourteen years of his life to it, the summa of a lifetime's thinking, but its outline did not materialize from nowhere. This chapter offers an overview of Proust's works before the Search, showing how his sensibilities developed as a writer and how his early writings bear traces of interests and preoccupations that develop more fully in the Search. I keep in focus Proust's near-constant vacillation between different literary forms in his early years, his many experiments with literary style and his tireless scrutiny (and often scathing analysis) of society life. The main works are surveyed in chronological order of their composition.

Pleasures and Days

Proust's first book was neither a commercial nor a critical success. Its title was suggestive of dilettantism and idle leisure, in contrast to Hesiod's Works and Days on which it riffs; it was a luxury edition, whose price was four times the average cost of a book at the time; and its presentation – prefaced somewhat enigmatically by Anatole France, illustrated by society hostess Madeleine Lemaire and including four pieces for piano by Reynaldo Hahn – meant that the audience to whom it appealed was small from the start.