His father, Adrien Proust, was a doctor celebrated for his work in epidemiology; his mother, Jeanne Weil, was a stockbroker’s daughter of Jewish descent. He lived as a child in the family home on Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, but spent vacations with his aunt and uncle in the town of Illiers near Chartres, where the Prousts had lived for generations and which became the model for the Combray of his great novel. (In recent years it was officially renamed Illiers-Combray.) Sickly from birth, Marcel was subject from the age of nine to violent attacks of asthma, and although he did a year of military service as a young man and studied law and political science, his invalidism disqualified him from an active professional life.

During the 1890s Proust contributed sketches to Le Figaro and to a short-lived magazine, Le Banquet, founded by some of his school friends in 1892. Pleasures and Days, a collection of his stories, essays, and poems, was published in 1896. In his youth Proust led an active social life, penetrating the highest circles of wealth and aristocracy. Artistically and intellectually, his influences included the aesthetic criticism of John Ruskin, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, the music of Wagner, and the fiction of Anatole France (on whom he modeled his character Bergotte). An affair begun in 1894 with the composer and pianist Reynaldo Hahn marked the beginning of Proust’s often anguished acknowledgment of his homosexuality. Following the publication of Emile Zola’s letter in defense of Colonel Dreyfus in 1898, Proust became “the first Dreyfusard,” as he later phrased it. By the time Dreyfus was finally vindicated of charges of treason, Proust’s social circles had been torn apart by the anti-Semitism and political hatreds stirred up by the affair.

Proust was very attached to his mother, and after her death in 1905 he spent some time in a sanatorium. His health worsened progressively, and he withdrew almost completely from society and devoted himself to writing. Proust’s early work had done nothing to establish his reputation as a major writer. In an unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil (not published until 1952), he laid some of the groundwork for In Search of Lost Time, and in Against Sainte-Beuve, written in 1908–9, he stated as his aesthetic credo: “A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.” He appears to have begun work on his long masterpiece sometime around 1908, and the first volume, Swann’s Way, was published in 1913. In 1919 the second volume, Within a Budding Grove, won the Goncourt Prize, bringing Proust great and instantaneous fame. Two subsequent sections—The Guermantes Way (1920–21) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1921)—appeared in his lifetime. (Of the depiction of homosexuality in the latter, his friend André Gide complained: “Will you never portray this form of Eros for us in the aspect of youth and beauty?”) The remaining volumes were published following Proust’s death on November 18, 1922: The Captive in 1923, The Fugitive in 1925, and Time Regained in 1927.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Biographical Note

An Introduction by Richard Howard

A Note on the Translation (1981) by Terence Kilmartin

A Note on the Revised Translation (1992) by D. J. Enright

Dedication

Part One: Combray

Part Two: Swann in Love

Part Three: Place-Names • The Name

Notes

Synopsis

AN INTRODUCTION

Richard Howard

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

OSCAR WILDE

Dear Proust, I’d like you to meet your new readers. Most of them have heard about you for some time (there have been at least four films made of In Search of Lost Time; there has even been a film about you, and your housekeeper, and your asthma, and your cork-lined room—a film of course about the inaccessible last years of your life), and certainly they have had many opportunities to get acquainted with your great work—everyone has been told it is great—but for one reason or another they haven’t done so.

Why not? you’d like to know. Well, to begin with, your reputation as a difficult author is widespread, and many readers are daunted. For instance, you’re said to have written the longest sentence in the history of literature; there’s even a parlor game that challenges people—bright people!—to diagram it. And of course the Search itself is one of the longest novels in modern literature—long and intricate and allusive; why, there are even some critics (you know how we’re all intimidated by critics) who say it isn’t a novel at all.

What do they say it is? Oh, a cultural cosmogony, a Menippean satire, and most overwhelming of all, a sort of evangel. For you offer us the postulation that we can, in the shadow, or rather the radiance, of your own enchiridion, go and do likewise. Each reader, instructed and inspired by your own salvationist exercises, has a capacity to redeem his own past, to regain the time. I myself have … or have had … two friends, Jean Stafford and Roland Barthes, they’re both dead now, who felt your book was more like a gospel than a novel. Jean used to say she had to start your book over every five years because each time she read you she had already become a different person. And Roland, near the end of his own life in 1978, wrote that he

like Proust ill, threatened by death (or believing himself so) came back to the phrase of Saint John which Proust quotes in Contre Sainte-Beuve: “Work, while you still have the light.…” Does this mean that I am going to write a novel? How should I know? I don’t know if it will be possible still to call a “novel” the work which I desire to write and which I expect to break with the nature of my previous writings. It is important for me to act as if I were to write this utopian novel, to put myself in the position of the subject who makes something, and no longer of the subject who speaks about something.

It is of more than incidental interest, with regard to the Search as this sort of gospel and prototype, that Roland Barthes found himself qualified to make certain reservations, certain criticisms, which do not alter his soterial purpose. He readily acknowledged that he preferred certain parts of the Search to others, but that each time he read the book again, the parts he then preferred were different ones, and that was why Proust was a great writer.

But the real trouble new readers have with your book is reading it for the first time.