Marcel Proust Biography and List of Works

French novelist, best known for Á LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (Remembrance of Things Past), his autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style. The work collected pieces from his childhood, details, and fetishes of high-class life-style, gossip, memories, and recollections of the world he never quite managed to join. The leading motif in the book is of a past that has true reality for man. The key scene occurs when a Madeleine cake enables the writer to experience the past as a simultaneous part of his present existence.

"A great part - perhaps the greatest - of Proust's writing is intended to show the havoc wrought in and round us by Time; and he succeeded amazingly not only in suggesting to the reader, but in making him actually feel, the universal decay invincibly creeping over everything and everybody with a kind of epic and horrible power."
(Georges Lemaitre in Four French Novelists, 1938)

Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil, near Paris, the son of an eminent doctor, Adrien Proust. His mother, Jeanne Weil was from a well-to-do Alsation Jewish family. He attended the Lycée Condorcet (1882-1889) and in spite of his severe asthma did one-year of military service at Orléans. Proust studied law at the famous Sorbonne at the École des Sciences Politiques. His first books, PORTRAITS DE PEINTRES and LES PLAISIRS ET LES JOURS were published in 1896. Proust's unpublished texts from this period, JEAN SANTEUIL and CONTRE-SAINTE BEUVE, an attack of the biographical criticism of Sainte-Beuve, were discovered in the 1950s.

From 1895 to 1899 Proust worked on an autobiographical novel that remained unfinished. His earliest love affairs, which had been heterosexual in nature, later became homosexual. Among them was Alfred Agostelli, who was married and was killed in an air accident. Up to the age of 35, Proust lived the life of a snob and social climber in the salons, although he worked for a short time as a lawyer and was active in the Dreyfuss affair, like Émile Zola and other artists and intellectuals.

Proust suffered throughout his life from asthma and was nursed by his mother. When his father died in 1903 and then his mother in 1905, Proust gradually withdrew from his high-society social life. A virtual recluse, Proust lived in a soundproof flat, on the Boulevard Haussmann, and devoted himself to writing and introspection. He was financially independent and was free to start on his great novel, Remembrance of Things Past, which was influenced by the autobiographies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and François Chateaubriand. From 1910 he spent much time in his bedroom, often sleeping in the day and working in the night. "For a long time I used to go to bed early."

In 1912 Proust produced the first volume of his seven part major work, Remembrance of Things Past. The second book, which was delayed by the WW I, appeared in 1919, and the next parts finally made him internationally famous. The massive story of 3000 pages occupied the last decade of his life. Proust managed to complete the novel before his death on November 18, 1922.

The narrator in Remembrance of Things Past is Marcel. He is not Proust but resembles him in many ways. Marcel is initially ignorant - only slowly does he begin to grasp the essence of the hidden reality. At the end he is preparing to write a novel, which is like the one presented just to the reader. Marcel's childhood memories start to flow when he tastes a Madeleine cake dipped in linden tea such as he was given as a child. "Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of Madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me. Immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre."

Memory is one of the principal themes of the novel. The narration follows the lives of three families, Marcel's own, the aristocratic de Guermantes and the family of the Jewish bohemian dilettante Swann. Among the central characters are the faithless cocotte Odette, whom Swann marries, homosexual Baron de Charlus, Dutchess, Mme de Villeparisis, Robert Saint-Loup and Marcel's great love Albertine, who is perhaps lesbian and who dies in a riding accident. In the climax of the novel the narrator fails to recognize many of his friends because they have changed so much physically during the years.

A prolific writer, Proust also was an avid letter writer. Multiple volumes of his correspondence reveal his interest in various subjects. Proust believed the proper role of the novelist is one of discovery. He is generally considered a pioneer of the modern novel. Proust's work widely influenced authors in different countries, among them Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. His style, long sentences, some of which extend to several pages in length, paved way to Claude Simon's narrative inventions.

Proust's literary criticism did not attract wide attention until 1954, when CONTRE SAINTE-BEUVE appeared. He admired Vigny, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle, but for him Baudelaire was the greatest poet of the nineteenth century. Proust denied Henri Bergson's influence on his work, although they were both occupied with time and memory. Proust made a clear distinction between man and work. The writer is a man of intuition and "A book is the product of a different self we manifest in our habits." There is no progress in literature - all writers stand-alone. The most famous of Proust's essays is on Flaubert's style, in which he compares Flaubert's grammatical use of tenses to Kant's revolution in philosophy.

For further reading: Marcel Proust by S. Beckett (1931); Four French Novelists by Georges Lemaitre (1938); The Mind of Marcel Proust by F.C. Green (1949); Proust's Way by F. Mauriac (1950); Proust A. Maurois (1950); Nostalgia: A Psychoanalytic Study of Marcel Proust by M.L. Miller (1956); Proust and Literature by Walter A. Strauss (1957); Marcel Proust by R.H. Baker (1958); A Reading of Proust by W. Fowlie (1964); Proust's Narrative Technique by B.G. Rogers (1965); Marcel Proust: Critique littéraire by René de Chantal (1967); A Readers Handbook to Proust by P.A. Spalding (1975); Marcel Proust by G. Painter (1978, 2 vols.); A Readers Guide to Remembrance of Things Past by T. Kilmartin (1983); Proust: Philosophie du roman by Vincent Descombes (1992); Le Temps sensible by Julia Kristeva (1994, as Time and Sense, 1966) - See: Colette, Isaiah Berlin, André Maurois's The Quest for Proust - See also: Henri Bergson, whom Proust called "the first great metaphysician since Leibniz." Proust and Bergson knew each other socially and Proust's cousin on his mother's side, Louise Neuberger, married Bergson in 1892.

PORTRAITS DE PEINTRES, (1896)