When Marcel Proust began offering his manuscript of Swann's Way to French publishing houses in 1911, editors were frightened by the sheer size of the book and by its interminable, page-long sentences. Proust's stream of consciousness was so uninterrupted that he initially wanted to publish the first two volumes of his 16-volume masterpiece as a single paragraph.
Two years later, Proust finally persuaded Bernard Grasset to publish Swann - at the author's expense. Throughout the first World War he continued working on A la recherche du temps perdu, known in English as Remembrance of Things Past, but better translated as Search for Lost Time.
One of the editors who rejected Swann was the writer Andre Gide at the Nouvelle Revue Francaise. Gide soon realised his error. He lured Proust back to the NRF, which brought out a new edition of Swann and published all subsequent volumes of Remembrance. Proust's literary reputation was established. He received France's highest literary award, the Prix Goncourt, in 1919. The following year he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. The green and gold medal rests in a glass case at the family home in Illiers-Combray, the tiny village immortalised by Proust 120 kilometres south-west of Paris.
Over 4,500 people (more than the population of Illiers-Combray) each year make the pilgrimage to the home where Proust spent his childhood vacations. Thousands more visit the writer's black granite tomb in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. And every Thursday, the bank which now owns the flat at 102 boulevard Haussmann where Proust wrote most of Remembrance opens his empty former bedroom to the public.
Every year more books are added to the mountains of Proust lore. The most recent include a collection of Proust's childish but humorous drawings, prefaced by the novelist Philippe Sollers, and the first volume of a charming comic strip version of Remembrance. Although the comic book is painstakingly faithful to the original, it shocked some Proust purists; "They're murdering Marcel!" a headline in Le Figaro said.
If few French people have read all 4,000 pages of Remembrance, virtually every French man or woman with more than a primary school education knows its first line - said to be the most beautiful in the French language: "Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure." The English, "for a long time I went to bed early" sadly lacks its music.
Remembrance is an exploration of the mechanism of recollection, which Proust divided into "voluntary" and "involuntary" memory. The latter, he wrote, is hidden beyond our reach "in some material object . . . where we do not suspect it". We encounter the objects that unlock our past purely by chance.
In the most famous passage of Remembrance, the adult Narrator's mother forces him to drink tea on a cold winter day. "She sent for one of those short and plump little cakes called Petites Madeleines which seem to have been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell . . . I brought to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a piece of the madeleine. But at the very moment when the liquid mixed with crumbs from the cake touched my palate, I trembled, aware of the extraordinary thing taking place within me. I was filled with a delicious pleasure . . . "
A page later, the narrator discovers the secret of this serendipitous moment. As a child in Combray, he would enter the room of his bed-ridden Tante Leonie on Sunday mornings before going to Mass. The old woman would give him a piece of a madeleine soaked in her linden tea. That taste, rediscovered by chance many years later, brings his entire childhood back to the author. He finds Combray in a cup of tea, and the experience launches him on the narrative of a lifetime, a vast panorama of provincial and Belle Epoque France, an almost anthropological study of the upper middle classes and the moribund aristocracy.
Tante Leonie, watching the comings and goings of Combray through her bedroom window, prefigures the invalid Proust writing in his bed. Visiting her home today is strangely touching: there is the little "oriental salon", furnished with Algerian pottery, paintings and furniture brought back from the colonies by Proust's uncle. In the main sitting room hang portraits of Proust's father, the famous medical doctor Adrien Proust, and his mother Jeanne Weil Proust, the daughter of a cultivated and wealthy Parisian Jewish family.
Her initials, "J.W." are engraved on the writing case in the salon, which Proust is believed to have used to write Remembrance. The dark, wood-panelled dining room smells of damp, dust and furniture polish. It was here that the Narrator's parents stayed up late talking with Charles Swann while the little boy pined away upstairs for his mother's kisses. Proust's bedroom is exactly as he described it, with its view of the garden and the path to Swann's house, the sleigh bed in the alcove, a prie-dieu and an engraving of Eugene de Beauharnais.
On the winter week-day when I visited Illiers-Combray, I was joined on the house tour by an American trial lawyer from Chicago and his estate agent wife. They had travelled from London on the Eurostar for the day just to visit a Proust exhibition at the Bibliotheque nationale and to see his home in Combray. The lawyer had started Remembrance for the same reason he read Joyce's Ulysses, he said: for the challenge. "At the beginning it was daunting, but then I began to understand his revelations."
The fourth member of our group was an Iranian grandmother who has lived for many years in London. Over the past two decades, she read the entire 4,000-page novel three times. This was her second pilgrimage to Combray. "Proust invaded my life," she told me. "The first time I came was in June, and there were red poppies in the wheat fields, just as Proust said. I want to come back in April, to see the hawthorn hedges blooming."
Irene Goujon has seen all manner of Proust fanatics in the 15 years she has sold entry tickets, books and postcards in Tante Leonie's house. "Once a Brazilian woman burst into tears the moment she crossed the threshold. Another time a Canadian woman from Montreal came straight from the airport. She didn't go to her hotel or eat anything. After the tour she asked to go back to Proust's bedroom. We found her kneeling on his prie-dieu, in ecstasy."
In 1971, to mark the centenary of Proust's birth, the mayor and local lycee director had Illiers's name changed to Illiers-Combray, in honour of Proust's novel. The dreary village has altered little since Proust stayed here in the 1870s. After 22 years in Illiers, Mme Goujon says the local farmers and shopkeepers consider her a blow-in. "Your family has to be here for two or three generations before you belong here. They couldn't care less about Tante Leonie's house; if anything it annoys them. They think Proust is for Parisians."
Mercifully, Illiers is not a Proust Disneyland. On the sloping square outside the 15th-century church where the awe-struck Narrator first saw the Duchess of Guermantes; no hotel or cafe bears Proust's name. Aside from Tante Leonie's house, Illiers-Combray's only concessions to its great writer are the little plastic bags full of madeleine cakes sold in village bakeries.
MarieCeline Fossard, the guide at Tante Leonie's house, suspects old-fashioned bigotry may account for Illiers's indifference to its famous son. The Prousts lived here as bourgeois merchants from the 16th century. A street was named after Marcel's father, the medical professor, many decades before the lycee was given Marcel's name. Is it because he was a homosexual? In Proust's day, homosexuality was considered an illness. Proust himself called homosexuals "inverts" and said that they, along with Jews, belonged to a "race of the damned". He never denied that he was half Jewish, but he did try to hide his homosexuality.
Remembrance contains many allusions to male and female homosexuality, from the composer Vinteuil's lesbian daughter to the love affairs of at least three of the novel's male protagonists. Yet when fictionalising his own great passion for his driver, Alfred Agostinelli, Proust transforms Alfred into a female character called Albertine. His description of Albertine sleeping ("Looking at her, I had the impression of possessing her completely which I did not have when she was awake . . . ") is one of the most beautiful in the novel.
Devastated by his mother's death in 1905 and suffering from severe asthma, Proust increasingly withdrew from society. On the advice of the poet Countess Anna de Noailles, he lined the walls of his over-heated bedroom with cork in 1910. For more than a decade, until his death from pneumonia at the age of 51, he worked mostly in bed, writing on his knees or dictating to his secretary Celeste Albaret. From time to time he would host a midnight dinner at the Ritz Hotel, to gather dialogue and costume details for his novels. Word of such parties reached the soldiers in first World War trenches - and prompted some to mutiny. Proust seduced three of his last male companions from among the Ritz staff.
Time Regained opens at the IFC tomorrow
