The Quest for Proust
by
Edouard Roditi
In his The Past Remembered , which constitutes the last section of Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust tells us how, after many years of painful hesitation, his autobiographic but nevertheless fictional hero was finally able to write his long novel that thus begins being written where it ends. He was staying in a country house where his hostess lent him her copy of the still unpublished Journal of the Goncourt brothers. Reading it, he was fascinated by the intelligence and charm of the people described there, and began to wonder why, in his own social life, he had never been privileged to associate with such interesting people. Suddenly it dawned on him that the people described in this Journal were those whom he, too, had known for many years, but had always found vulgar, foolish or insignificant; and he thus begain to understand that memory or art can transform our dullest experiences, raising the insignificant to a new level where, not longer present, it acquires significance and ceases to be dull….
Memory, like a painting by Giorgio de Cirico, has its false perspectives, where experiences that seemed to be insignificant when they were in the foreground of the present can loom ever larger as they recede from us in time. As the years go by, the fascinating game of speculating about “what might have been, if only…” can also embellish or enlarge what actually happened, until we no longer distinguish what happened from what we later imagined. Finally, later experiences superimpose themselves on earlier ones, lending to these a posthumous significance in a series of double exposures, like those of a photographic film, so that the original event is thereby transformed, to fit better into our total experience at some later date rather than in that of the time when it originally occurred.
Proust, a few years after his death, began to become the victim of such tricks of memory in the minds those who had known him and been merely tolerant of him as a verbose and affected snob, but who now discovered, often to their surprise, that they had known and met a great writer. When published articles and books began to identify the real life persons whom Proust had used as models for his ficitonal characters, many of those who had known and neglected him were even offended because he had failed to remember them, if only as models for such minor or grotesque characters as Madame de Cambremer.
[Here, Roditi goes into a rather lengthy description about Leon Suares, an elderly Egyptian Jewish Banker, friend of an uncle and possibly a distant relative of Roditi's grandmother, and, finally, friend of mutual writer friends. Through this rather complicated social network, Suares discovered that the rather effete “man who used to hang around here late at night and seemed to know everybody, [who] was very fussy about the service, but was known to give extravagant tips,” —that that not so well remembered man was a great writer—Marcel Proust. Among other reactions, this sent Suares back to his home in a fruitless search to retrieve some letters he and Proust had exchanged. This, in fact, seems to be a common theme among those interested in Proust: the writer left a tantilizing trail of misplaced or lost letters and documents, some never to be found; others, found much later in unexpected places (consider the recently discovered “Seventy Five Pages,” which illuminates work in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.)
[Clearly, the subject of memory inevitably enters this dscussion; and Roditi goes on to muse about his own “shadowy” memories of,” as an 8-year old asthmatic child, having met “an odd and haggard man who questioned me at great length about the symptoms of my asthma.” This was at the behest of his physician who had arranged for the two to meet, ostensibly to help the young Roditi describe his own symptoms more accurately.]
[Roditi goes on:] When I was sixteen, I was again being treated by Docteur Ladowski, this time at home, where I was bed-ridden with a feverish bout of influenza. I happened to be reading Remembrance of Things Past when he entered my room; and he admitted to me that he never enjoyed Proust’s prose enough to read more than a few pages of the first volume of his masterpiece. Whether as a patient or as a friend, he had always found Proust a rather wordy and difficult crank. Then he added, “If you had met him again and known him better, I doubt whether you would still be as fascinated by his writings as you now seem to be.”
“Met him again?” I enquired.
Memory, like a painting by Giorgio de Cirico, has its false perspectives, where experiences that seemed to be insignificant when they were in the foreground of the present can loom ever larger as they recede from us in time. As the years go by, the fascinating game of speculating about “what might have been, if only…” can also embellish or enlarge what actually happened, until we no longer distinguish what happened from what we later imagined. Finally, later experiences superimpose themselves on earlier ones, lending to these a posthumous significance in a series of double exposures, like those of a photographic film, so that the original event is thereby transformed, to fit better into our total experience at some later date rather than in that of the time when it originally occurred.
Proust, a few years after his death, began to become the victim of such tricks of memory in the minds those who had known him and been merely tolerant of him as a verbose and affected snob, but who now discovered, often to their surprise, that they had known and met a great writer. When published articles and books began to identify the real life persons whom Proust had used as models for his ficitonal characters, many of those who had known and neglected him were even offended because he had failed to remember them, if only as models for such minor or grotesque characters as Madame de Cambremer.
[Here, Roditi goes into a rather lengthy description about Leon Suares, an elderly Egyptian Jewish Banker, friend of an uncle and possibly a distant relative of Roditi's grandmother, and, finally, friend of mutual writer friends. Through this rather complicated social network, Suares discovered that the rather effete “man who used to hang around here late at night and seemed to know everybody, [who] was very fussy about the service, but was known to give extravagant tips,” —that that not so well remembered man was a great writer—Marcel Proust. Among other reactions, this sent Suares back to his home in a fruitless search to retrieve some letters he and Proust had exchanged. This, in fact, seems to be a common theme among those interested in Proust: the writer left a tantilizing trail of misplaced or lost letters and documents, some never to be found; others, found much later in unexpected places (consider the recently discovered “Seventy Five Pages,” which illuminates work in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.)
[Clearly, the subject of memory inevitably enters this dscussion; and Roditi goes on to muse about his own “shadowy” memories of,” as an 8-year old asthmatic child, having met “an odd and haggard man who questioned me at great length about the symptoms of my asthma.” This was at the behest of his physician who had arranged for the two to meet, ostensibly to help the young Roditi describe his own symptoms more accurately.]
[Roditi goes on:] When I was sixteen, I was again being treated by Docteur Ladowski, this time at home, where I was bed-ridden with a feverish bout of influenza. I happened to be reading Remembrance of Things Past when he entered my room; and he admitted to me that he never enjoyed Proust’s prose enough to read more than a few pages of the first volume of his masterpiece. Whether as a patient or as a friend, he had always found Proust a rather wordy and difficult crank. Then he added, “If you had met him again and known him better, I doubt whether you would still be as fascinated by his writings as you now seem to be.”
“Met him again?” I enquired.
Proust was, indeed, that odd man of this long ago encounter, though Roditi’s memories of it, even then, were vague. And this began Roditi’s search to establish a firmer foundation for those clouded remembrances. Over several hand-typed pages, with handwritten corrections--which we interrupt with out own print when the original is too cluttered to read comfortably--Roditi chronicled his search for the Proust that his physician insisted he had met in childhood.
After additional anecdotes of chance and planned encounters, we finally arrive at the time when Roditi is working at Editions du Sagittaire, a small Paris publishing house, and is asked by chief editor, Léon Pierre-Quint, to assist with the revised edition of his critical study of Proust which, since the author’s death, needed updating. Pierre-Quint, unbeknownst to Roditi at the time, was a drug addict and often too ill or doped up to make meetings he had scheduled with recipients of some unpublished letters of Proust which he knew about. However, one day Pierre-Quint asked Roditi to go to a Paris Turkish bath to copy, “in his stead, certain passages” from Proust’s letters to the owner of the bathhouse.
After additional anecdotes of chance and planned encounters, we finally arrive at the time when Roditi is working at Editions du Sagittaire, a small Paris publishing house, and is asked by chief editor, Léon Pierre-Quint, to assist with the revised edition of his critical study of Proust which, since the author’s death, needed updating. Pierre-Quint, unbeknownst to Roditi at the time, was a drug addict and often too ill or doped up to make meetings he had scheduled with recipients of some unpublished letters of Proust which he knew about. However, one day Pierre-Quint asked Roditi to go to a Paris Turkish bath to copy, “in his stead, certain passages” from Proust’s letters to the owner of the bathhouse.