Fran Presents Marcel Proust

Jacquie's Email

Hello Literary Ladies!!! Fran will be regaling us all about her time spent with Marcel Proust at the Literature Club of Hastings-on-Hudson's next meeting this Wednesday, December 1st at 12:45 pm at the home of our newest member, Sharon. Masks will be required, and there will be no refreshments served.
I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday that generated good memories to be considered past when remembered in the future. (As long as it includes ingesting something sweet, I'm ok with it!) À bientôt! Jacquie

Christine's Minutes
On December 1, 2021, thirteen members - and in a first for Literature Club, one of those members, Jacquie, joined us via Zoom - and one associate, gathered in Sharon DeLevie's airy living room on Amherst Drive.

President Fran Greenburg called the meeting to order at 1 pm.

Connie read the minutes of our last meeting, and they were so complete and lively, that even those of us unfortunate enough to have missed the meeting learned more about Beatrix Potter than we ever thought possible.

Lori reported that our treasury contains $265.11. Lori questioned what exactly comprised our fiscal year. Fran assured her that it goes right along with the academic year. Some may find it comical that the Literature Club even has a fiscal year.

It was brought to our attention that, because of COVID, we may have missed giving our annual gift to the library in 2020. We did give them $121 in 2021. The decision was made to simply be over-generous next time around.

Fran thanked our gracious hostess, Sharon, who did provide us with water, as well as madeleines individually wrapped.

Then it was time to travel to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Paris and spend time with Proust. Fran’s program artfully wove together the life and the fiction of Marcel Proust, as well as the tumultuous history of his times, and the many characters who found their way into À la recherche du temps perdu.

For Fran, there are the three giants of twentieth century literature, Kafka, Joyce, and Proust. Thus, for her, a francophone and Francophile, the choice of Proust was a natural one. While there have been several English language translations of À la recherche du temps perdu since the original one by Scott-Moncrieff, Fran agreed with Adam Gopnik that Scott-Moncrieff’s remains the classic.

There are possibly more biographies of Proust than there are translations, so making a choice among them was key. Fran chose to use George Painter’s 1965 biography. Painter started his biography in the late 1940’s, when many of Proust’s friends, and especially his longtime maid Celeste (the source for Francoise in À la recherche) were still alive. But he chose not to interview them in order to stick entirely with primary sources.

Celeste was in fact interviewed by other writers, later, and she also wrote a book herself, in which she adamantly denied Proust’s homosexuality.

Marcel Proust was born in 1871 to Adrien Proust and Jeanne née Weil. Adrien was a specialist in infectious diseases and credited with ending cholera in France by establishing a ‘cordon sanitaire.’ Jeanne was wealthy, Jewish, and 15 years younger than Adrien. Two years later came Robert, who would become a prominent gynecologist. Though Jeanne never converted to Catholicism, she raised both boys as Catholics. As a child, Marcel was sickly and suffered from asthma.

In both Proust’s life, and in his masterpiece, the questions of Jews and Jewishness, and the issue of homosexuality, are supremely important, even as they are often referred to only obliquely.

The three places where he spent his childhood were translated into the three major venues of À la recherche du temps perdu; his father’s hometown of Illiers becomes Combray, the seaside resort of Cabourg becomes Balbec, and Paris remains Paris. In his adolescence, Marcel had crushes on several girls; three playmates from the Champs-Élysées were blended together to create Gilbert in À la recherche du temps perdu. He first encountered Paris society at the salon of Madame Strauss, the mother of his Marcel’s lifelong friend, Jacques Bizet. Marcel also came to know the aristocrat, and openly homosexual Count Robert de Montesquiou, who was most certainly one of the models for Baron Charlus.

In 1896, exculpatory evidence in the Dreyfus affair came to light, and Zola published his J’accuse. The Dreyfus affair divided and dominated Proust’s social world.

Marcel’s father died in 1903, and his mother died two years later, in 1905, after which Marcel went into isolation for a month. In 1907 he returned to Cabourg, where his grief flooded back. His friend Jacques found him a driver, Alfred Agostinelli, who became the great love of Proust’s life, and also the model for Albertine, the great love of the narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu.

Marcel was fascinated and compelled by the aristocrats of La Belle Epoque. It was not a simple thing for a half-Jewish, closeted homosexual to gain admittance to the salons, but Marcel did, and discovered he was not the only one with Jewish ancestors. There were of course the Rothschilds, and he met Charles Haas, the lone Jew admitted to the Jockey Club, who became the model for Swann. Then the onset of WWI brought an end to the salons of French society.

Meanwhile, Proust had completed a third of À la recherche du temps perdu and began to seek a publisher. But he ended up paying for the printing of Volume One in 1913, as well as arranging for notices in all the papers. He continued to write all through the war. His health was terrible, but he dined regularly at the Ritz. More volumes of the novel appeared after the war.

Attended by his brother Robert, and his housekeeper Celeste, Proust died in 1922, still editing the proofs of À la recherche du temps perdu. The last three volumes only appeared after his death.

In addition to our readings from Painter’s biography, and Proust himself, members read selections from Adam Gopnik and André Aciman,

The question of how autobiographical was À la recherche du temps perdu remains an intriguing one, and future biographers will surely continue to examine the life and the masterpiece.

Respectfully submitted,
Christine Lehner
Recording Secretary