I’m not really a Jew, you know, just Jewish.
—Peter Cook, Beyond the Fringe
Marcel Proust’s novel is not everybody’s cup of tea, not even if taken with a dab of madeleine cake. At 1,267,069 words in seven volumes, À la recherche du temps perdu—in English known as In Search of Lost Time, or, in the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation, Remembrance of Things Past—is the longest novel ever published, with hundreds of characters roaming about in its more than 3,000 pages.
The novel offers few of the usual pleasures of fiction, having neither a linear plot, nor a happy or sad ending, nor any characters with whom one is likely to identify. Many of its sentences run to 200 or more words, and several of these contain lengthy parentheses often quite as interesting, which is to say diverting, as the sentences in which they are embedded. Paragraphs can run to two or three densely printed pages. Chapters are too lengthy to provide readerly respite. The very opposite of a “page-turner,” In Search of Lost Time is a page-stopper.
With all these obstacles, with so many of the usual delights of fiction absent, how is it that In Search of Lost Time also happens to be the greatest novel of the past century? For one thing, in its pages, one regularly discovers passages of a brilliance that call for rereading and dwelling upon before moving on. Recently reading along in Sodom et Gomorrah, the novel’s fourth volume, within 20 pages I came upon Proust’s observation that “a little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.” Of women married to weak or effeminate men, Proust notes that “they end by acquiring both the good and bad qualities which their husbands lack. The more frivolous, effeminate, indiscreet their husbands are, the more they grow into the charmless effigies of the virtues their husbands ought to practice.” And: “The invert believes it is only in later years that he imagines—another exaggeration—that the unique exception is the normal man.” René Groos, one of Proust’s contemporaries, called him “the genius of pure reflection”; another, Ludmila Savitsky, claimed, “Marcel Proust’s art is lucidity.” Neither exaggerated.
In Search of Lost Times is surely the most psychologically penetrating novel ever written—and penetrating on the most significant of subjects: society, love, and art. Many has been the novelist who has written about love. Proust did so, too, but he is perhaps alone in writing about falling out of love, a point that Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust’s most thorough biographer, also notes: “Proust’s most important contribution to the understanding of passion was to chronicle not just its birth but its death.” As for art, specifically the art of literature, Proust reflects that “to write that essential book, the only true book, a great writer does not need to invent it, in the current phrase of the term, since it already exists in each one of us, but merely to translate it. The duty and tasks of a writer are those of a translator.”
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Who was the genius who wrote this monumental, this dazzling, the singular work? He was, perhaps alone among the great novelists, a Jew by Jewish standards. Marcel Proust was born in 1871. His father Adrien, a nonpracticing Catholic and a physician whose specialty was national hygiene, was the son of a candlemaker. His mother, Jeanne, of the Weil family, the daughter of a successful stockbroker and herself a lover of the arts, was Jewish, though she did not practice her religion. Marcel was baptized in the Catholic Church but followed no Catholic ritual. In his ninth year, he suffered the first of his asthma attacks, and it was respiratory problems that would eventually kill him, in 1922, at the age of 52. At 16, he became convinced of his homosexuality. As a young man, he wrote some short stories, a fair amount of criticism, a lengthy translation of John Ruskin, and an uncompleted novel (Jean Santeuil), before turning to In Search of Lost Time in 1909, his 38th year.
Half-Jewish and fully homosexual, Marcel Proust was a member of two outsider groups in the French society of his time. This outsider status gave him an especially sensitive view of the inner workings of society. As a young man, he was a social climber and a snob, but a snob who eventually became the world’s greatest anatomist of snobbery. He longed to be inside society at its highest stations and, once there, came to realize that it wasn’t anywhere near as splendid as it seemed from the outside. If In Search of Lost Time has a major theme, this is it.
To what extent did Marcel Proust’s Jewishness contribute to the making of In Search of Lost Time? Might he be considered a Jewish writer, part of that group of Jewish geniuses of the 20th century, among them Freud, Kafka, and Einstein, none of whom was a practicing Jew either? Perhaps the best analogy to Proust is his fellow Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) another great writer with a Christian father and Jewish mother. Montaigne was the first great essayist, but what he shares with Proust is a certain meandering style. Each sought completeness without ever quite finding it. Both were still at work on their books, Proust’s Search, Montaigne’s Essais, at their deaths, a reminder of Paul Valéry’s remark that the true artist never really finishes but in the end abandons his work.
André Gide is excellent on what the two writers provide careful readers: “It seems that turn by turn each page [of Proust] perfectly finds its end within itself. Hence this extreme slowness, this lack of desire to go more quickly, this continuous satisfaction. I experience similar nonchalance only with Montaigne, and that is no doubt why I can only compare the pleasure of reading a book by Proust to the pleasure I derive from the Essais. These are works of long leisure.”
While neither Montaigne nor Proust proudly proclaimed his heritage, Montaigne came out against the mistreatment of the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, and Proust was among the first to defend the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus in fin-de-siècle France. Jews come up occasionally in the Essais, a book of 1,283 pages, but are central to In Search of Lost Time. Charles Swann, one of the novel’s main characters, is a Jew, and so are a number of characters of lesser but not insignificant importance. In fact, in his creation of some of these Jewish characters, Proust had even, in an earlier day, been accused of anti-Semitism. Jean Cocteau, never a great admirer of Proust, wrote: “Proust, who had a thousand reasons not to be anti-Semitic, manages to give the impression of being one in his book.”
The argument can be made that both Montaigne and Proust, while theologically uninterested in Judaism, thought Jewishly. By thinking Jewishly, I mean that in their writing both showed an essentially Jewish point of view—a slightly self-deprecating, sometimes comic, yet ultimately serious view of the world. In our time, not all Jewish writers had it. Saul Bellow did; Norman Mailer, who in his penchant for violence and hipness wasn’t especially keen on being a Jew, didn’t; Bernard Malamud did; Philip Roth, who viewed the world through a rather coarse Freudianism and callow liberal politics, also didn’t; among poets, Karl Shapiro had it, while Allen Ginsberg distinctly did not, as Gregory Corso or Lawrence Ferlinghetti could as easily have written “Howl.”
The French scholar Antoine Compagnon’s Proust: A Jewish Way deals with the question in Proust’s work in considerable detail. The question is made all the more interesting because Proust, according to Jean-Yves Tadié, never thought himself a Jew, though he did not protest being called one—and yet this did not, of course, stop others from considering him a perfect example of the Jews of that day. Abel Bonnard, who knew the young Proust, described him as appearing “a bit Oriental,” saying, “He had those traits, the nose, mouth, beautiful eyes. He also had that specious, superlative politeness.” André Spire, who often wrote about Proust, noted “that invincible sympathy that drove Marcel Proust, half-Jew, baptized, raised outside of Judaism, to prefer his Jewish relatives and to choose his friends especially among Jews and half-Jews, to construct his story of late nineteenth-century French society around [Charles Swann,] a good, proud, intelligent Jewish hero.”
A goodly portion of Compagnon’s book is taken up with what early readers made of In Search of Lost Time. “I wanted to examine the way in which Proust’s work was read by the French community during the 1920s and by young Zionists in particular,” Compagnon writes. These writers had no difficulty, as André Spire notes, delighting “in discovering what Proust’s work owed to the Jewish part of his blood.” Yet from the time he first began to publish parts of it, Proust’s extraordinary novel was a matter of contention among French critics. Some among them connected Proust’s style to the Talmud and to the Zohar, the foundational text of Kabbalist literature, though there is no evidence that Proust ever read either. As Compagnon writes: “By the end of 1927, the publication of À la recherche du temps perdu was complete; the question of Proust’s Jewishness and the influence of his maternal heritage on his work had been thoroughly discussed from multiple and contradictory perspectives, ranging from being dismissed as irrelevant…to being considered essential and seminal.”
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In the end, there is something ineluctably Jewish about his novel. Proust’s maternal family was well established among French Jews, to the point of having its members buried in the Jewish section of the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. At his mother’s death in 1905, Proust sought a Jewish burial for her, with a rabbi in attendance to say the mourner’s kaddish. Compagnon has discovered that, as a boy, he went with his Weil grandfather to lay a stone on the family graves at Père Lachaise, a Jewish tradition Proust never forgot and regretted not being able to continue in the final years of his illness. He also upheld the Jewish rule of shloshim and did not send letters of condolence until 30 days after a death.
Many serious Jews thought Proust not Jewish, while many non-Jews thought him essentially Jewish. Some even thought his creation of Swann, Bloch, the actress Rachel, and other of his characters demonstrated an anti-Semitic impulse in him; others insisted that he wrote like a rabbi. Compagnon says that “the young contributors to the Zionist reviews in the 1920s . . . were Jewish enthusiasts who saw him as a proud Jew whose novel could encourage other Jews to join their ranks. On the other hand, Jews closer to consistorial and institutional Judaism… had little use for Proust because they refused to separate Jewishness from religion.” Compagnon also notes that, had Proust lived longer and remained in France, more likely than not he would have been killed as a Jew by the Nazis, who did not make such fine distinctions.
Some of those who first wrote about Proust found the quality of “resilience” in him highly Jewish. In Proust’s case, resilience was required not only to complete his mammoth novel but to get it published. Three different French publishers rejected the novel, including André Gide at the firm of Gallimard, before it was eventually taken up by Bernard Grasset under terms extremely favorable to the publisher. Proust himself died before his entire work saw publication.
The author of this In Search of Lost Time is someone who calibrated every element of status in French society and did so with just that modicum of insecurity that a less than altogether secure status itself makes possible. So many of the scenes and settings of the novel, at the homes of the Verdurins, the Villeparisis, the Duc and Prince de Guermantes, center on locating the social power in the room and limning with the subtlest of details those who hold it. In Search of Lost Time could have been written only by a Jew. Marcel Proust, social climber extraordinaire, snob turned brilliant analyst of snobbery, penetrating observer, carrying the social freight that he did, was the man, the best and only man, for the job.
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