5- Proustaverses
Marcel Proust is an opportunist who absolutely wants to be published and therefore – we paraphrase André Gide, head of the Nouvelle Revue Française and later Nobel laureate – hides his homosexuality behind the many heterosexual infatuations in the literary closet in a cowardly way. André Gide held this against him permanently, even after he refused Proust’s first volume of the ISOLT manuscript unread.
5- Proustophiles
Whether the story that Gide didn’t even open the package with the manuscript of the first part of the ISOLT in it (remember the story of the complicated knot around it) is true or not, it does not detract from the fact that Gide rejected the manuscript because he found Marcel Proust to be a dilettante snob, an amateur without taste, style or skill, in short a bungler who did not deserve to be published by the prestigious N.R.F. We are writing November-December 1912. The first volume ‘Du côté de chez Swann’ is published by Grasset at Proust’s expense and enjoys a modest commercial success. But the French literary guild recognizes his writing talent and praises the book as a literary innovation. Le Grand Marcel is born.
On January 11, 1914, Gide writes to Proust with a deep genuflection:
My dear Proust4,
For the past few days I have not left your book; I am overindulging in it, with delight; I am wallowing in it. Alas, why must it be so painful for me to love it so much?…. The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake of the N.R.F. – and (because I am ashamed to be largely responsible for it) one of the most burning regrets and remorses of my life. No doubt I believe that an implacable fate must be seen here, for it is not enough to explain my mistake to say that I had formed an image of you from a few encounters in “society” dating back almost twenty years. For me you had remained the one who frequents Mme X and Z – the one who writes in the Figaro. I believed you, shall I confess? to be “on Verdurin’s side”; a snob, a worldly amateur – something couldn’t be more unfortunate for our magazine.
…
I will never forgive myself – and it is only to alleviate my pain a little that I confess to you this morning – begging you to be more indulgent with me than I am with myself.
ANDRÉ GIDE
The amiable Marcel replies with a subtle knee-jerk
January 12 or 13, 1914.
My dear Gide5,
I have often found that certain great joys have as their condition that we have first been deprived of a joy of lesser quality, which we deserved, and without the desire for which we would never have been able to know the other joy, the most beautiful. Without the refusal, without the repeated refusals, of the N.R.F., I would not have received your letter. And if the words of a book are not entirely mute, if (as I believe) they are like spectral analysis and tell us about the internal composition of those distant worlds that are other beings, it is not possible that having read my book you do not know me well enough to be certain that the joy of receiving your letter infinitely surpasses the joy I would have had in being published by the N.R.F.
…
If you regret having pained me (and you have done so in another way as well, but I would rather tell you that in person if ever my health allows me to do so), I beg you not to keep any regrets, for you have given me a thousand times more pleasure than you have given me pain.
…
Well, that pleasure, happier than the traveler, I finally had it, not as I thought, not when I thought, but later, but differently, and much greater, in the form of this letter from you.
Your sincerely devoted and grateful
MARCEL PROUST
Marcel does not let himself be pushed around and reacts with an ironic subtlety that hits harder than a mule kick.
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