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| The grave at Paris' Père Lachaise Cemetery |
There's a certain wistfulness, when an artist dies in the midst of working, to discover something left incomplete (or, worse, incompletable): imagine "What If...?," holding sketches for that 10th Symphony found in Beethoven's desk? The mind has stopped creating; the body, living. Published works live on; the possibility of works that weren't finished tantalizingly survive. Even though you may own or even have read the complete À la recherche du temps perdu, it's not that easy when you realize he hadn't really finished it – when then, voilá, Proust died.
And when he died, we were told his vast novel, the only major work he wrote, was "more or less" complete. At least, that's the "short" version one usually reads in those biographical summaries. Of its seven volumes, each one a separate novel, the last three were published posthumously, but he hadn't finished editing them.
Keep in mind, this means we have no definitive version of what Proust intended to do with this apparently never-ending novel which he'd initially planned as two or three novels, ending with Time Regained. It's not really a finite story: the hero isn't born and then dies; a goal isn't necessarily sought and ultimately reached. But there are telling details – the myriad "What Ifs?" of the imagination's potential – many of which I've found in Ronald Hayman's 1990 biography, making me wish I'd at least paged through it years before.
When World War I started and his publishers put everything on hold for the duration, Proust decided to fill things in. Otherwise, instead of sequels or pre-quels, he might have published some... well, "mid-quels." I knew, courtesy of various introductions to those volumes of the novel I'd read, how he gradually inserted four new novels. I was less interested in these details at the time, more concerned with trying to figure out what was going on. Keeping Proust's cast of thousands and reading voluminous explanatory footnotes was enough work.
While the opening, Swann's Way, first appeared in bookshops on November 11th, 1913, Hayman mentions Proust's secretary had already been typing up the manuscript for the novel's second part before he quit that December. In June, Proust was correcting new proofs but war broke out by August; and by January, the publication was officially suspended.
This second part, completed in 1914, had not yet been definitively titled – in fact, the whole novel underwent numerous title transformations – and Proust continued adding new characters like Albertine into an organically evolving plot. Knowing how he wanted it to end, what was originally the middle volume became five, one thing leading inevitably to another. Throughout the course of the war, he exasperated his publisher by adding and revising these new volumes even after the Armistice. By then constantly ill, Proust would add this disclaimer: if only he lived.
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| Photograph of Proust writing letters in bed (c.1913) |
In February, 1922, Proust still wrote there'd be more books to come, inserting "whole volumes" between The Fugitive and Time Regained. He told his publisher, "À la recherche du temps perdu is scarcely beginning." Then, in the early spring that year, he told his housekeeper, "Last night, I wrote 'The End.' Now I can die."
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| Proofs for The Prisoner |
In 1921, he told his current publisher the sequence following the death of Albertine was better than anything he'd ever written. But even this was being considerably revised, eventually causing lots of unresolvable confusion.
In The Fugitive, Albertine, the Narrator's mistress, escapes from his control and dies in a riding accident. The Narrator then spends the rest of the volume trying to prove she'd been having lesbian affairs. In the new version, cutting some 250 pages from the proofs, she dies along a river, his ensuing obsession considerably reduced.
By August, 1922, he'd called this new, shortened version Albertine disparue ("Albertine Missing") but his posthumous editors eventually suppressed the revision. The typescript itself "went missing," not to be discovered and published until 1987.
In October, after finishing work on The Prisoner, he resumed editing The Fugitive, before he decided to change the title to Albertine disparue, hoping to avoid any confusion with Tagore's new novel, The Fugitive. Some published editions would call Proust's sixth volume La fugitive and others, Albertine disparue, but only the title had been changed.
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| The cork-lined bedroom Proust rarely left |
The confusion is not entirely unexpected, given Proust worked from his sickbed, rarely leaving his apartment during these last few years. By June, he continued editing even though his temperature was often around 102°. In August, he couldn't tell his typist what he wanted her to do; in September, he had several severe asthma attacks.
His eyesight deteriorated, he had periods of giddiness, flu turned into bronchitis. He tried to stand up but often "fell over." By November, bronchitis became pneumonia. But he continued to edit his novel's proofs.
One major problem with the revised Albertine disparue (not to mention several other last-minute revisions) was, there was no easy continuity with the opening of Time Regained, even as to where it should begin. Would he have inserted another volume about those years his Narrator spent in a sanatorium during and immediately after the War?
There were minor, contradictory details still needing clarification that perhaps another pair of eyes might find so he could correct them. Yet, considering how his creative process worked, could he have ever finished it...?
Looking at the piles of papers left in Proust's room, there was no way, now, there'd ever be "a definitive text." Ironically, on November 18th, Marcel Proust ran out of Time. He was 51.
Regardless of his having written "The End," his novel still wasn't quite finished when his funeral was held on November 22nd.
– Dick Strawser
Read my 1st installment for The Proust Centennial, "987 Words: Remembrance of Things Proust," here...
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