Proust letters going under the hammer
THE reviews for French writer Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) work were glowing in their praise.
Of course – they had actually been written by the author himself!
The revelations are contained in letters that are set to hit the auction block at the end of this month.
In the letters, Proust wrote about the need to get reviews of the first volume of his now-renowned sevenvolume Remembrance Of Things Past to be put in newspapers.
(The title – A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu in its original French – tends to be translated as In Search Of Lost Time nowadays rather than the first translation of the work’s title by C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922.)
Proust wrote the notices himself and sent them to be typed up by his publisher “so there is no trace of my handwriting”.
The letters have come to light with an extremely rare copy of Swann’s Way, which is expected to go for about US$580,000 (RM2.4mil) when it goes under the hammer in Paris on Oct 30.
Proust paid 300 francs – around US$1,175 (RM5,000) today – for a flattering reference to Swann’s Way
to appear on the front page of the
Figaro – then, as now, one of France’s leading newspapers.
He paid a further 660 francs for another much larger summary of a glowing review by a friend of his to similarly appear on the front page of the Journal Des Debats.
The letters to his editor, Louis Brun, show that marketing hucksters had little to teach Proust when it came to the dark arts of hype and selective editing.
Swann’s Way, he wrote, is a “little masterpiece” which “like a gust of wind blows away the soporific vapours” of everything else on sale.
Proust tried to get three other publications to carry the highlights of his friend’s review, although he was prepared to offer money to sweeten their passage to only one of them, the Gil Blas daily.
His desperation for publicity by fair means or foul was partly because he had to pay for the book’s publication himself, experts say.
A string of publishing houses had turned it down before Brun persuaded his boss, Bernard Grasset, to take it in 1913 – but only if the author paid all the costs.
Even so, Grasset had no great hopes for it, telling a friend to whom he gave an advance copy: “It’s unreadable.”
But within weeks of its publication, some critics saw it as a work of genius even though others remained puzzled by it.
“The publisher Gaston Gallimard would later write to Proust saying that turning it down was the biggest mistake of his career,” says Benoit Puttemans of auctioneers Sotheby’s.
Ever the aesthete, Proust had a special edition done to celebrate in expensive “Japan tissue” made from the bark of mulberry trees.
Only four copies still exist – one of which he gifted to Brun for the delicate operations he undertook on the author’s behalf.
It will now go under the hammer with the letters on Oct 30. – AFP