RESEARCH General Arts

PROUST
Six letters show French novelist to be an obsessive editory of own copy

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

8/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — To say that the French novelist Marcel Proust was attentive to every detail of publishing his great work, "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" ("In Search of Time Lost"), is a bit of an understatement.

His heavy and perpetual edits on the page proofs alone must have driven his editors up the Eiffel Tower, and his torrent of letters carrying even more changes – not to mention criticisms and reprimands – probably made them consider jumping, at least occasionally.

New evidence of the incredible extent to which the master tinkered with his copy has surfaced in the form of six "new" letters, previously held in private hands and never published.

The University of Illinois' Rare Book and Special Collections Library is the new owner of the six letters, all from Proust to his publisher Gaston Gallimard, whom he called his "confessor," and to Gallimard’s assistant, Berthe Lemarié. The letters – 50 pages in total, all handwritten and handsomely bound in a small multi-colored leather book with matching case – recently were sold at a Sotheby's auction in London. The library, which holds one of the world's largest collections of Proust materials, does not know who the seller was.

In typical form, Proust only dated one of the letters. All of them, however, deal with the publication of "A L'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs" ("Within a Budding Grove") and "Le Côté de Guermantes," two of the seven volumes that comprise "Time Lost."

According to Caroline Szylowicz, the librarian and keeper of the Kolb-Proust Archive for Research at the UI, the new letters not only "document Proust’s involvement in the publishing process," but also may offer valuable clues that might help scholars untangle the terrible cobweb of dates and cloud of versions surrounding the novel. Proust, a chronic asthmatic, lived only long enough to see the first four volumes of "Time Lost" through publication.

In the first newly acquired letter, Proust returns corrected proofs for "Grove," ranting about missing words, sentences and pages; he vents most of his spleen, however, on the "ignorant" typists, who had the audacity to change one of his words. In the fourth letter, he tells the ailing Gallimard to stop worrying so much, and explains that he took back his manuscript only to make some "small changes," not to withdraw from the deal. With "Grove" about to be published, Proust complains bitterly in the sixth letter that the type is too small, and insists that it be changed – otherwise no one will read it, he says; he also notes that there are mistakes – even on the title page.

Proust compulsively rewrote his final proofs, often gluing in scraps of paper and unfolding inserts and jumping from volume to volume.
Because of the huge amount of ongoing changes, there is "no one definitive edition" of "Recherche," Szylowicz said, conceding that "scholars have always argued about what Proust intended – and probably always will."