Word: proust
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...takes my life with her," he wrote of his mother in the most passionate letters included in this book. In revealing words he told a friend: "To Mother I was always four years old." Proust began to write with the dedication of a man possessed. Rarely did he leave his dark, stuffy room, and when he did it was to make midnight forays into hotels and parties to watch for the quirks of behavior and appearance of the people with whom he loaded his long novel...
...Proust submitted the first part of Remembrance of Things Past to a firm of which André Gide was a member. Gide turned it down. Later, after Proust had published it at his own expense, Gide wrote him that "the rejection of this book will remain . . . one of the most poignantly remorseful regrets of my life . . ." With infinite grace Proust replied: "Had there been no rejection ... I should never have had your letter...
...last years Proust found fame, but by then it hardly mattered. He could live only by alternately dosing himself with stimulants and sedatives. The obtuse charge that he was a snob roused him to heat in his last letters. He was as friendly, he insisted, with valets and chauffeurs as with princes. And was it not the world of fashion, he asked another correspondent, which "is slandered ... is always wrong, talks nonsense [in my writing...
...November, 1922, Proust called his maid at 3 o'clock one morning to dictate notes for his book-on how it felt to die. Later the same day he was dead...
...Proust never dated his letters...