Word: proust
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...MARCEL PROUST: A CENTENNIAL VOLUME, edited by Peter Quennell. 216 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...takes talent to recognize genius. Marcel Proust caught his first readers napping. One of the publishers to whom he submitted the first volume of his seven-volume masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past rejected it, explaining: "I cannot understand why a gentleman should employ 30 pages to describe how he turns and returns on his bed before going to sleep." When that first volume, Swann's Way, finally appeared in print in 1913-at Proust's expense-an influential critic dismissed the author as the "crudest of improvisers...
...things have changed. One hundred years after his birth (July 10, 1871), Proust is a critic's industry. "More has been written about Proust in many languages than about any other author of the 20th century," Proustian Scholar Roger Shattuck claimed a few years ago, counting over 3,000 items in bibliography. To which now can be added this slender volume of eleven essays of French, English and American Proustians collected by English Biographer and Critic Peter Quennell. The book is splendidly illustrated with a variety of period images ranging from lady bicyclists to Sarah Bernhardt reclining amid pillows...
...Funny and Cruel. Latter-day readers with almost Proust-like patience have even counted the number of images contained in Remembrance of Things Past -4,578. The Master himself has turned into a series of literary images, perhaps at the expense of his own work. There is le petit Marcel in his fur-lined greatcoat, posed like a sad Charlie Chaplin. Or running from salon to salon: the funniest and crudest young man in any room. Or crouched motionless before a rose, as if he could devour it and the whole world just by looking. Finally attention is drawn...
...American member questioned whether Powell readers should be a club at all, observing that it was snobbish and tended to make us take the master too seriously. He complained of comparisons to Proust. The Chairman ruled him out of order, saying that Powell was a clubbish sort of writer, and that anyway we were all too addicted to consider whether this was a good thing. [Applause.] A dissident younger group demanded a debate on the proposition that The Music of Time was altogether too cultivated and leisurely, neither as trenchantly funny as Evelyn Waugh nor as morally serious as Graham...