The day they hated Marcel Proust: old, snob and right

• Little Marcel Literary and personal confessions

How long have we read In search of lost time ? Five years, 15 years, 30 years? Will we ever find the time to reread it as we promised then? While searching for their time, Proust readers settle for collecting replicas that keep the longing alive. Proust and Spain, Proust in love, Proust and music, Proust and its editors ... These are some of the issues that have fueled books and cycles in recent years. Now, we can add one more theme to the collection: Proust and the people who hated Proust . Those interested can search Proust, Goncourt Prize. A literary mutiny , the book by Thierry Laget that has just published Editions of the Subsoil.

A summary: before the war, By the way of Swann he was a candidate for the Goncourt prize and took a vote. Then came the war and then, the Goncourt of December 1919 (now a century ago), which had a clear favorite: The wooden crosses , by Roland Dorgelès, was a moving tale of trenches, patriotic and noble . He had the audience on his side. But In the shadow of the blooming girls slipped into the party, he took the prize from Dorgelès and half France enraged. "They reward the old man," Louis Aragon wrote: "We never imagined that a laborious snob would receive that award."

What was reproached to Proust? All. He was reproached for writing poorly , for writing about a world of refinements and swimming when France still cried to its dead, that it was rich and that it was old (he was 48 years old). He was also reproached for liking men and carrying the sins of the Goncourt jury, in which, it is true, there was a suspicious character.

The conclusion was surprising: Proust was the writer of the right, representative of unbearable privileges when France shared the suffering of war.

Proust of rights? The only policy memory left of In Search of Lost Time is the Dreyfus case, in which Proust aligned with the progressives. «In 1919, Proust was a stranger; few people knew that he had been a fervent dreyfusard. As he wrote in Le Figaro , which was the newspaper of the conservative bourgeoisie, and as his main support for the award was Léon Daudet, who was an editorialist for L'Action française , a monarchist newspaper, people imagined that he shared those ideas. In addition, in his novel the work of a nostalgic of the aristocratic world was seen . And, as his adversary was close to the Socialists, a kind of political antagonism was invented between them: if Dorgelès was the left, Proust could only be right-wing. The truth is that Proust went far beyond these oppositions: it describes a whole world in its complexity and wealth. Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare are right or left? Does this question make sense for works that span centuries and bear witness to what is deeper in the human experience?

Who speaks is Thierry Laget, the author of Proust, Goncourt Award. A literary mutiny . And in his words he drops that the real reason to disdain In the shadow of the blooming girls is not politics or snobbery; The real reason is that the challenge of reading Proust is a lot and not everyone is up to it.

Was the 1919 reader prepared for Proust? Were there books that would have paved the way? « I don't think that reading Proust is difficult, neither in 1919 nor in 2019. The difficult thing is to find the time to learn to walk to the rhythm of the narration . As soon as we have the right rhythm, everything is extraordinarily easy and pleasing. The only difficulty for the readers of 1919 was that they only had two of the seven novels of In Search of Lost Time and there could be confusion before a book that seems to have no intrigue or construction.

So why the misunderstanding? «Was it possible to understand, at that time, the radical novelty of such a novel, which involves everything real, from love to music, from homosexuality to death? Goncourt Academy knew how to do it. But Proust himself guessed the difficulties he would have to overcome. He said: ' From time to time, a new and original writer arrives [...] This new writer is often tiring to read and difficult to understand because he sees things through new relationships' ».

Proust is an almost comic character in Laget's book. His enemies characterize him as a vampire who, instead of blood, drinks milk in his spooky night outings . For some he is as a millionaire as a Rotschild ; for others it is ruined and lives pathetically. He himself is naively vain and lends himself to the game awkwardly. He receives the worst journalists in Paris in his apartment and looks like an idiot in his chronicles. «It is true that Proust sought glory with an almost childlike aspiration. But he was aware of the value of what he had written and wanted a public reward for years of work and loneliness. The actors and opera singers greet at the end of the performance: the audience applauds them. Writers do not usually have that honor. And sometimes they deserve it.

Just ask about Dorgelès, the Salieri of this story . « The wooden crosses are one of the most beautiful French novels about the war of 1914. It is the testimony of a journalist, touching and very human, but it is not the work of a writer who forges his language. If he hadn't found Proust on his way, he would have had the Goncourt in 1919 but I don't think we were talking about him now.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• literature
• France
• culture

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