Collecting Proust in the New Millennium (continued)
What I found – highlights
In English translation I have complete sets of first editions of ROTP & ISOLT, US and UK, and many illustrated editions of the Recherche and Swann. The condition of all is “good to fine”. I have first editions of the seminal works of biography and literary criticism, letters and memoires.
At the apex of French language Proustiana there exists a despairingly finite number of “good” to “fine” autographed and inscribed (by the author) numbered copies of the original editions of the seven novels comprising ALRDTP on various special fine papers. There is almost but not quite nothing on the market at this level. Since I began there has almost always been one or two Grasset Swann’s, listed at from $5000 to $45,000, with prices subject to the normal rules governing the value of first editions. I never saw a one volume first edition of A l’ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs for sale at any price until now. This copy is in fine binding and slipcase from the library of Jean Schlumberger, at the time of publication a member of the NRF editorial board one of the first run by which so horrified MP when he sawthe “microscopic” size font the printer used. It runs to 443 pages, eight fewer pages than a Grasset Swann. (The font in my paperback Penguin edition of A l’ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs in the Grieve translation is quite readable at 531 pages.)
I have gathered a few of the more affordable original editions of the later volumes of the Recherche. As of 2009 I have an original two-volume edition of La Prisonniere (1923) in a fine binding. I have the two-volume original edition of Albertine Disparue (Nov. 30, 1925) numbered 132 of 1200, in “good” condition. I also have a copy of Volume One of the original edition of Les cote de Guermantes, #678 of 800, in “good/very good” condition.
Foiled by the hard realities - extreme scarcity and astronomical prices - of collecting at the peak of the Proustiana market, I decided to buy what I could of the rarest titles I could afford including French original editions of second-tier items. My quest grew more interesting. Rather than try to repeat what has already been done better, I would attempt to form the most well-rounded and comprehensive collection possible. I bought not firsts but fine, serviceable editions of books that influenced Proust’s development by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, as well as a sampling of Saint-Simon’s diaries, a collection of the letters of Mme. De Sevigne, Rousseau’s Confessions, Freud’s Psychology of Every Day Life, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, and Whistler and Montesquiou. The Butterfly and the Bat by Edgar Munhall – books and a few artifacts that animate the France of the Belle Epoque. (One such non-book item is a period Magic Lantern that might be the very one with which Proust himself projected those lantern slides depicting the life of Genevieve de Brabant upon the walls of his lonely room in Combray/Illiers). In French I have first editions of books and memoirs by his contemporaries and friends, the acknowledged social and artistic celebrities of the day. Two highlights of the latter are Reynaldo Hahn’s The Divine Sarah (Hahn’s biography of one of Proust’s idols, a prototype of the thespian character la Berma, and Hahn’s own close friend Sarah Bernhardt) and Le Journal de l’Abbe Mugnier, a Catholic priest whose “flock” occupied the golden pinnacle of Sainte Germain, and who usually supped with those who “dined” and never “ate”. In English I have first editions of Ruskin’s Sesame and Amiens as well as ofPhilippe Jullian’s Prince of Aesthetes, a biography of Proust’s friend, the aristocrat, bon vivant, social tyrant and third-rate poet, Robert de Montesquieu; of My Blue Notebook, the memoirs of the famous Belle Epoque courtesan Liane de Pougy; of The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman’s history of Europe from the Belle Epoque to the outbreak of WW I; of Misia, Gold and Fizdale’s biography of Misia Sert; and of Paris Sees It Through, the journalist H. Pearl Adam’s account of living through WW I in Paris. As well, I have books by and about Proust’s father, his Mother, and even a copy of a pamphlet for a lecture delivered by his brother, Dr. Robert Proust.
I purchased copies of NRF magazines, in which parts of the Recherche first appeared in an edited version slightly different from what the author published later in the original editions. I acquired NRF debuts of “Les Intermittences du coeur” and “Le Mort d’Albertine”. I also bought some of Proust’s short stories and essays in their first NRF appearances, such as “Un Baiser (The Kiss)” and “Une Agonie”; and “A propos de style de Flaubert” as well as “A Propos de Baudelaire”. These early pieces illuminate shadows around the Recherche. Proust’s life story shows that he read and wrote almost constantly, long before he started ALRDTP. His early salon and literary pieces, his translations of Ruskin, his two posthumously published unfinished fictions Jean Santeuil– composed between 1895 and 1899 -and Contre Sainte-Beauve – following Ruskin and preceding the Recherche – his first and unsuccessful attempt to convey philosophy through art, are all in my archive.
These posthumous publications transfused thrilling new vigor into the scholarship and creative guesswork of devoted academics, men like Tadie and Milly in France and Enright and Kilmartin in England. In the last thirty years, the painstaking and seminal (but also flowery and self-indulgent) Scott Moncrieff translation, warmly received at first, has been subjected to harsh criticism and sometimes nit-picky and perhaps unfair and less satisfying revision. Entirely new English translations have appeared that purport to adhere more strictly to the now accepted texts – texts that in some cases were drastically revised by the academics mentioned above. All these and the commentary and criticism they spawned increased the scope of the collector who aims at thoroughness. Now the Proust Industry is self-perpetuating. It both whets and indulges an insatiable appetite.
Aside from the Recherche, Proust wrote tens of thousands of letters. He never wanted them published, and repeatedly asked the recipients to destroy them. One notes that he wrote CSB to convince the reader that works of art transcend the artist’s personality and biographical details, hence directly contradicting Sainte-Beuve’s theory that knowledge of the writer’s life provided the reader with all he needs to understand a writer’s work. Fortunately thousands of Proust’s letters were saved. Whether or not one agrees with Proust’s conviction a’ la CSB, neither the worldwide Proust Industry nor the recipients of his letters complied with the author’s wishes. His correspondence has been published in as many volumes and formats as his fiction to comprise one of the highlights of the Industry. The French engine of the Proust Industry, naturally enough, has published the most volumes of his correspondence. Only a few volumes of selected letters have appeared in English, the four volumes of Selected Letters and Mina Curtiss’s seminal Letters of MP.
