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Monsieur Proust (New York Review Books Classics)

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If you're a writer, you can't help but feel curious about the habits of other writers -- particularly the great ones, the writers you admire. How and when did they work? How did they accomplish their masterpieces? Of course, a cross-section of famous writers only demonstrates that there is no one way of working. Hemingway got up at dawn and wrote until lunch or so. Kafka had supper late in the evening and then began to write after ten or eleven o'clock, when everyone else was going to bed. Evidently day is as good as night, if you have talent and the will to write.

One of the more unusual schedules had to be that of Marcel Proust. Unlike Kafka, who wrote at night even though he had to get up in the morning to go to the insurance firm where he worked, Proust was a man of independent means and was thus able to maintain as irregular a schedule as he liked. Or rather, his schedule was highly regularized, it just wasn't exactly "normal." Typically, Proust woke up around four in the afternoon -- if he even really slept that much, which is an open question. Upon awakening, he would "smoke," which was his term for a fumigation process meant to relieve his asthma. Afterward he would drink one or sometimes two cups of cafe au lait prepared according to very stringent requirements. Sometimes he would eat a croissant, sometimes not. If he were staying home for the evening, as he often did in the years he was writing A la Recherche du temps perdu, he might begin work right after this "breakfast." If he was going out, he might not return until the middle of the night. Arriving home at, say, three in the morning, he might spend a few hours telling his chambermaid all about his evening -- and then, at perhaps six in the morning, after having been up all night, he would begin to write. What's more, he always wrote in bed. It really gives new meaning, when you consider this, to the famous opening line of his masterwork: "Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure." For a long time I went to bed early -- this was written by a man lying in bed after having been up all night.

The chambermaid who was Proust's nocturnal confidante during the last decade of his life -- precisely when he was writing his masterwork -- outlived him by more than sixty years. (Proust died in 1922, Ms. Albaret in 1984). For the bulk of those years, she maintained a strict silence about her former employer, honoring Proust's own sense of privacy. But finally, late in life, she felt the need to set the record straight and thus agreed to be interviewed for this "as told to" memoir. This is fortunate for fans of Proust, and for fans of literature in general, for her memoir is as intimate a portrait as you can find of any writer. It is the kind of view you produce of a person whom you love, respect, admire, but also serve in the most minute and detailed capacities. You can practically smell Proust's underwear in this book -- which is not to say that it's a lurid tell-all, because it isn't. Ms. Albaret seemed only too content to keep Proust's underwear perfectly clean.

Too clean, some critics have said. And it is true that Ms. Albaret flatly denies Proust's homosexuality. She admits he went to a certain male brothel, but only -- in her view -- to gather information for his book. Otherwise, if he had any trysts during her decade with him, she didn't see them, or didn't want to. But then again, so what? Do you really have to look for stains in the man's underwear? In comparison to all the vanguard writers who were absolute jerks, it comes as something of a relief to read of a writer who comes off as a sweet, generous, nostalgic, insightful man.

Not that Proust didn't have his eccentricities, because certainly he did: his nocturnal schedule, abstemious diet, the cork walls lining his bedroom to prevent noise, the curtains closed to keep out the sunlight. It can almost be harrowing to read of Ms. Albaret's indoctrination into Proust's neurotic universe, and yet at the same time you can recognize that this controlled climate was necessary to enable Proust to recreate the splendid universe of memories in his book. Ms. Albaret says it best herself:

"Now I realize M. Proust's whole object, his whole great sacrifice for his work, was to set himself outside time in order to rediscover it. When there is no more time, there is silence. He needed that silence in order to hear only the voices he wanted to hear, the voices that are in his books. I didn't think about that at the time. But now when I'm alone at night and can't sleep, I seem to see him as he surely must have been in his room after I had left him -- alone too, but in his own night, working at his notebooks when, outside, the sun had long been up."

And perhaps that is also the truest thing anyone can really say of a writer's schedule. Hemingway's dawn, Kafka's evening, Proust's night -- what they all have in common is their own internal rhythm, a private sequence of sun and moon. It was Proust's thesis that writing could recover time lost in reality, and yet the unspoken irony is that in reality you also lose time just in order to write.

The pleasure of memoirs is that for all that they allow a circumscribed vision of things they tend to offer coherent narratives of the past, and let you know "what it was like." This famous memoir by Celeste Albaret, Proust's housekeeper for ten years while he was writing his masterpeice, gives us thus a better and more complete view of the writer during his most productive years than could be imagined otherwise. Albaret was not a writer herself--the memoir was composed by others who shaped her oral reminiscences--but this work is beautifully shaped, and flows wonderfully. Almost all the major questions anyone would have about Proust--how he wrote, what he was like, who the bases were for the characters in his novel, and what his relations with his family were like--are answered in due course, and though Albaret retains her biases (she refuses to give much credence to his affairs with his chauffeur and others, for example) she is still as honest as can be. It's clear that she considered knowing and working for Proust the great event of her life, and she feels bound to tell as much as what she saw as she can.

What a love story!

In 1913, Marcel Proust's driver, Odilon Albaret, married a young woman from a small mountain village. Celeste knew no one in Paris, and her loneliness mounted. Proust suggested that she deliver copies of his new book to friends.

And so it began.

Messenger, housekeeper, confidante, friend, nurse --- until his death in 1922, Celeste Albaret spent more time with Proust than anyone else. Indeed, she spent so much more time at Proust's home than she did in her own that she and Odilon moved in. As her memoir attests, she begrudged not a minute of those hours in his service. [To buy "Monsieur Proust from Amazon, click here.]

Early on, she left Proust's apartment to go to church. "There will be plenty of time for that after I'm dead," he said. She never went to church again while he was alive. Proust --- the man and the writer --- came first. "Time contained no hours," she writes, "just a certain number of definite things to be done every day." And yet, no matter how exacting his demands, she never entered his room without a smile.

Proust, as you know, had an upside-down schedule. He awoke in an unheated, cork-lined bedroom around four in the afternoon, burned a special powder to hold his asthma at bay, then rang for coffee. In the evening, he might go out; if he did, he gave Celeste a full report on his return. And then his writing day began.....

In 1914, Proust saw Death ahead, and he decided that he had to suspend all travel and almost all socializing in order to focus on his book. With that, Celeste moved from the background of his life into sharp focus. Not only did she bring him coffee and tend to the smallest details of his life --- and Proust was a notorious micro-manager --- she got the big picture, and fast: "M. Proust's whole object, his whole great sacrifice for his work, was to set himself outside time in order to rediscover it. When there is no more time, there is silence. He needed that silence in order to hear only the voices he wanted to hear, the voices that are in his books. I didn't think about that at the time. But now when I'm alone at night and can't sleep, I seem to see him as he surely must have been in his room after I had left him -- alone too, but in his own night, working at his notebooks when, outside, the sun had long been up."

Proust liked to try out material on Celeste, and when he'd come home from a night in Society, he'd often tell her stories until dawn. These included astute descriptions of social figures. Even better, Proust made universal observations. "This is often why people are so nasty," he told Celeste. "They cannot forgive others for not being as ugly as themselves." On never going back to his childhood home: "The only place where you can regain lost paradises is in yourself." On rising in Society: "The main thing is to gain admission. After that it just builds up on its own."

"I was the privileged spectator," she writes, "of the most beautiful theater in the world."

And the most privileged assistant. It was Celeste who pasted Proust's scraps of paper --- his afterthoughts --- into the manuscript.

For all their intimacy, the relationship was always formal:

"Monsieur, why don't you call me `Celeste'? It makes me self-conscious when you call me `madame.'"
"Because, madame, I cannot."
That was that.

And yet, he admitted, "The only person I could have married is you." (In these pages, Proust is not a homosexual --- I like to think Celeste knew otherwise, but was a model of discretion. Which is entirely possible; she and her husband never gossiped about their employer.)

In every other way, this is a book of close observation, of details that, taken together, reveal character. Proust's insistence on old handkerchiefs. He brushed his teeth obsessively, but never washed with soap. He liked an occasional beer --- if brought to him from the Ritz. He wore cheap watches. He told Odilon not to buy a new taxi: "I don't want people to notice me as I go by."

You cannot read the long section on Proust's death without seeing the love story from both sides. You see it even more vividly in "Celeste," a movie Percy Adlon made about their relationship in 1981. Though filmed in Paris, everyone speaks German. No matter --- it's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. Sadly, there's no DVD.

In his last years, Proust compared the value of his book to Celeste's. "When I am dead, your diary would sell more copies than my books," he said. Yes, if she had published it right away. But she waited 60 years. That is love.

I am loving this book almost as much as I loved Marcel Proust's opus. It presents a wonderful view of Proust's inner sanctuary and the marvelous relationship he had with the one person, Celeste, he trusted to perform all of his chores, from making his daily coffee just when and how he liked it, to dealing with all of the people who besieged him both by phone and by calling at the house. He could not take precious time from his work to deal with anyone who had no connection to it.

'Monsieur Proust' is based on tape recorded interviews with Marcel Proust's personal assistant/chambermaid Celeste Albaret, made in the 1970's, several decades after Marcel's death. The text has (probably) been altered from the spoken word, and is very clear, consistent and readable. Celeste tells in detail about the last ten years of Proust's life, which he mostly spent in his bed, curtains blocking the light and a layer of cork shutting out noises - writing on 'À la recherche du temps perdu'. Celeste had to attend to all of Prousts routines and whims: he usually woke up late in the afternoon, ate only a croissant and some coffee and sometimes went out in the middle of the night to attend parties, and Celeste had to stay awake and let Marcel in cause he didn't use a key. As time went by the relationship between Marcel and Celeste became closer, and he became more and more dependent on her.
'Monsieur Proust' is not only about Marcels charming eccentricities. It also gives a glimpse of Paris in the late 1910's, and some insight into Proust as a writer, the relationship between his writing and memory and the demise of the old society. And the debacle between Proust and Gallimard and Gide when 'Du côté de chez Swann' was first refused (something Proust made them regret).
Also, Celeste criticizes some of the established views of Proust given by other commentators, his homosexuality for instance. I don't know how trusted Celeste can be as a narrator, and what may be additions made by the publisher, but 'Monsieur Proust' is a very captivating read.