First Steps.(Review)

The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (Cooper Square Press, 224 pp., $25.95)

Was there ever a great writer who began less auspiciously than Marcel Proust? His first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours, now ably translated, along with six additional pieces, by Joachim Neugroschel, so disgusted one reviewer that he ended up fighting a duel with its 25-year-old author. Others were less demonstrative only because they couldn't summon the energy for a more emphatic dismissal. And while it is true that the novelist Pierre Loti praised the book, a posthumous examination of his library reveals that he never even cut the pages of his complimentary volume.

Part of the problem was the hype that surrounded the book when it was first published in 1896, bound in sumptuous turquoise cloth. No one could fawn like Proust when he wanted a dedicatory preface, and he succeeded in bagging the elephant when he cozened old Anatole France, then at the summit of his glory, to churn out two pages of measured introductory praise. Proust also secured the blessings of Madeleine Lemaire, a formidable saloniste who sprinkled the book with some innocuous flower paintings (though not before requiring that Proust "remove certain pieces that are a bit muddled and dull" and that he also do something about the "immaturities that are found in each line and phrasings that are somewhat awkward").

Yet such was the chronic unsuccess of Les Plaisirs et les jours that, two decades later, when Proust had won the Prix Goncourt and was already a pillar of modernist literature, his first book remained a standing jest in the French literary world. Only 329 copies had been sold by 1918, and the publisher was looking for anyone to relieve him, "a tres bas prix," of 1,071 more that continued to clutter his basement.

In time, Proust himself would come to believe that an air of effete paltriness hung over the whole affair. Most of the stories in this volume of juvenilia aspire to be character studies of their young and neurotic protagonists. But it is evident that Proust is thoroughly dazzled by their aristocratic pedigree. To invoke the expression of a later age, he is "acting out" his own arriviste fantasies through heroes like the protagonist of "The Death of Baldassare Silvande, Viscount of Sylvania," dying before his time, or the pining daughter of the Viscount of Styria in "Violante or High Society." Another story, "The Melancholy Summer of Madame de Breyves," begins typically: "That evening, Francoise de Breyves wavered for a long time between Princess Elisabeth d'A.'s party, the opera, and the Livrays' play." A similar tone dominates "A Dinner in High Society" and "The End of Jealousy," which takes place in "the salon of Madame Seaune, nee Princesse de Galaise-Orlandes." Proust is so enamored of this rarefied world that he is quite incapable of subjecting it to the psychological vivisection that would become the most eminent quality of his seven-volume masterpiece.

And yet, never was the child more father to the man than the author of this book is father to the author of A la recherche du temps perdu. What begins here as a mildly pretentious pose becomes, two decades later, a monumental cultural reality. But the resemblance between Proust's earliest and latest works goes beyond their shared worldview. Unlike the roughly contemporary Rilke and Joyce, whose mature works are radically different from what went before, it seems clear that the young Marcel was training to become the mature Proust from the time of ...