Few authors foreground the arts quite so comprehensively as Proust; certainly, none made them so central to their own literary production. Proust's whole life was saturated with love of the arts, and so too was to be his great novel: probably no other work of literature celebrates the arts as totally as his, or is so convincing in this pursuit. If one could point to, say, Joyce or Thomas Mann as examples of writers who display a keen awareness of the literary possibilities of incorporating the arts into the fabric of their own work, even their efforts seem small when compared to Proust's.

We are fortunate in possessing a clear picture of Proust’s artistic tastes in his youth, and as he grew up. Two general questionnaires which he filled in have survived (CSB, pp.335–7), and the entries for the arts make fascinating reading: if, at the age of about fourteen, there is a predictable juvenility about some of his choices (George Sand, the historian Augustin Thierry, Musset, Meissonnier, Mozart, Gounod), there are already signs of the maturity which was to be expressed, fully-fledged, in the questionnaire completed at the age of 21. Here, the list acquires more substance: Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Baudelaire, Vigny, Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt. And, as if to underscore the import of his choices, at the top of the questionnaire Proust has written ‘Marcel Proust par lui-même’ [‘Marcel Proust on himself’].

In a 1975 essay, where I proposed Frost's “The Wind and the Rain” as his best “unknown” poem, I also claimed that the opening ten poems in A Witness Tree (1942) (“The Wind and the Rain” is one of them), is the most impressive sequence of poems to be found anywhere in the poet's work. The sequence, I wrote, contained “extremes of delicate tenderness and of shocking brutality,” and its pervasive melancholy reached a depth not hitherto encountered, or to be encountered again, in Frost. Recently two accounts of the biographical circumstances out of which A Witness Tree emerged have caused me and perhaps others to think again about that book, especially its opening sequence, and about the degree to which a poet's art can be more fully understood and appreciated when we learn more about the life experiences that surround and motivate it. My comments here are directed toward clarifying, or at least exploring further, these matters of literary and biographical criticism.

The Narrator's reflections on love, sexuality and friendship are at first sight baldly phrased, universalising and tragic.

In Paris, on Saturday, 3 September 1870, as news of the humiliating defeat of the French by the invading Prussian army at Sedan spread throughout the capital, Dr Adrien Proust, a middle-aged Catholic bachelor, a grocer's son originally from the small provincial town of Illiers, married Jeanne Weil, the Jewish daughter of a wealthy Parisian family. At twenty-one, the beautiful, dark-haired woman was fifteen years younger than the bridegroom. No one knows how they met, but it is likely they were introduced at a government sponsored event or social gathering. Adrien had recently risen to the top ranks in public health administration and Jeanne's family had many connections in official circles.

Marcel was born the following July at Uncle Louis Weil’s estate at Auteuil where Jeanne’s family usually spent the summer months. The house, built of quarrystones, was large, with spacious rooms, including a drawing room with a grand piano and a billiard room where the family sometimes slept to keep cool during heat waves. In fine weather Louis and his guests enjoyed the large garden with a pond surrounded by hawthorn trees, whose blossoms Marcel was also to admire in his other uncle, Jules Amiot’s garden in Illiers.

As we turn the page from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the literary reputation of Marcel Proust is clearly on the rise. Not only does he continue to be considered a primary figure in European Modernism occupying the same rarefied aesthetic atmosphere as James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, but increasingly, within the field of French Studies, he is being singled out as the twentieth-century writer, or even, the French writer of all time. Thus Jean-Yves Tadié, the author of the most comprehensive biographical study on Proust to date and also the general editor of the 1987–9 Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu, does not hesitate to assert:

We live in an age of epistemes as decals: depthless, portable, easy to peel and carry off. Or so we think. Robert Frost did not. But his epistemes were not firmly anchored either. Here is an example. Frost rejects the gentility and aesthetic dandyism of his immediate predecessors (William Vaughn Moody, say, or Oscar Wilde). They, politely or with disdain, luxuriated in art's imposed or elected exemption from the commerce-based estimates of the Gilded Age. They rejected their culture's exaltation of values associated with industrial manufacture and market capitalism, technology and business - the values of utility and commodity - as ultimate standards of worth. Frost shared their doubt that commercial viability and usefulness alone could properly evaluate all things, but he differed from both genteel and art-for-art's-sake assumptions in taking it for granted that his culture's dominant values were real ones, with their own legitimate, if partial, claims on literature and life. Thus Frost's “realism” of subject matter and treatment, his culturally derived or driven recasting of supposedly feminine poetry as a form of manly prowess and competition, and his “commercial” insistence on “the trial by market everything [including poems] must come to” (CPPP, 845) seem to exist at a chill, even polar remove from Wilde's heated, anti-utilitarian faith that life imitates art. But the complications twist, then turn. Frost's passionate preference for Jamesian “wishful” thinking, his insistence that knowledge is metaphorical, his subtle but persistent intertextuality, his unmooring of meaning from fixity, and his pleasure in parodic appropriation all have a Wilde, postmodern savor.

Received opinion dictates that Proust is a 'difficult' author. Is this really so? After all, everyone knows something about him, even if it is only at second hand. On the level of Proust the person, the (in)famous cork-lined room he inhabited for a number of years is deemed to epitomise an ivory-tower existence far removed from the harshness of everyday life. The fact is, of course, he lived on the bustling street side of a modern building in the heart of the business and social district of the Parisian right bank, and was in rapid and frequent contact with the world outside. He even had a telephone, a means of communication he would memorably immortalise in his novel. Installing the cork was only intended to be a temporary measure, to shield him from builders hammering away in the next apartment. Not much of an ivory tower, really. But the elitist image is surprisingly persistent, and still biases opinion: Proust, in moving in high bourgeois and aristocratic circles, and in dealing with them in his novel, is assumed to be a snob, not an appropriate stance from which to speak with universal authority. And of course his demeanor as a sickly individual, sexually suspect, sleeping during the day and 'working' at night, is frowned upon: these are not features which add up to greatness. Being wealthy, too, is a distinct disadvantage on this score: as one of the 'idle rich', Proust can hardly be expected to speak for the generality of human beings.

Proust's Narrator is the successor to a long line of heroes in European fiction who mirror the author's sensibility and reflect his conception of reality. This mirror is different however. The central character in A la recherche du temps perdu is more akin to Flaubert's and Stendhal's characters who reflect their inner vision of the world outside them, than to the robust actors of La Comédie humaine whose physical image is inseparable from the reality they represent. The psychological analysis of Proust's fictional hero reaches into the cocoon of sensations, impressions and reflections which inform his view of himself as an artist. It is they which furnish the key to the Narrator's personality. If we wish to understand him we must look into his mirror, share the images swirling around in his imagination and unravel the process by which they form patterns which will turn into a work of artistic creation. The path down which the reader is led is the same as that which the central character himself follows without realising it. The originality of the portrait lies in the fact that the novelist he becomes at the end of A la recherche du temps perdu relives his transformation and shares it with the reader without damaging the chrysalis from which he is emerging.

Near the middle of 'Combray', the opening section of Proust's Search, the Narrator describes the exceptional after-dinner walks the Protagonist and his parents used to take on beautiful May evenings. His father would lead them far out into the countryside as darkness was falling and then suddenly ask, 'Where are we?' (I, 113; I, 136/160). After his mother invariably acknowledged that she was utterly lost, her amused husband would point out that they were standing right in front of their lower garden gate: by a gently circuitous route, he had led them home in the dark. 'You're extraordinary!' the wife would exclaim admiringly. The Protagonist would stand silent, attentive to how the forbidding world of unfamiliar shadows around him was now transforming itself under his feet into the welcoming garden of his childhood.

No novelist could compose such an incident of getting lost and finding one’s way again without thinking about how to tell a story and its effect on the reader. In this case, the father’s surefooted navigation stands for Proust’s confidence about the direction and outcome of his story. ‘You may think you’ve lost your way in my narrative, but I know exactly where I’m taking you.’ We are, of course, still close to the opening.

British psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips has suggested that “the contingent self enjoins us to imagine a life without blaming, a life exempt from the languages of effort and self-control.” To live a life without blame, and to be exempt from the language of self-control, ought to be good things. Much may be said in favor of flirtation, with its tolerations, and Phillips says it well. But notice the equation, by apposition, that informs his remarks: effort and self-control seem somehow essentially to involve blame - blame of others and of oneself. The contingent self Phillips is concerned to advance is in certain respects the opposite of the responsible self, at least from the point of view of conventional society, which is why it is usually something of a scandal. The contingent self really isn't, then, a “self” at all, as that term is properly understood. In any case, it is not a self in the legal sense: hence the concept of the “diminished capacity” of selves made contingent by neglect, abuse, insanity, poverty, immaturity. An ethics founded on the contingent self diminishes everyone's capacity: to do wrong, to be punished, to be condemned. Its language is always the language of mercy, which brings us to Robert Frost.

The promotion in Proust's novel of inner psychological states is regularly reinforced by the Narrator's pronouncements on their importance. Thus our social life stands ostensibly as inferior to the intricate workings of private memory; time spent in society is deemed wasted, whereas according time to introspective contemplation is commended. The aesthetic solutions proposed in Le Temps retrouvé confirm this assumption. The fact that the Narrator, through involuntary memory, rediscovers his private past that is now to be immortalised in the work of art reinforces the view that the internal psychological ruminations of the Narrator should override the social. Reflecting on friendship, which signals the social, the Narrator protests that the self loses its true orientation, becoming 'hospitalisé dans une individualité étrangère' (ii, 689) ['hospitalised in an extraneous individuality' (iii, 456/541)].

“Robert Frost was so fascinated by the story of his life that he never tired of retelling it.” Thus Lawrance Thompson opened the first paragraph of the introduction to the first volume of the official biography. In the thirty-three years since the publication of Robert Frost: The Early Years, neither have readers of Frost tired of retelling, untelling, or simply telling off Thompson. The “Frost biographical wars,” as Christopher Benfey remarks in a review of Jay Parini's 1999 Robert Frost: A Life, continue unabated, and at the center of the conflict stand opposed the public figure of the poet as venerable Yankee sage and the figure of the private man as “monster” inscribed in Thompson's biography. The distortion in both aspects of this Janus-Frost has in recent years drawn an impressive array of critics and biographers into the fray, among them William H. Pritchard, Stanley Burnshaw, John Evangelist Walsh, Lesley Lee Francis, Jeffrey Meyers, and, as mentioned, Jay Parini.

The editor of the present volume reminded us in his Introduction of the anxieties that are associated with the sheer length and bulk of A la recherche du temps perdu, and a number of contributors have returned to this theme, sometimes anxiously, but more often in a mood of celebration. Proust's novel has always been famous for being long, and it is currently getting longer as more and more sketches, drafts and cancelled passages become available to the international community of his readers. Yet brevity too is a Proustian watchword, and it is to this aspect of his literary art that I should like to devote these concluding pages. Proust's writing can often be brisk, pithy, pointed, laconic, concise, poetically compacted, and it would be unfortunate if these qualities came to be obscured by his long-range plotting, his wideangle view of French society or the headlong inventiveness of his 'grand style'.

However, rather than immerse myself at once in the detail of Proust’s text and in the Venetian episode that I shall shortly be quarrying for one of my main examples, I shall take a preliminary glance at a pictorial detail from the brush of a great Venetian painter who does not figure in Proust’s pantheon. The painter is Canaletto (1697–1768), and the work in question a view of the Grand Canal from the Campo S. Vio. This scene was painted before 1723, and is now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Madrid.

Robert Frost repeatedly warns his readers, sometimes openly, often mischievously, to look for further implications in his poems and not to stop with their obvious associations. In 1927 he said, “I almost think a poem is most valuable for its ulterior meanings . . . I have developed an ulteriority complex.” This view about his writing has been increasingly acknowledged by his more critical readers from the second half of the twentieth century as they explore the deceptively homespun New England persona and subject matter of many of Frost's poems and discover the many subtle ways that they embody and play with the forms and thought of our literary tradition, including the Bible, as well as much of the theological, philosophical, and scientific thought of an increasingly global world. It is clear from his critical writings and from his talks that he wanted the public to recognize this aspect of his work and was annoyed by how slow most of his readers were to grasp it. The question to ask a poet, he said, is “not what he means but what he's up to”(CPPP, 823). His readers failed to see what he was up to, how large a world of forms and ideas he was drawing on.

Of the many areas of Proust scholarship, the one that has probably most enriched our knowledge of A la recherche du temps perdu consists of the wealth of genetic and textual studies on the novel carried out over the past thirty years. It now seems generally agreed that the long history of the novel's conception, elaboration and publication is not only fascinating and rewarding in its own right, but also enlightens our understanding and appreciation of Proust's work, giving a glimpse into the mind of one of the great masters of modern writing. In this chapter, I will outline the various compositional stages the novel underwent in the fourteen years of its development between January 1908, when Proust began to jot down ideas for a new fictional project, and November 1922, when - already terminally ill - he envisaged a highly controversial reorganisation of the novel's penultimate volume, Albertine disparue.

From ‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’ to the novel of remembrance (1908–1909)

The year 1908 is generally considered as the starting point for the Recherche. Proust is thirty-six years old and virtually unknown as a writer. He has published a collection of short stories, portraits and poems, Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896), two annotated translations of Ruskin, La Bible d’Amiens (1904) and Sésame et les lys (1906), as well as a series of articles and reviews, but has produced no fiction since 1899, when he abandoned his novel Jean Santeuil. We do not know precisely what made him return to novelistic writing in the early months of 1908.

Robert Frost was an immensely skillful and conscientious poet, and he was fascinated by the technical aspects of versification. The magical paradox of fine verse is that it marries fixed measure with fluid idiomatic speech, and no poet more keenly relished and embodied this paradox than Frost. For more than sixty years, he wrote in a manner that was both utterly conventional and brilliantly idiosyncratic. Further, he was a thoughtful analyst of his art and made many just and original observations about it.

Unfortunately, however, Frost's talents and insights as a craftsman have seldom been adequately acknowledged. There are two reasons for this neglect. First, Frost is a poet's poet. His art conceals art. It is easy to overlook his dexterities because he appears to achieve them effortlessly. Second, though Frost made many sparkling perceptions about versification, they are not conveniently accessible in any one place, but are scattered here and there in his correspondence, in the handful of short essays and prefaces he published in his lifetime, and in transcripts of interviews with him and of public lectures he delivered.

”Directive” (CPPP, 344) is one of the most widely and variously interpreted of Frost's poems. Randall Jarrell in his seminal essay on Frost's poems quoted it at length, and though pronouncing it largely uninterpretable, praised its “humor and acceptance and humanity.” Some have connected it to the Romantic solipsism of Emerson, seeing it as a kind of guidebook that one must write for oneself without benefit of the normal moral and intellectual landmarks. But as always with Frost's audience the appearance of solipsism, sarcasm, and even contradiction could not prevent many readers from seeing the poem as good plain country truth. By the time the poem appeared Frost had long been a figure of folklore, and there is enough of his familiar folksy routine in it to preserve it from a too close inspection by most of his admirers. Even his academic readership had by the time of Steeple Bush (1947) accepted Frost as a poet with the limitations implied by popularity. He was not (as a recent critic announced) “tinglingly alive with a sense of the modern.”