Proust's Deadline

4. Grasset's Revenge

4 Grasset’s Revenge One wonders if by some quirk of history this is to be Grasset’s editorial revenge, in the form of a commercial coup, for losing Proust to Gallimard. —Christie McDonald, The Proustian Fabric 83 Some nine months before his death, Proust announced to his publisher Gaston Gallimard that the Recherche had scarcely begun. “J’ai tant de livres à vous offrir qui, si je meurs avant,” he wrote in February 1922, “ne paraîtront jamais (À la recherche du temps perdu commence à peine)” (I have so many books to offer you which, if I die before then, will never appear— À la recherche du temps perdu has scarcely begun) (Corr., 21:56). Proust’s eleventh-hour remark to Gallimard clearly indicates a state of affairs that has relatively recently come to the attention of the public: À la recherche du temps perdu is an unfinished work. The announcement of future volumes that appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Française just days after Proust’s death bears witness not just to the novel’s incompletion, but to the stunning extent of it. “In press: Sodome et Gomorrhe III. La Prisonnière; Albertine disparue. Forthcoming: Sodome et Gomorrhe in several volumes (suite); Le Temps retrouvé (conclusion)” (see Chapter 1). This barely posthumous announcement of several volumes to come— volumes that would never see the light of day—illustrates beautifully what Proust called elsewhere announcing in doubt. Just before his death he wrote to Gallimard, referring to La Prisonnière 040 Cano Ch04 (83-114) 7/25/06 5:03 PM Page 83 and Albertine disparue, “Si vous désirez, dans le doute, annoncer mes deux volumes suivants pour 1923, bien volontiers cher ami. Mais . . . je ne peux prendre aucun engagement” (If you wish to announce, in doubt, my next two volumes for 1923, go right ahead, dear friend. But . . . I cannot make any promises). He concluded by making his ritual connection between the practice of announcing and the threat of death: “En ce moment je vais un peu mieux cela me permet de me remettre au travail. Mais qui sait ce que demain me réserve. Si donc m’annoncer, c’est me promettre, non, ne m’annoncez pas” (Being slightly less ill at the moment, I can get down to work. But who knows what tomorrow has in store. Therefore, if to announce my books means committing me, then, no, don’t announce them) (Corr., 21:331; SL, 4:394, first translation modified). The final announcement ostensibly signifies an engagement on the part of the Nouvelle Revue Française to produce these last, vaguely designated volumes; but it is a promise whose real guarantor has disappeared, and it has since come to be read as a kind of text itself, a text that preserves the “letter” of Proust’s intention for future generations of critics.1 Proust’s long-anticipated disappearance in 1922 seems to have left his Nouvelle Revue Française editors in a quandary. Their unexplained advertisement of several more volumes in the Sodome et Gomorrhe series suggests that they expected to discover the corresponding notebooks among his manuscripts and were then disappointed. Proust had indicated just such an expansion in a letter to Gallimard at the beginning of the year, referring to an eventual “Sodome IV,” “Sodome V,” and “Sodome VI” (Corr., 21:39; SL, 4:290). But if toward the end of his life Proust once again intervened in every imaginable material detail of the publication process—dates of appearance, intervals between volumes, pagination , font size, the number of lines to a page, and down to the colored ribbon in which the text was wrapped—his sudden silence was all the more remarkable now. In 1986, sixty-four years after his death, when the corrected typescript of Albertine disparue was discovered among the papers of Suzy Mante-Proust, its unearthing was followed by a multiplication of critical voices that seemed to compensate for the absence of his once active, explicit editorial voice. In the intense interpretive effort set off by the rediscovery of 84 proust’s deadline 040 Cano Ch04 (83-114) 7/25/06 5:03 PM Page 84 the typescript, the slimmest traces of intention have become interpretable : the soiled envelope on which Proust scrawled his last words, the crossed-out note ending in anacoluthon, the “relative assurance” of the hand that formulated the incipit to Albertine disparue (“Ici commence Albertine disparue, suite...