Collecting Proust in the New Millennium

by Tremain Haynes

One collector and Marcel Proust

I ask myself, me with a high school diploma, no French and a hearty antipathy to academia, how was I bewitched by Marcel Proust? Well, he is a magician and his prose is mesmerizing, traits he shares with many writers. Uniquely, however, Proust either chose, or in total submission to the necessity of art found no other subject worthy to write about but Time and Truth, the conundrum of existence that must be courageously illuminated and transformed into art. He enriches the lives of all who explore his work. Today, late in my life, his pursuit of a century ago and my own pursuit of him culminate in my collection.

Still, I am surprised to find myself, the quintessential amateur still actively collecting within this field that I liken to a robust, hydra headed industry, the Proust Industry. (Hydra headed? Certainly. A head each for academia, for professional biographers, for nostalgia oriented dilettantes, for bibliographers, for the reading public, for professional translators, for critics - heads ad infinitum.)

As a teenager when I first learned of Proust and the subject of his novel, which some kind critic presented to me in comprehensible prose I thought Proust must be unique and I would have to scale his formidable mountain of prose. I was always drawn to long novels - the longer, the better. So that moment was really as inevitable as learning Earth is a sphere. Once I caught a whisper of the Recherche my rendezvous with Proust became destiny. Nor did it matter that I came to him prematurely, as a naïve, restless teenager. Aiming high and without a guide, my thirst for literature at the time was voracious and undiscriminating.

At about seventeen - hormonal, overreaching, and unprepared - I lost my way in the third volume of Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Remembrance. Despite initial disappointment I knew one day I would take it up again. I never forgot Proust and fifteen years later – living in near total isolation on a sinking float house at the remote northern tip of Vancouver Island I read it through from the beginning. And in a un-Proustian way I was not disappointed, as one often is reaching back for something from the past, aglow with all the golden adornments of memory. On the contrary, in the first flush of that initial success, while having barely scratched the surface Proust was not done with me. We were fated for a lifelong relationship. And thus it has been for thirty years. Four years ago that I began aggressively to collect Proustiana in our contemporary way, on the Internet.

Reading Proust and Proustiana

For those who are curious I must insist that I have actually enjoyed reading most of the English language books I have collected. These include everything by Proust himself, except the longwinded and aimless Jean Santeuil which, like the author himself, I could not finish. Additionally I have read all the biographies, a great many of the books of background material, reference books and many of the books of literary criticism, especially the earliest ones, and the modern ones on Proust and Venice and on Proust as devotee and translator of Ruskin. Among my favorites are Samuel Beckett’s brilliant little essay, Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Reconstructions, Harold Pinter’s unproduced screenplay and his collaboration with Di Trevis on a successfully produced theater  adaptation. It is no wonder that interest in Proust and Proustiana remains robust nearly a century after his death. But despite my devotion and having read a great deal of and on such Proust I make no assertion of academic scholarship. One day my collection, a work in progress, will speak for me as an amateur bibliophile.

Collecting Marcel Proust in the New Millennium

Because I don’t speak French when I began collecting Proust in 2005, before I knew what excitement I was in for, I set the parameters of my ambition at first editions in English of all his works and the seminal works of biography and literary criticism. In pursuit of these, reading through lists on eBay and Abebooks, I got a sense of how oceanic this collecting field has become. It seemed relatively easy to track down what I wanted in English and by the time I had covered it I felt confident enough to pursue French original editions and other related material in French, for sifting through them in quest of material in English had made them familiar to me.

The internet is essential. This way of building a library offers the means to the end I seek though admittedly with the secondary rewards of the traditional, more painstaking but outmoded and expensive process of travelling to collect. I refer to the joy of travel itself, as it once was, and the camaraderie of dealers and other collectors. (I never could afford to collect Proustiana in this way though previously I traveled and collected in other fields despite being unable to afford to, so that I have some slight acquaintance with travel as the Way of the Gentleman Collector.) So a daily search of new listings is my morning routine. I’ve come to understand that this internet smorgasbord is the progeny of the vibrant germination of the “Proust Industry”.

I had to learn to accommodate one constant difficulty in my collecting career. It’s not the attenuation of quarry but my Champagne taste on a beer budget of which I speak, i.e. the necessity to acquire things with a small financial reserve usually much less than $1000. Impecuniosity sharpens focus, prioritizes, and promotes resourcefulness (or leads to destitution). Collectors collect with energetic optimism, like bees in search of pollen we buzz indiscriminately from weed to flower to compost with no thought for tomorrow. Or, perhaps, with these thoughts only: what will I find, where is it, how will I pay for it? For even under dung something will appear, and I will have to have it.

Today as a collector of Proust, my intention from the first was to form the best collection I could with limited means. I set a distant time limit as well. It is both self-indulgence and a speculative venture.  I hope the total will prove to be worth more than the sum of its parts and produce financial rewards for my retirement after having providing me with great pleasure until then. To maximize its monetary potential I intend to hold on to it until near the centenary of his death in 2022.