Immediately after his death and the gradual posthumous appearance in France of all seven novels in a confusing and garbled text, critics considered the Recherche too cerebral and analytical to lend itself to illustration. The critics were wrong and time has turned that opinion on its head. Today we may safely say that despite its interiority and psychological complexity, all Proust’s prose is highly adaptable to illustration. Metaphoric imagery and detail is one of the outstanding rewards of Proust. There are dozens of illustrated versions of his work with new ones appearing regularly. Morelle’s aquatints for Un Amour du Swann (1998), and at the other extreme Brezet’s comic format lithographic work of the new millennium, could hardly take more differing perspectives. Combray (1998), A l’ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs (2002), and Un Amour de Swann (2006), are now in Brezet’s comic-formatted editions, with four years of labour intervening between their publications. While some considered these mere oddities and they certainly are not pure, they are reverent and sincere. They provide visual renderings only of the epiphanous moments of the novel, necessarily omitting the dense analytical prose. The more traditional watercolour illustrations of Van Dongen and Grau-Sala of the mid-twentieth century are informed by altogether different reference points from those of Brezet. Each has found its admirers. Here colour and line do not detract from the prose. I have included most of the illustrated editions in my archive. In this vein I purchased a fabulous large scale L’Affaire Lemoine numbered 108 of 110 copies. It was issued in modern fine linen binding of distinction and illustrated with twelve black and white engravings by twelve noted contemporary French engravers in 1971.
My greatest collecting coups to date lie in this area, three limited edition portfolios of engraved illustrations of immortal scenes and characters from ALRDTP. Inspired by the Recherche, I have catalogued them under “Spawn”. The earliest and rarest is one of just thirty-five folio copies of ten engravings by Varvara Zazouline, later known as Barbara Rhode. It’s very much a hands-on, homemade item, the front inscribed in the artist’s hand in red: Un Amour du Swann . . . Marcel Proust . . . vu par Varvara Zazouline en dix pointes siches originale (no date).I bought it for several reasons: foremost, it was there. Also it was the first attempt to illustrate Proust, the direct result of Andre Maurois’ influence. (Maurois was one of Proust’s early champions. He “discovered” Zazouline at one of her exhibitions in Paris and encouraged her to attempt it.) Additionally I purchased it because at the end of her life Barbara Rhode (Zazouline) lived a number of years with her daughter in Nelson, British C. U.. As art, her engravings appear somewhat tentative and perhaps less accomplished than the other two. Nevertheless they were groundbreaking. I found it on AbeBooks in the inventory of a Parisian bookseller. Then within a week or two a copy of Philippe Jullian’s portfolio, XV characters (undated), appeared in the inventory of a dealer in Los Angeles. Only 150 copies of the latter’s mannered engravings were printed. These have been called insipid but I find them greatly amusing. My copy includes an additional original pen drawing signed and inscribed by Jullian on the verso of the front cover, marked “Londres. 20.7.49”. His engravings decorated the Chatto and Windus uniform edition of ALRDTP (1949.) I have also a copy of that set in publisher’s blue Morocco - #48 of 165. The last, largest and most luxe presentation of the three, Bernard Lamotte’s Proust Portfolio - the France of Marcel Proust is also the most ambitions and successful. In consists of twenty-five black and white engravings. In my opinion, this is the artistic highpoint of Proust illustration. This monumental work was printed in one hundred copies and created in Lamotte’s Manhattan studio at East 56th Street. I bought it from a San Francisco dealer. In 1954 thirty-one of Lamotte’s even more brilliant pastels graced the Heritage Press limited edition of Swann’s Way. Since I knew nothing of the existence of these folios before I found them on the internet, it seems reasonable to hope other folios of engravings by Proust’s other illustrators are out there – by Van Dongen? Grau-Sala? Liepke? Morelle? Pecnard? Wait and see.
Still in the category of “Spawn,” I have both translations of Maurois’ fantasy about Proust in England, Chelsea Way (1930 and 1952). These fifty-six page tongue-in-cheek rarities are limited editions and illustrated. I have Harold Pinter’s unproduced Proust Screenplay (1978). His ROTP: Play (2000) (co-written with Di Trevis) is a much later stage adaptation of his original screenplay. It was finally produced in 2000 at the Royal National Theatre to unanimous acclaim. Di Trevis followed this up with ROTP; A Rehearsal Diary (2001), her illustrated commentary on the process of staging it from conception to first night. Also in drama, Six Proust Reconstructions (1958), Pamela Hansford Johnson’s brilliant 1950’s BBC radio dramas freely adapted from the Recherche, cannot, in my opinion, be bettered. I would love to hear these professionally performed. But I will rekindle my own enormous pleasure in them when I reread them. It’s no surprise that a number of rather labored novels have been spawned by Proust’s life and work. I think the best of these is a rather scathing who-done-it, Murder chez Proust (1994.) It succeeds at sending up both the academic pomposity and the overly reverential snobbishness of his academic and interested laymen devotees. Luxe editions of two Belle Epoque cook books have been published. These are perfect examples of the Proust Industry in full throttle. For is it not slightly scandalous on the part of publishers to make such an effort to associate Proust with fine dining when he had no interest in eating? His famous reference to that most humble of French tea cakes, the Madeleine, is hardly a basis for such extrapolation. It is true that he was often invited to dine with his aristocratic friends, where guests certainly “dined”. But, on the rare occasions he was well enough to join them in their gilded mansions, he hardly touched their food while, swathed in tattered scarves, sweaters and overcoats, he enthralled them with his conversation and impressions of absent personages such as Montesquiou. He rarely ate anything at home but fried potatoes, iced beer from the Ritz, and once or twice picked at a scrawny chicken.
I’ve acquired more than fifty fine bindings, including a few from Andre Maurois’ library, such as Robert de Billy’s Marcel Proust. Letters and conversations (1930). Maurois was an early biographer of Proust (1949), and during the 1930s and 1940s a literary beacon in the Proustian firmament. I have a copy of Maurois’ own Supplement a Melanges et Pastiches de Marcel Proust, #525 of 1100 copies.I was fortunate, when searching for an original edition copy of his first publication Le Plaisirs et les Jours (1896), to find a copy in a leather craft binding by Anthony Gardner, O. B. E.. I have a sixteen-volume full Morocco Oeuvres complete and another fifteen-volume full leather uniform edition of ALRDTP (1929-1933). Another fine binding rarity is Georges Gabory’s Essai sur Marcel Proust (1926), in quarter green Morocco, #12 of 20 on lavender paper known as ‘violettes de parma”. Also on colored paper, green, in a fine Morocco binding from the venerable hands of Paul Affolter, who worked in the basement of his brother’s bookshop, where Proust often sent Celeste to buy the books he wanted. It is Robert Dreyfus’ Souvenirs sur Marcel Proust (1926). (This is the rarer of two copies in my archive.) My copy of Charles Briand’s scurrilous Le Secret de Marcel Proust (1950) #240 of 260 copies in a fine gray moiré folder in a slipcase is possibly from the bindery of Alain Devauchelle. These two volumes that comprise Le Secret, of dubious academic distinction since the first contains questionable scholarship and the latter is undoubtedly a tissue of lies and aspersions, are nonetheless rarities as well as items of beauty.
Today and in closing
In our day it seems the Proust Industry pumps our more and more academic treatises on Proust and the Recherche. (Yet, with all that, no up to date bibliography has appeared since V. E. Grahams in 1975.) With a few exceptions, such as the comic book versions of Swan, The Lemoine Affair, Proust in America, Proust’s English, Proust as Interpreter of Ruskin, etc., I have tried with less than perfect success to steer clear of current publications. This decision is subject to revision and as time passes I am certain to add recent and future publications. For example, I hope and expect that before 2022 some of the earlier works on Proust, published in German ( Curtius) and in French (Proust’s letters to Reynaldo Hahn,) will appear in English for the first time and I will add those to my collection.
With few exceptions (damaged and fragile items purchased for the sake of owning a copy of something extremely rare and significant of which no other copy was available), my collection includes only the rarest and best copies available. When I found them I chose copies in fine bindings, and copies from the smallest, numbered editions on the finest hand-made paper, signed and inscribed. All fragile items are now in acid free envelopes and all dust jackets in Brodart sleeves.
I wished to make this catalogue interesting and accessible to all. To facilitate this, in some of my catalogue listings I have quoted from standard bibliographical references. My intention in doing so was to elucidate the contents of earlier volumes, the relevance of which may have become obscured by the passage of time or superseded. I hope devotees of Proust will contact me for a look at my catalogue (work in progress) through the link provided at Dan Ford’s Reading Proust web page.
