Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor Page B

are hopeful about us.
T ROUVILLE . H ôTEL DES R OCHES N OIRES , F RIDAY , S EPTEMBER 22, 1893.
    Marcel has written a final letter to his father saying he is ready to sit the exams on his return, and enter a law office as soon as he passes. We seem to have arrived at this decision simply so as to arrive at a decision. Marcel is resigned rather than relieved, but I hope that once past these technical hurdles he will warm to the work itself. He leaves on Monday, and I have suggested that he have lunch with his uncle Georges immediately. I shall return at the end of the week, and this morning gave the manager our notice.
P ARIS . W EDNESDAY , O CTOBER , 11, 1893.
    A pass. Marcel seems a little unsure what to do with hissuccess, and has still not decided that law is the right route, but Georges will give him advice about how to find a situation. Papa dropped by yesterday afternoon to get word as soon as the results were posted. He was delighted and told him so most heartily. “You are coming along nicely, Marcel, no more silliness, eh?”
    Marcel speaks no more of the idea of a novel, thank goodness. These projects are only a waste of time.
    W HAT LOVELY IRONY there is in these entries from the summer of 1893—indeed, I have selected these passages to underline both the poignancy and the ridiculousness of the situation. No, Marcel would never become a lawyer and his parents’ interventions in his career would prove fruitless in that regard.
    You will have gathered that I call Marcel Proust friend. Of course, I never met the man. He died in 1922, forty-four years before I was born. Yet I like to think of him as a friend, a comrade in pursuit of memory, and I have come to the Bibliothèque Nationale to visit him, transported back one hundred years thanks simply to Air Canada.
    Certainly, I appreciate his literary achievement. I have read the novel with careful attention, studied the biographies, sought out some critical commentary, yet my affection extends beyond that of an appreciative reader. I feel personal gratitude for what he wrote and sense some human bond. Yes, I know the link is one-sided; I am not delusional. But I don’t think my fondness is merely artistic idolatry, that tedious elevation of a distant genius by the dilettante who would aggrandize herself with this connection to agreatness she will never achieve. Proust himself struggled with that demon when he was translating Ruskin: he placed the Englishman on a pedestal and devoted years of his life to Ruskinian pilgrimages, following the critic’s footsteps to Venice and Amiens with his art books for guides. In the end, Proust produced some lovely translations of Ruskin’s essays, but they merely delayed his own artistic maturity. Another case of getting distracted from the task at hand. My own translations will be less beautiful, of course, yet I hope they are more than a distant tribute. I offer here a real vote of thanks for the novel and some attempt at understanding the man.
    Let me explain. I was about fifteen—indeed it was not long after the school trip to Toronto—when I encountered the great French novelist Marcel Proust, or rather a small reproduction of his portrait by Jacques Emile Blanche, staring out from the pages of my high school reader. He is a fragile figure with unnaturally pale skin punctuated by large dark eyes, like pools of balsamic vinegar sitting in white porcelain saucers. His lips are small but gracefully shaped, promising a gentle sensuality. His black hair is parted emphatically down the middle and slicked into place like the Sunday coiffe of a docile schoolboy. He wears evening dress and a white flower in his lapel. He appears as a gentle dandy, romantic, exotic, more intriguing, more desirable than the heroic masculinity of Balzac, Hugo, and Zola whose portraits I have encountered on the preceding pages.
    Proust’s novel,
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
or
Remembrance of Things Past
, published in seven books between 1913 and