The Thrill of Proust's Handwriting: The New Yorker The first time I saw Proust's bedroom, in the Musée Carnavalet, in Paris - a tiny tableau cordonned off by a chain, lined in cork, and crammed with undistinguished, illogically placed furniture - I was struck more than anything by the modesty of the bed. Proust famously preferred to write in bed, and, between chronic illness and predisposition, ended up spending much of his life there. "It is pleasant, when one is distraught, to lie in the warmth of one's bed, and there, with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with one's head under the blankets, surrender completely to howling, like branches in the autumn wind," he wrote in "Pleasures and Regrets," his first book, a collection of prose poems, philosophical reflections, and sketches, published in 1896, when he was twenty-five. A current exhibition at the Morgan Library, in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the publication, in November of 1913, of "Du Côté de Chez Swann" ("Swann's Way"), the first volume of Proust's masterwork, "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu" ("Remembrance of Things Past," or, in more recent translations, "In Search of Lost Time"), is a companion of sorts to the Carnavalet room. Here we get to see the pages that once lay scattered among the blankets as Proust wrote in bed, now neatly laid out in a small, dimly lit room painted in damask rose, which itself might make for a suitable sleeping chamber. There is a trove of notebooks; a few letters; some photographs and vintage postcards; several fair copies and galley proofs of "Du Côté" in various stages of revision; and a cheap-looking, pale-yellow original edition of the finished book, published by Bernard Grasset and riddled with typos. There is also the complete twelve-volume edition of "À la Recherche," published by the Nouvelle Revue Française between 1919 and 1927, after its initial rejection by André Gide. At the time, he considered Proust "un snob, un mondain amateur," and he never forgave himself for this error in judgment, calling his rejection of the book one of the bitterest regrets of his life. This is the first time that many of these materials have been exhibited outside the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which owns most of them (thanks to De Gaulle, of all people, who considered them a national treasure and rescued them from private sale), and being in their presence feels significant, and not just for that reason. There is something almost uncanny about bearing witness to the silent, gestural language of Proust's actual handwriting on the actual paper he wrote on. The nuances and cadences of handwriting can be as expressive as a drawing, and immediately transport us back in time to the very moment of its execution. Pages from the working notebooks, the "Cahiers," are written in fluid, all but illegible script, suggesting that Proust wrote quickly and easily. He wrote in lined notebooks, with double-lined red margins, where you sometimes find the absent-minded doodling of the author; at other times, he seems to be elaborating on the things he has set down. On one notebook page, he's drawn a kind of surrealist collage of portraits (Proust looks to have been a capable, imaginative draftsman) that blend into one another, and which may offer clues to the way he conceived of his novel: an amalgam of people he knew in life, dismantled and reassembled to form the characters of his fiction. Next to the collage, he has drawn a female face, which, the gallery note tells us, represents the genesis of Albertine. One wonders if it's true. If so, it's all the more enchanting to behold. On another page, he has written the heading "Swann et le Monde," followed by the words "Swann cependant n'avait pas complètement abandonné le monde" ("Nevertheless, Swann hadn't completely abandoned the world"), which offer a different kind of palpable thrill. Among the earliest notebooks on view, the "Carnets," are three the size of pencil cases, embossed with Art Nouveau figures, from the Kirby, Beard & Cie gift shop in Paris. They were given to Proust by Geneviève Straus, George Bizet's widow, for New Year's in 1908, when he was a rather advanced thirty-six, and they look as if they were intended for keeping lists. So it's remarkable to learn that one of them contains drafts of his essay "Contre Sainte-Beuve," whom Proust felt did not sufficiently appreciate Balzac (think of his having typed the essay on the Notes app on an iPhone). The same notebook also contains the astonishing question that Proust posed to himself in 1908, the year he began work on "À la Recherche": "Faut-il en faire un roman, une étude philosophique, suis-je romancier?" "Should it be a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?". At a lecture at the library one recent evening, Antoine Compagnon, the Proust scholar and editor of the Gallimard Folio edition of "À la Recherche," who curated the exhibit, showed a slide of the notebook page containing the question, going on to discuss other aspects of the book, including the little-known fact that "Swann's Way" was self-published - Proust paid out of pocket for everything (including advertising). This after the book had been turned down not just by the N.R.F. but also by Ollendorf, whose editor for the life of him couldn't understand why it took thirty pages to describe the process of falling asleep, and by a reader for Fasquelle, who complained that after seven hundred pages it was impossible, absolutely impossible, to say what the book was about. Facts like these give every writer, especially every late bloomer, hope. At the time of the book's publication, Proust was forty-two, an age that today does not convey the same urgency that it did when the average life expectancy in France was around than fifty; Proust died at fifty-one. Publishers weren't the only ones who were nonplussed. Once the first volume finally came out, Proust sent copies to his friends, and was bemused by their response. Compagnon spoke of the reply Proust received from his friend Louis d'Albufera, an aristocratic playboy. Had he read the book? Proust wanted to know. Oh, you've published a book? Yes, I sent you a copy. Ah, yes, well, "Si je l'ai reçu, tu peux être sûr que je l'ai lu, mais je ne suis pas certain de l'avoir reçu." "If I received it, you can be sure that I read it, but I'm not sure I received it." Another friend, Mme. Gaston de Caillavet, wrote to thank Proust for the book and to say how moved she was by its reference to a First Communion. Only there was no such reference in the book, prompting Proust to write back thanking her and saying that, while he didn't think he had made reference to a First Communion, of course he might be wrong. "À la Recherche" has been largely reduced in the public imagination to a book about insomnia and dipping madeleines into cups of tea. See Alain de Botton's hilarious account of his ill-advised pilgrimage to the madeleine capital the world, Illiers, on which the fictional Combray was based, and now officially rechristened Illiers-Combray, in his playful, informative book "How Proust Can Change Your Life." The madeleine serves as a vehicle for the very modern idea at the time, of expressing the relationship between an unthinking action and the capacity of such an action to unleash a torrent of memory. It could be anything; the other day, I came upon the words "pesto cream" and was immediately transported to a dinner at one of my mother's friends in my home town in the eighties. Compagnon stressed other modernist aspects of the work, among them the "audacity" and the "novelty" of the title: "those two prepositions," he noted - "du" and "de" - which people at the time found "horrible." It was not something that had ever been seen before in formal written French, and its strangeness has been lost in the most common translation, "Swann's Way," which sounds elegant, even a little fusty, but does not convey the slangy vernacular of the original. (It's a difficult problem to solve, as Lydia Davis explains, in the translator's note to the Penguin U.K. edition, which she translated as "The Way by Swann's." André Aciman took her to task for this in The New York Review of Books, claiming her rendition approached "monstrosity," echoing, as it did, "something along the lines of "How's by you?" "By me is fine." " Well, awkwardness aside, it would appear that her rendering was closer to the author's original intent. What would Proust say? As the editor of the Gallimard Folio edition, Compagnon has access to the book's sales, which have remained remarkably consistent over the years: between fifteen thousand and seventeen thousand copies of "Du Côté" are sold each year; that number drops to between five and six thousand for the second volume, "À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs" ("Within a Budding Grove"), to three thousand for "Le Côté de Guermantes" ("The Guermantes Way"), and so on. (Audience titters of embarrassment. Je l'avoue: I myself have made it only halfway through the second volume.) Reading Proust is daunting, and not just because of length. Compagnon described the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the opening pages, comparing them to approaching a new city at night - with no map. People read Proust for all kinds of reasons and on many different levels, he said - for its treatment of Jewishness, homosexuality, children - but he advises his students to read the "bare text," and to read "naïvely." The bare text itself is certainly beautiful to behold, especially when you see what it looked like just before it came into being as a book. Some of the most riveting as well as the most aesthetically interesting documents at the Morgan are the fair copies and galley proofs, which testify both to Proust's fluidity as a writer and also to his dogged perfectionism: he was a serial reviser, changing isolated words and perfecting sentences and phrases right up until the very end. Even at the late galley stage, we find him still undecided about one of the most famous sentences in all of modern literature, finally settling on "Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure" ("For a long time, I went to bed early"). But perhaps the most arresting page, and the most moving, is the final page of the third corrected galley proof of "Du Côté." Even though Proust was paying for the book's publication, Grasset insisted that it was too long and told him it had to be cut by a third; this is the reason that "Noms de Pays: Le Nom" ("Place Names: The Name") is a fraction of the length of the other two sections in the book. The radical cut having been made, Proust has squeezed in the final four sentences, all but indecipherable, at the bottom of the page, nearly veering off it. They are the exact words one finds in every edition published since 1913: "La réalité que j'avais connue n'existait plus...." The reality I had known no longer existed.... And then, in blue pencil: "Ici finit le volume." Here ends the volume. Cahier 12, by Marcel Proust. Courtesy The Morgan Library & Museum/Bibliothèque nationale de France/RMN-Grand Palais.