The avant-texte and the brouillon.

Peter Brooks is always worth reading, and his NYRB review article “In Search of His Vocation” (March 21, 2024 issue; archived) has interesting things to say about Proust, but what grabbed me was the final section, much of which I will reproduce here: Readers who can’t get enough of Proust from the novel now can delve into the beginnings of the Search in The Seventy-Five Folios. […] They apparently date more or less from 1908, when Proust, having abandoned Jean Santeuil, his first novelistic venture, finally started work on the Search. To Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Tadié, they give us “the sacred moment” of first creation. You can see, for instance, how the originally prolix and diffuse drama of bedtime, with his mother’s kiss withheld, becomes in Proust’s rewriting the utterly memorable, indelible scene of childhood anguish in Swann’s Way. They are surely of interest to dedicated Proustians, though not quite up to the hype that greeted their appearance in France, where their…