Marcel Proust. His Life and Work.
INSCRIBED
(Cather, Willa) Pierre-Quint, Leon. Marcel Proust. His Life and Work. Translated by Hamish and Sheila Miles. New York: Knopf, 1927.
8vo.; yellow cloth; dust-jacket; fine.
First American edition of the first biography of Proust in English.
A presentation copy, inscribed by Cather to her first friend from her days in Pittsburgh: For May Willard, to recall the happy hours I spent in the loveliest house I know in the world. Willa Cather. Cather arrived in Pittsburgh in 1896, and one of the first places she visited was the Carnegie Library, where Willard was the reference librarian. They travelled to New York together in 1906, and exchanged visits in later years. May Willard pre-deceased Cather, and it is likely that Cather, obsessed with privacy, retrieved and destroyed whatever letters she had sent. We cannot trace any other association copy or letter documenting this important relationship.
In 1919 Elizabeth Sergeant gave Cather in 1919 some books of Proust, probably the first two volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu, and Frank Swinnerton sent her Within a Budding Grove in 1924. In 1933 Cather would call Proust “the greatest French writer of his time”; like his, her works show the nostalgia she expressed in this inscription. She had earlier told Sergeant, after the beginning of the war, and Isabelle McClung’s marriage, which in effect ended Cather’s Pittsburgh life, “Our present is ruined - but we had a beautiful past.” This beautiful past evoked in the inscription was the intellectual and aesthetic awakening that she first experienced during those years in Pittsburgh, and the passion for French literature that she shared with Willard, in that “loveliest house” (this could well refer to the Carnegie Library which Cather loved). It is moving to see her recall those days with this book – not her own work, but a thoughtful gift,
the first biography of Proust in English, presented at the height of her success.
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