An Evening Spent in Proust's Overcoat

I get compulsives, I really do. There but for... what have you. I've never been trapped endlessly washing my hands or checking the locks, but I can see something within myself that doesn't trust much to chance, that might have a greater need someday of comforting rituals, personal superstitions, unthinking repetitions. I certainly understand what it is to build a fortress from possessions, valuable if only to me. Just look at this room. I'm not suggesting that what I do requires the intervention of professional organizers and a TV crew to shame me into letting things go, but I do recognize that my acquisition of books is neither entirely normal, nor quite sane. I'm not really even a collector, or rather, I'm not what could be called serious; I never search for variant editions, though I own some books in more than one, I can't be bothered hunting rare firsts or that sort of thing. I've been but twice to a book show of the antiquarian kind, and left considerably shocked. Silly business, some of it. But I do collect books, obviously, and far too many of them for my budget, had I one, or this room, or my actual needs. I've read about serious collectors and frankly they frighten me a little; so few seem to ever read the books they buy. The British novelist, Geoff Nicholson, with great sympathy and good humor has chronicled the lives of all sorts of obsessives, with nothing much in common but their adoration of Volkswagen "bugs," for instance, or women's feet, or guitars. I've enjoyed reading Nicholson's novels, every one of them. I'm strangely proud, however, to point out that I haven't one of his books in the joint. Sold 'em. Ages ago. So, see? I'm not that bad, right?

I will admit to a greedy curiosity to read everything that I might, but I needn't own everything I read... only the good ones, or only my favorites, past and present, and any that might yet be. Doesn't really narrow the perimeters much, does it? Well, I know what I mean, anyway.

The very nature of this kind of behavior, compulsion, eccentricity or whatever one ought to call it, is generally inexplicable, I should think. But to whom is an explanation owed? My husband doesn't have to understand it, so long as he's willing to tolerate it, bless 'im. Can't think of anyone else. I have wondered what might become of my library after me, but since most of my books were bought secondhand, I know I wasn't the first person to want them so I don't imagine I'll be the last. There's little enough here that wouldn't do just as well on the market piecemeal, which is after all exactly how it came together. Mine is a library in no way representative of anything but me. The value of the thing, to me, is just that.

But such is not the case with every such collection. Some collections, indeed, some rooms, are worth preserving and failing that, painstakingly reassembling; book by book, by bed, by notebook, by garment . An Italian journalist, Lorenza Foschini, ably aided by her translator, Eric Karpeles, has written an exquisite little book that provides a perfect example, perhaps the perfect example of this. Proust's Overcoat: The True Story of One Man's Passion for All Things Proust, is a love story. Jacques Guerin was the illegitimate son of a wine merchant with a taste for art and a most exceptional mother. Even when the lady finally divorced her impotent husband, and might have married her lover, Guerin's father, the boy's unconventional parents chose to maintain their separate lives, preferring to just go on as they were. The lovers saw each other every day for the rest of their lives and raised two very beautiful, very gifted and very gay sons together. After her divorce, Guerin's mother became a very successful businesswoman in her own right, at a time when such things were not done. Jacques inherited, along with his mother's perfume business, which he in turn ran quite successfully the rest of his life, a considerable fortune, and, from both parents, passion and very good taste.

Jacques Guerin loved Proust. Poor Marcel had already written "finis" in his cork-lined bedroom and passed to immortality by the time the handsome, gay businessman became obsessed with the novelist. Guerin, though only as a patient, did meet Marcel's brother, Robert, who was an entirely respectable surgeon. The doctor showed his brother's young admirer a stack of the novelist's notebooks and manuscripts, stacked in a case Guerin was later to rescue from the junk man, after the doctor's own death. Thus are obsessions born.

Proust's family, unlike Guerin's, was an eminently respectable, meaning a rigidly conventional bunch, with the obvious, and hence painfully disconcerting exception of that one great genius in their midst. After his death, Marcel's brother did his best to see the novelist's memory properly honored -- though in a telling anecdote, retold in Foschini's book, when asked, the well connected doctor had been unwilling to help his brother secure a medal he very much wanted. Marcel forgave him, though not without mentioning, just in passing, "My book The Guermantes Way, will be coming out the first week in October. It's only half as long as the others, but I'm sure you won't read it... " Foschini aptly describes that line as a "small and bitter revenge."

The doctor's bitter widow had her revenge on her embarrassing brother-in-law; selling off Marcel's possessions and furniture, and burning much of what her husband had rather carelessly preserved of his brother's papers, until Jacques Guerin convinced the junk dealer who'd already sold him some of these precious things to intervene and save the rest. Finally convinced of the potential value, if only in francs, of what hadn't already been tossed into the flames or the bin, the rather horrid woman eventually let the collector have the lot. Guerin cultivated relationships with both the doctor's widow and her junk dealer, and spent a considerable fortune in the process. This proved to be well worth whatever it cost the collector. "It would take him many years of desperate searching," Foschini tells the reader, "before he could rest, confident he had done everything possible to preserve what remained of Proust's earthly possessions." In the end, almost everything that still exists of Proust's material existence, even that overcoat, everything we now have of that famous room that became for Marcel Proust the world, only survives because of the passionate interest of the prescient and covetous perfumer.

For a long time, much of this stuff: letters, photographs, manuscripts, Proust's walking stick, his hat, even his bed, Guerin kept to himself. When the time came and the rest of the world caught up with him, Guerin would tantalize his guests with the promise of a glimpse into the his collection, but the host, being French, would usually insist on a proper meal first, and perhaps a cigar, and then where had the time gone? Next time, perhaps. I can understand this. The things he'd collected had been Proust's, but the collection was Guerin's. After the collector's death, everything went to a museum. Plenty of time for the Proust scholars and other admirers to poke about among his things now.

How many times have famous artists insisted that biographies, as Twain put it, "are but the clothes and buttons," of a person and not the person proper? True enough, but from even such stuff as a fur-lined overcoat, the buttons moved so as to make it fit more snugly a Parisian junk dealer who wore it out fishing, eventually giving it to a collector as a present, in thanks for years of good business, may retain something of the reality of it's original owner. There is hardly a recorded anecdote by the friends and contemporaries of Marcel Proust that fails to mention that coat, which he wore everywhere, even to dinner, the coat he buttoned on over layers of shirts and sweaters and knitted mufflers, in the belief that in this way he might preserve his frail person long enough to finish his great work. Having read his masterpiece, who would not be moved, as Foschini was, to stand in the back room of a Paris museum while this extraordinary and now fragile object was lifted from it's box and layers of tissue-paper so that those misplaced buttons might remind the onlooker of the man that wore this coat while he wrote what for a long time only he could see would be À la recherche du temps perdu?

As Leigh Hunt says in his autobiography, the muse is "sometimes an awful divinity." Can we not appreciate the cost to one of her most accomplished servants just a bit better because of an old overcoat?

"Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among Mankind," Carlyle insisted in his Sartor Resartus, and much as the consequences of that fact may have many dubious and dangerous results, it can also give us history we would not otherwise have: an overcoat, a letter, the manuscript of a masterpiece, a photograph found in a hatbox in a junk shop, a photograph of two little French boys, loving brothers who would grow up to be very different men, one of them the greatest novelist of the 20th Century. As Foschini's book so beautifully explains, we only have these things because of one gay businessman, an obsessive collector, a hero, in a small way, in his own right.

As for me and my accumulation, there's no comparison, of course. No one will owe my memory much when the dealer comes to cart away my library. I rather hope though that someone in a bookshop somewhere, long after I'm gone, finds Foschini's little book, pays the price marked inside, and carries it home to read in a night, as I did. It is a little treasure. I'm keeping it.