Proust His Banker

This study explores the surprising relationship between Proust’s creative genius, his financial extravagance, and the steady hand that kept him afloat. What Marcel Proust wanted from life most of all was unconditional requited love, and the way he went after it—smothering the objects of his affection with gifts—cost him a fortune. To pay for such extravagance, he engaged in daring speculations on the stock exchange. The task of his cousin and financial adviser, Lionel Hauser, was to make sure these speculations would not go sour. In Proust and His Banker, Gian Balsamo examines this vital, complex relationship and reveals that the author’s liberal squandering of money provided the grist for many of the fictional characters and dramatic events he wrote about. Focusing on hundreds of letters between Proust and Hauser among other archival and primary sources, Balsamo provides a fascinating window into the writer’s creative process, his financial activities, and the surprising relationship between the two. Successes and failures alike provided material for Proust’s fiction, whether from the purchase of an airplane for the object of his affections or the investigation of a deceased love’s intimate background. Over the course of their fifteen-year collaboration, the banker saw Proust squander three-fifths of his wealth. To Hauser the writer was a virtuoso in resource mismanagement. Nonetheless, Balsamo shows, we owe it to the altruism of this generous relative, who never thought twice about sacrificing his own time and resources to Proust, that In Search of Lost Time was ever completed.

If there is anyone worthy of producing an intimate biography of the enigmatic genius behind Remembrance of Things Past, it is Edmund White, himself an award- winning writer for whom Marcel Proust has long been an obsession. White introduces us not only to the recluse endlessly rewriting his one massive work through the night, but also the darling of Parisian salons, the grasper after honors, and the closeted homosexual-a subject this book is the first to explore openly. From the frothiest gossip to the deepest angst, here is a moving portrait to be treasured by anyone looking for an introduction to this literary icon.

A must-read financial history for investors navigating today's volatile global markets Following an unprecedented economic boom fed by foreign investment, the Russian Revolution triggered the largest sovereign default in history. In Bankers and Bolsheviks, Hassan Malik tells the story of this boom and bust, chronicling the experiences of leading financiers of the day as they navigated one of the most lucrative yet challenging markets of the first modern age of globalization. He reveals how a complex web of factors—from government interventions to competitive dynamics and cultural influences—drove a large inflow of capital during this tumultuous period. This gripping book demonstrates how the realms of finance and politics—of bankers and Bolsheviks—grew increasingly intertwined, and how investing in Russia became a political act with unforeseen repercussions.

The first discussion of Proust’s circle of Latin American friends, lovers, and literary models. Part biography, part cultural history, part literary study, Rubén Gallo's book explores the presence of Latin America in Proust's life and work. The novelist lived in an era shaped by French colonial expansion into the Americas: just before his birth, Napoleon III installed Maximilian as emperor of Mexico, and during the 1890s France was shaken by the Panama Affair, a financial scandal linked to the construction of the canal in which thousands of French citizens lost their life savings. It was in the context of these tense Franco–Latin American relations that the novelist met the circle of friends discussed in Proust's Latin Americans: the composer Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s Venezuelan lover; Gabriel de Yturri, an Argentinean dandy; José-Maria de Heredia, a Cuban poet and early literary model; Antonio de La Gandara, a Mexican society painter; and Ramon Fernandez, a brilliant Mexican critic turned Nazi sympathizer. Gallo discusses the correspondence—some of it never before published—between the novelist and this heterogeneous group and also presents insightful readings of In Search of Lost Time that posit Latin America as the novel’s political unconscious. Proust’s speculation with Mexican stocks informed his various fictional passages devoted to financial transactions, and the Panama Affair shaped his understanding of the conquest of America in a little-known early text. Proust's Latin Americans will be of interest to scholars of modernism, French literature, Proust studies, gender studies, and Latin American studies.

From the author of the acclaimed Queen of Fashion--a brilliant look at the glittering world of turn-of-the-century Paris through the first in-depth study of the three women Proust used to create his supreme fictional character, the Duchesse de Guermantes. Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe--these were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style." All well but unhappily married, these women sought freedom and fulfillment by reinventing themselves, between the 1870s and 1890s, as icons. At their fabled salons, they inspired the creativity of several generations of writers, visual artists, composers, designers, and journalists. Against a rich historical backdrop, Weber takes the reader into these women's daily lives of masked balls, hunts, dinners, court visits, nights at the opera or theater. But we see as well the loneliness, rigid social rules, and loveless, arranged marriages that constricted these women's lives. Proust, as a twenty-year-old law student in 1892, would worship them from afar, and later meet them and create his celebrated composite character for The Remembrance of Things Past.

Proust's Cup of Tea analyzes Proust's reading of various Victorian authors and shows how they contributed to A la recherche du temps perdu. This book proves that British literature and art played a fundamental role in Proust's writing process by citing from the manuscript versions of his novel, as well as from his correspondence, essays and the lengthy critical appartus accompanying his translations of Ruskin. Eells reflects here on why Proust was attracted to Victorian culture, and how he incorporated it into his novel. The works of the British novelists he was most interested in-Thomas Hardy and George Eliot-address questions of gender which Proust develops in his own work. He builds Sodome et Gomorrhe I, the section of his novel focusing on homosexuality, on a series of explicit citations and guarded allusions to Shakespeare, Darwin Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson. Eells explores how Proust followed in the pioneering footsteps of those British writers who had ventured beyond the boundaries of conventional sexuality, though he took pains to erase their traces in the definitive version of his work. This study also highlights how Proust made his fictitious painter Elstir into a master of ambiguity, by modeling his art on Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler. Eells shows that Proust drew on Victorian culture in his depiction of sexual ambiguity, arguing that he confounded eroticism and aestheticism in the way he inextricably linked the man-woman figure with British art and literature. As Proust aestheticized male and female homosexuality using references to British art and letters, Eells coins the term 'Anglosexuality' to refer to his characters of the third sex. She defines Anglosexuality as an intersexuality represented through intertextuality, as an artistic sensitivity, an aesthetic stance, and a new way of seeing. Proust's Cup of Tea thus demonstrates that Victorian culture and homoeroticism form one of the cornerstones of Proust's monumental work.

An exploration of Marcel Proust and Anthony Powell's greatest literary achievements. There are few writers about whom opinions diverge so widely as Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time sequence is one of the most ambitious literary constructions in the English language. In Different Speeds, Same Furies, Perry Anderson measures Powell’s achievement against Marcel Proust’s celebrated In Search of Lost Time. The literature on Dance is a drop in the ocean compared to that on Proust. Yet in construction of plot and depiction of character, Anderson ranks Powell above him. How much do particular advantages of this kind matter, and why is Powell an odd man out in English letters? At once so similar and dissimilar, the intricate retrospectives of the two novelists on bohemia and Society, upbringing and mortality, relationships and personality, invite interrelated judgements. The closing chapters of Different Speeds, Same Furies reach beyond their handlings of time to chart the historical novel from Waverley to Underworld, and the breakthrough in epistolatory fiction of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, held together by what its author described as ‘a secret chain which remains, as it were, invisible’.