“There I am now – at last at the party… Now I do think this might be the best of my endings.” The novel was published in 1925. Still, she continues writing and revising until, less than a year later, in 1924, she’s changed her view. As she told her diary on the day she reached the 100th page of her draft: “It may be too stiff, too glittering and tinselly”. There are diary-like confidences, too: “a delicious idea comes to me that I will write anything I want to write”, she declares at the top of one page, in bracing contrast to the self-doubts that were simultaneously besetting her. She ruled her own margins in blue pencil and used them not just for insertions but also to tot up her word count, a very practical way of cheering herself on. In a detail sure to set every graphophile’s pulse racing, Woolf wrote in purple ink. As for that iconic morsel of memory-laden cake, the madeleine, it started out as a slice of toast and a cup of tea. However much Proust doubted himself – and he doubted his chosen art form, too – he pressed on with a monumental task that would occupy him for the rest of his life. This is the heavy lifting of literary endeavour made manifest there is no preciousness here, nothing is sacred.
While their faded ink and age-dappled paper evoke physical fragility, what they showcase is a robust, almost aggressive determination.
The greatest summer novels ever written Nothing more powerfully illustrates the truth of that creative-writing-class maxim, ‘writing is rewriting’, than the liberally crossed-out, lavishly annotated, occasionally doodled-upon notebooks in which Proust composed his seminal, seven-volume text. Specifically, a page from In Search of Lost Time in manuscript form. Writers who find themselves mired in procrastination would do well to take a page from Marcel Proust’s most famous book.
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