"Marcel Proust and Swann's Way," the Morgan Library's exhibition of Proustian notebooks, drafts, typescripts, and proofs, is in its last week, and I urge anyone with an interest in the author to see it. Mary Hawthorne wrote a lovely piece about the show for the New Yorker website, to which I have little intelligent to add. I'd like to single out, though, a wonderful detail regarding Proust's struggle to fix the famous opening sentence of Swann's Way. It's often said in writing classes that you can find a strong opening by cutting unnecessary throat-clearing pronouncements and starting with your second or third sentence. Although Proust is a risky model in the art of concision, one of his typescripts provides a case in point. It begins: "At the time of that morning, whose memory I would like to fix, I was already ill; I would be up all night and went to bed only during the day. However, the time when I would go to bed early and, with a few short interruptions, would sleep until morning, was not that far in the past, and I was still hoping that it would return." Proust, reading over his work, crosses out those sentences and writes, "For a long time, I went to bed early." He kept on fussing with the opening, as you can see from the galley proof above, but in the end he did not change his mind.
