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When Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swannappeared in November 1913, the first French reaction was far from the universal admiration we now associate with it. The dominant response was bewilderment: critics often saw something self-indulgent, shapeless, excessively long, and difficult to classify. But a small number of perceptive readers immediately sensed that something radically new was happening.

1. The first reaction: “This is not really a novel”

The most famous early rejection came before publication, when Proust submitted the manuscript to the Nouvelle Revue française (NRF). André Gide, one of its leading figures, helped reject it. The manuscript’s enormous length and Proust’s association with fashionable Parisian society worked against him. The NRF regarded him partly as a “mondain”—a society writer, someone interested in salons, aristocrats, and social gossip. 

After publication, this suspicion persisted. The NRF’s Henri Ghéon initially characterized the book in strikingly dismissive terms: according to Yale’s Modernism Lab, he essentially concluded that it wasn’t a conventional novel at all, but an obsessive, interminable prose poem. 

That distinction is important. The problem wasn’t simply that Proust was “bad.” Critics struggled to understand what kind of literary object they were reading.

2. His sentences bothered readers enormously

Proust’s prose violated expectations about French literary clarity.

Readers accustomed to relatively controlled, logical sentences found:

• extraordinarily long sentences;
• digressions within digressions;
• qualifications and subordinate clauses that continually postponed the main point;
• sudden transitions between external observation, memory, sensation, and philosophical reflection;
• descriptions that seemed disproportionate to their subjects.

Jacques de Lacretelle, looking back in 1962, remembered being shocked by Swann in 1913. He disliked the title itself, but especially the opening sentences, which irritated someone who valued “logic and limpidity of expression.” 

And this wasn’t an isolated reaction. Antoine Compagnon has summarized the initial response as readers saying, essentially, “It’s written off the cuff; it’s memoirs, it’s chatter.” The crucial thing they missed was the extraordinary architecture underneath the apparent looseness. 

In other words, early readers often mistook deliberate complexity for lack of discipline.

3. The “thirty pages to describe going to sleep” problem

One of the best illustrations comes from Louis de Robert’s attempt to find Proust another publisher. Alfred Humblot of Ollendorff reportedly responded:

“I may be corked with emery, but I can’t understand how a gentleman can spend thirty pages describing how he turns and turns in his bed before finding sleep.”

That’s almost a perfect summary of the initial critical difficulty.

To Proust, the apparently trivial experience of lying awake is an entrance into memory, consciousness, time, desire, habit, and the construction of the self. To a skeptical publisher, it was simply thirty pages about going to bed.

4. Yet some critics immediately recognized the style as extraordinary

The reaction wasn’t uniformly negative. Some reviewers were struck precisely by what others found excessive.

Contemporary notices praised the quality of Proust’s thought and style, and one early review singled out the remarkable way his prose transformed landscape and imagination into something almost hallucinatory. 

Most importantly, Jacques Rivière—a major figure at the NRF—understood that the apparent disorder was actually construction. He recognized that Swann was extraordinarily composed, with details planted for effects that might occur hundreds or even thousands of pages later. 

That is perhaps the central historical irony of Proust’s first reception:

what looked to many readers like sprawl was, to the best readers, architecture.

5. André Gide famously changed his mind

The most dramatic reversal was Gide’s.

After the book appeared, Henri Ghéon’s positive assessment prompted Gide to read it properly. He became convinced that rejecting it had been a monumental mistake. He wrote Proust apologizing and called the NRF’s rejection “the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF.” 

Gide’s reversal matters because it shows that Proust’s initial difficulty wasn’t necessarily permanent. A reader could go from “this is an overlong society writer’s manuscript” to recognizing a major literary achievement once he actually surrendered to the book’s method.

So what did early French critics think of Proust’s style?

A useful shorthand would be:

Early objection	What Proust was actually doing
Too long	Expanding subjective time rather than clock time
Too digressive	Reproducing the associative movement of consciousness
Too obscure	Making perception and memory themselves the subject
Too personal / autobiographical	Turning the fictionalized recollections into an instrument for investigating general human experience
Not sufficiently structured	Concealing an elaborate long-range architecture
Too precious / mondain	Using the social world as material for psychological and moral analysis
Not really a novel	Inventing a form somewhere between novel, memory, essay, psychological study, and prose poem

And that last point is particularly revealing. Proust’s innovation was initially experienced as a failure to conform to existing literary categories. His later reputation partly rests on precisely the same qualities that initially made critics uncomfortable.

The 1913 reception therefore wasn’t simply “critics hated Proust.” It was more interesting: many competent readers couldn’t yet see what the book was asking them to do as readers. The few who could—Gide after his conversion, Rivière, and some other unusually receptive critics—recognized that Proust’s apparently meandering sentences represented a new way of making consciousness itself into narrative form. 

Paul Souday — Le Temps, 1913: “too extended,” “chaotic”

The clearest hostile-or-baffled response was from Paul Souday, the influential critic of Le Temps. Shortly after Du côté de chez Swann appeared, he wrote:

“Il me semble que le gros volume de M. Marcel Proust manque d’unité de composition, qu’il est aussi démesuré que chaotique…”

In English:

“It seems to me that M. Marcel Proust’s large volume lacks compositional unity, that it is as overextended as it is chaotic…”

Souday’s conclusion was devastatingly condescending: the book contained “precious elements” from which Proust might have made “an exquisite little book.” 

That is fascinating in retrospect. Souday was not saying there is nothing here. Quite the opposite. He thought there were beautiful pieces—but believed Proust had failed to turn them into a properly proportioned novel.

And he had a legitimate reason for feeling lost. Swann consists of three radically different sections:

• Combray — childhood, memory, family, place;
• Un amour de Swann — Swann’s obsessive love for Odette, narrated largely in the third person;
• Noms de pays : le nom — the narrator’s adolescent imagination and desire.

The connections that become obvious once you’ve read the entire Recherche were not yet visible to a first reader. 

So Souday’s “chaos” is particularly revealing: Proust’s structure was operating on a scale larger than the individual volume.

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Henri Ghéon — the NRF’s initial reaction

The response from Henri Ghéon, associated with the Nouvelle Revue française, is even more revealing because the NRF was precisely the literary milieu that would eventually become central to Proust’s reputation.

Ghéon essentially regarded the work as something that could not comfortably be called a novel—a kind of endless prose poem or exercise in personal reminiscence. His reaction was that Proust had produced something fascinating but formless and interminable. 

This is a recurring pattern in the early reviews:

“It’s beautiful—but what is it?”

That question matters enormously. Proust wasn’t simply breaking rules within an accepted genre. He was making readers uncertain about the genre itself.

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André Gide — perhaps the most spectacular mistake

Then there is the famous case of André Gide.

When Proust submitted the manuscript to the NRF, Gide was involved in the decision not to publish it. Gide later confessed that he had badly misjudged Proust.

The extraordinary thing is that Gide’s initial impression was partly shaped by what he thought Proust was: a fashionable society figure, a salon writer, a chronicler of aristocratic and bourgeois circles.

Once Gide read the published book seriously, he realized his mistake and wrote to Proust apologizing. He called the rejection “the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF.” 

This is perhaps the single best anecdote for understanding the early reception.

Gide had been perfectly capable of recognizing literary modernism. What defeated him was Proust’s surface appearance: the apparently leisurely observations, social gossip, psychological minutiae, and extraordinarily long sentences.

He initially saw material where Proust was constructing an entire philosophy of consciousness.

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Jacques Rivière — the reader who “got it”

Jacques Rivière, by contrast, came much closer to understanding what was happening.

Rivière eventually became one of Proust’s strongest defenders within the NRF. What he perceived was that the apparent looseness of Proust’s writing concealed an extraordinary degree of organization.

This is the crucial counterargument to Souday.

Souday sees:

excessive length → lack of unity → chaos

Rivière sees something closer to:

apparent digression → delayed connections → enormous structural unity.

Later readers would come to recognize just how important this distinction was. Things that seem like incidental details in Swann can acquire significance hundreds or even thousands of pages later.

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And then there was the reaction to the style itself

This may actually be the most interesting part.

Imagine being a French critic in 1913 and opening Swann.

The book begins:

“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.”

“For a long time I would go to bed early.”

That sounds deceptively simple.

But then Proust spends page after page exploring what happens to consciousness when the boundary between waking and sleeping dissolves.

For a nineteenth-century reader trained in the conventions of the realist novel, this creates a fundamental problem:

Nothing seems to be happening.

There is no conventional plot advancing.

Instead, Proust follows:

sensation → memory → association → imagination → reflection → another memory → another association.

The sentence itself becomes the vehicle of consciousness.

And contemporary readers often experienced precisely this as digression.

A particularly famous anecdote comes from Alfred Humblot of the Ollendorff publishing house. When Louis de Robert tried to interest him in Proust’s manuscript, Humblot reportedly complained that he couldn’t understand how someone could spend so many pages describing how a man turns over in bed before falling asleep.

That reaction is almost comically perfect because it identifies the fundamental disagreement:

Humblot asks: “Why does this require so many pages?”

Proust’s answer, implicitly, is:

“Because the experience of those few minutes contains an entire world.”

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Why Proust sounded “badly written” to some readers

There is another subtle point here.

Proust’s sentences aren’t merely long. They are syntactically recursive.

He frequently starts with a perception and then qualifies it:

I saw X, which reminded me of Y, although at the time I didn’t understand Y, because I was thinking of Z, which later came to seem connected with X…

The sentence doesn’t merely describe thought.

It behaves like thought.

A conventional French sentence tends toward clarity:

subject → verb → object → conclusion.

Proust often gives you something closer to:

perception → qualification → correction → memory → analogy → qualification of the analogy → retrospective correction → conclusion.

To critics trained in the ideal of clarity, proportion, and controlled composition, this could look like stylistic indiscipline.

And that is why the early criticism is so interesting: the same sentence could be judged either “chaotic” or “profoundly faithful to consciousness.”

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One especially important distinction

We should also be careful about the phrase “French critics hated Proust.”

That’s too simple.

The initial reception was actually mixed and confused.

There were readers who recognized the brilliance quite early. Proust wasn’t simply dismissed. What happened was more interesting:

His admirers initially had difficulty explaining why he was great, while his detractors had surprisingly concrete objections to the form.

They could point to:

• the enormous sentences;
• the absence of conventional pacing;
• the shifts in narrator and perspective;
• the three-part structure;
• the apparent autobiographical nature;
• the obsession with tiny sensations;
• the endless social distinctions;
• the lack of obvious plot progression.

Those objections weren’t stupid. In fact, they tell us something important about how revolutionary Proust actually was.

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The irony of Souday’s “exquisite little book”

Souday thought Proust had perhaps 100–200 pages of excellent material buried inside an enormous manuscript.

History turned that judgment upside down.

The things Souday regarded as expendable—the digressions, reflections, memories, descriptions, social observations—turned out to be the very substance of the work.

Proust’s great wager was that the supposedly insignificant material of life—waiting for sleep, remembering a room, tasting a madeleine, hearing a piece of music, thinking about someone who isn’t there—could become the central subject of a novel.

And eventually the critics had to change their idea of what a novel was.

That’s why the first reviews are so illuminating. They weren’t merely reviews of a new book; they were a collision between an older conception of the novel and a new conception of literary consciousness.

What happened with the NRF

Proust sent the manuscript of Du côté de chez Swann to the Nouvelle Revue française in 1912. The manuscript circulated among the editors, and André Gide was involved in the rejection.

The reasons weren’t simply aesthetic. Proust’s reputation worked against him. He was associated with fashionable Parisian society, and Gide apparently had an image of him as a rather precious, socially ambitious writer.

The manuscript was eventually rejected.

Proust then turned to Bernard Grasset, who published Du côté de chez Swann in November 1913.

The irony is that the NRF would later become the great institutional home of Proust’s work.

Gide’s change of heart

After Swann appeared, Gide heard more favorable reactions and reconsidered the book. He finally read it properly.

He wrote to Proust in January 1914, apologizing for the earlier rejection. The letter is extraordinarily candid. Gide essentially admitted that he had misjudged Proust personally and therefore failed to recognize the literary importance of the manuscript.

The famous passage is:

“For several days I have not stopped regretting my error…”

Gide went on to explain that he had been influenced by the impression that Proust was primarily a “mondain”—someone concerned with fashionable society.

And then comes the devastating admission: Gide realized that the NRF had committed a huge error in rejecting him.

This wasn’t merely literary embarrassment. Gide understood that he had failed as a reader.

Proust’s reaction is remarkably gracious

You might expect Proust to be furious.

Instead, he was deeply moved.

He understood exactly how the rejection had happened, and he also recognized that Gide’s apology was sincere. Proust wrote back with considerable generosity.

But there is something fascinating underneath his graciousness: he doesn’t really accept Gide’s explanation that the mistake was merely accidental.

Proust had been rejected because the editors had initially misunderstood what kind of writer he was.

And that misunderstanding was precisely what Proust had been fighting throughout the composition of the book.

Proust knew that his novel looked “wrong”

This becomes particularly clear if we look at how Proust described his own method.

He was not trying to write a conventional realist novel in which:

event → event → event → climax → resolution.

His subject was the transformation of experience by memory.

That explains why Swann begins with consciousness rather than action.

The famous opening:

“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.”

isn’t just a pleasant autobiographical beginning.

Proust is deliberately starting with an apparently insignificant fact and then asking:

What happens to a person’s identity when memory begins to recover a lost world?

The answer eventually becomes the enormous architecture of À la recherche du temps perdu.

And Proust had a very specific theory of why this required such a strange style

This is where the later critical reception becomes easier to understand.

Proust believed that ordinary language gives us a false picture of experience.

We say:

“I remember my childhood.”

But that’s not actually what happens.

A smell, taste, sound, phrase, or visual impression suddenly brings something back. The memory arrives sideways, unpredictably. One thing evokes another.

Proust therefore wanted the prose itself to reproduce that movement.

So when a Proustian sentence seems to wander, it isn’t necessarily wandering.

It is following an association.

And when he spends pages on something apparently trivial, he is testing whether that trivial thing contains a buried emotional or temporal reality.

This is why the madeleine episode is so important.

The narrator doesn’t simply say:

“Eating a madeleine reminded me of Combray.”

Instead, Proust dramatizes the astonishing fact that conscious intention cannot summon the past at will. The involuntary sensation does it.

This also explains the controversy over “style”

Early critics could object:

Proust doesn’t know how to write a concise sentence.

But Proust’s implicit answer was:

Perhaps the problem is that a concise sentence cannot represent consciousness accurately.

That is a much more radical proposition.

His long sentences aren’t simply decorative. They allow him to keep several moments of consciousness alive simultaneously:

what I felt → what I thought I felt → what I later realized I had felt → what I now understand about that earlier self.

Time becomes layered inside the sentence.

That’s one reason Proust can describe something that happened decades earlier while simultaneously allowing the older narrator to comment on his younger self.

And this is why the Gide episode matters so much

Gide was not an unintelligent or conservative reader.

He was one of the major figures of French modernism.

Yet even Gide initially read Proust through the wrong category.

He saw:

society → salons → aristocrats → gossip → personal reminiscence.

He eventually saw:

memory → consciousness → desire → time → art.

That transformation in Gide’s reading is almost a miniature version of what Proust was asking from his readers.

You have to stop asking:

“What happens next?”

and start asking:

“What is happening to consciousness?”

Once you make that shift, Proust’s enormous digressions begin to look completely different.

One final irony

Proust’s rejection by the NRF happened just before the First World War, when the literary world was about to undergo enormous changes.

Within a few years, the very qualities that had made Swann seem strange—fragmentation, subjectivity, psychological depth, unstable chronology, the breakdown of conventional narrative—would become central to modernist literature.

Proust didn’t suddenly become a different writer.

The readers’ conception of what literature could do changed.

And Gide’s reversal is perhaps the perfect symbol of that transformation.