The French publishing house Grasset, now part of the Hachette empire, is generally thought to be one of the world's most august: It has been around since 1907 and has published some of the world's greatest thinkers and novelists – Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, François Mauriac. Several of them are Nobel laureates. So if you are going to submit a manuscript to them, you had better have some kind of a reputation.
This was not the case, however, in 1913, when the fledgling publisher made a somewhat grasping deal with a little-known writer called Marcel Proust. The writer, who was rich through family money, had a novel that no one wanted to publish. Called Swann's Way, it was the first volume of a planned sprawling tome about the lives of the upper middle classes and the operations of memory. It had been turned down by many more prestigious publishers, including the famously visionary editor at the Nouvelle Revue Française, André Gide. If Gide saw no brilliance in something, then it probably wasn't there. Proust made an offer to Grasset: He would pay for the book's publication and assist in its promotion. Grasset accepted, cynically – its publisher confessed in a letter to a friend that he had no hopes at all of selling this book to a large public.
This turned out to be what is probably the most famous vanity-press publishing deal in history. The book went on to score astonished reviews. Gide wrote to Proust to tell him that turning it down had been the most serious mistake ever made by his journal. And it is generally seen now not as any kind of upstart outsider work, but consummately intellectual and educated. It cannot be imagined as anything but canonical.
But about those reviews: turns out several of them were fake. This was revealed recently in the discovery of a stash of letters in a rare edition of Swann's Way. The book and the letters are to be auctioned off this month by Sotheby's and they are expected to fetch somewhere in the neighbourhood of half a million pounds. The letters, written by Proust to his editor, Louis Brun, are shocking. They discuss with great frankness the writing and planting of fake reviews.
According to Agence France-Presse, which broke this news, in one letter, Proust sends Brun instructions to pay Le Figaro – a stolid conservative newspaper – 300 francs (about $1,495 today) to feature a "flattering reference" to the new book on its front page (which it duly did). Proust promises to repay Brun. Proust paid an even higher sum – 660 francs – for the same review to be planted in another paper. The review in question had been written by Proust's friend, the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, then favourably edited by Proust. The letters give clear instructions to Brun to retype the reviews before they are sent in, "so there is no trace of my handwriting." The instructions make clear that Proust was aware that the action would be seen as dishonest.
In his fake reviews, Proust had very high praise for himself. He compares himself to Dickens, and adds that this work "is almost too luminous for the eye. … This book suggests almost the fourth dimension of the Cubists."
A consummate networker, in telling friends about the review by Blanche, Proust was sure to praise the artist. He spread the word that "a great painter" had evaluated his work.
This is a principle of blurbing that remains true to this day. If you are asked by a well-known writer to blurb a book, you accept because having your name on that book causes your star to rise as well. This is known as logrolling.
Paying for reviews happened in those days. As the century progressed, though, the ethical standards of both publishers and newspapers grew higher, and by the late 20th century it was considered taboo to pay to influence literary reviews. Grasset became the high-minded publisher it now is.
And then things changed again. How contemporary Proust now looks! Since the advent of the Internet and digital devices, self-publishing is easier than it ever was, and the massive success of many of these books – such as The Martian – has changed the industry's views about the value of the independent author.
With self-publishing comes self-promotion. Now, when anyone can upload an amateur review of any book to Amazon or Goodreads, and when these reviews can change the overall star-rating of a book and measurably affect its sales, it's quite common for authors, even very successful ones with mainstream contracts, to write and plant, anonymously, their own reviews, or to canvass their friends to do so for them. Every self-publishing guru stresses the importance of self-promotion, of constant advertisement and networking, and the idea of the author as entrepreneur. Publicists aiding authors with big houses do the same.
The days of paying big newspapers to run a review are over (for the record, The Globe and Mail won't take your bribe), but we do argue today over whether posting author-written reviews is unethical or just necessary in a world with decreasing literary media coverage.
It's notable that Proust was an extremely privileged guy. He used his society connections to promote his highbrow and daring literary oeuvre. He was also rich – he could easily afford the large sums spent on bribes. His advantage was massively unfair.
The same advantages apply to contemporary authors who are bankrolled by spouses or inheritances to create elaborate websites and newsletters for their YA stories. The new open world that claims to be democratic – the world that claims to have eliminated "gatekeepers" – isn't really.
And yet, we don't actually know to what extent Proust's early good reviews affected his sales. His reputation took off, through word of mouth, so meteorically after that that the views of Figaro very rapidly became inconsequential. One wonders, particularly in light of the contemporary insistence on author as entrepreneur, if Proust's connections and his unscrupulous manipulations had anything at all to do with his canonization. One will never know, but I suspect they didn't. Read a few paragraphs of his writing and you will be so dazzled that you might agree. History has long forgotten his friends and his scams. They are irrelevant now.