November 18, 1922: Author Marcel Proust, long in ill health, dies of a pulmonary abscess in Paris. He was only 51 years old.
Since 1909, he had begun working on a multi-part novel that he called À la recherche du temps perdu. Translating from French to English, this becomes In Search of Lost Time. When the 1st English edition was released, shortly before his death, and comprising the 1st 4 volumes, it carried the English title Remembrance of Things Past. It would not be until 1992 that an English edition with the correctly translated title appeared.
Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother, Robert. In chronological order -- by publication, if not by content:
1. Swann's Way, 1913
2. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 1919
3. The Guermantes Way, 1921
4. Sodom and Gomorrah, 1922
5. The Prisoner, 1923
6. The Fugitive, 1925
7. Time Regained, 1927 (originally mistranslated as Finding Time Again, later as The Past Recaptured)
All told, it was around 3,200 pages, with more than 2,000 characters. When people want to joke about reading, or writing, something incredibly long, they usually compare it to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. At 1,225 pages, it's about 38 percent as long as the entirety of In Search of Lost Time.
The short version: The narrator (who, in all those page, never once mentions his own name) tells of his childhood and experiences into adulthood in the high-society France of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and thinks about the loss of time and the lack of meaning in the world.
In 1922, while it was still in the process of being published, and Proust was still alive, English author Virginia Woolf wrote, "Oh if I could write like that!" In 1965, Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov said that the greatest prose works of the 20th Century, in this order, were "Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Bely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time."
English author Graham Greene called Proust "the greatest novelist of the 20th Century." Another English author, W. Somerset Maugham, called In Search of Lost Time "the greatest fiction to date." American literary critic Harold Bloom said it "is now widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century." In 2013, American author Edmund White called it "the most respected novel of the twentieth century." In 2014, American author Michael Chabon called it his favorite book.
On the other hand, in 1948, English author Evelyn Waugh wrote, "I am reading Proust for the first time... and am surprised to find him a mental defective." In 2015, Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro said, "To be absolutely honest, apart from the opening volume of Proust, I find him crushingly dull."
And in 1999, as a guest on the last episode of The McLaughlin Group in the 20th Century, host John McLaughlin asked his panelists to name various bests and worsts of the Century, including the "most original thinker" and the "most stagnant thinker." Tony Blankley, a political operative who had worked for President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, named Proust his most stagnant thinker, "for wasting his considerable intellect on the remembrance of things past."
Disclaimer: I have never read the novel. Nor do I intend to. If you have, you are entitled to your own opinion of it.
Because of the sheer volume, no one has seriously tried to film the whole thing, even as a series. In 1982, Italian director Fabio Carpi filmed Basileus Quartet, with parts of the 4th and 7th volumes. In 1984, German director Volker Schlöndorff -- who looks like Bryan Cranston as Walter White, and whose name sounds like that of a male porn star -- filmed Swann in Love, with Jeremy Irons and Ornella Muti.
In 1999, Chilean director Raúl Ruiz filmed Time Regained, encompassing the 7th volume, with Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart and John Malkovich. And in 2000, Belgian director Chantal Akerman filmed La Captive, about the 5th volume. In 2011, French director Nina Companeez helmed a 4-hour, 2-part miniseries for TV network France 2, and even this one drops the 1st volume, somewhat condensing the last 6.
*
November 18, 1922 was a Saturday. Baseball was in the off-season. There was hardly any professional basketball. The NHL season didn't begin for another month.
But there was college football. Among those games:
* Army beat Bates College of Maine, 39-0 on The Plain at West Point, New York.
* The University of Pennsylvania beat Penn State, 7-6 at the new Franklin Field in Philadelphia.
* North Carolina beat Davidson, 29-6 at Wearn Field in Charlotte. UNC won the Southern Conference, a precursor to both the Southeastern (SEC) and Atlantic Coast (ACC) Conferences.
* The University of Chicago beat the University of Illinois, 9-0 at Stagg Field in Chicago.
* Iowa beat Ohio State, 12-9 at the new Ohio Stadium in Columbus. Iowa won the Big Ten.
* Notre Dame beat Butler, 31-3 at Irwin Field in Indianapolis.
* Nebraska beat Kansas State, 21-0 at Nebraska Field in Lincoln. They went on to win the Missouri Valley Conference (a forerunner of the Big 8/12).
* Baylor beat Oklahoma A&M, 10-0 at Lewis Field in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Baylor went on to win the Southwest Conference. Oklahoma A&M is now Oklahoma State, and Lewis Field, still standing, is named Boone Pickens Stadium.
* Texas beat Oklahoma, 32-7 at Boyd Field in Norman, Oklahoma. "The Red River Showdown" would be held in Austin the next season, but, every time since then, it has been held in Dallas (with the exception of the 2018 Big 12 Championship Game, which was held near Dallas at the Cowboys' AT&T Stadium in Arlington.)
* The University of California beat the University of Nevada, 61-13 at California Field in Berkeley. They won the Pacific Coast Conference (a forerunner of the Pac-12), went on to go 9-0, and were retroactively awarded the National Championship.
* The University of Southern California beat Idaho, 14-0 at the new Rose Bowl stadium outside Los Angeles in Pasadena, California. They went on to beat Penn State in the Rose Bowl game.
* Oregon beat Oregon State, 10-0 at Bell Field in Corvallis, Oregon State's home field at the time.
* In New York City, Columbia University -- despite having a sophomore fullback named Lou Gehrig -- lost to Dartmouth, 28-7 at South Field. City College of New York (CCNY) lost to Catholic University, 21-0 at Lewisohn Stadium. Fordham lost to Holy Cross, 28-0 at Fitton Field in Worcester, Massachusetts, so that's a New England team embarrassing a team from The Bronx.
* In New Jersey, Princeton beat Yale, 3-0 at Palmer Stadium in Princeton. And, on neutral ground at Ashland Stadium in East Orange, Rutgers beat New York University (NYU), 37-0.
And in English soccer, North London team Arsenal traveled to Sunderland in the North-East, and played Sunderland to a 3-3 draw at Roker Park.
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