It may appear willful not to say eccentric to regard Proust's writing as having been in any way influenced by America. Proust never visited the United States nor showed any known inclination to do so. Even had he been offered passage to New York, as is Odette de Crécy by one of her young lovers, we can imagine him doing precisely as she does: handing the ticket to someone waiting at the dock side and returning straight to the comforts of Paris. Does this mean Proust was uninterested in the States? We might usefully approach the question from the perspective of his relationship with Britain. Despite plans to cross La Manche, Proust was never to set foot in England. His grasp of the language was by his own admission shaky. “[J]e lis l'anglais très difficilement” [I read English with great difficulty], he wrote Violet Schiff in 1919 (Corr. XVIII:475; my translation). His inability to speak English fluently he put down to his learning it while suffering with asthma: “et ne pouvais parler, que je l'ai appris des yeux et ne sais ni prononcer les mots, ni les reconnaître quand on les prononce” [and I couldn't talk, I learned with my eyes and am unable to pronounce the words or to recognize them when pronounced by others] (Corr. III:221; SL I:290).

Proust grew up at the height of Anglophilia in Paris, and his interest in British art and culture is a reflection of the times. What knowledge he had of Britain came either from his reading (the periodical La Revue des deux mondes advertised itself as “Anglophile”) or from friends such as Robert d'Humières, author of L'île et l'empire de Grande–Bretagne: Angleterre, Egypt, Inde and the translator of Rudyard Kipling; Robert de Billy, who worked for three years at the French Embassy in London, from where he kept Proust abreast of the Wilde scandal;…