As it is, the chief contemporary novelist of the day, for Lovecraft, was neither American nor British but French—Marcel Proust. Although he never read more than the first two volumes in English (Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove) of Remembrance of Things Past, he nevertheless doubted that “the 20th century has so far produced anything to eclipse the Proustian cycle as a whole.”[57] Proust occupied the ideal middle ground between stodgy Victorianism and freakish modernism; and Lovecraft’s fondness for Derleth’s mainstream work rested in large part on his belief that it reflected that sense
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This surprises me.
