Proust's Way

Dear friend, you guessed, did you not, that since your visit I have been seriously ill. Had it not been for that, would I have been able to refrain from writing you, in spite of your request and even without waiting for your letter? I am sending you this word at a time when I am still suffering. But I do not want my continued silence to make you think I have dreamed of forgetting you. When we see each other again, if we do see each other, I beg you, be just as you tell me you generally are. I can not understand that the admiration you tell me you have for me can change anything, since you know that there is, on my side, an equal and reciprocal admiration. So they neutralize one another, and we should see each other as two gay men who love life (even the one who is half dead) and who, when they are alone and separate think deeply, but together engage in all the kinds of amusement of good folk who are not artists and who do not admire each other, amusements from which literary conversations are, of course, not necessarily excluded.

I am so tired I tell you all that very badly with a pedantic air that fills me with horror, and as if you did not know as well and better than I what constitutes the charm of frank and simple friendships.

Cordially yours,

Marcel Proust.

Here I should recount an incident which preceded that nocturnal repast at Marcel Proust’s bedside and to which there is reference in a letter. The night before, I received this message by telephone: “Marcel Proust would like to know whether M. François Mauriac would care to hear the Capet String Quartet during the meal or whether he prefers to dine with the Count and Countess of X….”

To-day I would not have hesitated to catch the dear mystifier in his net, and I would have demanded the Capet Quartet, but in my persistent innocence, I was profuse in my gratitude and answered that I wished nothing and nobody except the presence of Marcel Proust himself. This little fact ends by throwing light on certain aspects of that strange man, the same that the letters which he addresses to me betray. Even if we knew nothing of Marcel Proust, those letters would suffice to recreate a character like the greater part of those that populate his novel. For instance, under that flood of civilities, that interpretation of my wail: “Not an article on my book …” which he translates immediately as a disguised request, that deluge of words to refuse me what I am not asking for, the bait of tittle-tattle in regard to G. he throws to me, or again that allusion to friends who would force me to choose between them and him, all that in spite of a sincere sympathy and a touching sweetness, exhales a rather offensive odor, that of the society whose hell he describes to us. In the depths of that sick man, attacked at the meeting-place of flesh and spirit, the outside world against which he was defenseless, which was swallowed up in him and which his memory brought up again, bathed for years. All those characters were immersed in it, as it were, and underwent alterations due to that physiological bath.

My admiration for Marcel Proust twenty years after his death remains just as lively but is, nevertheless, slightly altered. I am not as certain that the work, in its entirety, marks the triumph of a method. This strikes me: the heights of that great work emerge from the most distant past of the author. Only the child in Swann’s Way and the grown-up people that the child observed with an unspoiled gaze (I am thinking in particular of the famous episode: One of Swann’s loves) have resisted corruption.

But as the time recaptured by Proust moves away from his early years and brings to the surface a determined sexual life and the beings it drags along behind it, the metal of the work, up to then intact, is corroded little by little. It resists in certain places as though preserved by the sacred memory of the mother and grandmother of the hero. Everywhere else, the corruption of a life, stagnant though remarkably attentive, defenseless against the outer world, given over entirely to swarming sensations, besieges, penetrates, gnaws and destroys the human beings to whom the novelist had given existence. In the last volumes, even the face of Françoise, the immortal servant, fades out. The phantom of Albertine floats like ectoplasm in the suffocating darkness of a room. With the living gone, nothing remains except the incomparable clinical study of jealousy in an accursed creature to whom the love that God has showered upon human couples is forbidden. Everything that was flesh in the novel gives way little by little to corruption and returns to dust, but the framework remains: those views, those generalizations of the most profound moralist who has ever existed in any literature.

That is to say that Proust’s work appears to me just as dominating as twenty years ago. I stand amazed at discovering that its importance still escapes certain critics. Proust’s place in the ranks of the great European novelists will never be taken away from him. It remains for us to find ourselves to-day more sensitive than we were in the dazzlement of first reading, to that contamination of a whole romantic world by that morbid creator who bore it too long mingled with his own life, mixed with his deep murkiness, and who communicated to it the germs with which he found himself infected.

In the course of the night that Marcel Proust reminds me in a letter, when the Capet Quartet did not play, I recall that gloomy room on the rue Hamlin, that black den, that bed where an overcoat served as a blanket, that waxy mask through which it could have been said our host watched us eat, and whose hair alone seemed living. As for him, he no longer partook of the nourishment of this world. The hidden enemy of which Baudelaire speaks, that time “which consumes life” and which “grows and strengthens itself on the blood we lose” was condensing, materializing at the bedside of Proust, already more than halfway to non-existence, and was becoming that enormous, proliferous mushroom, nourished on his own substance, his work: Le Temps retrouvé.

He still made use of the language of friendship in which he had not believed for a long time. Woe to the man who can not distinguish between tenderness and desire! Woe to the heart incapable of cherishing another heart, without the flesh being attacked and wounded! The words he still used no longer corresponded to that inner havoc, that destruction. The formulas of tenderness survived only on lips all dried up by a frightful thirst which would never be quenched.

Yet in his evocation of that nocturnal repast, he names: “My incomparable H.” But the boy was to leave a short time afterwards for America where Proust had found him a situation. And so he cut the last moorings; and he remained alone in that furnished room, worrying about the proofs of his book, the paste-ons that he added in the margins, between two choking fits, having no other connection with his friends than the one which binds him to them now that he is no longer there. His relationships with us were a forerunner of those that death establishes between a writer and his admirers who can reach him no longer except through his books.

And certainly Proust is as living in my eyes as many of those who have survived him—as living as Jean Cocteau whose route crosses mine at long intervals, and whom I recognize by his voice, by that very slight squint, by that skinny hand, by that delicate lizard’s foot that in 1910 he held up with the same gesture in the dark entrance of his house on rue d’Anjou, before the eyes of an astonished valet de chambre, as when, in the salon of Madam Alphonse Daudet, he recited in an affected and charming tone:

My brothers of Paris, our divine realm
Spreads out in all directions from
the Place Vendome

A Cocteau before Diaghilew, before the discovery of Paludes at Offranville at Jacques-Emile Blanche’s home, before Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Picasso, before the illumination that determined his fame.

At this crossroads where I have arrived, I hesitate between a thousand trails. It is not a life that I am recounting. The most uniform existence, the least filled with events, the most sedentary, is a cloth so closely woven with circumstances and passions, so many other destinies cross it, it is a skein so tangled that even if we were deprived of all shame, that would be of no use to us except to resolve us to say everything.

The youth of a man appears short on the plane of eternity, but under the microscope that drop of water discloses a swarming comparable to that of the infinite spaces. The integral history of a young life, of its loves, its friendships, its weaknesses, its intellectual or religious crises, offers the vast proportions of the history of the ideas and customs at a certain epoch as they are reflected in a single spirit. And a long old age would not be enough to complete the account or to exhaust its drama.