Books: Dandy’s Progress

LETTERS OF MARCEL PROUST (462 pp.)—Translated and edited by Mina Curtiss—Random House ($5).

In the last 17 years of his life, Marcel Proust spent the greater part of his waking time ransacking his memory and writing down what he found with mingled love and horror. When he died in 1922, he left a mountain of legends about himself—of the fabulous invalid who nearly always wrote in bed, with his manuscript propped on his knees; of the Paris room whose walls were lined with cork to deaden all sound of the world outside. Besides his monumental Remembrance of Things

Past, he also left a voluminous correspondence. Now, after more than a quarter of a century, Mina Curtiss’ selection of his letters (which the onetime Smith College associate professor has translated herself) makes most of them available in English for the first time.

Dreyfus Echoes. At first glance, the letters seem only the posturings of a dilettante, but this impression soon wears off. Proust’s letters display a remarkable transformation in character: from an effete youth to a sharp observer of the tragedy in life, from a superficially clever snob to a mordant analyst and remorseless judge of snobbery.

In one of the earliest, probably written when he was only 15,* Proust practices the mincing tones of flattery: “Madame, you are pretty, extremely pretty.” He signed a note to one creature: “The most respectful servant of your Sovereign Indifference.” He feigned passion, and strained for it, but could seldom find it. Later he was to admit that “I only know how to tell women I admire and love them when I feel neither one nor the other.” Perhaps he remembered the letter he had written to a Creole courtesan, a friend of his great-uncle: “I should far rather make a slip with you than be on the right side even with the whole Academy—and [Anatole] France would, too. Indeed, it would be delightful to make a slip with you.” His passion for the Creole never went beyond an “amour de tête.”

But even the life of a wealthy, pampered dandy could not go undisturbed. Proust’s father, a successful physician, was a Catholic; his mother, whom he adored and whose image dominated his life, was Jewish. When Marcel was 23, the Dreyfus affair split France, and the young man instinctively rushed to the defense of the Jewish captain. In one of the few political acts of his life, Proust circulated petitions for Dreyfus’ release. The echoes of the affair rang in his novel years later; after the bigoted behavior of his aristocratic Parisian friends, Proust could never write long about “society” without bitterness.

Behavior Quirks. From childhood, when he discovered that by feigning illness he could avoid parental discipline, Proust had suffered from asthma. The illness was, he knew, at least partly “a nervous habit,” and though it struck him severely through most of his adult life, he refused to submit to thoroughgoing treatment. Instead, he isolated himself in his cork-lined room. Stung by the Dreyfus affair and aroused to literary ambitions, he found himself “weary of insincerity and friendship, which are almost the same thing.” After his mother’s death in 1905, the shaken, 34-year-old Proust withdrew from society more & more.

“She takes my life with her,” he wrote of his mother in the most passionate letters included in this book. In revealing words he told a friend: “To Mother I was always four years old.” Proust began to write with the dedication of a man possessed. Rarely did he leave his dark, stuffy room, and when he did it was to make midnight forays into hotels and parties to watch for the quirks of behavior and appearance of the people with whom he loaded his long novel.

In 1911, Proust submitted the first part of Remembrance of Things Past to a firm of which André Gide was a member. Gide turned it down. Later, after Proust had published it at his own expense, Gide wrote him that “the rejection of this book will remain . . . one of the most poignantly remorseful regrets of my life . . .” With infinite grace Proust replied: “Had there been no rejection … I should never have had your letter.”

In his last years Proust found fame, but by then it hardly mattered. He could live only by alternately dosing himself with stimulants and sedatives. The obtuse charge that he was a snob roused him to heat in his last letters. He was as friendly, he insisted, with valets and chauffeurs as with princes. And was it not the world of fashion, he asked another correspondent, which “is slandered … is always wrong, talks nonsense [in my writing]?”

In mid-November, 1922, Proust called his maid at 3 o’clock one morning to dictate notes for his book—on how it felt to die. Later the same day he was dead.

* Proust never dated his letters.