Books
An artist's progress
Peter Quennell
Marcel Proust: Selected Letters 1880-1903 Edited by Philip Kolb (Collins £15.95)
Elderly women have sometimes a bad habit of inventing little domestic jobs to keep their grandchildren amused; and the famous French hostess Madame de Chevigne once bade her juvenile grand- daughter, the future Marie-Laure de Noailles, gather up and throw away into a basket the innumerable letters she had received from `cet raseur de Proust', most of which, she admitted, she had never had the leisure or the energy to read. None of the letters Proust wrote Madame de Chevigne, a woman he always admired and, at one period in his life, had thought he lov- ed, can be found in this selection of his cor- respondence. There is a single mention of her name — a reference during the year 1895 to 'the days when I went to the Avenue Marigny every morning to see Madame de Chevigne pass'. Once he had dared to speak to her; but she was evidently displeased and, remarking that she was about to visit a friend — 'Fitz-James m'attend' she snap- ped at him — immediately resumed her walk.
The story of his infatuation, and of the snub that brought it to an end, would be commemorated in his great novel; while her appearance — she was wearing a hat trim- med with blue cornflowers that matched her brilliantly blue eyes, and had an erect carriage and delicately bird-like profile was later immortalised in his portrait of the beautiful duchesse de Guermantes. No doubt her description of Proust as a dead bore was absurdly ill-judged; but the letters he sent her, and that she must have burned before her death, may well have been both intolerably effusive and wearisomely repetitious. The group of letters written bet- ween 1880 and 1903, which Philip Kolb has edited and Ralph Manheim translated, themselves occasionally try the reader's pa- tience.
Proust's method of addressing those he loved, and even correspondents whom he had decided to cultivate but did not per- ticularly esteem, was often too adulatory to carry much conviction. Robert de Montes- quiou, for example, the homosexual dandy and patrician poetaster, who had helped to introduce him to the Faubourg Saint- Germain, is showered with extravagantly flattering phrases; until their relationship begins to resemble that of La Fontaine's Maitre Corbeau and the crafty Fox circling around his tree. Meanwhile, Montesquiou learned that his new disciple, a wonderfully
accomplished mimic, used to entertain dinner-parties by marvellous impersona- tions of his explosive speeches and eccentric gestures.
If Proust's deepest feelings were aroused, his epistolary style was no less florid; and, as friendship was for him a consuming pas- sion, it is frequently difficult to distinguish his carnal loves from the friends he merely cherished and admired. Among his loves, the earliest and dearest was the pianist and composer Reynaldo Hahn, whom he had met in 1894, the recipient of a long series of tenderly affectionate messages, which became only a little less intense, though the two rpelomaniacs always remained friends, once he had taken up Lucien Daudet and, somewhat later, Bertrand de Fenelon, an engaging young diplomatist.
That Proust's homosexuality had been strongly rooted since his adolescence, despite his romantic cult of Madame de Chevigne and his courtship of the cultivated demi-mondaine Laure Hayman, formerly the mistress of his rich great-uncle Louis Weil — the prototype of the mysterious 'lady in pink' of whom his Narrator has a fascinating glimpse — is revealed throughout his adult letters with their lavish endearments and impassioned undertones.
On the other hand, the suggestion that the charming girls Proust introduces were habitually boys disguised is, of course, a serious error, which ignores the protean aspect of his literary genius. He assured Andre Gide that he had never enjoyed a woman; but this lack of physical experience does not mean that he failed to admire and understand the sex. He was keenly concern- ed with their tastes and vagaries and way of life — all the more concerned perhaps because he recognised the woman in himself. In mind, if not in body, Proust's was a bisexual character.
The story these letters unfold — and that alone would make the book worth reading — is the record of an artist's progress, its false starts, disappointments and missteps, overshadowed by a haunting sense of failure and the knowledge that both his devoted parents had hoped he might do bet- ter things. His father, Dr Adrien Proust, the eminent physician, was constantly demanding, he wrote in 1893, that he should decide upon a suitable career; but Proust as obstinately evaded the issue; and, having agreed to become an unpaid assis- tant at the Mazarine Library, he very seldom crossed its threshold, and informed the Director that 'the present nature of my studies, even more than the state of my health', obliged him to prolong his leave of
absence.
Otherwise, Proust was a good son, loved and respected his father, though their political arguments sometimes took all' angry turn, and adored his sympathetic mother, who, besides reorganising her whole household to safeguard the un- conventional hours he kept, like the Nar- rator's grandmother — her counterpart in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu — shared many of his literary interests and could quote their idolised Madame de Sevignt page by page. From her he carefully con- cealed his sexual affairs, which she would have found inexpressibly shocking, but did not hide his social faults. She learned, for example, of a ridiculous fit of rage, when he had flown at 'poor Fenelon' picked up his new hat, 'stamped on it, tore it into shreds, and finally ripped out the lining', just as in Le Cote de Guermantes. (his readers will recollect) the hero seizes and demolishes the hat of the astonished Charlus.
Having covered the preparatory period, which very often seemed so wasted, this volume of his letters carries us forward to December 1903; and by that time his father had suddenly died; while his mother, an in- consolable widow, was to leave the world within the next two years. His literary achievement at that stage was still com- paratively slight. True, he had translated Ruskin's Bible of Amiens, and had publish- ed in 1896 Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a sheaf of stories and sketches, with illustrations by a fashionable flower-painter and a preface by Anatole France, who observed that Proust reminded him of 'an innocent Petronius and a depraved Bernardin de Saint-Pierre', and transported us 'into a hot-house atmosphere amid intelligent orchids'. But, in 1899, after an exhausting struggle, he had abandoned Jean Santeuil, his first attempt at an ambitious full-length novel and the ballon d'essai for A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Not until January 1909 was he to launch his major effort.
His letters show him gradually ap- proaching that moment, and while he does so, endlessly gathering material. They are not only an effort to communicate with the men and women whom he liked or loved; they are also a form of investigation, an at- tempt to elicit their ideas and feelings, and, if he can, to grasp their motives. Hence the artificiality of the curious style he employs, his circumlocutory approach to any subject that engages him, which becomes par- ticularly apparent on pages 92 and 93 of this book, where young Madame Henri Gauthier-Villars, better known as Colette and still happily married to the nefarious 'Willy', provides a couple of perfectly straightforward paragraphs in reply to one of Proust's effusions. The difference is striking. Her letter shows Colette at her best, without a trace of guile or subterfuge. She says precisely what she means to say. One can't help wishing that the greater and far more complex novelist, at least in his private letters, had now and then followed her example.
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