A Proust Friendship
Marcel Proust : Lettres a Une Arnie. Recueil de quarante-et-une lettres inedites adressies I Marie Nordlinger I899-1908. (Editions du Calame, Manchester. LI Is.) A scAftcrrt of dates and addresses in these letters and a vagueness in Mrs. Riefstahl's otherwise helpful introduction make it a little difficult to trace the course of this friendship. Related on her father's side to Proust's friend, Reynaldo Hahn, Marie Nordlinger (as she then was) first met Proust at the Halms' house when visiting Paris from Manchester in 1896. She does not then appear to have read Proust's unsuccessful first book, Les Plaisirs et les Yours, which come out that year.
His first letter (wholly Proustian in its analysis of the powerful charm of souvenirs) thanks her for a Christmas card sent from Man- chester in 1898 ; his second—a year later—acknowledges what must have been a happily expressed appreciation of Las Plaisirs, and tells of his literary projects. He is writing about Ruskin and architecture. Also: "je travaille depuis iris longtemps a un moorage de fres longue haleine mais sans rien achever. Et :I y a des moments ou je me demande si je ne ressemble pas au man de Dorothee Brook dans Middlemarch et si je n'amasse pas des ruines."
Miss Nordlinger's response was to send him one of Ruskin's books containing her own marginal notes in French (he knew not a word of English), and soon they were collaborating by post in trans- lations of The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies.
Their second meeting came about in 19oo (the year of Ruskin's death) by a happy chance which brought her, Hahn and Proust together on their first visit to Venice. Between then and 1905 she was often in Paris. She was a painter and sculptor, and the three went to galleries and museums, attended musical soirees, discussed the arts and still exchanged letters. That year she went for some months to America. On her return, Proust, never well, looked so ill that she hardly recognised him. In the autumn his mother died. While she has kept and here gives us every other scrap he wrote to her, Mrs. Riefstahl has destroyed the letters about this bereavement . . . it y a devoilait sa blessure avec un abandon si complet que je me fis un devoir de les soustraire aux regards indifferents.
In 1912, when the wok de tres longue haleine began to appear with Du Cote de chez Swann, Marie was married and established in Paris. At least one passage in the book derived unmistakably from her friendly commerce with the author begun so gently thirteen years before, but his last—as also his most affectionate—letters are dated 1908. The rest belongs to silence, or to La recherche du temps perdu.
Beginning with formal grace, concluding with the most affectionate tenderness, these are the letters of a man seldom free from suffering and destined, we may think, to inflict suffering. But they breathe patience, sweetness, courtesy, and are not without laughter. One can hardly read them without subscribing to the verdict given by the writer's friend, Stephen Hudson, in the English Tribute at the time of Proust's death in 1922—" the essential element of this ultimate ego was goodness."
Much more might be said. Coming at this time this book evokes a sharp pleasure, perhaps a sharper pain. It it as if some quiet revenant from the 'nineties were to steal up and lay upon our Woolton dessert plates a small, but perfectly ripe, pine-apple. The experience is the more piquant in that we owe it to a group of Manchester residents—French savants and Lancashire printers—and to the daughter of a Lancashire woman. There are two delightful portraits of the youthful correspondents.
CATHERINE CARSWELL.
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