A Review of Marcel Proust’s
Letters to His Neighbor
Originally published in the
Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2018
Letters to His Neighbor
By Marcel Proust
Translated by Lydia Davis
New Directions ($19.95)
Marcel Proust, author of the world’s longest and perhaps
greatest novel, In Search of Lost Time,
was a near-invalid who sequestered himself during most of his novel’s
composition inside a cork-lined, shuttered bedroom, banishing pollen, noise,
sunlight, people, and everything else in the world other than his own voluminous
memories. Stories of his reclusiveness have become so legendary and proverbial that
inside views of his life—such as his housekeeper Céleste Albaret’s profoundly illuminating
memoir, Monsieur Proust—read like gospel
to pilgrims in search of more shards of the true Proust. He didn’t write any
memoirs himself, unless you count his great roman
à clef as a memoir, but his epic correspondence forms a kind of double
mirror to his endlessly refracting novel, and so when any new artifacts
documenting this monster of neurotic hermeticism come to light, it’s like the
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves of Qumran. Who knows how much of
Proust’s correspondence lies unread in private collections, or lost in
someone’s attic, but the latest discovery of twenty-six of his letters to his
upstairs neighbor, written over a decade during the composition of his novel,
will delight any Proustian and will tide the faithful over until new relics
come to light.
An American dentist named Charles
Williams lived and worked in the flat just above Proust’s—a nightmare for any
sensitive person, let alone one who only slept during the day—and nearly all of
the letters in this volume are hilariously labyrinthine requests for quiet.
Three are addressed to Dr. Williams himself, while the twenty-three others are addressed
to his wife, Marie, who like Proust also had ongoing health problems and whose
sensitivity and intelligence very slowly made their mark on her complaining
neighbor’s empathy. Some of these letters are simply ingenious in how they wend
their way toward their true purpose—quiet,
please!—but Proust couldn’t help becoming connected to his fellow sufferer
upstairs, and while almost never actually coming into contact with her he nonetheless
gave her much of himself, and he received perhaps just as much in return.
Responding to a letter she wrote him while she was on vacation (and thus not
even around to complain to), he revels in her perceptive descriptions and
reflects his own crepuscular experience right back at her:
You, with your pictorial and sunlit
words, have brought color and light into my closed room. Your health has
improved you tell me, and your life become more beautiful. I feel great joy
over this. I cannot say the same for myself. My solitude has become even more
profound, and I know nothing of the sun but what your letter tells me.
Gradually recognizing each other’s finely attuned minds, the
two eventually began exchanging books—always through intermediaries, despite
being a floor apart; in fact, he even sent some of his letters to her via the
mail—and early on he began offering her published samples of his ongoing novel,
despite his qualms about their level of polish and completion. Sending her magazine
excerpts of what eventually became the work’s second and third volumes, he
illuminates his expansive method as he subtly impresses her with why she and
her husband need to give him the quiet that his labors require:
But will these detached pages give
you an idea of the 2nd volume? And the 2nd volume itself doesn’t mean much;
it’s the 3rd that casts the light and illuminates the plans of the rest. But
when one writes a work in 3 volumes in an age when publishers want only to
publish one at a time, one must resign oneself to not being understood, since
the ring of keys is not in the same part of the building as the locked doors.
Those Daedalian keys eventually took seven volumes to become
almost integrated into the novel’s full
ground plan, Proust’s fully articulated vision halting just short of completion
when he died eight years later, his revisions and expansions having ballooned
the three volumes that he mentions in this 1914 letter into seven nearly
perfect halls of mirrors.
Renowned
Proust translator Lydia Davis reproduces the author’s idiosyncratic usage and orthography
faithfully, mimicking the improvised quality of these dashed-off letters with a
slashing verve, and she includes photographs of many of the letters so that
readers can see their slapdash nature for themselves. The volume’s original
French editors Estelle Gaudry and Jean-Yves Tadié contribute helpful endnotes,
which Davis translates, expands, and emends to great effect, although Davis unfortunately
has her hands tied with Proust-biographer Tadié’s labored foreword.
Davis’s
afterword also indulges in a few too many of her own peccadillos, such as way
too much extra-Proustian information about what the bank that occupies Proust’s
former apartment looks like now, which is totally irrelevant to what Proust
experienced himself. The real magic of her afterward comes in its coda, which
tells the story of the grandson of a Norman florist reading extracts from these
letters online and subsequently disclosing Proust’s flower-buying habits and
etiquette with the Williamses and others, noting the thirty-two times that he
visited the shop between 1908 and 1912. Unearthing these intricately revealing
records is the true Proustian pursuit, redeeming Davis’s mini-gospel of its few
apocryphal lapses and elevating this volume’s host of testamentary material to
nearly the level of the letters themselves. A tiny reliquary, this book’s illuminated
codex now serves as a minor pilgrimage site for all true Proustian communicants.
—David Wiley
