The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  Here finally, in coming to the heart of Swann’s tragic failure, the narrator finds the truth about himself. He does have a task, since the ‘truth that was made for him’ has, by a kind of grace, been revealed to him in his own lifetime. He is a writer; his life is a book, and all the men and women he has encountered are characters in it.

  The long process of this discovery, which is also the process through which the experience is to be remade, the coincidence of life and book, of feeling and seeing with telling, of the writer’s experience being word for word and line for line the reader’s, of its being our book, the book of our lives, all this is what constitutes not only the great achievement of A la Recherche (and it seems the ultimate and universal fiction – other novels are just novels) but also the great experience of reading it. Praise or censure, as Proust himself saw – and he was being modest – are neither here nor there, an irrelevance, when they are not merely a presumption. We discover in reading this book what it is to be a great writer. ‘It really is like that.’

  Scripsi, 1983

  PROUST’S BELLES LETTRES

  THERE ARE WRITERS WHOSE letters we turn to in the assurance that what we will find there is what we find in all their work, the full creative self, since they cannot, whatever they are writing, be less than they are. Thomas Mann, in even the briefest request for information or reply to an enquiry, is always at full stretch, the instant representative of culture and mind: Isak Dinesen, in the letters she wrote from Africa between 1914 and 1931, had not yet found her vocation, but the voice is unmistakeable; we discover her as a writer before she has quite discovered herself. These writers intensely scrutinise; they argue, explore, give themselves up to playful speculation, produce, out of sheer exuberance and for the delight of their correspondents, observations on people, places, events, little passing phenomena, as if the mere taking up of a pen released in them that irresistible desire to exercise the spirit and entertain the world that is the writer’s natural mode. No biographer can produce them for us as immediately or as richly as they produce themselves, and this because the production is immediate; we have to engage with them as their first readers did, in full spate, as agents vigorously on the move. To read such letters is to be in medias res, in life as it is being lived. We are too closely engaged to see what we are reading as ‘secondary material’; as affording no more than clues, insufficient ones generally, to the other more composed sort of writing that is ‘literature’.

  The first thing to be said of Proust’s letters is that we get very little of the writer in this mode: they are scarcely letters at all in the sense that Mann’s are. As Proust himself points out (Vol. II, 136) they are ‘correspondence’, by-products of his social life, bread-and-butter letters – except that they are mostly jam: the man is hidden in them (in some cases it is their only purpose) behind a screen of art nouveau flourishes and circumlocutions, politenesses so artificial and perfunctory that they can scarcely be taken as the products of a ‘writer’ at all. The man who penned them is all poses. He watches himself; not analytically – not at all – and not to see what sort of figure he may be cutting among the immortals either, but out of fear of giving himself away. Wary always of nature, and of his own nature, he takes refuge in a kind of playfulness that is in contact with the truth only by lying at a tangent to it.

  A good many of the letters are in code, some of them, like the ones to Reynaldo Hahn, in a form of baby talk or lovers’ language (one thinks of the use of ‘cattleyas’ in Du côté de chez Swann) that may or may not go back to an actual affair – we simply cannot tell; nor can we make much sense of them. Others do speak a public language, but it is a language of effusive flattery and hyperbole that belongs so completely to the period, or to a particular class, or to the forms of French rhetoric, that it too is indecipherable now, and was perhaps, to the uninitiated, even then. What are we to do with all this if what we are interested in is sincerity and truth?

  Proust is quite capable of writing plainly when the occasion demands, but for the most part it does not. Here he is (I, 92, May 1892) writing to Robert de Montesquiou. There is nothing indirect about this; nothing slavish either, considering that it is early enough in their acquaintance for Proust to be risking something, socially, by being so frank:

  Dear Sir,

  yesterday I did not answer the question you put to me about the Jews. For this very simple reason: though I am a Catholic like my father and brother, my mother is Jewish. I am sure you understand that this is reason enough for me to refrain from such discussions. I thought it more respectful to write this to you than to answer you in the presence of a third person. But I very much welcome this occasion to say something to you that I might never have thought of saying. For since our ideas differ, or rather, since I am not free to have the ideas I might otherwise have on the subject, you might, without meaning to, have wounded me in a discussion. I am not, it goes without saying, referring to any discussion that might take place between the two of us, for then I shall always take an interest in any ideas on social policy which you may choose to expound, even if I have a most fitting reason for not sharing them.

  Yours,

  Marcel Proust

  He could also be robust in argument if he wanted. The reply he writes to the famous questionnaire from Maurice le Blond is wonderfully spirited, with all that combative and contrary play of mind that we might expect of these letters and so rarely get:

  [About 27 or 28 August 1904]

  Sir,

  I have received the questionnaire you were good enough to send me. On the pretext of clarifying the meaning of the questions you pose, you hasten to point out the spirit in which the answer should be framed. And after two pages of highly interesting and as you say necessary explanations, you rightly consider the reader to be sufficiently ‘prepared’ so that you no longer need all that circumspection to express your thought and reveal your aim, which is not at all, is it, to ‘conduct an inquiry’, but to get a particular opinion endorsed. Thus after the ‘necessary explanations’ you give your questionnaire a new and entirely unequivocal form: ‘Do you accept the age-old tyranny of Rome, etc.’ ‘Do you think the State has the right to subjugate artistic personality?’ Faced with a question posed in this way, would anyone dare to reply that he is in favour of the tyranny of Rome or the subjugation of personality? …

  And yet, Monsieur! Whether or not the State has ‘the right’ to subjugate artistic personality, do you think that so important since in no circumstances will it ever have the power to do so. What can subjugate the personality of an artist is, first of all, the beneficent force of a more powerful personality – and that is a servitude which is not far from being the beginning of liberty – and secondly, the pernicious effect of sloth, sickness or snobbery. But the ‘State’, Monsieur, how do you imagine the State can subjugate a personality?

  Most of these letters are the product either of social tactics or private intrigue. There are, for example, the letters to older writers who might in some way be of use to him – Anatole France, Bergson, Sorel.

  With an unctuousness and opportunism that would do credit to Bloch, whose exercises in shameless self-promotion provide some of the most savage humour in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, they proceed in a sort of sideways style that involves a whole flurry of protective denials and negatives. The letter to Bergson is pure comedy:

  25th May, 1904

  Dear Sir,

  Allow me to thank you with all my heart for your great kindness. You can imagine how much store I set by a few words from the philosopher I most admire, and how delighted I am at the thought that he might be prepared to say them. Had I not been so unwell recently I should simply have gone round to ask you whether you didn’t find the whole thing excessive, and hence out of place, inopportune, perhaps ridiculous. If by any chance you did find it so, please don’t take the trouble to write to me. I shall understand that your opinion was that it would be better to do nothing, on seeing that you have in fact done nothin
g. If on the other hand you find the idea natural and possible, don’t bother to tell me either, and it will be a great joy to me, a just cause for gratitude and pride, that you should have done it.

  Your most respectful admirer

  Marcel Proust

  That is the public side. On the other, the private side, Proust is forever urging his friends not to betray him to one another, or insisting that what he has just told one of them is ‘tombe’ – a tomb that must not be violated. Typical is his letter to Antoine Bibesco of September 1902. It is worth quoting at length, since as well as the usual accusations it makes reference to an early story, ‘Fin de la jalousie’ (the title is itself suggestive), in which there is already some question of the transposition of sexes. (‘His Blue Eyes’ here is Bertrand de Fénelon.)

  My dear little Antoine,

  Don’t let what I am writing, which is very affectionate, make you angry (I’m not referring to ‘doubts’; whether or not I have any has nothing to do with the case). But it horrifies me to have you ask me out loud whether I’ve asked Lauris if he thought ‘His Blue Eyes’ (not Lauris’s blue eyes!) was nice or not so nice to me on a certain evening, etc.

  Hadn’t I made it absolutely clear that you were the only person to whom I had spoken of this business, that even Reynaldo doesn’t know about it. Without stopping to think, you passed it on to others. I’ve done all I could to straighten things out. But if you’re going to start dropping innuendoes to Lauris, etc.! Think of the impression it would make and what people would think of me. It’s true that, especially at times like this when my ‘Fin de la jalousie’ is causing me mortal anguish, such childishness as what people will think of me seems unimportant. But it’s not only on my account, I also owe it to my family not to let myself be taken for a Salaïst [homosexual]: gratuitously since I’m not one. Of course this wouldn’t necessarily make me look like a Salaïst, but cut off from the interpretation which your knowledge of my character and of the daily course of events have given you, it would certainly look odd. Besides, my affectation of humility, etc etc. already makes me look servile enough, without adding to that impression by representing me to Lauris or others as living in expectation of a smile from the King. But the nub of the matter is that what the intensity of my sympathy for you, my absolute confidence in you, and my habit of telling you everything have made me confide in you, should remain privy to you and not be passed on to anyone whomsoever. Neither Lucien Daudet, nor Reynaldo, nor Yeatman, etc. know of it. So there is no reason to speak of it to Lauris, Billy or Constantin.

  Of course none of this would be of the least interest if there had not been growing in the mind of the man who wrote these letters one of the supreme fictions of our century; if, submerged under all this fuss, there was not the great cathedral (his image) that by the end of the period covered by this second volume of letters had begun to rise, with all its towers and buttresses and elaborately sculptured figures, and figures behind figures, and was preparing to burst into the sun. It is for hints of the submerged cathedral that these letters draw us. They are there in plenty, but here too the eager student or lover of the book needs to take care.

  Proust rejected the biographical approach, and not only because he had so much, in his own case, to fear from it. In simply being what it is, A la Recherche, with its paradoxical and contradictory view of things – of events, characters, even geography – its misapprehensions, provisions, corrections, recorrections, revelations that make a kind of nonsense, but only a kind of nonsense, of what has gone before, is a direct assault on that method and should itself warn us against bringing these letters, or any known ‘facts’ of Proust’s life, to a reading of his book.

  There is always a gap between the observable life of an artist and his creations. The wider it appears (think of Mozart) the more we are led to wonder what hidden and unknowable other life there must have been in the man that could produce works so much larger than his known self could encompass; what leap of being must have occurred in him that nothing in the apparent life accounts for. The gap is larger in some artists than in others. In Proust it is very large indeed. Literary detectives and biographers, for all the facts and witnesses they may call on, are given very little foothold and have a long way to fall.

  We see the problem in Gide’s rejection of Du côté de chez Swann. The trivial person he knew could not have written a great novel so the novel he was reading was not great. Proust was to have the same problem himself with Cocteau.

  One way of putting it is this: there is, as we have seen, a good deal of Bloch in Proust, as there was a good deal of Charlus, but Bloch could not have written A la Recherche; and neither could Proust if there had not been enough of Bloch in him, and of Charlus too, for him to see these characters from the inside as well as observing them satirically from a distance.

  Take these two letters of 1908, the first to an old school-friend, de Lauris, who has broken a leg in a motor accident, the second to a young man he scarcely knew, the Vicomte de Pâris. They are, it seems to me, in the style of Charlus, as the letter to Bergson was in the style of Bloch:

  Wed, 7th (?), October 1908

  At the moment I’m unable to leave my bed, but I hope to come and see you soon. It is always delightful to see you, but even more gratifying now: each of your limbs so miraculously spared, your beautiful, gentle hands which from time to time, when I express a doubt about your friendship, seek mine in a gesture of persuasive eloquence, your whole body whose natural gait, immobilised now but not altered, is the only one I know that is entirely devoid of conventional mannerisms, swift in its movement towards what it desires or knows itself to be desired by, and above all your eyes, which darken so quickly if a sadness traverses your heart but in the depths of which, in an instantaneous effulgence, magnificent azure flashes pierce the clouds – your whole body, indeed, is what I should like to see and touch now after having too long forgotten that it is the necessary condition of all that spiritual spontaneity which is you and which we love and for which we must worship the integrity of this symbol of yourself, this body in which your spirit dwells, those hands through which the force of your grasp runs as through a unique and highly conductive metal … It seems to me that I have too exclusively loved your mind and your heart hitherto and that now I would experience a pure and exalting joy, like the Christian who eats the bread and drinks the wine and sings Venite adoremus, in reciting in your presence the litany of your ankles and the praises of your wrists.

  Alas, people have always been so cruel and uncomprehending about me, that these are things which I scarcely dare to say, because of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations which would spring up in others’ thoughts. But you who know me and grasp with your infallible intelligence the palpable reality of what I am, will understand how purely moral and reverently paternal is what I say to you.

  Friday evening, 12 June

  It would be easy for me – and you have been unfriendly to me for some time – to leave you with the notion which pleases you, and which is a matter of indifference to me, as to this evening’s little incident. But I have such a sad proof to give you of the sincerity of what I said and the stupidity of what you thought, or claimed to think, that I cannot resist the melancholy pleasure of indulging in these memories. My poor Mama whom I lost nearly three years ago – without your ever having offered a single word of sympathy for a misfortune so great that you would have taken pity if you had the least suspicion of it – my poor Mama thought you had the most handsome face of any man she knew, and she knew that I also admired your looks. If you pretended to find something funny in the way I told you this, it’s because I didn’t want to embarrass you with a compliment coming from me in front of Madame de Chimay. And after you left us, I told Madame de Chimay that mama used to say to me: ‘I find M. de Pâris much better-looking than Lucien Daudet.’ This you must not repeat because he’s a friend whom I’m fond of and who was very fond of Mama. But I told the Princesse de Chimay because she knew very well that
I would never link Mama’s memory with anything that wasn’t the very truth itself … I would never profane the memory of the person I loved more than anything in the world, in order to pay you a compliment or relieve you of the bitterness of an alleged criticism, which in any case I wouldn’t mind the least. You are not worth my having tired myself writing you all this. But the truth is worth it.

  The two occasions are different of course. De Lauris is an intimate, quite accustomed, one might guess, to these passionate outpourings, which as we see here, even allowing for a certain degree of literariness and working up, can be pretty strong. Even so, having made the advance, Proust finds it necessary, once he sees what he is saying – once he sees, that is, how others may see it – to beat a retreat. But the de Pâris incident was seriously embarrassing; we may judge the nature of it from the letter to de Lauris. Proust attacks the recipient of his compliment, his favours; sets him at fault, insists that he has been misinterpreted, acts wounded, and punishes the young man for a crime he may not even know he has committed. He was to make brilliant use of that sort of ploy when he came to Charlus.

  And the emerging outline of the book itself?

  One can see clearly enough the points in time at which the potential of the thing begins to become clear. It’s like those picture-puzzles whose points we used to join up as children to produce at last an aeroplane or a jaunty automobile or Mickey Mouse. It was miraculous. At one moment nothing was to be seen, then suddenly, in the next, there it was.

  Some of those points are: the Preface to Proust’s translation of Sesame and Lilies (‘Sur la lecture’) which is in fact a first draft of the opening pages of the book; the death of his mother in September 1905; his reappearance, after a long period of mourning, at a musical soirée at the Princesse de Polignac’s in 1907, when he notes how people he used to know have aged; his first adult visit, in August of that year, to Cabourg (the Balbec of A la Recherche), where he visited the painter Vuillard and hired a series of chaffeur-driven cars from the Taximetres Unic de Monaco; then, in a letter of May 6, 1908 to his friend d’Albufera, the list of projects he has in mind: ‘a study on the nobility / a Parisian novel / an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert / an essay on Women / an essay on Pederasty (not easy to publish) / a study of stained-glass windows / a study of tombstones / a study on the novel.’ Then in mid-December 1908 in a letter to Mme de Noailles: ‘Will you allow me without preamble to ask your advice. I should like, although I’m very ill, to write a study of Sainte-Beuve. The idea has taken shape in my mind in two different ways between which I must choose; but I have neither the will-power nor the clearsightedness to do so. The first would be a classical essay … the second begins with an account of a morning, my waking up and Mama coming to my bedside; I tell her I have an idea for a study of Sainte-Beuve; I submit it to her and develop it. Can you tell me which of them seems the better.’