Letters to His Neighbor Read online

  Because they are the real thing and not approximations, Proust’s bedroom furniture — the brass bedstead, the bedside table and lamp, the desk, the sideboard, the chaise longue, two armchairs, and the Oriental screen — are haunted by his presence, especially those with signs of wear: most of all, because so intimately associated with the human body, the places on the upholstery where the nap of the fabric has been worn down to the thread, not only by Proust but by others, too, presumably his mother, his father, his brother, and his visiting friends.

  Because of his illness, Proust spent most of his time in bed, heavily dressed in — according to one account — two sweaters, socks, and long underwear, with a hot-water bottle at his feet that was renewed three times a day. A blanket folded in four hung over the large door to the room to protect him from drafts and noise. Both shutters and curtains were closed over the double-paned windows, so that no sound could be heard from the street. The chandelier that hung from the ceiling was never illuminated. A candle was kept burning, since he lit his powders using a folded paper rather than striking a match. He generally woke “for the day” at nine in the evening, and had his only meal at that time — coffee and a croissant which Céleste would bring to him when he rang.

  When he felt well enough, Proust liked to have a friend come visit occasionally, as long as that friend followed certain rules: no cigarettes, of course, no perfume. Proust describes Reynaldo Hahn coming in, playing the piano for a little while, and then leaving again “like a hurricane” (or, at other times, “like a whirlwind” — as Proust puts it apologetically in letter 23).

  One can pause to listen, via YouTube, to the composition by Reynaldo Hahn mentioned in the note to letter 23, Le ruban dénoué [The untied ribbon], twelve waltzes for two pianos. As performed by two Italian pianists in a lamplit chamber concert in Rome, it is at times dynamic and forceful, more often gentle. The audience, visible in the background, is so absolutely still that for a while you might think the video has been manipulated and they have been frozen visually. From this, you may stray over to Anne Sofie von Otter singing another composition of Hahn’s, a three-minute song. Her voice is liquid, effortless. In contrast to his style of entering and leaving Proust’s building, Hahn’s compositions tend to be calm, balanced and elegant, intimate, moderate in tempos and dynamics, and characterized by uncluttered simplicity, charm, and sentimentality. Hahn himself, though a singer and gifted interpreter of his music, apparently smoked and talked too much.

  Many friends have described visiting Proust in the room, among them the writer Maurice Rostand, who says of the room: “Everything was left lying around, his aspirins and his dress shoes; books were piled up in pyramids; ties were strewn alongside catalogues, invitation cards to the British embassy lay next to medical prescriptions . . .”

  Céleste herself, in her memoir, remembers that the predominant color was blue, and the lamp next to his bed cast a green light because of the shade. She describes the room as perpetually dark as night, and densely smoke-filled when Proust had been burning his powders. The smoke from these powders would sometimes drift under the doors and out into the rest of the building, and the neighbors would sometimes complain.

  And it has to be said that in other ways, too, Proust was in his own turn guilty, on occasion, of disturbing his neighbors. He describes to a different correspondent how another long-time close friend, Robert de Montesquiou, came by in the early hours of the morning and, in his emotion, kept stamping on the floor “without pity” for the Gagey family sleeping downstairs (whom Céleste in her memoir describes as plutôt des couches-tôt, or “rather early-to-bedders”).

  Or, several times, Proust, a great lover of music, and not well enough to go out to concerts very often, would hire musicians to come play for him in his bedroom. Once, at 1 a.m., impulsively and without prior warning, he sent for the Poulet Quartet to come play César Franck’s quartet. Before beginning, the musicians (in the room lit only by candles) hung cloths over the opening of the fireplace to stop the sound from traveling — though one would think that was hardly effectual. When they reached the end of the piece, at two in the morning, Proust induced them (for a handsome sum) to start over and play the whole piece again.

  But Proust was well liked by his neighbors, on the whole, for the same qualities so evident in his letters to Mme Williams: his grace, eloquence, thoughtfulness, sympathy, gestures of gratitude. Evidence of these good relations is not hard to find: an inscription in a copy of his Ruskin translation, La Bible d’Amiens, to his “good neighbor,” one Arthur Pernolet, who occupied the apartment above him before the arrival of Dr. Williams, and whom Proust knew already before he moved in; the helpfulness of Mme Gagey when the time came for most (or all?) of the tenants of the building to move out — she supplied Proust with the results of her own research into suitable apartments; and the fact that a year after they were no longer neighbors, having scattered to other buildings, Dr. Gagey came to Proust in answer to a request for a consultation: oddly enough — perfectly symbolic — he had put something in his ear to block the ambient noise, it had got stuck, and the ear was infected.

  As the vast resources of the Internet allow us to walk along a Paris street that is almost unchanged from the 1920s and gaze up at — or even float over — the building in which one of Proust’s friends died, and as it allows us within a few seconds to begin listening to one of Reynaldo Hahn’s compositions, or to leaf through the caricatures of the very popular singer Thérésa, with whom Hahn was infatuated, so it also reveals more of the life of Proust’s building: the wartime activities of Proust’s downstairs neighbor, the couche-tôt Dr. Gagey, who was commended in 1915 for his ambulance service “in circumstances often difficult and always perilous”; and the legacies of the former upstairs neighbor, Proust’s friend Pernolet, who, after his death, also in 1915, left funds to at least two Paris museums for the acquisition of paintings. Follow every reference in these letters, and Proust’s world opens out before us.

  Proust, so very solitary, as he says in many of his letters, and devoting most of his waking hours to his work, was also intensely gregarious and an uninhibited talker. When he was feeling well enough, he talked without pause, and the person he talked to the most, because she was always available, was Céleste, an intelligent and responsive listener. He often rang for her after she had gone to bed, and she would come as she was, in her nightgown and robe, her hair “down her back,” as she says. He would talk to her for hours at a time, sitting up in bed leaning against two pillows, while she stood at the foot of the bed.

  Gide describes, in his journal, Proust’s style of talking: “His conversation, ceaselessly cut by parenthetical clauses, runs on . . .”

  The diplomat and Proust fan Paul Morand enlarges upon this: the Proustian sentence was “singsong, caviling, reasoned, answering objections the listener would never have thought of making, raising unforeseen difficulties, subtle in its shifts and pettifoggery, stunning in its parentheses — that, like helium balloons, held the sentence aloft — vertiginous in its length . . . well constructed despite its apparent disjointedness; . . . you listened spellbound . . .”

  This style, so natural to him in conversation, pours out also in his letters — letters, as his friend Robert Dreyfus put it, “in which he always wanted to say everything, as in his books, and in which he succeeded by means of an infinity of parentheses, sinuosities, and reversals.” It is the same style that is evident, though more strictly controlled, in the extended, balanced periodic sentences of his finished, published work (or, perhaps one should say, never quite finished, but brought to a certain point and then ended). Here is an example from letter 23, with Proust’s characteristic paucity of punctuation and his multiple enclosed subordinate clauses: “My friend Reynaldo Hahn who for the 1st time in 15 months was returning from the front and who entered in disarray may have occasioned some noise which would so ill have recompensed that which you are sparing me . . .”
/>   Another example of the spare punctuation can be seen in letter 14: “I am quite unwell as I write but I thank you deeply for the letter that has brought me I assure you a vision more enduring than a bouquet and as colorful.” And, later in the same letter: “. . . not to mention the innumerable ‘mature roses’ of two poetesses my great friends whom I no longer see alas now that I no longer get up Mme de Noailles and Mme de Régnier” — note the interpolated comment and at least five, by my count, commas missing which would be present in a more standard syntax.

  We are told that Proust wrote very fast. This, too, is apparent in the letters, in the sprawling handwriting, in the tendency to abbreviate, in the occasional missing word, and perhaps, though not necessarily, in the missing punctuation.

  Yet, at the same time, his syntactical agility is always in evidence, as in letter 13, in which he includes in one fairly short sentence a rather elaborate, and in this case indignant, parenthetical remark (“as I have been accused”) that manages to enclose within it yet another clause (“it seems”): “I have been so ill these days (in my bed which I have not left and without having noisily opened or closed the carriage entrance as I have it seems been accused of doing) that I have not been able to write.” Here he exemplifies, in a rougher, more urgent way, his declaration concerning his published writing that a sentence contains a complete thought, and that no matter how complex it may be, this thought should remain intact. The shape of the sentence is the shape of the thought, and every word is necessary.

  Perhaps the most extreme example, in this collection of letters, of his complex syntax, and lack of punctuation, as well as his colorful and fertile imagination, comes in letter 25, which is mainly devoted to the cathedral of Reims so heavily damaged by bombardment in the first autumn of the war. Here we approach the precision, the rhetorical heights, and the luscious imagery of In Search of Lost Time (and with a reference to a Ruskin title covertly slipped in): “But I who insofar as my health permits make to the stones of Reims pilgrimages as piously awestruck as to the stones of Venice believe I am justified in speaking of the diminution to humanity that will be consummated on the day when the arches that are already half burnt away collapse forever on those angels who without troubling themselves about the danger still gather marvelous fruits from the lush stylized foliage of the forest of stones.”

  The acute understanding of psychology and social behavior displayed so richly in the novel is another continuing thread in the letters, and is especially apparent in letter 21: “I always defer letters (which could seem to ask you for something) to a moment when it is too late and when consequently, they are no longer indiscreet.”

  And the gentle touches of humor, so prevalent in the novel, also have their place in the letters, as in the continuation of letter 21: “Considering how little time it took to do the work on Ste Chapelle (this comparison can only I think be seen as flattering), one may presume that when this letter reaches Annecy, the beautifications of Boulevard Haussmann will be nearly done.” (With, later in the same letter, his comparison of the various noises that surround him to his Lullaby.)

  How revealing letters can be, in the era when they were written by hand and rarely copied over, especially not by the suffering Proust, who so often, according to him, had barely the strength or energy to write even a short note. Unrevised, a letter may show the thread of the thought as it develops: “When it has subsided,” Proust writes, of one of his attacks, in letter 24, and then realizes it may not subside, and so goes on to add what has just occurred to him: “if it subsides.”

  The letters, written over a span of years and in different moods and physical conditions, show different aspects of his personality and character. He may be gracious and flattering, as in letter 11: “At least I would have the joy of knowing that those lovely lucid eyes had rested on these pages”; or flowery and eloquent, as in letter 15: “My solitude has become even more profound, and I know nothing of the sun but what your letter tells me. It has thus been a blessed messenger, and contrary to the proverb, this single swallow has made for me an entire spring.” Or, in contrast to his poetic descriptions, he may suddenly deploy, with cool adeptness, in letter 26, a metaphor taken from the world of chemistry: “Already I carry around with me in my mind so many dissolved deaths, that each new one causes supersaturation and crystallizes all my griefs into an infrangible block.”

  He is meticulous and particular not only in his requests as to when and where his upstairs neighbors might nail shut their crates, in letter 17: “Or else if it is indispensable to nail them in the morning, to nail them in the part of your apartment that is above my kitchen, and not that which is above my bedroom. I call above my bedroom that which is also above the adjoining rooms, and even on the 4th”; but also in describing the nature itself of disturbance from noise (as he continues the sentence): “. . . since a noise so discontinuous, so ‘noticeable’ as blows being struck, is heard even in the areas where it is slightly diminished.”

  And in letter 19, too, he goes into detail about the effect of noise: “What bothers me is never continuous noise, even loud noise, if it is not struck, on the floorboards, (it is less often no doubt in the bedroom itself, than at the bend of the hallway). And everything that is dragged over the floor, that falls on it, runs across it.” I think we readers, peering over Mme Williams’s shoulder, may find his precision amusing, but he himself, though so likely at other times to see the humor in a situation, here seems in deadly earnest. And the same earnestness must be present in another letter, letter 22, as he describes one of his weekly torments (again, with a somewhat eccentric placement or omission of commas): “Yet tomorrow is Sunday, a day which usually offers me the opposite of the weekly repose because in the little courtyard adjoining my room they beat the carpets from your apartment, with an extreme violence.”

  Proust’s style, in these letters, then, is a mix of elegance and haste, refinement and convolution, gravity and self-mockery, marked by abbreviations and mistakes, very little punctuation, and no paragraphing to speak of, or almost none, as he shifts from topic to topic.

  My approach to translating this style has been to hew very close to it, not supplying missing punctuation or correcting mistakes, but at the same time trying to retain as much of its grace, beauty, sudden shifts of tone and subject, and distinctive character as I could. It was a pleasurable challenge to attempt to reproduce his non ­sequiturs, his flowery constructions, his literary references, and his meticulous instructions for lessening the intrusions of noise. One is bound to feel compassion — as his neighbors did — for the beleaguered Proust, pushing ahead, against all odds and in the worst of health, with his vast project; it is certainly impossible, in any case, for anyone with neighbors to blame him for being so fussy about their noise.

  One particular challenge in the translation was to create a passable version of Proust’s pastiche in letter 21, of the sonnet by Félix Arvers. This poem became so famous in its day that Arvers has been dubbed a “one-poem poet,” so famous that it inspired a contemporary American poet to translate it. One would not immediately associate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with Proust, and yet, for a time — not at the same time — they were both concentrating their attention, and their literary abilities, on “My Secret.” We may gain yet another idea of the original from reading Longfellow’s version, from which I had hoped to steal some phrases but managed only to take the last line:

  My Secret

  My soul its secret hath, my life too hath its mystery,

  A love eternal in a moment’s space conceived;

  Hopeless the evil is, I have not told its history,

  And she who was the cause nor knew it nor believed.

  Alas! I shall have passed close by her unperceived,

  Forever at her side, and yet forever lonely,

  I shall unto the end have made life’s journey, only

  Daring to ask for naught, and having naught received.


  For her, though God hath made her gentle and endearing,

  She will go on her way distraught and without hearing

  These murmurings of love that round her steps ascend,

  Piously faithful still unto her austere duty,

  Will say, when she shall read these lines full of her beauty,

  “Who can this woman be?” and will not comprehend.

  As for the other apparatus in the book, I have made only a few slight changes to the very helpful notes by Estelle Gaudry and Jean-Yves Tadié, and to M. Tadié’s foreword, when it was necessary to supply a first name, for instance, or an identification, or otherwise enlarge upon a reference that might not be obvious to an Anglophone reader.

  By way of coda: After these letters were brought into public view from where they had been residing in the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits in Paris, and after some excerpts from them, in the original French, were published in Le Nouvel Observateur online, on Oct. 10, 2013, an interesting response added a few more details to our understanding of Proust’s life and activities.

  A person by the lyrical name of Lerossignol — “the nightingale” — writes an online comment to the article. He is the grandson of a florist with a shop in the seaside town of Houlgate, on the stretch of the Normandy coast aptly known as the Côte Fleurie (the Flowery Coast); Houlgate was a neighboring town to Cabourg, where Proust liked to stay at the Grand Hôtel. Guests marveled, according to Philippe Soupault in his memoirs, over “how Monsieur Proust rented five expensive rooms, one to live in, the other four to ‘contain’ the silence.” Cabourg became Balbec in Proust’s novel. The flower shop was the one Proust patronized in the years 1908 to 1913 when sending flowers to, among others, Mme Williams. M. Lerossignol writes that the family archives in his possession include records of the shop’s transactions which mention Proust’s sending flowers to the Williamses; he has therefore known the name for a long time and was aware that the couple must have been acquaintances of Proust’s. But only now, with the publication of the present letters, does he know who they were. He would like, incidentally, to correct one statement in the commentary that accompanies the extracts — that in those days etiquette required that a man send flowers not directly to a married woman but to her husband. He can attest from his family records that this was not always the case, and he knows in which cases Proust sent flowers to the husband and in which, in fact, directly to the wife. With regard to the Williamses, however, he adds, Proust was always very correct. (See, for example, letter 3.) M. Lerossignol goes on to remark that Proust, despite his illness, did venture into the family flower shop: Lerossignol’s grandmother counted thirty-two visits before 1912.