534
PARTISAN REVIEW
the essence of Proust's situation that his status and very identity were
always in a process of becoming. This necessarily touched many of his
relationships with a certain falseness, which communicates itself to his
intimate letters. He is at his best when, letting himself go, he sounds
most like the author of
Remembrance of Things Past;
as when, ad–
dressing his late uncle's mistress, Laure Hayman, he strikes the familiar
note of piety towards beautiful women-the
femme du monde
as an
historic institution; or when, writing to his mother in 1899, he tells how
various noble families are responding to recent developments in the
Dreyfus affair. With his mother his ego is at peace and he is almost
relaxed; for the rest, his letters are too relentlessly composed, ridden
by the leitmotif. In this respect his first schoolboy effort, a set-piece on
the theme of passion strangely addressed to his grandmother, fore–
shadows the important letter of 1914 in which, acknowledging Gide's
apology for having rej ected
R emembrance of Things Past
for the NRF,
he elaborates this Panglossian sentiment:
I have often found that certain great joys require our first having
been deprived of a lesser joy, which we had the ,·ight to expect and
without the expectation of which we could never have known that
other joy, the most splendid of all. Had there been no rejection, no
repeated rejections by the N.R.F., I should never have had your letter.
His literary letters are a different affair, notably direct and author–
itative. Without doubt, as Mrs. Curtiss remarks, he knew that he was
suspected by his friends of being an imaginary writer as well as an
imaginary invalid. Yet no morbid self-consciousness is to be detected
m these sentences addressed to Louis de Robert in 1912:
You know, perhaps, that ever since I have been ill, I have been
working on a long book, which I call a novel because it isn't as for–
tuitous as memoirs (it is fortuitous only to the degree that life itself is) ,
and the composition is very severe although difficult to appraise because
of its complexity; I don't know how to describe the
genre.
Certain parts
take place in the country, some in one kind of society, others in another
kind; some have to do with family life and much of it is terribly indecent.
His comments on his developing masterpiece show how clearly he had
its larger aims in mind from the beginning. More interesting, perhaps,
are the numerous scattered remarks that define his general sensibility:
What's more, ever since Hervieu, Hermant, etc., snobbism has been
so frequently represented from the outside that I wanted to try to show
it inside the person, like a wonderful kind of imagination....
