Books: Obeying Pain

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MARCEL PROUST: SELECTED LETTERS, 1880-1903

Edited by Philip Kolb Translated by Ralph Manheim Doubleday; 376 pages; $19.95

Ma chère Maman,

Although we are both in Paradise, I cannot keep from writing you these incessant, voluminous, tormented letters. Forgive me, Maman, but you know as well as anyone that although I am now an immortal I am also still an asthmatic and get winded easily. So it is only in my writing that I can take the long breaths necessary for sustenance.

As the proverb has it, the more things change, the more they are the same. Even up here, my health is precarious: as I used to write you in clinical detail during my years of childhood, adolescence and maturity, I suffer from hay fever, chills, diseases of the urinary tract and bowels, insomnia and aches of the joints. Perhaps disease is what guards my moral sense. As I wrote in Remembrance of Things Past, "Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; we obey pain."

I am aware that one should not bother a parent, even the wife of a doctor, with complaints of the body. But then, you are no ordinary mother. Who else would write to her 18-year-old son, "Adieu, my darling, I kiss you tenderly with a pedal point to be sustained until the next kiss"? Small wonder that I could not bear to be parted from you, and that your death drove me to withdrawal from society and into the winding passages of Time, Memory and Art.

Speaking of the past recaptured, I am delighted to report that a selection of my letters is being published, edited by Philip Kolb, an American professor, with an introduction by J.M. Cocking, a British don. He writes, "The most exciting references to Proust's developing sense of vocation come in letters later than those included here." His statement is, at the very least, open to question. On the subject of the Dreyfus case, for example, I am for the innocent captain and against the corrupt military men who accuse him of treason. These Dreyfusard letters foreshadow my special pleading for those whom society punishes by exclusion. And when I speak about a youthful search "for the grain of poetry indispensable to existence," I forecast the nuances of my later work, summoning up the floating vistas of Combray and the light-suffused salons of Paris.

Granted, I seem to hold opposing opinions from page to page, but this is in character with a man of mixed Roman Catholic and Jewish heritage, and who wrote a novel about the search for a vocation only to find, at the end of seven volumes, that his intended career was as a writer in search of a vocation. The other contradictions also have a strange consistency: in September of 1899 I complain to you that "I'm so horrified at the way the money slips away that I don't dare go out any more"; yet four months later, Anatole France scolds me for my extravagance in sending him "an admirable and extremely costly Rubens drawing." I claim, legitimately, to be well read, and yet at the age of 26 have not discovered Dickens or Dostoyevsky, my favorite Russian author. My sexual inclinations are an open secret even in the early years, yet in a 1902 letter speaking of homosexuals I insist that "I'm not one."