Proust was a very prolific letter-writer - he hated the telephone - and major claims have often been made for his correspondence and its literary merits. No doubt, when he consciously chooses to put out his full strength intellectually and emotionally to some chosen correspondent, or to state his literary credo or pass a considered judgment on some writer past or present, the result can be magisterial and eloquent. This volume, however, only spasmodically reveals the maitre and shows more of the socialite and gossip, even though Proust was by this period in his life a confirmed invalid who rarely went into "society" - rarely, in fact, even left his famous, cork-lined room.
Social tattle and friendly interchange are not the only component, however. Proust was by this stage an established and even famous author, a quasi-celebrity whose private life and doings were "copy". As such he was increasingly written about, not always by the best-informed people, and there are recurrent complaints about the misinformation and misunderstandings about him which appear regularly in the press, and the unfounded rumours which fly about Paris.
He was keenly and defensively aware that though only fifty-odd, he represented a generation of writers which was no longer "contemporary" - particularly in the speeded-up literary world of the 1920s, when an entirely new sensibility was rapidly becoming dominant. Proust, in spite of his daring innovations and his originality in handling the time element in his fiction, remained at heart a citizen of the Belle Epoque.
For an invalid (and a terminally ill one too, since this volume ends with his death) he still demonstrated considerable energy and steely will-power where his writings, his literary reputation and his literary earnings were concerned. Early in his career Proust had been unlucky with publishers; four firms in succession had rejected the early volumes of A la Recherche and in the end he had them published at his own expense. But Andre Gide soon realised his mistake in turning down the novel for the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, which he himself had founded, and Proust made no bones at all about ditching his early publisher and signing on with a more prestigious one, the NRF.
This meant a dense, sometimes irritable correspondence with Gaston Gallimard, the director of the NRF, and with Jacques Riviere, who edited the prestige periodical of the same name, in which excerpts of Proust's novels regularly appeared. Both, plainly, had their hands full with this sometimes exasperating and captious author-invalid and Riviere, in particular, must sometimes have found editorship of the NRF a bed of thorns.
In spite of his outward show of indifference, Proust cared intensely about the fate of his books and how and by whom they were reviewed. Those who praised him were rewarded with fulsome thanks (sometimes studded with little half-buried barbs), while those who were captious in their criticism were liable to receive pages of hurt, drawnout but polite refutation. The fact that he knew he was dying made him feverish rather than detached, anxious to be understood by the literate public while he was still alive, and not to be labelled either esoteric or intolerably long-winded as a writer. (His relatively late start as a novelist may have partly caused this apparent insecurity).
His sales alone should have been reassuring - the successive volumes of his huge novel were big earners for the publishers, and he himself was a highly paid author, though sometimes a spendthrift and too inclined to gamble unwisely on the Stock Exchange. And most of the time he was still writing furiously, so that A la Recherche grew and grew in size and complexity (even on his death-bed, it seems, he was rewriting the Albertine episode which many critics have seen as the novel's chief weakness). He turned out other literary work too, including the volume Pastiches et Melanges which contained splendid parodies of other writers, and a series of brilliant articles and essays including his famous one on Baudelaire.
There are letters to fellow-writers including Gide, Henri de Regnier, Paul Morand, Cocteau and Mauriac, though Colette does not appear, nor do certain new names such as Radiguet. Oddly enough, Proust particularly admired Jean Giraudoux, who today is largely forgotten outside France and probably not much read even there. His favourite writers are paid regular homage - Racine, Baudelaire, Alfred de Vigny, Madame de Sevigne, Saint-Simon, and his analyses of them (all too infrequent) show Proust's clairvoyant powers as a critic.
Too often, however, he adopts a flowery, flattering tone with contemporaries and this epistolary flattery is carried over into many of the letters to old friends - particularly if they happen to be women. There is relatively little about his own homosexuality, though it must have been widely known and tacitly accepted.
Like Henry James and Evelyn Waugh, Proust was one of the great writer-snobs
Like Henry James and Evelyn Waugh, Proust was one of the great writer-snobs, and like them too, he seems to have been accepted by his aristocratic friends in a way climbers rarely were or are. A few foreigners are admitted into his inner circle, including the American Walter Berry, the francophile international lawyer and cousin of Edith Wharton, whom Proust teases about his womanising in an unexpected tone of male billiard-room bawdry. Another was Sydney Schiff, the cultured, cosmopolitan Jewish businessman who wrote some fine fiction (well worth reprinting) under the nom-deplume of Stephen Hudson and was one of the half-submerged influences of his age. Proust did not lack "social consciousness" - he was angry when people forgot or ignored his early championing of Dreyfus - and with the Great War just ended, he sometimes refers to the peace settlement and the need (as he saw it) to be tough with Germany and Austria.
However his torturing asthma grew steadily worse; letter after letter records weeks of painful fighting for breath and lack of sleep, so that often he had to dictate rather than write in his own hand. His domestic hours were bizarre; he usually stayed in bed by day and got up at night or late in the evening, often dining alone at the nearby Ritz (where his huge tips were famous) in the small hours of the morning. Ventures into social events became rarer and rarer, until in the end Proust saw virtually nobody except his devoted housekeeper, Celeste Alberet.
His brother Robert, a doctor, tried to get him to change his treatment, but in vain - even when he approached Proust through the medium of his one-time lover, the gifted composer Reynaldo Hahn. It is Hahn, too, who in the final letter of this volume gently breaks the news of his death to a few close friends.
Plainly this grim medical regimen must explain much of the loose style and inconsequent manner of the very late letters, as well as the sometimes tangled syntax which recurs throughout. I suspect that some of this, however, is the result of over-literal translation, making rather too many sentences trying to the eye as well as awkward-sounding to the inner ear. Occasionally words are missing, and even the (very useful) notes contain a few misspelling and factual slips. Perfect Proustians will, of course, want this volume (even if it is a selection from previous ones), but a little more ironing out may be needed before it joins the canon.