Selected Letters: 1918-1921

In November 1920, Marcel Proust wrote to Paul Sonday: "Let us not confuse life", he opened, "with literature". Some hope. Ever since he started to publish, Proust's life has been mercilessly plundered for the detail it might throw on his massive Remembrance of Things Past. Every character, every scene, every conversation has been tracked down to some putative real-life source by Proust fanatics. 80 years after his death, filmmaker Raoul Ruiz took this pastime to its logical conclusion and wrote Proust back into his own Time Regained. But Proust's "life" writings, in the form of his voluminous correspondence, deserve to be read in their own right, not merely as a study-aid to Proust the novel but as an introduction to the fascinating, obstreperous, obnoxious and beguiling Proust the man. This, the fourth and final volume, comprises 271 letters from January 1918 to his death in November 1922. By this point in his life, Proust was consumed by his masterwork, desperate to finish before mortality caught up with him, which it did, tragically early, at the age of 52. His letters are, as ever, pitched at a high level of emotion: many of them begin with the complaint that the correspondent's previous missive had been "painful", "negative", leaving him "dismayed". But amidst the pain of the chronic bronchitis and asthma, there's sometimes unalloyed joy at receiving the compliments of his peers--André Gide, Gaston Gallimard, Léon Daudet, Wyndham Lewis. But the overwhelming sense is of a genius painfully fading, perhaps at greater length than he expected: "I've just passed through yet another period of death", he reported in March, 1921. "I'm aware that if it's tedious for the patient--it's no less so for those exasperated by these announcements of death postponed, the postponement moreover being of little benefit to a man who is no better than a corpse". 160 further letters prove there was life in the corpse yet. --Alan Stewart