How Proust Can Change Your Life

An example of how this separation influenced Proust’s behavior can be seen in his friendship with Fernand Gregh, a onetime classmate and fellow writer. When Proust published his first collection of stories, Fernand Gregh was in an influential position on the literary paper La Revue de Paris. Despite the many flaws in Pleasures and Regrets, it was not too much to hope that an old school friend could put in a nice word for the book, but it did prove too much to hope of Gregh, who failed even to mention Proust’s writing to the readers of La Revue de Paris. He found space for a little review, but in it talked only of the illustrations, the preface, and the piano pieces that had come with the book and that Proust had had nothing to do with, and then added sarcastic jibes about the connections Proust had used in order to get his work published.

What do you do when a friend like Gregh subsequently writes a book of his own, a very bad one at that, and sends you a copy asking for your opinion? Proust faced the question only a few weeks later, when Fernand sent him The House of Childhood, a collection of poems in the light of which Anna de Noailles’s work could truly have been compared to Baudelaire’s. Proust might have taken this opportunity to confront Gregh on his behavior, told him the truth about his poetry, and suggested he hold on to his day job. But we know this wasn’t Proust’s style, and we find him writing a generous letter of congratulation. “What I have read struck me as really beautiful,” Proust told Fernand. “I know you were hard on my book. But that no doubt was because you thought it bad. For the same reason, finding yours good, I am glad to tell you so and to tell others.”

More interesting than the letters we send our friends may be the ones we finish, then decide not to post after all. Found among his papers after his death was a note Proust had written to Gregh a little before the one he actually sent. It contained a far nastier, far less acceptable, but far truer message. It thanked Gregh for The House of Childhood, but then limited itself to praising the quantity, rather than the quality, of this poetic output, and went on to make wounding reference to Gregh’s pride, distrustfulness, and childlike soul.

Why didn’t he send it? Though the dominant view of grievances is that they should invariably be discussed with their progenitors, the typically unsatisfactory results of doing so should perhaps urge us to reconsider. Proust might have invited Gregh to a restaurant, offered him the finest grapes on a vine plant, pressed a five-hundred-franc tip into the waiter’s hand for good measure, and begun to tell his friend in the gentlest voice that he seemed a little too proud, had some problems with trust, and that his soul was a touch childlike, only to find Gregh turning red in the face, pushing aside the grapes, and walking angrily out of the restaurant, to the surprise of the richly remunerated waiter. What would this have achieved, aside from unnecessarily alienating proud Gregh? And anyway, had Proust really become friends with this character in order to share his palm reader’s insights with him?

Instead, these awkward thoughts were better entertained elsewhere, in a private space designed for analyses too wounding to be shared with those who had inspired them. A letter that never gets sent is such a place. A novel is another.

One way of considering In Search of Lost Time is as an unusually long unsent letter, the antidote to a lifetime of proustification, the flip side of the Athenas, lavish gifts, and long-stemmed chrysanthemums, the place where the unsayable was finally granted expression. Having described artists as “creatures who talk of precisely the things one shouldn’t mention,” the novel gave Proust the chance to mention them all. Laure Haymann might have had her ravishing sides, but she also had less worthy ones, and these migrated into the representation of the fictional Odette de Crécy. Fernand Gregh might have avoided a lecture from Proust in real life, but he received a covert one in Proust’s damning portrait of Alfred Bloch, for whom he was in part the model.