September 27, 2006
Gopnik on Proust's letters
Last Tuesday I listened to the New Yorker critics Joan Acocella and Alex Ross discuss criticism; last night I listened to the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik discuss Marcel Proust’s letters. This took place at NYU’s Maison Francaise, and marked the republication, earlier this year, of The Letters of Marcel Proust, selected and translated by Mina Curtiss and introduced by Gopnik. Two actors read three-to-five-letter selections of missives in rough chronological order, displaying the novelist’s development from late-nineteenth-century aesthete and social butterfly to daring, “morally sound” commentator, a “caterpillar slowly working his way inch by inch across society and Western consciousness.” Gopnik’s lip curled upward, conspiratorially, at some of the rhetorical excesses and “almost sycophantic” flattery Proust bestowed upon those he beseeched.
Several of Gopnik’s comments stood out, though I’m sure some are variations on what he has written for the book’s introduction, which I have not read. He suggested that we read writers' letters for either love of their writing or out of fascination at the author’s winningness, placing Henry James in the former category (“I sometimes prefer his letters, which say ‘yes’ to perception and ‘no’ to tedious plots, to his late novels”) and Proust and Chekhov in the latter. He claimed that it was around 1907–08 that a “sharp conviction emerges” from the dandyish flattery of the earlier letters. He noted how courageous Proust’s position that “the only people who defend the French language are those who attack it,” expressed in a letter written around that time, must have been in that era, as it still holds a charge now.
Gopnik was, of course, asked when he first came to Proust, and expounded at length on reading Moncrieff’s translation—his favorite, “a masterpiece of English writing” and “the perfect balance between languages that draw from Shakespeare (English) and Racine (French)”—with his girlfriend (now his wife) in the summer of 1977. He also mentioned a “Talk of the Town” piece by John Updike about reading Proust in New York in the 1950s, which I came home to pull from the Complete New Yorker DVD archive but could not find. Nor could I find it by scanning the indices to Hugging the Shore and More Matter. Instead I offer, below the jump, one of Gopnik’s own “Talk” pieces, from the issue of September 17, 1990, that compares Proust’s house in Illiers to his co-op on Broome Street.
My favorite comment from the letters read last night: “I’m too lazy to write about things that bore me.” If only I had the fortune—or the will—to abide by that.
A friend writes:
Proust’s great subject, as every comp-lit major knows, was the marvellous correspondences in life—the way incidents and events that at first look like just a lot of unrelated stuff turn out, when you get them in the right order, to be pieces of an immense and intricate pattern. My wife and I experience plenty of the unrelated stuff, but the opportunity to float off and discover its unexpected patternings seldom presents itself. I have an idea, for instance, that the two apparently unrelated paths that lead in opposite directions from our door here on Broome Street—one running off, bumper to bumper, toward the Holland Tunnel (Frank’s Way, we like to call it), the other running off toward Mulberry Street (Du Côté Chez Gotti)—are probably the arms of a single encompassing figure. But we can’t get far enough back—or up, or away—to really look at it.
Not long ago, when the process of co-op conversion which has been going on in our building since the Beame Administration at last appeared to be drawing to a climax, my wife and I decided to go to France. We were getting so much confusing real-estate advice (too soon, too late, a rip-off, a steal) that the only rational response to our dilemma seemed to be flight. In Paris, we drank and ate and walked and looked, and hardly thought about the co-op plan at all. Then, one morning, we decided to go out and look at the stained-glass windows and the long, bread-shaped statues of Chartres, and while we were planning our trip we noticed that there on the map was a little town with a familiar name—Illiers, which was the original of the village of Combray, the narrator’s home town in “Remembrance of Things Past.” We decided to tack a visit to Illiers on to our day at Chartres.
We got to Illiers early in the evening, and the first thing we did was to walk over to Proust’s aunt’s house, on the Rue du Docteur-Proust; we discovered that it was only half of a two-family house, and that the house was for sale. We jotted down the name of the real-estate agents, and when we got back to Paris we asked a Parisian we know to call them for us. The price for the Proust house was six hundred thousand francs, or roughly what the co-op people were asking for our apartment. We had obviously stumbled onto one of those strange Proustian parallels.
Proust’s House: surrounded by “the sweet savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving and settled, heedless and provident, linen smells, morning smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace . . . and in a prosiness which serves as a deep source of poetry to the stranger who passes through their mist.”
Our House: also surrounded by aromas as punctual as a village clock—the accumulated smells of the Mexican place down the street and the smell of the big charcoal broiler in that restaurant over on Wooster that has been, in the past seven years, a Japanese country inn, an Indian tandoori oven, an Ethiopian hut, and a Key West saloon, and is now an American barbecue.
Proust’s House: fronting on the center of town and facing a church where the congregation “had managed by agelong repetition to acquire a destructicve force, to impress itself on the stone, to carve ruts in it, while the tombs below “furnish the choir with a sort of spiritual pavement.”
Our House: facing a video-rental store that was recently locked up by the feds for nonpayment of taxes, and features a façade that has also managed, by agelong repetition, to acquire its own destructive force, as pieces of it fall off and imperil passersby below, thereby creating a kind of spiritual pavement, too, if you look at it that way.
Proust’s House: managed by Françoise, the loyal servant who strangely resembles one of the Virtues depicted in Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes.
Our House: managed by an enigmatic follower of the Lubavitcher rebbe who is generally called the Man with the Yellow Hat, because of his resemblance to the character in the “Curious George” books.
So there was the pattern: Proust’s house and our house are more or less the same house, just as Méséglise Way and Guermantes Way turned out to be more or less the same path. And not only that: even the experience of watching our building go co-op has been, in terms of experiential extension (to borrow a phrase from a college paper of mine), a lot like the experience of reading Proust. You begin hopefully, you dream of new vistas of pleasure opening up before you, you think that your friends will think better of you for having done it, you follow each twist and turn and try to find the big picture, and then you get bogged down and the whole thing seems to go on forever. It’s a depressing thought, but we may already be living in Combray.
[Copyright 1990 the New Yorker]