Word: proust
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LETTERS OF MARCEL PROUST (462 pp.)-Translated and edited by Mina Curtiss-Random House...
...last 17 years of his life, Marcel Proust spent the greater part of his waking time ransacking his memory and writing down what he found with mingled love and horror. When he died in 1922, he left a mountain of legends about himself-of the fabulous invalid who nearly always wrote in bed, with his manuscript propped on his knees; of the Paris room whose walls were lined with cork to deaden all sound of the world outside. Besides his monumental Remembrance of Things...
Dreyfus Echoes. At first glance, the letters seem only the posturings of a dilettante, but this impression soon wears off. Proust's letters display a remarkable transformation in character: from an effete youth to a sharp observer of the tragedy in life, from a superficially clever snob to a mordant analyst and remorseless judge of snobbery...
...earliest, probably written when he was only 15,* Proust practices the mincing tones of flattery: "Madame, you are pretty, extremely pretty." He signed a note to one creature: "The most respectful servant of your Sovereign Indifference." He feigned passion, and strained for it, but could seldom find it. Later he was to admit that "I only know how to tell women I admire and love them when I feel neither one nor the other." Perhaps he remembered the letter he had written to a Creole courtesan, a friend of his great-uncle: "I should far rather make a slip with...
What fatally distorts Critic Connolly's frank and intelligent book is his conception of "the artist." To Connolly, art is a fragile thing, and its maker a highly vulnerable esthete. Gide, Proust, Strachey, Rimbaud and other artists of a particularly tortured and susceptible nature are his inspiration; he draws none from more robust types such as Dickens, Trollope, Shaw, Dostoevsky, Thackeray. His artist is a creature entirely different from the rest of humanity-a fact that makes Connolly regard Mr. Shelleyblake's failure as something horrifying and unusual, as though it were not a common fate...