Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [2]
The great Colette completely failed to sense his value when she first ran into Proust (they were both very young and just starting out as writers). She’d even gone so far, in one of her early Claudine novels, as to call him a “yid” (youpin), but her husband urbanely crossed out the insult and replaced it with “boy” (garçon). Even cleaned up, the passage doesn’t make for very pleasant reading. It states that at a literary salon, “I was pursued, politely, all evening by a young and pretty boy of letters.” Because of her cropped hair, unusual for the period, he kept comparing her to the young god Hermes or to a cupid drawn by Prud’hon. “My little flatterer, excited by his own evocations, wouldn’t leave me alone for a second. . . . He gazed at me with caressing, long-lashed eyes. . . .” At the same time, in 1895, she wrote Proust a letter in which she acknowledged that he had recognized a crucial truth: “The word is not a representation but a living thing, and it is much less a mnemonic sign than a pictorial translation.”
Perhaps Colette had been initially irritated because the young flatterer had already divined her bisexuality. By 1917, after Proust had begun to publish Remembrance of Things Past, she could see him in another light. He was very ill, he weighed no more than one hundred pounds, and he seldom emerged from his cork-lined room. He had become a martyr to art (and she herself was one of his few living rivals as a stylist). She saw him at the Ritz during the war with a few friends, wearing a fur coat even indoors over his evening clothes: “He never stopped talking, trying to be gay. Because of the cold, and making excuses, he kept his top hat on, tilted backwards, and the fan-like lock of hair covered his eyebrows. Full-dress uniform, but disarranged by a furious wind, which, pouring over the nape of his hat, rumpling the calico and the free ends of his cravat, filling in with a grey ash the furrows of his cheeks, the hollows of his eye-sockets and the breathless mouth, had hunted this tottering young man of fifty to death.”
These portraits already suggest the outlines of Proust’s extraordinary personality. He was attentive to his friends to the point of seeming a flatterer, though he thought friendship was valueless and conversation represented the death of the mind, since he believed only passion and suffering could sharpen the powers of observation and the only word of any value was the written. He could stare transfixed at a rose—or at anything else or anyone who was on his peculiar wavelength—but though he read everything and was deeply cultivated, he had little interest in disembodied ideas. He wasn’t an intellectual, though he was supremely intelligent. He applied his attention to flowers and people and paintings, but not to theories about botany nor to psychology nor aesthetics. He never read a word of Freud, for instance (nor did Freud ever read a word of Proust). He was hilariously funny and entertaining, but he emanated a calm spirituality except, perhaps, when he was doubled up with a crazy bout of laughter (his famous choking fit of hilarity, his fou rire, which could go on so long it struck strangers as weird, even slightly mad). He was such a presence that many people spoke of him as tall, but in fact he stood just five feet six inches.
Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother. He himself was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d’Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never practiced that faith and as an adult could best be described as a mystical atheist, someone imbued with spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in a personal God, much less in a savior. Although Jews trace their religion through their