Raiding Proust’s waste-paper bin

The neurotic perfectionist would be mortified to think of his sketches of gay 1890s Paris being read

THE MYSTERIOUS CORRESPONDENT by Marcel Proust, tr Charlotte Mandell

144pp, Oneworld, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £6.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

How many ghosts of great writers offer thanks to posterity for drawing excitable attention to their discarded juvenile effusions and delivering them over to the truffling scrutiny of hungry literary critics? Perhaps Jane Austen would acknowledge that her teenage skits show promising comic panache, but one imagines a neurotic perfectionist like Marcel Proust being mortified at the way that his drawers have been ransacked and his every written word fetishised and dissected.

This latest raid – in the wake of the exposure of his first novel, Jean Santeuil, his literary sketches Contre Sainte-Beuve and his novella L’Indifférent, not to mention 21 volumes of correspondence – has produced something that is being marketed as a volume of “new stories”. Hmmm: they may be new in the sense that they haven’t previously been published, but they scarcely merit the attribution of “stories”: none of them is much more than a thousand words long, several have abruptly been left incomplete, and a few are mere fragments.

These sketches appear to date from the early 1890s when Proust was in his early 20s, a gay young

man about town, and they are best interpreted as cast-offs from his first published collection, Les plaisirs et les jours. For this edition, the translator is Charlotte Mandell, who faithfully attempts to follow the twists and quirks of Proust’s distinctive syntax rather than polishing it into fluent English. An accompanying introduction by Luc Fraisse pays tribute to the pioneering research of the late Bernard de Fallois: oddly, it is not made clear who has provided the annotation or critical commentary.

All such reservations aside, there is a lot to charm and intrigue Proustians here: marginal these writings may be, but they aren’t trivial, and the author’s luminous intelligence and sensibility shines through on every page. Here is a young genius in search not only of a voice but a

tune, playing with notes that a decade later would begin to emerge in the themes of his epic masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu.

Emotions are recollected and analysed in tranquillity, and homosexuality – both male and female, and treated in psychological rather than physical detail – is another recurring subject. An army captain recalls the sublime but inconsequential moment he met the sudden intense gaze of a beautiful young corporal. A happily married lady receives anonymous love letters: she fantasises that they come from a handsome soldier, but it transpires that their author is a dying woman who has long been her friend. The resonance with the situations of characters in À la recherche such as the Baron de Charlus is unmistakable.

Proust’s romantic aesthetics are evident in the emphasis on reflective solitude and the encomium to music’s transcendent power in an essay entitled “After Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony”. “A kingdom of this world where God willed that grace would keep the promises it made us”; “the soul clothed in sound, or rather the migration of the soul through sounds” – purple prose erupts here, and it tends to fall flat. More sympathetically humane is the brief account of a visit to an old lady dying from cancer – an encounter that the narrator dreads, only to find himself spiritually uplifted by her wise serenity.

But the most memorable of these pieces is “The Gift of the Fairies”, in which prophecies are made over a baby in the cradle. First comes a sprite proclaiming: “Everyone will

harm you, wound you, the ones you won’t love, the ones you will love even more… never will anyone be able to console or love you. You will be constantly misunderstood.” To which another sprite responds: “the harshness, the stupidity, the indifference of men and women will turn for you into a diversion. Illness has powers that health does not know. Illness has its grace which will bring you profound joy.”

Twenty years after writing this, such would be Proust’s fate: tormented by asthma and disappointed in love for his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli, he would spend most of the last semester of his life confined to his cork-lined bedroom, writing À la recherche. Illness did indeed have its grace, because art gave him the profound joy that life denied him.