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TRANSLATION

Marcel Proust: Letters to His Mother. Translated and edited with an Introduction by George D. Painter, and with an Essay by Pamela Hansford Johnson. Rider. 238 pp.

Interest in Proust has recently been revived by the publication in 1952 of his early novel, “Jean Santeuil,” and the 1955 commemorative exhibition in London of his life and works. His letters to his mother, first published in France in 1953, are now offered to the English reading public, with useful notes and introductory essays linking Proust's family relationships with the resi of his life and work. His correspondence was, of course, vast; and though he loved society, he spent so much of his life as an invalid and, during most of his later years, lived secluded in his cork-lined bedroom working by night and sleeping by day. But the correspondence with his mother is of particular interest, since it'was such a close relationship and one that largely determined the course of his life. His asthma was primarily—as modern psychology allows us to see it—a bid for his mother’s love; and it was his mother’s over-anxious care and protective fondness that made him one of the tribe of Sodom. The letters are full of news as to the course of Proust's asthma—whether he slept during the night, whether he had to have a “fumigation” or not, how much trional he took—but such details are only part of the complete intimacy which existed between son and mother and are often recorded with a pleasant irony; “as for my personal thoughts, I’ve transmitted them to you down to the last groan.” The tone, usually demanding, is often that of a lover’s letters: Proust pleads for more and longer letters, or exclaims, “Never once did I think I’d go for a fortnight without having you in my arms.” And he expresses such delight in his mother’s letters—“My ‘Maman’s’ letters are so enchanting that we’ll have to reread them together” that the reader cannot help but wish that one of two of Madame Proust’s letters were extant tobe included in the correspondence. References to his father, for whom he had a great but hardly equal affection, are always interesting. One in particular is highly illuminating: By the way, as they wanted to bring me back in the car. Constantin said it was all my imagination that cold air was bad for me, because Papa told everyone that there was nothing wrong wltn me end that my asthma was purely imaginary. I

know only too well when I wake •here in the morning that it is very real, and ii would be. very nice if you could put something in your next letter like this: “Your father was furious when he heard you’d been in a motor-car. You know how few the things are that are bad for vou, but nothing is worse than a rush of cold air for your asthma."

Between the pathos, the tenderness and the self-absorption of the invalid, there are passages of gay social gossip, comment on the Dreyfus Affair, and occasional references to Proust’s work or his reading. Madame Proust was a woman of considerable education and intellectual distinction, to whom her son could express—in the full confidence of being under stood—his opinions on authors, or demand that, among the manyother more mundane things she was to do for him, she should “unravel (orally) the preface to •Sesame and Lilies’.” She died in 1905 at Evian (where she and her son had gone for the sake of his health, but it was she whe fell ill) without having the satisfaction of knowing that her son was to produce one of the world’s great novels. But ironically, .it was the crisis of her death which forced Proust into the emotional independence that resulted in his embarking on the long and laborious, almost superhuman, task of writing “Remembrance of Things Past” (“A La Recherche du Temps Perdu”), a task that was only finished with his own death in 1922.

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19570427.2.35.2

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28262, 27 April 1957, Page 3

Word count
Tapeke kupu
666

TRANSLATION Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28262, 27 April 1957, Page 3

TRANSLATION Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28262, 27 April 1957, Page 3

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