by STEPHEN HUDSON
IN trying to represent the personality of a friend to those who do not know him, one has in mind, though one may not deliberately use, a standard of reference with which he can be compared or contrasted.
In the case of Proust no such standard is available, and I find myself driven back to the frequently used but unilluminating word unique for want of a better expression. This uniqueness consisted less, I think, in his obvious possession to an outstanding degree of gifts and charms than in his use of them. Others probably have been and are as wise, witty, cultured, sympathetic, have possessed or possess his conversational powers, his charm of manner, his graciousness. But no one I have ever known combined in his own person so many attractive qualities and could bring them into play so spontaneously. Yet, while his use of these powers resulted in his eliciting the utmost fruitfulness from social intercourse, there was an impalpable objectivity about him, an aloofness felt rather than observed. It was as though the personality revealed at the particular moment was but one of many, while the dominant consciousness lay behind them, preserving its complete inviolability. It was, I believe, in the depth and capacity of this ultimate-6- consciousness that his uniqueness lay, as it is there that the source of his creative power and sensibility is to be found.
It seems to me that the essential element of this ultimate ego in Proust was goodness. This goodness had nothing ethical in it, must not be confounded with righteousness; and yet, seeking another word to define its nature, purity is the only one that occurs to me. There was in him the fundamental simplicity which was typified by Dostoevsky in Myshkin, and out of it grew the intellectual integrity which governed and informed his philosophy.
He possessed that rarest gift of touching everyday people, things, and concerns with gold, imparting to them a vital and abiding interest. Anything and everything served as a starting-point, nothing was too minute to kindle idea and provoke suggestive utterance. He could do this because he was himself the most interesting of men, and because Life was one long exciting adventure to him wherein nothing was trivial or negligible. It was not that loving beauty he desired nothing else, and was seeking an aesthetic disguise for the ugly, the sordid, or the base. On the contrary, he recognised that these also are of the stuff of which humanity is made, and that truth and beauty are as often as not masked by their opposites. In him extremes were not only reconciled but united. Supremely conscious and utterly unegotistical, one may look in vain in his-7- work for a trace of vanity, of self-glorification, or even self-justification. He is intensely concerned with his own consciousness, he is never concerned with himself. I can think of no conversation in any of his books in which he takes other than a minor part, and of very few in which he takes any part at all. He is wholly taken up with the thing in itself, whatever it may be, regarding his consciousness as an instrument of revelation apart from himself. And as he shows himself in his books, so he was in life.
In reply to a letter in which, expressing my disappointment at not seeing him on a certain occasion, I went on to say that, much as I loved his books, I would rather see him and hear him talk than read them, he wrote me:
Entre ce qu’une personne dit et ce qu’elle extrait par la méditation des profondeurs où l’esprit nu gît, couvert de voiles, il y a un monde. Il est vrai qu’il y a des gens supérieurs à leurs livres mais c’est que leurs livres ne sont pas des Livres. Il me semble que Ruskin, qui disait de temps en temps des choses sensées, a assez bien exprimé une partie au moins de cela.... Si vous ne lisez pas mon livre ce n’est pas ma faute; c’est la faute de mon livre, car s’il était vraiment un beau livre il ferait aussitôt l’unité dans les esprits épars et rendrait le calme aux cœurs troubles.
His immersion in the subject of conversation or inquiry was complete; nothing else existed until he had got to the bottom of it. But his-8- world was echoless; the voice never repeated itself, and banality could not enter in, because neither formula nor classification existed for him. Just as in his eyes one particular water-lily in the Vivonne was different from any other water-lily, so each fresh experience was an isolated unit complete in itself and unlike all other units in the world of his consciousness. His mind, so far from being overlaid by obliterating layers of experience, was as a virgin soil which by some magic renews itself after each fresh crop has been harvested. This power of mental renewal pervades and gives a peculiar freshness to all that he has written. It is in essence a youthful quality which was very marked in his personality. He was penetrated with boyish eagerness and curiosity, asked endless questions, wanted always to know more. What had you heard, what did you think, what did they say or do, whatever it was and whoever they were. And there was no denying him this or anything he wanted; he must always have his way—he always did have it, till the end of his life. And the great comfort to those who loved him is that till the last he was a glorious spoilt child. As Céleste says in Sodome:
On devrait bien tirer son portrait en ce moment. Il a tout des enfants. Vous ne vieillirez jamais. Vous avez de la chance, vous n’aurez jamais à lever la main sur personne, car vous avez des yeux qui savent imposer leur volonté....
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This was the same Céleste who devoted her life to his service for many years and was with him to the last. After his death she wrote of him: “Monsieur ne ressemblait à personne. C’était un être incomparable—composé de deux choses, intelligence et cœur—et quel cœur!”
Knowing the intensity of his interest in and sympathy with humble lives, the suggestion of snobbishness in connexion with such a man is ridiculous. Proust, like all great artists, needed access to all human types. It is one of the drawbacks of our modern civilisation that the opportunities for varied social intercourse are limited and beset with conventional prejudices. No man went further than he did to surmount these. He knew people of the “monde” as he knew others. As he writes in Sodome:
Je n’avais jamais fait de différence entre les ouvriers, les bourgeois et les grands seigneurs, et j’aurais pris indifféremment les uns et les autres pour amis avec une certaine préférence pour les ouvriers, et après cela pour les grands seigneurs, non par goût, mais sachant qu’on peut exiger d’eux plus de politesse envers les ouvriers qu’on ne l’obtient de la part des bourgeois, soit que les grands seigneurs ne dédaignent pas les ouvriers comme font les bourgeois, ou bien parce qu’ils sont volontiers polis envers n’importe qui, comme les jolies femmes heureuses de donner un sourire qu’elles savent accueilli avec tant de joie.
His friends were in fact of all classes, but his friendship was accorded only on his own terms,-10- and a condition of it was the capacity to bear hearing the truth. His friends knew themselves the better for knowing him, for he was impatient of the slightest insincerity or disingenuousness and could not tolerate pretence. Lies tired him. In a letter he alluded thus to one whom we both knew well:
Ce que je lui reproche, c’est d’être un menteur. Il a fait ma connaissance à la faveur d’un mensonge et depuis n’a guère cessé. Il trouve toujours le moyen de gâter ses qualités par ces petits mensonges qu’il croit l’avantager—tout petits et quelquefois énormes.
Proust’s insistence on truthfulness and sincerity caused him more than once to renounce lifelong associations. His sensibility was so delicate that a gesture or a note in the voice revealed to him a motive, perhaps slight and passing, of evasion or pretence. He was exacting about sincerity only. In other respects his tolerance was so wide that a hard truth from his lips, so far from wounding, stimulated. To his friends he was frankness itself, and spoke his mind without reserve. I once asked him to tell me if there were not some one, some friend of his, to whom I could talk about him. There was so much I wanted to know, and on the all too rare occasions when he was well enough to see me there was never time. In answer to this he wrote me:
Si vous désirez poser quelque interrogation à une personne qui me comprenne, c’est bien simple,-11- adressez-vous à moi. D’ami qui me connaisse entièrement je n’en ai pas.... Je sais tout sur moi et vous dirai volontiers tout; il est donc inutile de vous désigner quelque ami mal informé et qui dans la faible mesure de sa compétence cesserait de mériter le nom d’ami s’il vous répondait.
Thus in his words we reach the final conclusion that, even if Proust’s friends had the power of expressing all that they feel about him, they would still be “mal informés,” and would have to return to him for that deeper knowledge which only he could impart. As to this, there is his further assurance that his work is the best part of himself. Providentially, he was spared until that work was done and “Fin” on the last page was written by his own hand.
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