Proust plural.(Marcel Proust Letters)(Book review)

Marcel Proust Letters, translated by Mina Curtiss, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik. Helen Marx Books, 462 pages, $17.95

"The letters which we receive from a person should be more or less similar to one another and combine to trace an image of the writer," wrote Proust in A la recherche du temps perdu. Yet in his letters, there are many Prousts.

There's Marcel the cuddling bootlicker of ladies, writing worshipfully to his own father's mistress. There is Marcel the tender, steely narcissist, remarking of his mother in a letter to somebody else, "I had always hoped she would die before I did so that she should not have the grief of losing me." There's Marcel the self-mocker, who snickered, "I go from bad to worse. It's three weeks since I have set foot outside my house. My beard is so long it doesn't even make me look dirty anymore." There is, of course, Marcel the artist, who can dismiss the call to charm, and simply state, "One 'holds one's own' and cuts a fine figure in comparison with the writers of the past only inasmuch as one has tried to write quite differently." But don't forget Marcel the bitch-slapper, who dealt with a couple of fellows like this: "He and Bourget looked like two bigoted old maids delighted to have dared to use a slightly off-color word in front of their cure."

His leading roles in this book, which begins with his childhood and ends just before his death, include aphorist, ironist, aesthete, ruthless politicker, publicist, portraitist, critic, would-be bon vivant, sick boy, and then some. The man is soon a crowd, and what we're reading is a novel in letters, with more than one narrator. Who was he, anyway?

I would answer: There's no need to answer. Let's not narrow Proust's epistolary role unduly. For the crowd is the man, complete, complex, and inconsistent. Proust never intended to publish his letters; he did not stage-manage them as an epic "work." So it's possible to dodge, for once, the legend of the writer for the reality of the improvising person.

All the same, Adam Gopnik in his introduction claims Proust as a hero in the singular, as did Harry Levin in his introduction to a previous edition of the letters. The distinction: Levin's was a literary hero. Gopnik's is more the man, mundane yet resplendent. Even so, Proust doesn't play the hero in his letters; it was a foregone role.

When he wrote to different people, becoming ...