In the 1890s, two decades before the publication of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust wrote short stories. He printed 11 of these in Pleasures and Days but abandoned the rest as handwritten, unpublished drafts marked by insertions and deletions. Bernard de Fallois, a Proust scholar, discovered the stories in the 1950s, along with Jean Santeuil and Against Sainte-Beuve. But while the latter were published then, the stories remained forgotten in the archive until 2019.
Now One World Press has published them in Charlotte Mandell’s English translation. Like Pleasures and Days, most of The Mysterious Correspondent consists of fragmentary practices in fiction, essay, and philosophical dialogue. The stories explore gay love, illness, suffering, and morality, and they show a writer working out his narrative-philosophical-lyrical-essayistic treatment of the themes that would characterize his magnum opus. As Luc Fraisse writes in the introduction, “They should not be viewed as the dregs of the great work, but rather as harboring an abundance of literary experimentations. These books are laboratories; the texts palpitate like matter in fusion.”
Why not publish experimentations, matter in fusion? The writing lay dormant for more than a century. Fraisse reasons that Proust left the stories out of Pleasure and Days because “homosexuality would have become the main subject of the book,” which Proust might have worried would draw attention to his own sexuality; because he “wanted to preserve a more deliberate diversity within his collection”; or because “he may have doubted the quality and the literary success of these texts.” All probably motivated Proust, but especially the doubt in quality, as the stories present only premises, two-character interactions, and small pieces of beauty and life.
These abandoned works dramatize the conflict between the inner world, filled with imagination and longing, and the outer world, filled with the barriers of distance and words. “The Mysterious Correspondent” stands out as the best, and most complete, of the stories, and it reveals how a woman named Françoise receives letters from an anonymous lover. She imagines a man as their author, “one of those soldiers whose broad belt takes long to unbuckle,” and the letters create a dialogue with her fantasies. The stranger writes that “you have been my spiritual companion without knowing it. But that is no longer enough for me. It is your body I want, and unable to have it, in my despair and frenzy I write this letter to calm myself, the way one crumples a paper while waiting, the way one writes a name on the bark of a tree, the way one cries a name into the wind or over the sea. To lift the corner of your lips with my mouth, I would give my life.” This message shows young Proust at his best, and the story ends with the Christiane, the letter writer and Françoise’s friend, falling ill from unrequited love, confessing to the Abbé, and dying unfulfilled.
Poetic images and rhythms run through these stories of loneliness, however minor or incomplete. In “The Awareness of Loving Her,” a version of Poe’s “The Raven” but with “a kind of cat-squirrel,” the narrator says that, after a romantic rejection, “I gave myself over [to] all my ordinary occupations, I walked down indifferent streets, I beheld my friends and my enemies with a rare, sad voluptuousness.” The narrator of “A Captain’s Remembrance,” the only previously published story in the book, looks on past love as “a little world that is enough unto itself, that exists outside myself, that has its sweet beauty, in its so-unexpected clear light. And my heart, my cheerful heart of that time … is in that sun-filled little garden, in the courtyard of the barracks so far away and yet so close, so strangely close to me, so inside myself, and yet so outside myself, so impossible to reach ever again. It is there in the little town full of lilting light and I can hear a clear sound of bells filling the sun-drenched streets.”
By the end of the collection, it becomes clear that these stories about the disparities between inner and outer life also demonstrate Proust working through his own restraints of illnesses and failed love. He writes, in part, for solace. It can only come in the writing itself, which allows the suffering, like “little songbirds,” “to sing.” “The Gift of the Fairies” expresses this idea most clearly and illustrates the power of art through a lively Proustian description of “a lady who walked with her eyes closed after leaving the Louvre, so as not to see the ugliness of the passers-by and the streets of Paris after the perfect faces of Raphael and the woods of Corot.”
In that story a fairy speaks directly to a sick character. The fairy tells him that “illness has powers that health does not know.” The fairy says, “I am the voice of the one who is not yet but who will be born from your misunderstood sorrows, from your unrecognized tenderness, from the suffering of your body … Listen to me, console yourself, for I say to you: the sadness of your scorned love, of your open wounds, I will show you their beauty, so sweet that you will not be able to avert your gaze — damp with tears, but enchanted.” This is, after all, the only consolation we find when reading of Proust’s life of illness. He suffered from an extreme sensitivity to pollen, from asthma, pneumonia, insomnia, loud noises, and a fear of sudden death. Knowing this, the fairy’s words become the most moving in the book, as we can hear the young Proust speaking to himself.
Although the cover presents only Proust’s name, there are three authors to this book: Proust, the writer; Mandell, the translator; and Fraisse, a professor at the University of Strasbourg. Unfortunately, Fraisse’s prose dominates the volume. Short texts preceding each story summarize the history and plot, note how Proust varies the characters and ideas in his Search, and analyze the images and themes. But while the introductions contextualize each story, they can feel like excessive mini-lectures. By the time we get to the title story, for example, we have been told in a five-page note what to think and see, and the reading experience that follows comes to resemble the old nightmare of a professor watching over your shoulder, one who even says to “note here the way in which self-analysis gradually replaces the fairytale.”
One could argue that this book is meant only for scholars and fanatics, but I would ask: should scholars and fanatics be deprived of the joys of reading, too? Can they not revel in the page-by-page, sentence-by-sentence experience of discovering a work for the first time, passing into new images and scenes, mapping out the spaces for themselves? One writer once compared reading footnotes to “having to go to answer the door while in the midst of making love.” Forget in the midst: these sections prevent you from making love to Proust in the first place. Many doorbells ring in this book, too, and they would have been better, for all readers, in brief, with analysis held for the end of each story or in endnotes at the back.
Fraisse also dismisses Proust’s unpublished work in brief asides (from his gloss to the title story: “Proust (clumsily) attempts suspense writing”), and his criticism brings us back to the question of what we should do with a dead writer’s unpublished work. When Lavinia Dickinson went to burn her sister’s letters after Emily’s death, she discovered 40 notebooks of poems and published them. Without that, we would not have our idea of American Literature. But more often posthumous work only weakens a writer’s legacy. The books, promised treasures, disappoint, as their publications were determined by profits, not aesthetics. The literary executioners assemble notes, ideas, scraps of prose to dream about what could have been (in love, like in art, this never leads anywhere productive). Or they bring up entire manuscripts rejected by the authors themselves. In some instances, as with Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman, these actions become transgressive, even criminal. While they contribute to our knowledge of a writer’s progress and life, they do not need to be bound, covered, marketed, and sold.
Throughout In Memory of Memory, published in English this February, Maria Stepanova argues that we deprive the dead of their rights. “Culture treats the past as a state treats its mineral wealth, mining it for all its worth,” she claims. “The past lies before us, like a huge planet waiting to be colonized.” We often colonize our dead artists: we gossip their personal lives, reprint their letters, hawk their discarded work, abusing the dignity of their silence.
This isn’t completely true of The Mysterious Correspondent, this book of fragments, this afternoon of little curiosities and lyric phrases. Rather than disparaging his intentions or legacy, the collection presents a writer trying to work through some of the conflicts that would constitute his greatest work, that artist’s dream, a months-long event that takes you through the passage of time. It also reveals the hand of time, or the artist attending to other things. At the end of the “Unfinished Variation” on the title story, the prose builds up, as we are used to in Proust: images accumulate, rhythms accelerate, lyricism blooms, and the excerpt crescendos with how “thought usually lines the eyes admirably, hollows out depths in the gaze, but wilts the complexion, bends the waist. General de Notlains had escaped these laws. Before seeing him she wanted to love him; she saw him, she loved him, and by dint of thinking about him had given him her imagination and without making it too specific so as not to dissipate his prestigious mystery a perfect [breaks off].”
[Published by Oneworld Publications on April 13, 2021, 144 pages, $24.99 paperback]