Given the effort and strategic intelligence he devoted to friendship, it shouldn’t surprise us. For instance, it is often assumed, usually by people who don’t have many friends, that friendship is a hallowed sphere in which what we wish to talk about effortlessly coincides with others’ interests. Proust, less optimistic than this, recognized the likelihood of discrepancy, and concluded that he should always be the one to ask questions and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you with what was on his.
To do anything else would have been bad conversational manners: “There is a lack of tact in people who in their conversation look not to please others, but to elucidate, egoistically, points that they are interested in.” Conversation required an abdication of oneself in the name of pleasing companions: “When we chat, it is no longer we who speak.… [W]e are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people, and not of a self that differs from them.”
It accounts for why Proust’s friend Georges de Lauris, a keen rally driver and tennis player, could gratefully report that he had often talked to Proust about sport and motorcars. Of course, Proust cared little for either, but to have insisted on turning the conversation to Madame de Pompadour’s childhood with a man keener on Renault’s crankshaft would have been to misunderstand what friendship was for.
It was not for elucidating, egoistically, things that one was interested in. It was primarily for warmth and affection, which is why, for a cerebral man, Proust had remarkably little interest in having overtly “intellectual” friendships. In the summer of 1920, he received a letter from Sydney Schiff, the friend who would, two years later, engineer his disastrous encounter with Joyce. Sydney told Proust that he was on a seaside holiday in England with his wife Violet, the weather was quite sunny, but Violet had invited a group of hearty young people to stay with them, and he had grown very depressed by how shallow these youngsters were. “It’s very boring for me,” he wrote to Proust, “because I don’t like to be constantly in the company of young people. I am pained by their naïvety, which I’m afraid of corrupting, or at least of compromising. Human beings sometimes interest me but I don’t like them because they are not intelligent enough.”
Proust, cloistered in bed in Paris, had difficulty appreciating why anyone would be dissatisfied with the idea of spending a holiday on a beach with some young people whose only fault was not to have read Descartes: “I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it’s more or less irrelevant to me that they’re intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere etc.”
When Proust did have intelligent conversations, the priority was still to dedicate himself to others, rather than to covertly introduce (as some might) private cerebral concerns. His friend Marcel Plantevignes, the author of yet another volume of reminiscence, this one entitled With Marcel Proust, commented on Proust’s intellectual courtesy, his concern never to be tiring, hard to follow, or categorical in what he said. Proust would frequently punctuate his sentences with a “perhaps,” a “maybe,” or a “Don’t you think?” For Plantevignes, it reflected Proust’s desire to please. “Maybe I’m wrong to tell them what they won’t like,” was his underlying thought. Not that Plantevignes was complaining; such tentativeness was welcome, especially on Proust’s bad days.
These maybes were very reassuring to encounter in the light of certain rather surprising declarations Proust made on his pessimistic days, and without which, they would have made really too much of a shattering impression
,
thoughts like: “Friendship doesn’t exist,” and “Love is a trap and only reveals itself to us by making us suffer.”
Don’t you think?
However charming Proust’s manners, they might unkindly have been described as overpolite, so much so that the more cynical of Proust’s friends invented a mocking term to describe the peculiarities of his social habits. As Fernand Gregh reports:
We created among ourselves the verb to proustify to express a slightly too conscious attitude of geniality, together with what would vulgarly have been called affectations, interminable and delicious
.
A representative target of Proust’s proustification was a middle-aged woman called Laure Haymann, a well-known courtesan, who had once been the mistress of the Duc d’Orléans, the King of Greece, Prince Egon von Fürstenberg, and, latterly, Proust’s great-uncle, Louis Weil. Proust was in his late teens when he met and first began to proustify Laure. He would send her elaborate letters dripping with compliments, accompanied by chocolates, trinkets, and flowers, gifts so expensive that his father was forced to lecture him on his extravagance.
“Dear friend, dear delight,” ran a typical note to Laure, accompanied by a little something from the florist. “Here are fifteen chrysanthemums. I hope the stems will be excessively long, as I requested.” In case they weren’t, and in case Laure needed a greater or more enduring token of affection than a collection of long-stemmed plants, he assured Laure that she was a creature of voluptuous intelligence and subtle grace, that she was a divine beauty and a goddess who could turn all men into devoted worshippers. It seemed natural to end the letter by offering affectionate regards and the practical suggestion that “I propose to call the present century the century of Laure Haymann.” Laure became his friend.
Here she is, as photographed by Paul Nadar at around the time the chrysanthemums were delivered to her door:
Another favored target of proustification was the poet and novelist Anna de Noailles, responsible for six collections of forgettable poetry, and for Proust, a genius worthy of comparison with Baudelaire. When she sent him a copy of her novel La Domination, in June 1905, Proust told her that she had given birth to an entire planet, “a marvellous planet won over for the contemplation of mankind.” Not only was she a cosmic creator, she was also a woman of mythic appearance. “I have nothing to envy Ulysses because my Athena is more beautiful, has greater genius and knows more than his,” Proust reassured her. A few years later, reviewing a collection of her poetry, Les Éblouissements, for Le Figaro, he wrote that Anna had created images as sublime as those of Victor Hugo, that her work was a dazzling success and a masterpiece of literary impressionism. To prove the point to his readers, he even quoted a few of Anna’s lines:
Tandis que détaché d’une invisible fronde
,
Un doux oiseau jaillit jusqu’au sommet du monde
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“Do you know an image more splendid and more perfect than this one?” he asked—at which point his readers could have been forgiven for muttering, “Well, yes,” and wondering what had possessed their besotted reviewer.
Was he an extraordinary hypocrite? The word implies that, beneath an appearance of goodwill and kindness, lay a sinister, calculating agenda, and that Proust’s real feelings for Laure Haymann and Anna de Noailles could not possibly have matched his extravagant declarations, and were perhaps closer to ridicule than adoration.