The disparity may be less dramatic. No doubt he believed precious few of his proustifications, but he nevertheless remained sincere in the message that had inspired and underlay them: “I like you and I would like you to like me.” The fifteen long-stemmed chrysanthemums, the marvelous planets, the devoted worshippers, the Athenas, goddesses, and splendid images were merely what Proust felt he would need to add to his own presence in order to secure affection, in the light of his previously mentioned, debilitating assessment of his own qualities (“I certainly think less of myself than Antoine [his butler] does of himself”).
In fact, the exaggerated scale of Proust’s social politeness should not blind us to the degree of insincerity every friendship demands, the ever-present requirement to deliver an affable but hollow word to a friend who proudly shows us a volume of her poetry or her newborn baby. To call such politeness hypocrisy is to neglect that we have lied in a local way not in order to conceal fundamentally malevolent intentions, but rather, to confirm our feeling of affection, which might have been doubted if there had been no gasping and praising, because of the unusual intensity of people’s attachment to their verse and children. There seems a gap between what others need to hear from us in order to trust that we like them, and the extent of the negative thoughts we know we can feel toward them and still like them. We know it is possible to think of someone as both dismal at poetry and perceptive, both inclined to pomposity and charming, both suffering from halitosis and genial. But the susceptibility of others means that the negative part of the equation can rarely be expressed without jeopardizing the union. We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a level of malice far greater (or more critical) than the malice we ourselves felt in relation to the last person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our affection for them.
Proust once compared friendship to reading, because both activities involved communion with others, but added that reading had a key advantage:
In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to
.
Whereas in life, we are often led to have dinner because we fear for the future of a valued friendship were we to decline the invitation, a hypocritical meal forced upon us by an awareness of our friends’ unwarranted, yet unavoidable, susceptibility. How much more honest we can be with books. There, at least, we can turn to them when we want, and look bored or cut short a dialogue as soon as necessary. Had we been granted the opportunity to spend an evening with Moliere, even this comic genius would have forced us into an occasional fake smile, which is why Proust expressed a preference for communion with the page-bound, rather than the living, playwright. At least, in book form:
We laugh at what Molière has to say only so far as we find it funny; when he bores us we are not afraid to look bored, and once we have definitely had enough of him we put him back in his place as abruptly as if he had neither genius nor celebrity
.
How are we to respond to the level of insincerity apparently required in every friendship? How are we to respond to the two habitually conflicting projects carried on under the single umbrella of friendship: a project to secure affection, and a project to express ourselves honestly? It was because Proust was both unusually honest and unusually affectionate that he drove the joint project to breaking point and came up with his distinctive approach to friendship, which was to judge that the pursuit of affection and the pursuit of truth were fundamentally rather than occasionally incompatible. It meant adopting a much narrower conception of what friendship was for: it was for playful exchanges with Laure but not for telling Molière that he was boring and Anna de Noailles that she couldn’t write poetry. One might imagine that it made Proust a far lesser friend, but paradoxically, the radical separation had the power to make him both a better, more loyal, more charming friend, and a more honest, profound, and unsentimental thinker.
An example of how this separation influenced Proust’s behavior can be seen in his friendship with Fernand Gregh, a onetime classmate and fellow writer. When Proust published his first collection of stories, Fernand Gregh was in an influential position on the literary paper La Revue de Paris. Despite the many flaws in Pleasures and Regrets, it was not too much to hope that an old school friend could put in a nice word for the book, but it did prove too much to hope of Gregh, who failed even to mention Proust’s writing to the readers of La Revue de Paris. He found space for a little review, but in it talked only of the illustrations, the preface, and the piano pieces that had come with the book and that Proust had had nothing to do with, and then added sarcastic jibes about the connections Proust had used in order to get his work published.
What do you do when a friend like Gregh subsequently writes a book of his own, a very bad one at that, and sends you a copy asking for your opinion? Proust faced the question only a few weeks later, when Fernand sent him The House of Childhood, a collection of poems in the light of which Anna de Noailles’s work could truly have been compared to Baudelaire’s. Proust might have taken this opportunity to confront Gregh on his behavior, told him the truth about his poetry, and suggested he hold on to his day job. But we know this wasn’t Proust’s style, and we find him writing a generous letter of congratulation. “What I have read struck me as really beautiful,” Proust told Fernand. “I know you were hard on my book. But that no doubt was because you thought it bad. For the same reason, finding yours good, I am glad to tell you so and to tell others.”
More interesting than the letters we send our friends may be the ones we finish, then decide not to post after all. Found among his papers after his death was a note Proust had written to Gregh a little before the one he actually sent. It contained a far nastier, far less acceptable, but far truer message. It thanked Gregh for The House of Childhood, but then limited itself to praising the quantity, rather than the quality, of this poetic output, and went on to make wounding reference to Gregh’s pride, distrustfulness, and childlike soul.
Why didn’t he send it? Though the dominant view of grievances is that they should invariably be discussed with their progenitors, the typically unsatisfactory results of doing so should perhaps urge us to reconsider. Proust might have invited Gregh to a restaurant, offered him the finest grapes on a vine plant, pressed a five-hundred-franc tip into the waiter’s hand for good measure, and begun to tell his friend in the gentlest voice that he seemed a little too proud, had some problems with trust, and that his soul was a touch childlike, only to find Gregh turning red in the face, pushing aside the grapes, and walking angrily out of the restaurant, to the surprise of the richly remunerated waiter. What would this have achieved, aside from unnecessarily alienating proud Gregh? And anyway, had Proust really become friends with this character in order to share his palm reader’s insights with him?
Instead, these awkward thoughts were better entertained elsewhere, in a private space designed for analyses too wounding to be shared with those who had inspired them. A letter that never gets sent is such a place. A novel is another.
One way of considering In Search of Lost Time is as an unusually long unsent letter, the antidote to a lifetime of proustification, the flip side of the Athenas, lavish gifts, and long-stemmed chrysanthemums, the place where the unsayable was finally granted expression. Having described artists as “creatures who talk of precisely the things one shouldn’t mention,” the novel gave Proust the chance to mention them all. Laure Haymann might have had her ravishing sides, but she also had less worthy ones, and these migrated into the representation of the fictional Odette de Crécy. Fernand Gregh might have avoided a lecture from Proust in real life, but he received a covert one in Proust’s damning portrait of Alfred Bloch, for whom he was in part the model.