🖊️ “I realise that, of all my elders, you are the only one I admire without any ulterior motives and without any effort (…)…
Translated from French.
🖊️ “I realise that, of all my elders, you are the only one I admire without any ulterior motive and without effort (…) I mean, without criticism, without any professional concerns; you alone restore to me that innocence, that surrender to the writer’s prestige, that willingness to see, to feel, to suffer as he does. (…) none of those who love you are more faithfully devoted to you than I am.”
— Letter from François Mauriac to Marcel Proust, 1 March 1921, published in “Correspondance intime”, @editions_bouquins 2012, p. 168
A little flattering, a little servile, or even downright obsequious? Mauriac had just spent the previous evening in Proust’s room at 44 Rue Hamelin in Paris. 🛏️ Proust had given him a signed copy of his early collection “Pleasures and Days”, published by @calmann.levy in 1896. 📕
But Mauriac would criticise Proust, in his tribute “At Proust’s Grave” in November 1922, for having lost his way in life and for having led his characters astray by lacking faith… 🤷🏻♂️ And he would record this distressing entry in his diary: “A strange supper at 10 o’clock in the evening at Proust’s bedside: dubious sheets, the smell of that furnished flat, a Jewish face, with his ten-day beard, returned to ancestral filth.” 🤦🏻♂️
Proust himself, though capable of such wickedness, was driven by a desire to capture the truth of it in a work
Mauriac, with his dark thoughts, a prisoner of his time and his own pettiness, yet a marvellous, luminous reader of Proust – saved by that, and the rest of his life, was beyond reproach. He is both man and beast, just like all of us. Cocteau, cruel and brilliant yet loving – whereas Picasso, dry as a gnawed bone, did nothing to help save little Max, who was interned at Drancy, on the pretext that he was too busy to lend his assistance and his car when Cocteau asked for his prestigious presence “Little Max will be all right, don’t worry”, yuck… and Morand, a damned soul with a heart just as dry and, in this instance, harbouring a genuine and tenacious anti-Semitism barely concealed in the aftermath of the war for reasons of self-preservation, as evidenced by his diary, which, to put it mildly, soils the eyes and hands of its readers every time a colleague is mentioned… yuck again