Yours Ever (34 page)

WHENEVER
HIS
WIDOWED MOTHER
had to leave his side, Proust would sign letters to her with “A thousand loving kisses.” He took pleasure in complaining to her along the “sort of wireless telegraphy” he imagined connecting them, until Madame Proust’s death in
1905 allowed him to inflate real grief into a kind of infantilism he seemed to crave.

Being able to admit that one has never finished Proust is a sign of cultural security, even if the admission is usually followed by a declaration of intent to try again someday, perhaps by starting in the middle. Opening up the second volume of his letters, which runs from 1904 to 1909, may be a way of warming up for the task.

“I have just spent an entire year in bed,” he writes on August 6, 1907. A reader quickly finds that Proust’s asthma—as famous as Milton’s blindness, and in its way perhaps as propelling—is monitored with astonishing detail in this second volume of correspondence. At its beginning in 1904, the writer is thirty-two years old and has just endured the death of his father. He has pulled back from much of the social life he pursued in his twenties, relegated by his ailments to a strange nocturnal timetable: activity comes easier late at night. In May 1905, he writes his fellow invalid, Madame Émile Straus: “If I find an oculist who is prepared to see me at 11 o’clock in the evening I shall consult him.”

By the time he is thirty-five, he can at last think of himself as an orphan. He won’t attend a lecture near the anniversary of his father’s death, finds “unspeakable” a novelist pursuing an antifamily theme and extends the worship of his own ancestors to everybody else’s. He calls the mother of his friend Georges de Lauris “a person I never knew but whom I mourned and still mourn as though I had always known her.”

As George Painter’s biography showed, Proust’s homosexuality eventually became feverishly active, but in 1908, he is still so confused as to be able to indulge and repress it in the course of a single letter. A paragraph after telling de Lauris of the joy he would experience “reciting in your presence the litany of your ankles and the praises of your wrists,” he says he’ll refrain—“because of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations which would spring up in others’ thoughts.”

If there is a confessional aspect to these letters, it resides not in the admission of sexual exploits or emotional duplicity, but in the stealthily increasing revelation of an ambition, a mission that he will have little more than a decade to fulfill once he has fully embarked
on it. All of his personal preoccupations, so mannered and exaggerated, are actually the feathers and fuss of procrastination.

Take, for example, the art of the compliment. However assiduously it may have been practiced in the Belle Époque, Proust’s ornate courtesies remain positively exhausting to read. The characters in the short stories of Anatole France are, he tells their author, “freshly born of the miraculous foam of your genius,” and he reassures Anna de Noailles (also Colette’s friend) that some praise he’s passing on to her is “the inevitable echo of your divine accents in any human ear capable of hearing them.”

Like all gossips, he is touchy, though a little anger proves therapeutic: “when I have a grievance against people I like them to be guilty of wrongs against me which sound warlike fanfares in my heart.” He enjoys his epistolary tiffs with such aristocratic friends as Antoine Bibesco and Robert de Montesquiou, who more than once imputes hypochondria to him. It is, however, Prince Léon Radziwill who receives Proust’s testiest sign-off: “I was your truly sincere friend. Marcel Proust.”

Proust is well informed of both literary and national politics—where people stand on the Dreyfus affair is a basis for his judgment of their characters—and he eventually becomes adept at following the progress of his portfolio, which includes New York City bonds. But it is another sort of portfolio that is really on his mind, gnawing at it with a demand to be taken seriously.

As this volume begins, he is still hesitant about his literary career, devoting most of what energies he has to critical essays and translating Ruskin. Worried that he might “die without ever having written anything
of my own
,” he moves on to parodies (“pastiches”) and finally to his novel—but only by way of criticism: an essay taking issue with the biographical critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve turns into an early draft of
Remembrance of Things Past
.

His “horrible anti-asthmatic medicaments” may leave him unable to “remember what happened the day before,” but it is a remoter past he now goes after. By May 23, 1909, he is asking de Lauris if he knows whether the name Guermantes is “entirely extinct and available to an author.” The last letter in this volume mentions “some alterations which are essential for my peace and quiet
[being] done to my room in Paris.” The famous cork lining is being applied to the walls of his bedroom. His imaginative galleon is being assembled, against all odds, like a ship in a bottle.

OUR FIRST EPISTOLARY ACQUAINTANCE
, Charles Lamb, could match Colette’s gusto for anything emerging from the oven (“God bless me, here are the birds, smoking hot!”), but he tended to ask politely, rather than grab, for the platter. Even when trying to borrow an algebra text for his hapless friend George Dyer, Lamb confessed to the item’s owner that, in seeking the right delicate manner for the request, he has consulted the letters of Pliny, “who is noted to have had the best grace in begging of all the ancients.”

The “begging letter,” when written with enough sincere chagrin and charm, may end up seeming as much a present, a kind of prefacto thank-you note, as a request. Indeed, the “bread-and-butter letter,” which appreciative houseguests are supposed to send to their hosts the day after arriving home, seems with its curious name to show the codependence of supplication and gratitude. But there are those begging letters that spring from calculated greed, ones that exchange the downcast eye of embarrassment for a cunning tug of the forelock in order to make an entirely false confession of need. This variety of the letter survives even today in the sudden appearance, usually from overseas, of e-mailed opportunities to relieve a person’s medical desperation through the simple act of providing one’s bank account number. But the genre’s low-tech traditions go back centuries. Here, from
The New York Times
of March 29, 1901, is an explanation for the arrest of the entire Patrick McCann family of East Forty-sixth Street:

The Dickensian feel of this reconstruction reminds us of how, throughout his fame as an author, Dickens himself, that champion of the imprisoned debtor, received bagfuls of letters requesting his help and his cash. In the mid-1840s, he went so far as to report one schemer named John Walker to the Mendicity Society, whose very name Dickens would seem to have invented. But it was the mendacity, not the mendicity, that troubled the novelist. In an article for
Household Words
, Dickens wrote of his exasperation with the way the writers of begging letters were “dirtying the stream of true benevolence, and muddling the brains of foolish justices, with inability to distinguish between the base coin of distress, and the true currency we have always among us.”

The crook Dickens typically hears from has, at various times, “wanted a great coat, to go to India in; a pound, to set him up in life for ever; a pair of boots, to take him to the coast of China; a hat, to get him into a permanent situation under Government.” Dickens sometimes detects the pseudo-desperate writer “fuming his letters with tobacco smoke”—perhaps garlic, too—while he’s in the midst of threatening suicide and assuring the recipient that he has never written this sort of thing before. The letters usually come via a messenger, often a child, who will later graduate to practicing the profession himself.

The cheap chiseling drives Dickens to a rhetorical scorn that he normally reserves for industrial-scale malefactors like Mr. Bounderby. Indeed, it says something, as the critic Michael Slater reminds us, that the novelist picks begging-letter authorship as the epilogic fate of Pecksniff, one of his pettiest, nastiest and most memorable villains. The actual poor, Dickens insists, “never write these letters. Nothing could be more unlike their habits.”

BY THE MID-1980S
, William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) looked less like the “connoisseur of horror” he once called himself, than someone’s terribly frail grandfather, so stooped and skinny one could almost see his ribs through the back of his sport coat. That he lived for another decade, long enough to see the publication of his letters, seems a sort of medical mystery to their reader, who gets to follow Burroughs through the fifteen years of struggle that preceded the success of
Naked Lunch
, a time of solitary wandering and gluttonous drug-taking.

“I have given up junk entirely and don’t miss it at all.” These famous last words, written in 1946, are among the volume’s first: the thirty-two-year-old Burroughs is spending a court-ordered summer with his parents after a narcotics arrest. As the next dozen years go by and the family’s black sheep moves from growing vegetables in Louisiana to getting high in Colombia and on to buying boys and drugs in Tangiers, the reader almost requires a Burroughs calculator, source of the family fortune, to count Bill’s climbings onto and off the junk wagon.

Dope proves a distraction from his farming (“Putting out feelers in the local junk market”), and Burroughs ends up being one of the few men who can say their rehab was thwarted by dislocations to the agricultural economy: “I had hoped to go to a sanatorium for a 10 day cure on my carrot money. Now that hope is blasted.” On New Year’s Day 1950 he writes Jack Kerouac to praise a lack of Mexican effort at “curtailing self-medication. Needles and syringes can be bought anywhere.” By March of ‘51, he’s taken “the Chinese cure and [is] off the junk,” but thirteen months later, with the departure of a lover, he’s “got another habit. Start cutting down tomorrow.”

It goes on like this, year after year, from codeine to Eukodol, Peru to Morocco, in and out of “the straitjacket of junk,” crawling between resolute cleanness and “[d]egenerate spectacle: I just hit a vein (not easy these days. I don’t got many veins left). So I kissed the vein, calling it ‘my sweet little needle sucker,’ and talked baby talk to it.”

Even so, Burroughs slogs through the cycles of kicking and lapsing and kicking and lapsing with more plainspokenness than the average social drinker manages to summon. Whether he’s writing about the Texas drug laws (“For some idiotic reason the bureaucrats are more opposed to tea than to stuff”) or making fun of Allen Ginsberg’s short-lived “normalization program,” by which the younger writer hopes to turn heterosexual, Burroughs somehow keeps a perspicacious head above the ocean of dope. Even while he wallows in Tangier, a sort of peripheral vision permits him to see the city for what it is: “Things here are so typically Tangiers—‘My dear,
anything
can happen in Tangiers’—that it is positively sick-making.”

Between hallucinations he is more than ordinarily respectful of common reality, going so far, in 1948, as to pronounce a philosophy of “factualism”: “All arguments, all nonsensical considerations as to what people ‘should do,’ are irrelevant. Ultimately there is only fact on all levels, and the more one argues, verbalizes, moralizes the less he will see and feel of fact. Needless to say, I will not write any formal statement on the subject. Talk is incompatible with factualism.” He means for his early writings, such as
Junky
, to carry no message beyond mere descriptiveness (“You might say it was a travel book more than anything else”). He writes mostly to stave off misery, though he prefers contracts and royalties to neglect and persecution. A good deal of what’s in his letters ends up, sometimes word for word, in the novels he eventually publishes, and amid all the paranoid phantasmagoria those books contain, one can still detect a nod and a wink, the sly self-awareness of “That Junky writin’ boy Bill,” as he signs himself to Ginsberg in 1952.

American conservatism is hardly a seamless garment, and the question of drug legalization has always strained its libertarian lining. But Burroughs, no single-issue deregulator, can be found wearing the cloak with surprising frequency. In 1949, when renting the back house on his Louisiana property, he tells Kerouac of a dismaying discovery that he cannot evict his tenants “without removing the premises from the rental market. I tell you we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism.” All liberals, he writes a few months later, are “vindictive, mean and petty,” and when he heads for Mexico City on the GI Bill he delivers a word of
advice: “I always say keep your snout in the public trough.” Burroughs is frequently one step ahead of the local police, but the totalitarianism he fears is of the looming nanny-state variety. “Why can’t people mind their own fucking business?” is his motto. Ginsberg, his intellectual foil for some of these libertarian pronouncements, thinks Burroughs’s “b.s. about Statism and Cops and welfare state is just a W. C. Fields act,” but there is a bit more to it than that: “There are 2 bases for any ethical system,” Burroughs declares to him in 1950. “(1)
Aristocratic code
(2)
Religion
.”

That he is prepared to embrace neither doesn’t keep him from being a kind of ethicist to the Beats. He recognizes Neal Cassady as an “inveterate moocher” and offers Ginsberg this moral evaluation of the cross-country trip Kerouac would turn into
On the Road:
“I can not forgo a few comments on the respective and comparative behavior of the several individuals comprising the tour, a voyage which for sheer compulsive pointlessness compares favorably with the mass migrations of the Mayans.” Ginsberg himself needs few lectures in behavior. The letters provide consistent evidence of the poet’s loyalty, patience and simple niceness to Burroughs, whom he serves diligently, and for a time quite hopelessly, as a literary agent.