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Aldous Huxley described Marcel Proust as a “hermaphroditic” toad-like creature “spooning” his own tepid juice over his face and body. Written by Proust in his early twenties, the short stories contained in The Mysterious Correspondent are at times snobbish, sentimental and syrupy. They radiate the mannered hot-house atmosphere of the 1890s art-for-art’s sake movement, which Oscar Wilde had helped to popularize with his applications of rouge and dyed green carnation buttonholes. In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s masterpiece, was 20 years away: Proust had yet to find his voice.
The nine, previously unseen stories show Proust as a dandified soul drawn to themes of homosexual desire, sexualised suffering and solitude, and same-sex relationship troubles in general. Men dressed in sumptuous military uniforms (“whose belts it takes a long time – ah! such a long time – to unbuckle”) crop up frequently enough. The mature Proust prose style with its interminable sinuous sentences and interminable subordinate clauses is not much in evidence. The book is made up instead of dilettantish society sketches and John Ruskin-like flights of purple patchery (“I am the fairy of misunderstood sensitivities”). The stories are of considerable scholarly interest, though.
Reportedly they were “discovered” in the Proust family archives some time after the Second World War. A French scholar then wrote about them in a doctoral thesis that was never finished: only now have they emerged for publication. Revealingly the stories did not find their way into Pleasures and Regrets, a hodgepodge of youthful fiction by Proust, first published in 1896 when he was 25 and containing in essence the great themes of time lost and time regained, jealousy, memory, regret and love that he was to contemplate throughout his magnum opus. The 1896 book was too expensive for anyone to afford (it was illustrated by the salon artist Madame Lemaire, of whom Dumas fils remarked that “no one, except God, has created more roses”). So it too soon disappeared, along with the “forbidden” gay stories.
Why Proust chose to omit those stories from Pleasures and Regrets is not hard to fathom. Homosexuality was a taboo subject in late 19th century France; Proust may have had male lovers, but he viewed homosexuality as a curse and the cause of much suffering. The stories amount to a private diary which Proust “entrusted to no one”, the Proust scholar Luc Fraisse writes in his fine introduction.
Heavily annotated by Fraisse, the stories are at once revelatory and oddly familiar. The duchesses, countesses, barons, society belles and neurasthenic epicureans of ‘A Captain’s Reminiscence’ or ‘That is How He Loved’ have their counterparts in Lost Time. Proust moreover already has a pronounced nose for smells. The famous madeleine cake steeped in tea will trigger “involuntary memories” for the mature Proust but signs of that olfactory finesse are in evidence in the heady flower scents of these stories.
The title story, ‘The Mysterious Correspondent’, centres on a dying woman, Christiane, who is unable to act on her sexual feelings for Françoise. Should Françoise dare to make love to the consumptive Christiane in extremis? A Catholic father confessor is consulted on the matter. Gay male love is transposed here into a story of female homosexuality (Françoise and Christiane may as well be men).
A tone of elegiac mawkishness distinguishes ‘After Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony’, a study of the effect of music on the neurasthenic mind, while ‘The Awareness of Loving Her’, is an Edgar Allan Poe-like fantasia on the theme of loneliness (instead of Poe’s famous black raven, we have a spooky “cat-squirrel” creature, that may be an incarnation of despair, or perhaps just a gothic ornament).
Proust writes of the “painful voluptuousness” of unrequited homosexual love and other over-ripe literary concerns in a highly-wrought, Fabergé egg prose style that may cloy occasionally (“The air was so sweet that it floated over the water”). Proust has yet to speak authoritatively on the delusions and disappointments of life; as an embryonic draft for in Lost Time, though, the stories are certainly intriguing.
The Mysterious Correspondent: New Stories by Marcel Proust (Oneworld, £16.99)