The martyrdom of Proust

Why would a writer like Marcel Proust, who quivered and wheezed at the slightest sensation, decide to live surrounded by neighbours in one of the busiest parts of Paris? In 1906, at the age of 35, shortly after the death of his mother, he moved to a first-floor apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. ‘I couldn’t bear to live in a place that maman never knew,’ he explained.

For this ghostly comfort, he paid a heavy price. Petrol fumes and tree pollen — to which he was almost fatally allergic — drifted up from the boulevard. In the absence of maman’s goodnight kiss, he sedated himself with valerian and heroin, but there was no escaping the blaring of klaxons, the thud of demolition and the renovation of his neighbour’s toilet: ‘She keeps changing the seat — probably having it widened.’

These 26 recently rediscovered letters were written by Proust to another neighbour, Marie Williams, the French wife of an American dentist who lived above him on the second and third floors. In their excruciating politeness, they take us to the heart of his sensory hell. Touch, taste and smell are the senses usually associated with Proust: the episode everyone remembers from his seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, is the spongy madeleine which, dipped in a cup of tea, resuscitates the past by the miracle of involuntary memory. But the narrator’s ears — ‘anxious’ and ‘hallucinating’ — are just as active in the story as his nostrils and tongue.

Settling in to the apartment where, incredibly, he lived for more than 12 years, trying to write his novel, Proust faced the common dilemma of what the translator Lydia Davis calls ‘a noise-phobic’. He could either try to ignore or try to stop the noise.