Saturday
Dear friend,
It would interest me much less to take a trip to the moon or the planet Mars than one to the Hérédosphères.2 Those are the real spheres, and you the astronomer of genius who makes known to us the only universes that matter, the interior universes, and a law of gravity of much greater importance than the other one. There are stages in the ascent of your ideas, followed by new insights that enrapture (as we acknowledge to take one example among many, in which we see that your personimages are hérédosphères). And in one brief phrase, an incommensural ray of light, a clarity is thrown upon medecine, literary criticism, the philosophy of life that is bound to be deduced from it. (In the same way Descartes showed certain consequences of his methods). Perhaps I would be displeasing you by saying that often, when you are quoting from other writers, the things you say have a certain resemblance to those of Schopenhauer (I’m talking of course about a kindred way of thinking, not about imitation). But if you have read a small work that is probably out of print: “Aphorisms on the Wisdom in Life”, you will find some truth in what I say. If I have had the misfortune in life of thinking about myself, Hérédo and Le Monde de Images, would be for me a source not of joy, which they are, but of constant despair. As I no longer see anything other than from the point of view of Personimages, I weep to think that my books must rightly appear (contrary to what they are in reality) as a disorderly set of personimages not subject to any self-control. The management of my personimages is so severe as to frequently cause me the same as happened to me with Jammes. He had asked me to suppress from my first volume an extremely short episode that he found shocking. My refusal must have seemed odd to him because that episode really did seem meaningless in the first volume. But it is the support upon which the fourth and fifth volumes rest (through the recollections of this scene which haunt someone who is jealous), to the extent that if I had imprudently removed it, the whole edifice would have collapsed onto the heads of my readers. What you say about the omissions of memory is exactly what I think, and very much too about their reappearance, which is almost one of the very words from my as yet unpublished volumes, which you use when you say that you are losing your father for a second time. The same thing happens with my grandmother when I recover a memory of her at Balbec. The great difference is that it is only at that particular moment that I really lose her, because I had not felt any grief at the moment of her physical death. I’m worried that you might class me among those people who follow “tragic gossip” and who only judge others in comparison with themselves, seeing me talk so much about my fear of making myself apear to you as the prey to my characters. But also too, since you see the importance (with no “pathos”) that I attach to your judgement, you can imagine the immense joy that two unexpected, delightful and moving tokens caused me […] firstly such a charming dedication in Monde des Images […] Then the comments you made (which Reynaldo repeated to me) when you voted for me for the Prix Goncourt […] example in Tristan, when the bandage flutters, or when the arrival of the ship is announced by the shepherd’s flute, in such a joyful fashion. Dear friend, I only talk about all of this because I learned of the happy outcome of your sister’s illness (I did not even know that she was sick). Otherwise I would have spoken only of her. In any case I know that my letter would not have been read by you if you hadn’t been shaken up by the subject: I was told about the touching anguish with which you followed the progress of the operation. And such sensitivity is even more touching in a terrible man like you. One man? How many men!Because while we have all more or less allowed ourselves to be dominated by your personimages, you know how to regulate the play of your own with such magical power that whilst remaining a novelist, unequalled portraitist of the Judets, the Meyers, the d’Avenals, the Faguets, and so many others, author of books like Le Monde des Images, which opens up a new era and will produce incalculable consequences and in which, even before their ascent, the “takeoff” has taken place, an image like that of the well-lit window that we see with our eyes closed summarizes our entire intellectual life, you are also the man of politics who is guiding France. May the forthcoming elections give us the opportunity to hear that furious eloquence in the Chamber, which with a single blow will shake the rotten pears from the parliamentary tree. Dear friend I send you once again all my gratitude, all my friendship and all my admiration.
Marcel Proust.
Please pay my respects to Madame Léon Daudet. She knows how much I adore the style of Pampille and I was touched to hear about her grief of Madame your sister’s suffering.
1. Bibliophilia - Livres & autographes du XVIe siècle à nos
jours, Millon, 12 June 2024. Lot 327. Page 8 was not illustrated in the
online catalogue.
2. Hérédosphères and personimages are neologisms
invented by Léon Daudet.
“Isolated hereditary images present themselves to our consciousness
generally in groups or systems, themselves united in large congenital
and regenerated forms, analogous to constellations. Each of these images
rotates, or rather gravitates [...] For the self can only conquer, that
is to say dissolve, for another distribution and a new balance, the
hérédoconstellations, if it has recognized them clearly , only if it is
capable of naming at least their main elements, their hérédosphères of
the first magnitude.” L’Hérédo, Léon Daudet, 1916.
“By examining the images which succeed one another in the thoughts of
each of us, by considering how they are linked together in language,
literature and the different arts, as well as in the sciences relating
to man and his constitution, I was led to this conclusion that they
form, for the same moment in individual life, groups, figures, shapes,
what I call personimages (persona… imago).” Le Monde des
Images, Léon Daudet, 1919.
Created 16.08.24