Letters to His Neighbor

by Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis (Translator)

Overview

Now in a beautiful paperback edition, Proust’s tormented, touching, and often very funny letters to his noisy neighbor, vividly translated by Lydia Davis

Marcel Proust’s genius for illuminating pain is on spectacular display in this recently discovered trove of his correspondence, Letters to His Neighbor. Already suffering from noise within his cork-lined walls, Proust’s poor soul was not ready for the fresh hell of his new upstairs neighbor, Dr. Williams, a dentist with a thriving practice directly above his head.

Chiefly to Mme Williams, these ever-polite letters (often accompanied by flowers, books, or compliments) are frequently hilarious—Proust couches his pained frustration in gracious eloquence. In Lydia Davis’s hands, the digressive brilliance of his sentences shines: “Don’t speak of annoying neighbors, but of neighbors so charming (an association of words contradictory in principle since Montesquiou claims that most horrible of all are 1: neighbors and 2: the smell of post offices) that they leave the constant tantalizing regret that one cannot take advantage of their neighborliness.” Richly illustrated with facsimile letters and photographs, Letters to His Neighbor is catnip for lovers of Proust.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811238649
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/05/2024
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

“Everything great in the world comes from neurotics,” said Marcel Proust, one of the most admired and important writers of the twentieth century.

Lydia Davis, a MacArthur Fellow, is the author of Our Strangers and The Collected Stories and the translator of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

Date of Birth:

July 10, 1871

Date of Death:

November 18, 1922

Place of Birth:

Auteuil, near Paris, France

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Editorial Reviews

"Like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves of Qumran… twenty-six of Proust’s letters to his upstairs neighbor, written over a decade during the composition of In Search of Lost Time, will delight any Proustian and will tide the faithful over until new relics come to light."

Rain Taxi

"One wonders if the headaches of apartment living might even have inspired him, as a worthy enemy might goad one to action."

Harper's Magazine

Marcel Proust is a literary giant whose shadow is as long as his record-setting output. (Guinness claims À la recherche du temps perdu is the heftiest novel ever, which it may or may not be, but after 3,000 pages who's up for arguing?). With its influence as extensive as its word count — Conrad, Woolf, Benjamin, and writers of equal stature proclaimed it the most important novel of the twentieth century — no doubt its own verbiage is now exceeded by that of its exegeses. No need to add more to that category, thank you. So a newly discovered cache of letters, as slender as Proust's great creation is fat, gives occasion not to resubmit Proust's talent to the artistic calipers for yet another measurement, but to discuss the writer's need for quiet.

The letters Proust wrote to his upstairs neighbor on boulevard Haussmann in Paris come to us as a one-sided conversation, as we have none of her replies. Yet mysteriously they collectively form a work every bit as rich as an epistolary prose poem, or a novella, or the singular form of brief story of which translator Lydia Davis (Man Booker winner, MacArthur Fellow, translator of Swann's Way, and author of Break It Down and Can't and Won't) is herself originator and master practitioner. Richer still, they make a catalog of the peculiar physical conditions a writer requires in order to write in the first place.

Proust hosted a gala of afflictions, including asthma and very possibly his own iteration of what we now call social anxiety, but he almost certainly was a prisoner of misophonia. (And probably the related phonophobia, a symptom of which is a debilitating fear of future noise.) This syndrome, in which certain sounds send the sufferer around the bend, disproportionately affects artists, as confirmed by a study published in the journal Neuropsychologia in 2015. Haunt online forums devoted to the disorder, and the same complaints turn up again and again: sporadic concussive sounds incite annoyance even unto rage. It might be the person you love most in the world, but when he sucks his teeth, crinkles the chips bag, or noodles on his harmonica, you want to murder him. You don't. Instead, you can't write.

It is obvious that Proust admired Mme. Williams, the erudite French wife of an American dentist whose office was directly above Proust's apartment. But that did not stop him from expressing gorgeously veiled hostility to the sounds that emanated from her quarters, including those of workmen, movers, and the servants who "with violence" beat her rugs in the adjacent courtyard. Not to mention the dental patients who mistakenly rang his doorbell thinking they were on the verge of relief at last. Cork- lined bedroom notwithstanding, the writer's exquisite sensitivity to noise chronically bedeviled him. How much more might he have written had he not had to war with the sounds that drove him to distraction?

"But you have bequeathed to me so many workers . . . [ordered] violently and perhaps sadistically to start banging at 7 o'clock in the morning above my head, in the room immediately above my bedroom . . . that I have no strength to write and have had to give up going away," Proust complains — here forced to a directness he otherwise avoids — to a woman he has never met though they live at the same address. Usually he is oblique, backhanded, or delivers his pleas for quiet with flowers both actual and literary. He expresses sorrow for some recent trouble of Madame's by writing, "I would like even more not to ask you for this silence." He tries yet another tack by enquiring if he causes any similar discomfort to her; of course he knows he doesn't. "I also wonder if the voice of my housekeeper, very sharp, does not rise to you. She stays with me very late and does not make any noise when she moves about. But if her voice could be heard, I implore you to tell me."

Interestingly, sufferers of misophonia — and Proust was in good company, likely including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and Gustav Mahler, according to Mason Currey's Daily Rituals: How Artists Work — only mind noise that's sporadic or concussive. "What bothers me is never continuous noise, even loud noise, if it is not struck," Proust explains for the second time. Any writer who can't put down two words in succession while someone is practicing drums or preparing a meal in the kitchen but easily enters a state of flow against the steady background hum of a café or bar understands.

Worth noting is the fact that Proust was conducting his white- gloved battles with household noises heard from inside a bedroom while the First World War was blowing life apart with unprecedented fury in other parts of France. As a military audiologist reports of a war whose din was not recorded and can hardly be imagined, "Artillery rounds created noise levels of 140 dB or more, which were often heard in London some 200 miles from the front . . . During a bombardment the noise was loud enough to split the eardrums and it quite commonly caused permanent hearing loss, especially among gunners." The condition that during the conflict became known as "shell shock" was in part a response to the effects of repeated, horrific noise.

The Great War's destructiveness, if not its noise, was indeed a frequent subject of the letters – those from 1914 to 1918 could hardly avoid it. Yet even when they touch on the combat death of a friend or the leveling of a landmark like the cathedral of Reims, they exude aestheticized distance like faint perfume. The writer's suffering and solitude make a far more resounding clamor on the page.

Proust's work and its legacy is a tangle of paradox, not to mention syntax. His weighty masterpiece, for example, is full of fleeting delicacy. This deceptively slight collection of letters, recently unearthed in a Paris archive, evokes similarly lavish wonders. How can such a vibrant picture of a life emerge from only twenty-six missives, some quite short? The translator's fascinating afterword, full of sensate detail, reads like a detective story. All of a sudden it occurs that Proust's friendship with Mme. Williams is an online relationship avant la lettre: imbued with intensity and imperative disclosure, despite their never meeting (or because of it). Their letters arrived from two flights of stairs away by way of a distant server — I mean post office.

Lydia Davis's elegant translation, too, begets complex considerations. Primarily about the weird project that is taking a work made from specific materials — strings of particular words with their own sound, nuance, rhythm, diction — and replacing all its parts with different materials, then calling it the same thing. Germaine Greer holds a contrarian view of the writer Davis obviously reveres as well as finds a kindred spirit ("If you haven't read Proust, don't worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill") but she is technically right that "all translation is mistranslation." Because Davis's own genius is akin to Proust's — and because she does not so much translate as inhabit — her mistranslation is as like to the original as it may be possible to get.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of three works of nonfiction: The erfect Vehicle, Dark Horses and Black Beauties, andThe Place You Love Is Gone, all from Norton. She is writing a book on B. F. Skinner and the ethics of dog training.

Reviewer: Melissa Holbrook Pierson

The Barnes & Noble Review

"If you have suffered from noisy neighbours, you will sympathize with Marcel Proust."

The Times Literary Supplement

"Proust whining rhapsodically about the sounds of frolicking children on the other side of his bedroom wall, as translated by Lydia Davis — what’s not to love here?"

HTMLGiant - Evan Lavender-Smith

"Entertaining."

Nonfiction: 'Letters to His Neighbor,' by Marcel Proust - Star Tribune - Kevin Canfield

"Thoughtfully curated in English by New Directions with a scholarly and rigorous afterword by translator Lydia Davis, the letters are inflected by fine observations and moments of deep empathy. They are suffused with the intimate textures of daily life—flowers and fragrance—and allow us an insight into the larger social context of the time, with reports of the wounded returning from war. Thematically, they are often concerned with art, poetry, and ruins. As a collection, they obliquely chart the passing of seasons as well as the publication history of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time."

Saba Ahmed reviews Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust - Asymptote - Saba Ahmed

"A collection of letters to the neighbours about noise would seem unpromising material for a book, unless they were written by Marcel Proust, who was so sweet, kind, funny and charming that his letters of complaint, written between 1909 and 1919 to Marie Williams and her husband, are a delightful surprise."

Daily Telegraph

"Letters to His Neighbor, brilliantly translated by Lydia Davis, is inadvertently hilarious in hyper-genteel poise; we see Proust at his most desperate, charming to the extreme, an effect no doubt amplified by Davis’s elegant prose."

The Village Voice

"Proust elevated grumbling to an art."

The Art of Complaining About Noise - City Lab - Jessica Leigh Hester

"Amusing."

Elle

"In true Proustian fashion, the prose is winding, musing on everything from the properties of imagination."

The Paris Review - Caitlin Youngquist

"Literary people know that at the sentence level and the word level Lydia Davis is the best there is."

Bookworm - Michael Silverblatt

"I imagine someone discovering these letters and wondering where to put them—too quirky, too crazy, too minor, too marginal. But, as we all know, it’s the minor and marginal that are often the most interesting. And here the marginalia—the addenda and notes—are as essential as the letters. The foreword by Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadié and the afterword by celebrated French translator Lydia Davis serve as codes to these letters, through which we catch a glimpse of the writer’s idiosyncratic domestic life..."

Letters To His Neighbor - 4Columns - Jeanine Herman

"One wonders if the headaches of apartment living might even have inspired him, as a worthy enemy might goad one to action."

Harper's

"Like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves of Qumran... twenty-six of Proust's letters to his upstairs neighbor, written over a decade during the composition of In Search of Lost Time, will delight any Proustian and will tide the faithful over until new relics come to light."

Rain Taxi - David Wiley

"A sensitive and direct translation. Lydia Davis does us a great service in bringing back Proust."

Newsday - Claire Messud

2017-04-18
Recently discovered letters from Proust to a Paris neighbor show the author's kindness even when he complained about the noise.One might wonder why a man as sensitive to noise as Proust chose to live in a Paris building where someone might set up a dental practice two floors above him. That's what happened in the early 1900s, when a harp-playing artist named Madame Marie Williams and her husband, an American dentist named Charles, moved into Proust's building at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Despite the noise, Proust and the Williamses developed a close friendship, as is documented in these letters written between 1908 and 1916. Proust may have soundproofed his apartment with "a marbleized, decorative cork," as Davis writes in her translator's note, but that wasn't enough to keep out sounds of hammering or carpet beating. Yet it's hard to imagine politer requests to keep it down: "If in the morning there is hammering above me it's all over for the whole day for resting," Proust writes in 1909, a request for silence that included a gift of four pheasants. The tone of these letters, as Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadié notes in the foreword, is that "of ever growing intimacy" between Proust and Marie. He shows her sections of what would become Volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time and expresses sadness over the World War I bombing of Reims cathedral. Marie's responses, thought to be lost, would have made the book more engaging, but Proust's letters are as poetic as one might expect. They also show his self-deprecating wit. In 1911, he writes that, when repairs to Marie's apartment are finished, "the silence will resound in my ears so abnormally that, mourning the vanished electricians and the departed carpet-layer, I will miss my Lullaby." A trove of charming correspondence from literature's most famous "noise phobic."

Kirkus Reviews