On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. Here he is in July 1919, writing to Violet Schiff, a musician married to Sydney Schiff, who translated Le Temps retrouvé using the pseudonym Stephen Hudson:

I can feel that my caffeine is no longer strong enough to help me write you. But before saying adieu, I should like to reply to an objection of yours which moved me very much: “I feel that I shall have many sorrows.” I think perhaps by that you mean, since you so graciously regard Swann as a living person, that you were disappointed to see him become less sympathetic and even ridiculous. I can assure you that it has caused me great pain thus to transform him.

But I am not free to go against the truth and to modify the laws that control the characters. “Amicus Swann, sed magis amica Veritas.” The nicest people sometimes go through nasty phases. I promise you that in the following volume when he becomes a Dreyfusard, Swann once more starts being sympathetic. Unhappily, and this causes me much sorrow, he dies in the fourth volume. And he is not the principal character in the book. I should have liked him to be. But art is the perpetual sacrificing of inclination to truth.

From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard) : Sydeny and Violet Schiff

[Found by opening the book Augustine-style, as I’ve found other passages from letters to post on Proust’s birthday. “Amicus Swann, sed magis amica Veritas": Swann is a friend, but truth is a greater friend, a play on Plato.]