The Past Recaptured

By Gerald Clarke

OTHER PEOPLE'S LETTERS

by Mina Curtiss

Houghton Mifflin; 243 pages; $9.95

For most of her life, writes Mina Curtiss, she had an incurable obsession: she could not resist reading other people's mail. When she was a child, Mina was caught going through her mother's love letters in the attic. Shortly after she returned from her honeymoon, she read her husband's letters from his first wife. "I was convinced," she explains, "that the clue to the secret of life, the creative process, lay in personal letters intended for somebody else." Finally, in middle age, she turned her disreputable habit to professional use. In 1947 the sneak reader openly set out to gather the letters of an equally passionate voyeur, Marcel Proust. The story of her search is a book of rich and irresistible charm that might stand as Proust's own epilogue.

Traveling to Europe two years after World War II was an adventure itself. Food was scarce, few rooms were heated, and even electricity was rationed. But Curtiss, who comes from a rich Boston family--her brother is Lincoln Kirstein, a founder and patron of the New York City Ballet--had all the advantages of money and connections. Establishing herself in the Paris Ritz, she made it her job to befriend Proust's friends and to beg or borrow those precious letters.

Some people handed them over willingly; others had to be persuaded. One of the latter was Prince Antoine Bibesco.

After many phone calls, Bibesco finally invited her to his apartment and dumped a great album of letters on her lap. "Now, you'll be sweet to me," he exclaimed. "Now you'll go to bed with me. Look what a lovely bed it is ... I thought I was impotent. I have been for months. But you have roused me, you marvelous amazon. Let me kiss your lips." Curtiss put quest before scruple: "After all, I figured, the letters are unique and there are plenty of women who must like this kind of approach or he wouldn't have continued using it." In fact, the chore was less onerous than she had feared. "I must hand it to the Rumanians," she confided to her diary. "Their idea of impotence in old age is the Anglo-Saxon notion of potency in the prime of life."

A more unselfish helper was Celeste Albaret, Proust's companion and housekeeper from 1913 until his death in 1922. In her late 50s, when Curtiss met her, Celeste and her husband, Odilon, who had been Proust's chauffeur, were running a dreary, working-class hotel on the Left Bank. Mme. Albaret's memory was a library in itself; she seemed to have cross-filed and indexed everything Proust had done or said. At one point, she told Curtiss, the master had been thrilled by a letter from a "M. Henri Jammes." Jammes --Henry James--had written that he thought Swann 's Way the greatest French novel since the Charterhouse of Parma, but feared that Proust, like Stendhal, would never be recognized in his lifetime.

Eventually Curtiss published her Letters of Marcel Proust, and it brought a poignant meeting with the Countess Greffulhe, one of the models for the Duchess de Guermantes. All that remained of her remarkable beauty was exquisite bones and unique-colored eyes, which her cousin, the famous Count de Montesquiou, had compared to "black fireflies." Her memory was still young, however, and Proust was as vivid in mind as the day he walked into her salon. "I didn't like him," she recalled. "His sticky flattery was not to my taste. There was something I found unattractive about him ... But, of course, I never saw him after he turned out to be a genius." -- GeraldClarke

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.