The death of Proust

according to Ford Madox Ford:
I thought Evans had been killed the day after we had got back to the line—but he obviously hadn't. He had been farming in Canada after a very bad wound. He had had a hard time and that, as much as the war, had made him prematurely bald. Bald men are usually fat but he was thin as it was possible to be, and small, with ecclesiastical features and a rather mournful manner. He was not really mournful for he had done well in Alberta and had come to Paris to have some fun and to buy agricultural machinery. He went on talking and talking in his mournful voice—about putting in rail posts, I think, with the frost at 3o below zero. . . . He fortunately didn't want to do anything but talk and my panic grew and grew. . . . I sat there, watching the crowds of students that go ceaselessly by after the classes of the Sorbonne are over. I sat thinking and thinking till long after Evans had gone—trying to pluck up courage. It would not come.
At last I went to a cocktail party, given by a French writer with an American wife. That party was like death. People sat about with panic-stricken faces, silent. You would have thought that everyone there had lost all his relations and all their fortunes and a war. . . . Proust was dead. He had died that afternoon. My taxi-driver had said to me as I paid him: "Faith qu'il est mort! C'etait bien inattendu!" I had thought he had been speaking of Clemenceau who was sick at the time. Paris was a stricken city. In every house, in every cafe, on all the sidewalks people said continually: "It seems that he is dead. It was very unexpected." They knew that Proust had complained of his health for many years. The whole city knew that. He had adopted fan-tastic modes of life on account of his health. . . . But that had been taken to be merely hypochondria ex-pressed in the terms of a great, exotic novelist. . . . Now—it seemed that he was dead and Paris was a stricken city. I had seen something like it in London—when Marie Lloyd died. London traffic stopped for half a minute whilst the paper boys ran down the streets shouting: "Ma-rie dies! Ma-rie's dead!" But Paris was hushed for three days—and not for a music hall singer. . . . At that time if you said to a waiter: "Where's the funeral?" he told you or if, being in deep black you hailed a taxi, the man, without orders, drove you straight to where Proust lay in state. . . . At the same time Paris was preparing the paroxysm of hatred that attended the
hideously stage-managed last hours of Anatole France. . . . On the boulevards they hissed: "Ten thousand men of letters are starving whilst they walk the pave-ments of the city yet that irreverend dotard who be-trayed France has spent upon his prolonged death-rattle a fortune drawn from the pockets of a world that hates France!" . . . For indeed the fortunes spent on cabling the old man's last babblings to innumerable papers of a gaping world came from German and Anglo-Saxon coffers. Paris would have let him drift out of life quietly enough but for that. Proust represented France of that day with a singular intimacy that is not easy for the poor world-at-large to understand. He was the culmination of a school of writers that had been long in coming and, still more, he was the Unknown Soldier of the literature of that decade. Literature enters with an unparalleled intimacy into French life and the country had a sense of the subterranean and ignored strivings of that steadfast per-sonality—as if indeed he had been the personification of the obscure beings who, working subterraneously with small spades in hidden tunnels, had saved France for the world. I shared the feeling to the full. The death of Proust came to me like the dull blow of a softened club. That statement, I am aware, will read like hypocrisy when I go on to say that I had not read a word he had written. But it is not hypocrisy. I had not read him for a very definite professional reason but I had heard with avidity all that was to be heard of him. Thus for a long time I had had an extremely vivid sense of his personality and of his activities. .. . And indeed it added to the blow that I was to have met Proust himself on the very eve-ning of his death. Nevertheless it was his death that made it certain that I should again take up a serious pen. I think those that know my record will acquit me of the implication that might be read into that statement. I had no idea of occupying Proust's place and even at that date I still dreaded the weaknesses in myself that I knew I should find if I now made my prolonged effort. I was still tired and I have always been lazy. I think I am incapable of any thoughts of rivalry. There is certain literary work to be done. As long as it is done I don't care who does it. The work that at that time—and now—I wanted to see done was some-thing on an immense scale, a little cloudy in immediate attack but with the salient points and the final impres-sion extraordinarily clear. I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time. Proust being dead I could see no one who was doing that. . . . I was at the time merely passing through darkly tumultuous and crowded Paris.
and also

 Here at the gate of the Cote d'Azur it does not get really warm till April is over and perhaps one should not come here till May. . . . But the greater truth is that one should not come here at all. One should live here all the year round and go away from the end of January till March. In the North, poor devils, they have to know how to heat houses. Here they build their houses against heat and it can be cold on occasion to people softened by living here. Once every ten years or so they even have frost and, in the winter when I was in hospital at Cap Martin, as I have said, the snow even lay and the cold cut down all the olive and lemon trees so that they have only this year begun to bear again. It completely killed the immense mimosa whose limbs, ered with roses and ivy, still tower over the tiny idon. But for the greater part of the year you can, here—and I am doing it today at noon on the feast of St. Servais—sit without clothes in the shade and be un-aware of your corporal existence. The air will be exactly flesh-heat so that you are at one with the universe. That is why I have said that all the calamities of our poor civilisation come from humanity's having left these shores. If you are conscious of either heat or cold you cannot think justly and it is the final carrying out of the curse of Adam that men should have to work at the pit-face or in an atmosphere of crude mineral oil in order to keep humanity overwarmed in regions that are not fitted to support human life. Outside a radius of a hundred miles from these shores —to North or South—barbarism is always creeping in with the North or South winds. Here those deities are the great Mistral and the horripilant Sirocco! Down in the town at the foot of my hill it can be hot enough. It can be so hot that you can hardly drag your feet along the blistered pavements, the very shade of the plane trees is an offense and the Negro troops in their scarlet fezzes stagger beneath their rifles, rivers of sweat coursing down their faces. You would say it was Africa—and indeed it is Africa for the dreaded Sirocco is the fetid breath of the Sahara. It is in short Africa come to take a look at us and to make us under-stand that, pink as we may be, it is but a few degrees of temperature and barometer that separate us from the most abhorred anthropophages of the central Congo.

and additionally...

With regard to methods of writing. . . . For myself I dislike writing with a pen. My writer's cramp has never completely left me and every word I write is accompanied by a little pain. Towards the end of my morning's work it will be a very severe pain running from the knuckle of my third finger to my elbow. But for me, it is worth while. . . . After the volume I began at St. Jean Cap Ferrat the cramp became so severe that I could not hold a pen at all. I took to writing with a machine and then, worst of all, to dictating! I am not to that extent machino-phobe—or even a hater of stenographers—that I consider the one or the other below my dignity. It is that the one—and still more the other! — make me become too fluid. It is as if they waited for me to write and write I do. Whereas if I have to go to a table and face pretty considerable pain I wait until I have something worth saying to say and say it in th fewest possible words. The very ease and speed of a typewriter makes tautology thus likely. And, in myself, there is something worse. On a machine corrections whilst you are writing are relatively difficult to make. You must rub out words and replace them and your rubber is somewhere else. . . Then, too, I detest a typewritten page showing any corrections. Horrible as it may seem, if I happen to type an entirely wrong word,—say "almanach" when I mean "autograph" I will go through the most excruciat-ing mental gymnastics sooner than erase the word and make the correction. I am quite capable, I mean, of writing, when I want to say: "He asked me for an autograph"—"he asked me for an almanach on which, with a red stone, he might mark the happy date of his re-ceiving a specimen of my handwriting." . . . I do not say that I do this very often. But I do do it. The patient and faithful secretary is even more fatal. With his or her services you become a perfect fountain of words. It is so easy to try on any effect that you try them on galore, hoping that, if they do not come off, you will have the strength of mind to correct or eliminate offending passages. But often you do not find the strength of mind to correct or eliminate. Then you will have a terrible page or two of longueurs. Or if you do correct, the passage will lose all spontaneity. . . . Elimination is always good. . . . Conrad and I used, in humorous moments, to shut our eyes—and, at random, scratch out passage after passage of our work in hand.—The result was always improvement. It was the Beau Christ d'Amiens who gave the casting vote for verse as against prose. Because there are fewer words to the page! Then too there is the personal element. The creature of doom rings your bell at ten. If you are in a base mood you say: "I pay this creature to write for me. . . . Quick then, let me give him or her something to do.  .. In better moments the mere aspect—the reproach-ful air—of that amanuensis makes you plunge into work. . . . I have even had secretaries who sighed when I did not keep them busy! And, worst of all, there is the almost irresistible temp-tation to write at the secretary—that, I am convinced, was responsible for the decadence of Henry James's prose in its latest and most faisande developments. . . . You have the silent back or the emotionless face of the doomful creature presented to you. You dictate for a little while and nothing happens. And nothing and nothing. It gets to be like being in the presence of a marble block. At last you say: "Damn it all I will make that creature smile. Or have a tear in its eye!" Then you are lost. . . . When I was dictating the most tragic portion of my most tragic book to an American poetess she fainted several times. One morning she fainted three times. So I had to call in her husband to finish the last pages of the book. He did not faint. But he has never forgiven me. Having since become an eminent English literary critic he attacks me with a hatred and acridity that surpass all those of my worst detractors—with or without occasion. I don't wonder. I should hate anyone whose secretary I was forced to become. I should think I could write so much better than that fellow. . . . So one day—it was on board the Berengarict—I was correcting the typescript of a book I had finished some months before. It was a horrible experience. Partly I had typed the book; partly I had dictated it to a sec-retary who wrote longhand, partly to another who used a machine, and partly to a third who was a re-markable stenographer. At the time of my final correc-tion the book was about six months old. It is six months after finishing a book that it becomes most like stale fish to you. In ten years' time you may be wondering how it was you used to be able to write so well!