Proust and His Banker by Balsamo Gian;

Author:Balsamo, Gian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2017-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

THE THREE LEVERS OF THE NEW WORLD

In February 1918, Hauser confided to Proust that wartime conditions had curtailed his business commitments, so the writer should feel free to consult him both on economic and personal matters. A few days later, Hauser’s accountant queried Proust about his intentions regarding the securities, held in his Rothschild portfolio, of a meat-extract company called Liebig. Apropos, Proust had been puzzled about the recent performance of these securities. The anecdote he told Hauser about them seems devised to test the banker’s patience. From time to time, Proust got coupon payments in the mail from Liebig’s headquarters in England. Ten years previously, when he had moved from Rue Courcelle to Boulevard Haussmann, the payments kept coming, because the porters at the Rue Courcelle apartment building were careful to forward the letters from England to his new address. At first the war had not changed anything for the worse: certainly not the coupon payments, which had become larger and more frequent. But it had been a year since Proust had received the last payment. Either there was a new porter in Rue Courcelle, who pocketed Proust’s money, or the Liebig Company was no longer paying dividends; or the United Kingdom was prohibiting earnings from financial transactions to cross the channel. Proust was considering writing a note to the porter in Rue Courcelle to warn him that those payments belonged to their legitimate owner (COR XVII, 42, 43).

He did not have to wait long for Hauser’s answer:

My dear Marcel,

… The epic of the dividends of [your Liebig securities] is evident proof that the realm of poetry has nothing to share with what we, simple middle-class people, call the realm of common sense. I do not know if the book you are working on these days is the sequel to your last one and if it is intended to guide the reader again in the quest of lost time. If this is the case, you should devote a chapter to the matter of your Liebig coupon and ask each reader to gauge, roughly at least, the time you’d have gained, the efforts you’d have spared yourself and perhaps the money you’d have saved if, promptly after your old porter had forwarded you the first misaddressed letter carrying a dividend from this company, you had written a letter to notify them of your new address. (COR XVII, 44)

Proust answered in a sour tone, explaining that in his book the expression Lost Time (“temps perdu”) does not signify “squandered time” but rather “the Past” or time gone by (“le Passé”; COR XVII, 46). In Proust’s ears, the cutting tone of Hauser’s letter must have resounded of “the sense of … superiority” of the busy man described by him in Sodom and Gomorrah, who “drafts reports, lines up figures, answers business letters, or follows prices in the Bourse,” and sees in literature “the comic pastime of the idle” (Sodom and Gomorrah, 423).1 It is understandable that Proust’s letter went on in

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