Savepaperandfollow@newyorkeronTwitter

JUNE 2, 2014

The Sympathetic Spy Downstairs

BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

The Sympathetic Spy Downstairs, by Alexandra

Schwartz.
Heres a thought experiment for those of us who live
in cities and spend far too much mental energy on
our neighbors: Lets say that an apartment is opening
up in your building, one floor below yours, and by
some miraculous breach of the urban space-time
continuum, youre allowed to pick the new tenant.
But, because your citys new mayor wants to establish
some liberal cred and distinguish himself from the
market-driven ruthlessness of his predecessors realestate policies, a new law stipulates that the apartment be set aside for an artist: a dancer,
a musician, a painter, a fashion designer, an actor, or a writer. Youre all for supporting
creativity, but youre also for your own peace and quiet. The dancer is out, as is a musician
of any kind. A painter might be nice, but what if his work consists of shooting paint cans,
like William Burroughs, or he has noisy affairs with his models? The designer might cast
sideways glances at your Birkenstocks when you cross paths by the mailboxes. Actors like
to practice their lines in the mirror, plus theres the risk of Method shenanigans.
So you choose the writer and go about your business, blissfully unbothered. Some days
pass, without a sound. Then the letters start coming. They are winsome and solicitous
and erudite, but they have a consistent, definite point. Madame, they begin. I hope you
wont find me too indiscreet. Theres been a lot of noise these past few days and as Im
not well, Im more sensitive to it. If the hammering must be done in the morning,
might it be done in the part of your apartment that is above my kitchen, not my
bedroom. If theres too much noise on Sunday morning I wont be able to get out of bed
until the afternoon. The problem in the building isnt him. The problem is you.
In the London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/michael-wood/beat-thecarpets-later) a few weeks ago, Michael Wood brought to the attention of the Englishspeaking world Lettres sa voisine, a book of the recently discovered cache of letters
that Marcel Proust sent to his upstairs neighbors at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, where he
lived from late 1906 through the spring of 1919. (The book was published in France last
fall; New Directions is working on an English translation.) Proust, who lived in his
parents home until after his mother died, when he came into enough money to get his

own place, moved into the building when he was thirty-five. His apartment had belonged
to his great-uncle; as Edmund White notes in his biography of the writer, he had
inherited a quarter of the building but foolishly let his aunt buy out his share, leaving
him a renter. Proust had once been a man about town, but by the time he moved to
Boulevard Haussmann his terrible asthma kept him inside. He worked in his bedroom,
which he eventually soundproofed with squares of cork, and kept the windows closed and
the curtains drawn to keep out the dust and hubbub of the avenue below. Still, these
measures werent sufficient to block the intrusions of Charles Williams, an American
dentist who kept his office on the third floor, directly above Prousts apartment, and
Marie Williams, who lived with her husband and son upstairs.
It seems almost too perfect that Proust, the bedridden invalid, would have sent notes
upstairs, sometimes by messenger, sometimes through the post, to implore the
Williamses to nail shut the crates containing their summer luggage in the evening, rather
than in the morning, so that they could be better timed around his asthma attacks. (Is
there a trove somewhere of Baudelaires letters to his pharmacist, begging for a remedy
for absinthe hangovers?) But such is life in the city: things outside force their way in. As
Im writing this, the kid upstairs is practicing his jump shot, and I can tell you what time
he leaves for school in the morning, and what his mother yells at him to get him out the
door. I know that the little dog downstairs gets walked at nine in the morning and at
midnight. When the guy in the next building over pulls out his electric guitar, the
vibrations shake my bed.
This stuff can drive you to insanity, and often does, but Prousts letters to the Williamses
are full of wit and playful decorum, inspired by the necessity of nagging yet hardly
disgruntled in tone or spirit. Practical requests are folded in with winning pleasantries.
The word noise appears often, though so does the word charmant, as in, Alas on
coming home in the grip of the most violent attack I find your charming letter, or If
your charming son, innocent of the noise that martyrizes me, is nearby, please give him
my best wishes. Proust doesnt date his letters (the editors give approximations), but he
does note, pointedly, that hes writing at one in the morning. He sends up little gifts to
apologize for making so many demands: I hope that you will accept these four pheasants
with the same ease with which I offer them to you as a neighbor. This graceful flourish,
accompanied by some articles of his that he hopes M. Williams might find interesting, is
followed by a new demand: Could the next round of hammering happen the day after
tomorrow after seven in the evening, because if it goes on in the morning theres no
chance of getting any rest during the day and going out will be impossible?
It was Marie, as the books title indicates, with whom Proust carried on the bulk of the
correspondence; twenty-three of the twenty-six letters in the volume are addressed to her.
Spread out from 1908 to 1916, this doesnt seem like all that many, though maybe the
two had other ways of communicating. Proust kept a telephone in his bedroom until the
First World War broke out, and had a separate contraption called a thtrophone that

allowed him to listen to live concerts through the receiver. Marie played the harp; did he
sometimes call her up when insomnia struck to ask her to hold the receiver in her lap as
she gently plucked the strings?
There is a warmth and affection, plus a sprinkling of flirtatious flattery, in Prousts letters
to Marie, and, it seems, in her letters to him, though we have only his half of the
exchange. The noise almost seems like an excuse to drop her a line. He writes to her of
his workLa Nouvelle Revue Franaise was publishing extracts of In Search of Lost
Time, which he sent herand of her music. In a letter that the editors of the collection
have dated to March 1915, he tells her that his close friend Bertrand de Fnelon has
been killed in combat. Maries brother, too, has just died. I didnt think that God could
add to my pain, when I learned of yours, Proust writes. And Ive so fallen into the habit,
without knowing you, of sympathizing with your sorrows and your joys, through the
partition where I feel you invisible and present, that the news of the death of Monsieur
your brother has deeply distressed me. This subtle crossing of partitions, physical and
mental, this delicate art of sympathetic spying, is vital to any novelists work. Certainly it
is vital to Prousts, and his condolence note is also a kind of confession. Proust is telling
Marie that, during their eight years of living next to one another, she has come to occupy
real space in his imagination. That is where he knows her best.
Anyone who lives cheek by jowl with relative strangers is familiar with this compulsive
imagining, though it rarely takes such a sympathetic cast. I lie awake late at night,
listening to the scratchings and bumps rattling the floorboards over my head, and think,
along with Tom Waits, Whats he building in there? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=JaLjwSpZ6Cs&feature=kp) We want the neighbors to shut up, or at least for some
benevolent aliens to beam them away and leave us to get a good nights sleep. But on
they go, making their mysterious noises. Lydia Davis has a story, called Mildred and the
Oboe, that begins: Last night Mildred, my neighbor on the floor below, masturbated
with an oboe. The narrator of the story is lying in bed with a book, listening, in spite of
herself, to Mildreds performance, and wondering what it is. I could feel her pleasure
pass up through the floorboards into my room. Of course there might have been another
explanation for what I heard. Perhaps it was not the oboe but the player of the oboe who
was penetrating Mildred. Or perhaps Mildred was striking her small nervous dog with
something slim and musical, like an oboe. But then, what are our neighbors thinking
about us? Charles Kinbote, the narrator of Pale Fire and one of the creepiest neighbors
in literature, inadvertently puts it best: Later in life we learn that we are those others.
Escape from the city is one possibility. In Philip Roths Zuckerman Unbound,
Zuckerman, rocketed to fame and fortune by a book that looks a lot like Portnoys
Complaint, is set upon by anyone and everyone in New Yorkon the bus, in a coffee
shop, in front of a funeral parlor. They come to ogle him, or to complain about his
scandalous, sex-ridden novel, or to tell him what to do with his money. I am only a
neighbor, one says. Its not my affair. Never mind. Falser words were never spoken.

Some novels later, Zuckerman ends up leaving the big city for the monastic peace of the
Berkshires, though not before falling in love, in The Counterlife, with Maria Freshfield,
the woman who lives with her husband and little daughter in the apartment upstairs
from his.
In an essay on Saul Bellow, from 2000, Roth wonders if, at the outset of his career,
Bellow shied away from seizing Chicago as his because he didnt want to be known as a
Chicago writer, any more, perhaps, than he wanted to be known as a Jewish writer.
Someone like Bellow probably had other ambitions, Roth writes, inspired by your
European masters, by Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Proust, Kafka, and such ambitions dont
include writing about the neighbors gabbing on the back porch.
Maybe notthen again, maybe so. Proust, we now realize, was, along with everything
else, a neighbor, too. We who toss and turn, fantasizing about the exquisitely cutting
emails well never have the guts to send to the invisible others keeping us awake, are
happy to have him on our team.
Photograph Peter Marlow/Magnum.

Alexandra Schwartz is a member of The New Yorkers editorial staff and

the winner of this year's National Book Critics Circles Nona Balakian
Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.