This is what he wrote back:
Though you certainly didn't ask for a disquisition, there are many things I could say about Proust. Most importantly, let me just start with this: that Proust is really an easy writer. He is especially easy once you've accepted that his writing is what it is and that you're going to put up with it and even grow to love it. To ask Proust to court you all the time—else you'll put him down!—is pointless, which is why some readers shouldn't read him at all. He's not for them, and they're not for him.
Proust is about the search for happiness, and as a corollary to this, about the search for enchantment. But Proust is not happy, Marcel isn't happy, and Swann certainly isn't. Sometimes the only happiness Proust can find is in the beauty of language; or, conversely, in having the beauty of language reflect the happiness and enchantment which ordinary people and things were unable to provide. The beauty of style—or let's call it just "style"—organizes and radiates on the life around him and turns the ordinary into an object of enchantment. Things are beautiful, or interesting if they just promise to become material for a book, the purpose of which will be to confer a more enduring form of beauty (and therefore of happiness) on life. Proust's work is about the artistic temperament, which looks to validate itself by revealing how everything it touches is a preordained object of the artist's enchanted gaze.
Here is my Proust. One could write a whole book on this subject. I have grown tired of people talk about time, memory, smells, etc. The question Proust asks is: what makes life worth living: and his answer is twofold: happiness and art—and both are ultimately synonymous. The easiest question to ask is: why is love impossible in Proust? Or: Why are people not to be trusted?
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So there's that from him. More from me sometime soon.
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