How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

  The problem could be resumed in under two seconds by a skilled contestant from the All-England Summarise Proust competition: Young man unsure whether or not to propose marriage. Though not as brief as this, the letter the narrator one day receives from his mother expresses his marriage dilemma in terms that make his previous, copious analysis look shamefully exaggerated. After reading it, the narrator tells himself:

  I’ve been dreaming, the matter is quite simple.… I am an indecisive young man, and it is a case of one of those marriages where it takes time to find out whether it will happen or not. There is nothing in this peculiar to Albertine

  .

  Simple accounts are not without their pleasures. Suddenly, we are just “insecure,” “homesick,” “settling in,” “facing up to death,” or “afraid of letting go.” It can be soothing to identify with a description of a problem which makes a previous assessment look needlessly complicated.

  But it usually isn’t. A moment after reading the letter, the narrator reconsiders and realizes that there must be more to his story with Albertine than his mother has suggested, and so once again sides with length, with the hundreds of pages he has devoted to charting every shift in his relation with Albertine (n’allez pas trop vite), and comments:

  One can of course reduce everything, if one regards it in its social aspect, to the most commonplace item of newspaper gossip. From outside, it is perhaps thus that I myself would look at it. But I know very well that what is true, what at least is also true, is everything that I have thought, what I have read in Albertine’s eyes, the fears that torment me, the problem that I continually put to myself with regard to Albertine. The story of the hesitant suitor and the broken engagement may correspond to this, as the report of a theatrical performance made by an intelligent reporter may give us the subject of one of Ibsen’s plays. But there is something beyond those facts that are reported

  .

  The lesson? To hang on to the performance, to read the newspaper as though it were only the tip of a tragic or comic novel, and to use thirty pages to describe a fall into sleep when need be. And if there is no time, at least to resist the approach of Alfred Humblot at Ollendorf and Jacques Madeleine at Fasquelle, which Proust defined as “the self-satisfaction felt by ‘busy’ men—however idiotic their business—at ‘not having time’ to do what you are doing.”

  A good way of evaluating the wisdom of someone’s ideas might be to undertake a careful examination of the state of their own mind and health. After all, if their pronouncements were truly worthy of our attention, we should expect that the first person to reap their benefits would be their creator. Might this justify an interest not simply in a writer’s work but also in their life?

  Sainte-Beuve, the respected nineteenth-century critic, would have eagerly concurred:

  Until such time as one has put to oneself a certain number of questions about an author, and has answered them, be it only to oneself alone and under one’s breath, one cannot

  be sure of having grasped him completely, even though the questions may seem quite foreign to the nature of his writings: What were his religious ideas? How did the spectacle of nature affect him? How did he behave in the matter of women, of money? Was he rich, poor; what was his diet, his daily routine? What was his vice or his weakness? None of the answers to these questions is irrelevant

  .

  Even so, the answers tend to be surprising. However brilliant, however wise the work, it seems that the lives of artists can be relied upon to exhibit an extraordinary, incongruous range of turmoil, misery, and stupidity.

  It accounts for why Proust dismissed Sainte-Beuve’s thesis, and argued forcefully that it was the books, not the lives, that mattered. That way, one could be sure of appreciating what was important (“It’s true that there are people who are superior to their books, but that’s because their books are not Books”). Balzac may have been ill-mannered, Stendhal conversationally dull, and Baudelaire obsessive, but why should this color our approach to their works, which suffer from none of the faults of their creators?

  Whatever the persuasiveness of the argument, it is easy to see why Proust should have been especially keen on it. Whereas his writing was logical, well constructed, often serene, even sagelike, he led a life of appalling physical and psychological suffering. While it is clear why someone might be interested in developing a Proustian approach to life, the sane would never harbor a desire to lead a life like Proust’s.

  Could this degree of suffering really be allowed to pass by without raising suspicion? Could Proust really have known much, could he have had anything valid to say to us, and still have led such a difficult, unexemplary life? Can the proof be allowed to stand so far from Sainte-Beuve’s pudding?

  The life certainly was a trial. The psychological problems were exhaustive enough:

  T HE PROBLEM OF A J EWISH MOTHER : Proust was born into the clutches of a recklessly extreme example. “I was always four years old for her,” said Marcel of Madame Proust, otherwise known as Maman, or more usually “chère petite Maman.”

  “He never said ‘ma mère’ nor ‘mon père’, but always only ‘Papa’ and ‘Maman’ in the tone of an emotional little boy, with tears automatically welling up in his eyes as soon as these syllables had been uttered, while the hoarse sound of a strangled sob could be heard in his tightened throat,” recalled Proust’s friend Marcel Plantevignes.

  Madame Proust loved her son with an intensity that would have put an ardent lover to shame, an affection that created, or at the very least dramatically aggravated, her eldest son’s disposition toward helplessness. There was nothing she felt he could do properly without her. They lived together from his birth until her death, by which time he was thirty-four. Even so, her greatest anxiety was whether Marcel would be able to survive in the world once she had gone. “My mother wanted to live in order not to leave me in the state of anguish which she knew I was in without her,” he explained after her death. “All of our life had been simply a training, she for teaching me how to do without her the day she would leave me.… And I, for my part, I persuaded her that I could quite well live without her.”

  Though well-meaning, Madame Proust’s concern for her son was never far from bossy intervention. At the age of twenty-four, in a rare moment when they were apart, Marcel wrote to tell her that he was sleeping quite well (the quality of his sleep, his stool, and his appetite was a constant concern in their correspondence). But Maman complained that he was not being precise enough: “My darling, your ‘slept so many hours’ continue to tell me nothing or rather nothing that counts. I ask and ask again:

  “You went to sleep at …

  “You got up at …”

  Marcel was usually happy to fulfill his mother’s controlling desire for corporeal information (she and Sainte-Beuve would have had much to talk about). From time to time, Marcel spontaneously offered something up for general family consideration: “Ask Papa what it means to feel a burning sensation at the moment of peeing which forces you to interrupt, then to restart, five or six times in quarter of an hour. As I’ve been drinking oceans of beer these days, perhaps it comes from that,” he mused in a letter to his mother—at which point Maman was fifty-three, Papa was sixty-eight, and Marcel thirty-one.

  In answer to a questionnaire asking him for “your notion of unhappiness,” Proust replied, “To be separated from Maman.” When he couldn’t sleep at night and his mother was in her bedroom, he would write letters that he would leave at her door for her to find in the morning: “My dear little Maman,” ran a typical example, “I am writing you a note while I’m finding it impossible to sleep, to tell you that I am thinking of you.”

  Despite such correspondence, there were necessarily underlying tensions. Marcel sensed that his mother preferred him to be ill and dependent rather than healthy and peeing well. “The truth is that as soon as I am better, because the life which makes me get better annoys you, you ruin everything until I am ill again,” he wrote in a r
are, though significant, outburst against Madame Proust’s crippling desire to enact a nurse-patient relationship with him. “It is sad not to be able to have at the same time affection and health.”

  A WKWARD DESIRES : Then came the slow recognition that Marcel was not like other boys. “No one can tell at first whether he is an invert, or a poet, or a snob, or a scoundrel. The boy who has been reading erotic poetry or looking at obscene pictures, if he then presses his body against a schoolfriend, only imagines himself to be communing with him in an identical desire for a woman. How should he suppose that he is not like everybody else when he recognises the substance of what he feels in reading Mme de La Fayette, Racine, Baudelaire, Walter Scott?”

  Yet gradually, Proust realized that the prospect of a night with Scott’s Diana Vernon held none of the attractions of being pressed up against a school friend, a difficult realization given the unenlightened state of the France of his day, and a mother who continued to hope that her son would marry, and displayed a habit of asking his male friends to bring along young women when they took Marcel out to the theater or a restaurant.

  D ATING PROBLEMS : If only she had poured her energies into inviting the other gender, for it wasn’t easy to find young men similarly disenchanted with Diana Vernon. “You think me jaded and effete. You are mistaken,” Proust protested to one recalcitrant candidate, a pretty sixteen-year-old classmate called Daniel Halévy. “If you are delicious, if you have lovely eyes …, if your body and mind … are so lithe and tender that I feel I could mingle more intimately with your thoughts by sitting on your lap …, there is nothing in all that to deserve your contemptuous words.”

  Rebuffs led Proust to justify his desire with selective appeals to the history of Western philosophy. “I am glad to say that I have some highly intelligent friends, distinguished by great moral delicacy, who have amused themselves at one time with a boy,” Proust informed Daniel. “That was the beginning of their youth. Later on they went back to women.… I would like to speak to you of two masters of consummate wisdom, who in all their lives plucked only the bloom, Socrates and Montaigne. They permit men in their earliest youth to ‘amuse themselves,’ so as to know something of all pleasures, and so as to release their excess tenderness. They held that these at once sensual and intellectual friendships are better for a young man with a keen sense of beauty and awakened ‘senses’, than affairs with stupid, corrupt women.”

  Nevertheless, the blinkered boy continued in his pursuit of the stupid and corrupt.

  R OMANTIC PESSIMISM : Proust’s romantic pessimism was at least partly founded on the combination of an intense need for love and a tragicomic clumsiness in securing it. “My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved,” he declared, and defined his principal character trait as: “The need to be loved; more precisely, a need to be petted and spoilt more than a need to be admired.” But an adolescence filled with misguided seductions of school friends led to an equally fruitless adulthood. There were a succession of crushes on young men who didn’t call back. In the seaside resort of Cabourg in 1911, Proust expressed his frustration to the young Albert Nahmias: “If only I could change sex and age, take on the looks of a young and pretty woman in order to embrace you with all my heart.” For a time, there was a modicum of happiness with Alfred Agostinelli, a taxi driver who moved into Proust’s flat with his wife, but Alfred met a premature end in a plane crash off Antibes, and thereafter there were to be no profound emotional engagements, merely further pronouncements as to the inseparability of love and suffering: “Love is an incurable disease.” “In love, there is permanent suffering.” “Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”

  F AILURE OF THEATRICAL CAREER : Despite the pitfalls of psychobiographical speculation, it seems that there were underlying emotional difficulties focused on the integration of amorous and sexual emotions, a claim best illustrated by quoting a proposal for a play which Proust sent to Reynaldo Hahn in 1906. It was to run as follows:

  A couple adore each other, immense affection, saintly, pure (needless to say, chaste) of the husband for his wife. But this man is a sadist and, besides the love for his wife, he has relations with whores, where he finds pleasure in soiling his own feelings. Finally, the sadist, always needing something stronger, comes to soil his wife in talking to these whores, in asking them to say bad things about her, and to say them himself (he is sickened five minutes later). While

  he is talking like this once, his wife comes into the room without him hearing. She can’t believe her eyes or ears, falls. Then she leaves her husband. He begs, to no avail. The whores want to come back, but sadism would be too painful for him now, and after a last attempt to reconquer his wife, who doesn’t even answer him, he kills himself

  .

  Sadly, no Paris theater expressed an interest.

  T HE INCOMPREHENSION OF FRIENDS : A characteristic problem for geniuses. When Swann’s Way was ready, Proust sent copies to his friends, many of whom had difficulty opening the envelope.

  “Well, my dear Louis, have you read my book?” Proust recalled asking the aristocratic playboy Louis d’Albufera.

  “Read your book? You’ve written a book?” answered a surprised d’Albufera.

  “Yes of course, Louis, and I even sent you a copy.”

  “Ah, my little Marcel, if you sent it to me, I’ve certainly read it. Only I wasn’t sure I’d received it.”

  Madame Gaston de Caillavet was a more grateful recipient. She wrote to thank the author for his gift in the warmest terms. “I constantly re-read the passage in Swann about first Communion,” she told him, “as I experienced the same panic, the same disillusionment.” It was a touching thought for Madame Gaston de Caillavet to share; it might have been kinder had she taken the trouble to read the book and noticed that there was no such religious ceremony within it.

  Proust concluded, “About a book published only a few months earlier, people never speak to me without mistakes proving either that they’ve forgotten it or that they haven’t read it.”

  A T THIRTY , HIS OWN ASSESSMENT : “Without pleasures, objectives, activities or ambit ions, with the life ahead of me finished and with an awareness of the grief I cause my parents, I have little happiness.”

  As for a list of the physical afflictions:

  A STHMA : Attacks start when he is ten, and continue all his life. They are particularly severe, the fits lasting over an hour, as many as ten a day. Because they occur more in the daytime than at night, Proust takes up a nocturnal routine: he goes to sleep at seven in the morning and wakes up at four or five in the afternoon. He finds it impossible to go outdoors much, particularly in the summer, and when he has to, it is only within the confines of a sealed taxi. The windows and curtains of his flat are kept perennially shut; he never sees the sun, breathes any fresh air, or takes any exercise.

  D IET : He gradually becomes unable to eat more than a single, and unhelpfully gargantuan, meal a day, which has to be served at least eight hours before his bedtime. Describing a typical meal to a doctor, Proust details a menu of two eggs in a cream sauce, a wing of a roast chicken, three croissants, a plate of french fries, some grapes, some coffee, and a bottle of beer.

  D IGESTION : “I go frequently—and badly—to the loo,” he tells the same doctor unsurprisingly. Constipation is quasi-permanent, relieved only by a strong laxative every two weeks, which usually brings on stomach cramps. Urinating is no easier: it is accompanied by a sharp burning sensation, isn’t possible often, and the results display an excess of urea and uric acid. His conclusion: “To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides.”

  U NDERPANTS : Needs to have these circling him tight around the stomach before he has any chance of getting to sleep. They have to be fastened with a special pin whose absence, when Proust accidentally loses it early one morning in the bathroom, keeps him awake all day.

  S ENSITIVE
SKIN : Can’t use any soap, or cream or cologne. He has to wash with finely woven, moistened towels, then pat himself dry with fresh linen (an average wash requires twenty towels, which Proust specifies must be taken to the only laundry that uses the right non-irritant powder, the blanchisserie Lavigne, which also does Jean Cocteau’s laundry). He finds that older clothes are better for him than new ones, and develops deep attachments to old shoes and handkerchiefs.

  M ICE : Proust has a terror of these. When Paris is bombed by the Germans in 1918, he confides that he is more terrified of mice than of cannons.

  C OLD : Is always feeling it. Even in midsummer, he wears an overcoat and four jumpers if forced to leave the house. At dinner parties, he usually keeps a fur coat on. Nevertheless, people who greet him are surprised to find how cold his hands are. Fearing the effects of smoke, he doesn’t allow his room to be properly heated, and keeps himself warm mostly through hot-water bottles and pullovers. It means he often has colds and, more particularly, a runny nose. At the end of one letter to his friend Reynaldo Hahn, he mentions that he has wiped his nose eighty-three times since starting the letter. The letter is three pages long.

  S ENSITIVITY TO ALTITUDE : On returning to Paris after visiting his uncle in Versailles, Proust experiences a malaise and is unable to climb the stairs to his apartment. In a letter to his uncle, he later attributes the problem to the change in altitude he has undergone. Versailles is eighty-three meters above Paris.

  C OUGHING : Does it very loudly. He reports of one fit in 1917: “The neighbours, on hearing a continuous thundering and spasmodic barking, will think that I have bought either a church organ or a dog, or else that by some immoral (and purely imaginary) liaison with a lady, I have fathered a child who happens to have whooping cough.”