How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

  How can we do neither? Even if the creation of a masterpiece plays no part in the ambition, how can we learn to suffer more successfully? Though philosophers have traditionally been concerned with the pursuit of happiness, far greater wisdom would seem to lie in pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy. The stubborn recurrence of misery means that the development of a workable approach to it must surely outstrip the value of any utopian quest for happiness. Proust, a veteran of grief, knew as much.

  The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer

  .

  What would such an art of living involve? For a Proustian, the task is to gain a better understanding of reality. Pain is surprising: we cannot understand why we have been abandoned in love or left off an invitation list, why we are unable to sleep at night or wander through pollinating meadows in spring. Identifying reasons for such discomforts does not spectacularly absolve us of pain, but it may form the principal basis of a recovery. While assuring us that we are not uniquely cursed, understanding grants us a sense of the boundaries to, and bitter logic behind, our suffering.

  Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart

  .

  However, only too frequently, suffering fails to alchemize into ideas and, instead of affording us a better sense of reality, pushes us into a baneful direction where we learn nothing new, where we are subject to many more illusions and entertain far fewer vital thoughts than if we had never suffered to begin with. Proust’s novel is filled with those we might call bad sufferers, wretched souls who have been betrayed in love or excluded from parties, who are pained by a feeling of intellectual inadequacy or a sense of social inferiority, but who learn nothing from such ills, and indeed react to them by engaging a variety of ruinous defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.

  Without doing them an injustice, it may be possible to lift a number of these unfortunate sufferers from the novel, so as to consider what is ailing them, the Proustian inadequacy of their defenses, and to propose, in a gently therapeutic spirit, certain more fruitful responses.

  P ATIENT NO. 1: Madame Verdurin, the bourgeois mistress of a salon that gathers to discuss art and politics, and which she calls her “little clan.” Very much moved by art, she develops headaches when overcome by the beauty of music, and on one occasion dislocates her jaw by laughing too much.

  P ROBLEM : Madame Verdurin has dedicated her life to rising in the social world, but she finds herself ignored by those she most desires to know. She is not on the invitation lists of the best aristocratic families; she would be unwelcome at the salon of the Duchesse de Guermantes; her own salon is filled only with members of her social class; and the President of the French Republic has never invited her to have lunch in the Élysée Palace—though he has invited Charles Swann, a man she considers to be no more elevated in the world than she is.

  R ESPONSE TO PROBLEM : There are few outward signs that Madame Verdurin is bothered by her situation. She asserts with apparent conviction that anyone who refuses to invite her or come to her salon is merely a “bore.” Even the President, Jules Grévy, is a bore.

  The word is perversely appropriate, for it is the direct opposite of what Madame Verdurin in fact judges any grand figure to be. These figures excite her so much and yet are so inaccessible to her that all she can do is camouflage her disappointment in an unconvincing display of insouciance.

  When Swann carelessly lets slip at the Verdurin salon that he is lunching with President Grévy, the envy of the other guests is palpable, and so as to dispel it, Swann quickly adopts a deprecating line:

  “I assure you, his luncheon-parties are not in the least bit amusing. They’re very simple affairs too, you know—never more than eight at table.”

  Others might have recognized Swann’s remark to be mere politeness, but Madame Verdurin is too distressed to ignore any suggestion that what she does not have is not worth having:

  “I can easily believe that you don’t find them amusing, those luncheons. Indeed, it’s very good of you to go to them.… I’ve heard [the President] is as deaf as a post and eats with his fingers.”

  A BETTER SOLUTION : Why is Madame Verdurin suffering badly? Because we always lack more than we have, and because there are always more people who don’t invite us than who do. Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

  How much more honest to keep in mind that although we might like to meet the President, he doesn’t want to meet us, and that this detail is no reason to reinvent our level of interest in him. Madame Verdurin might come to understand the mechanisms by which people are excluded from social circles; she could learn to make light of her frustration, confess to it directly, even throw out a teasing remark to Swann asking him to return with a signed menu, and in the process might become so charming that an invitation to the Élysée would make its way to her after all.

  P ATIENT NO. 2: Françoise, who cooks for the narrator’s family, producing wonderful asparagus and beef in aspic. She is also known for her stubborn personality, her cruelty toward the kitchen staff, and her loyalty to her employers.

  P ROBLEM : She doesn’t know much. Françoise has never had any formal education, her knowledge of world affairs is scanty, and she is badly acquainted with the political and royal events of her time.

  R ESPONSE TO PROBLEM : Françoise has acquired a habit of suggesting that she knows everything. In short, she is a know-it-all, and her face registers the know-it-all’s panic whenever she is informed of something that she has no clue about, though the panic is quickly suppressed so that she can maintain her composure.

  Françoise would refuse to appear surprised. You could have announced that the Archduke Rudolf who she had never suspected of existing, was not, as was generally supposed

  ,

  dead, but alive and kicking, and she would only have answered, “Yes” as though she had known it all the time

  .

  Psychoanalytic literature tells of a woman who felt faint whenever she sat in a library. Surrounded by books, she would develop nausea and could gain relief only by leaving their vicinity. It was not, as might be supposed, that she was averse to books, but rather that she wanted them and the knowledge they contained far too badly, that she felt her lack of knowledge far too strongly and wanted to have read everything on the shelves at once—and because she could not, needed to flee her unbearable ignorance by surrounding herself with a less knowledge-laden environment.

  A precondition of becoming knowledgeable may be a resignation and accommodation to the extent of one’s ignorance, an accommodation which requires a sense that this ignorance need not be permanent, or indeed need not be taken personally, as a reflection of one’s inherent capacities.

  However, the know-it-all has lost faith in acquiring knowledge by legitimate means, which is perhaps not a surprising loss of faith in a character like Françoise, who has spent a lifetime cooking asparagus and beef in aspic for frighteningly well-educated employers, who have whole mornings to read the newspaper properly and are fond of wandering through the house quoting Racine and Madame de Sévigné—whose short stories she perhaps at some point claimed to have read.

  A BETTER SOLUTION : Though Françoise’s knowingness is a distorted reflection of a sincere desire for knowledge, Archduke Rudolf’s true status will sadly remain a mystery until she accepts the momentary, painful loss of face required when asking who on earth this could be.

  P ATIENT NO. 3: Alfred Bloch, a school friend of the narrator. Intellectual, bourgeois, Jewish, his appearance is compared to that of Sultan Mahomet II in Bellini’s portrait.

  P ROBLEM : Prone to making gaffes and embarrassing himself on important occasions.

  R ESPONSE TO PROBLEM : Bloch acts with extreme self-assurance where lesser mortals would offer humble
apologies, experiencing no apparent shame or embarrassment.

  The narrator’s family invite him for dinner, for which he arrives an hour and a half late, covered with mud from head to toe because of an unexpected rain shower. He might have excused himself for the delay and his muddy appearance, but Bloch says nothing, and instead launches into a speech expressing his disdain for the conventions of arriving clean and on time:

  “I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as time. I would willingly reintroduce the use of the opium pipe or the Malay kris, but I know nothing about those infinitely more pernicious and moreover flatly bourgeois implements, the umbrella and the watch.”

  It is not that Bloch has no wish to please. It simply seems that he cannot tolerate a situation where he has both tried to please and yet failed despite himself. How much easier, then, to offend and at least be in control of his actions. If he cannot be on time for dinner and is rained upon, why not turn the insults of time and meteorology into his own successes, declaring that he has willed the very things that have been inflicted on him?

  A BETTER SOLUTION : A watch, an umbrella, sorry.

  P ATIENT NO 4: She makes only a fleeting appearance in the novel. We don’t know what color her eyes are, how she dresses, or what her full name is. She is merely known as the mother of Albertine’s friend Andrée.

  P ROBLEM : Like Madame Verdurin, Andrée’s mother is concerned with rising in the social world; she wishes to be invited for dinner by the right people, and isn’t. When her teenage daughter brings Albertine home, the girl innocently mentions that she has spent many holidays with the family of one of the governors of the Bank of France. This is striking news for Andrée’s mother, who has never been graced with an invitation to their large house, and would love to have been.

  R ESPONSE TO PROBLEM :

  Every evening at the dinner-table, while assuming an air of indifference and disdain, [Andrée’s mother] was fascinated

  by Albertine’s accounts of everything that had happened at the big house while she was staying there, and the names of the other guests, almost all of them people whom she knew by sight or by name. Even the thought that she knew them only in this indirect fashion … gave Andrée’s mother a touch of melancholy while she plied Albertine with questions about them in a lofty and distant tone, with pursed lips, and might have left her doubtful and uneasy as to the importance of her own social position had she not been able to reassure herself to return safely to the “realities of life,” by saying to the butler, “Please tell the chef that his peas aren’t soft enough.” She then recovered her serenity

  .

  The chef responsible for this serenity and these peas makes even less of an appearance in the novel than his boss. Should we call him Gerard or Joel? Is he from Brittany or the Languedoc, did he train as sous-chef at the Tour d’Argent or at the Café Voltaire? But, of course, the critical issue is why it had to become this man’s problem that the governor of the Bank of France failed to invite his boss on holiday. Why did a bowl of his innocent peas have to carry the blame for the lack of an invitation to the governor’s large house?

  The Duchesse de Guermantes finds serenity in a similarly unfair and unenlightening way. The Duchesse has an unfaithful husband and a cold marriage. She also has a footman called Poullein, who is much in love with a young woman. Because this woman works as a servant in another household and her days off rarely coincide with Poullein’s, the two lovers seldom meet. Shortly before one such longed-for meeting, a Monsieur de Grouchy comes for dinner at the Duchesse’s. During the meal, de Grouchy, a keen hunter, offers to send the Duchesse six brace of pheasants that he has shot on his country estate. The Duchesse thanks him, but insists that the gift is generous enough as it is, and that she will therefore send her own footman, Poullein, to pick up the pheasants, rather than further inconvenience Monsieur de Grouchy and his staff. The fellow dinner guests are much impressed by the Duchesse’s thoughtfulness. What they cannot know is that she has acted “generously” for one reason only: so that Poullein will be unable to keep his appointment with his beloved, and so that the Duchesse will therefore be a little less troubled by evidence of romantic happiness which she has been denied in her own relationship.

  A BETTER SOLUTION : To spare the messenger, the cook, the footman, the peas.

  P ATIENT NO 5: Charles Swann, the man invited to lunch with the President, a friend of the Prince of Wales and an habitué of the most elegant salons. He is handsome, wealthy, witty, a little naïve, and very much in love.

  P ROBLEM : Swann receives an anonymous letter saying that his lover, Odette, has in the past been the mistress of numerous men, and has often frequented brothels. A distraught Swann wonders who could possibly have sent him a letter with such hurtful revelations, and moreover notes that it contains details that only a personal acquaintance of his would know.

  R ESPONSE TO PROBLEM : Searching for the culprit, Swann considers each of his friends in turn, Monsieur de Charlus, Monsieur des Laumes, Monsieur d’Orsan, but cannot believe any of them capable of sending this letter. Then, having been unable to bring himself to suspect anyone, Swann begins to think more critically, and decides that everyone he knows could in fact have written the letter. What is he to think? How should he evaluate his friends? The cruel letter is an invitation to Swann to pursue a deeper understanding of people.

  This anonymous letter proved that he knew a human being capable of the most infamous conduct, but he could see no more reason why that infamy should lurk in the unfathomed depths of the character of the man with the warm heart rather than the cold, the artist rather than the bourgeois, the noble rather than the flunky. What criterion ought one to adopt to judge human beings? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of shameful action. Must he then cease to see them all? His mind grew clouded; he drew his hands two or three times across his brow, wiped his glasses with his handkerchief.… And he continued to shake hands with all the friends whom he had suspected, with the purely formal reservation that each one of them had possibly thought to drive him to despair

  .

  A BETTER SOLUTION : Swann has been made to suffer by the letter, but the suffering has led to no greater understanding. He may have shed a layer of sentimental innocence, he now knows that the surface behavior of his friends may belie a darker interior, but he has found no way of identifying its signs or indeed its origins. His mind has grown clouded, he has wiped his glasses, and he has missed out on what, for Proust, is the finest thing about betrayal and jealousy—its ability to generate the intellectual motivation necessary to investigate the hidden sides of others.

  Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.

  It is one of the powers of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the emotions of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything

  .

  Swann may know as a general truth that life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each person he knows, he trusts that those parts of a life with which he is not familiar must be identical with the parts with which he is. He understands what is hidden from him in the light of what is revealed, and therefore understands nothing of Odette, difficult as it is to accept that a woman who seems so respectable when she is with him could be the same person who once frequented brothels. Similarly, he understands nothing of his friends, for it is hard to accept that someone with whom he entertained an ami
able conversation at lunch could by dinnertime have addressed a hurtful letter filled with crude revelations about his lover’s past.

  The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns us, “when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.”

  Compared to these unfortunate sufferers, Proust’s approach to his own grief now seems rather admirable.

  Though asthma made it life-threatening for him to spend time in the countryside, though he turned purple at the sight of a lilac in bloom, he resisted following the example of Madame Verdurin: he did not peevishly claim that flowers were boring or trumpet the advantages of spending the year in a shuttered room.

  Though he had spectacular gaps in his knowledge, it was not beyond him to fill them. “Who wrote The Brothers Karamazov?” he was asking Lucien Daudet (at the age of twenty-seven). “Has Boswelle’s [sic] Life of Johnson [sic] been translated? And what’s the best of Dickens (I haven’t read anything)?”

  Nor is there evidence that he redirected his disappointments onto his household staff. Having acquired a skill at turning grief into ideas, in spite of the state of his romantic life, when the driver he regularly used, Odilon Albaret, married the woman who would later become his maid, Proust was able to respond with a telegram congratulating the couple on their special day, and did so with only the briefest burst of self-pity and the most modest attempt at guilt-induction, here highlighted in roman type:

  Congratulations. I am not writing to you at greater length, because I have caught a flu and I am tired, but I send you all my deepest wishes for your happiness and that of your families