How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

  It obligates us to read with care, to welcome the insights books give us, but not to subjugate our independence or smother the nuances of our own love life in the process.

  Otherwise, we might suffer a range of symptoms that Proust identified in the overreverent, overreliant reader:

  S YMPTOM NO. 1:

  T HAT WE MISTAKE WRITERS FOR ORACLES

  As a boy, Proust had loved reading Théophile Gautier. Certain sentences in Gautier’s Le Capitaine Fracasse had seemed so profound that he had started to think of the author as an extraordinary figure of limitless insight, whom he would have wanted to consult on all his significant problems.

  I would have wished for him, the one wise custodian of the truth, to tell me what I ought rightly to think of Shakespeare, of Saintine, of Sophocles, of Euripides, of Silvio Pellico.… Above all, I would have wished him to tell me whether I would have had a better chance of arriving at the

  truth by repeating my first-form year at school, or by becoming a diplomat, or a barrister at the Court of Appeal

  .

  Sadly, Gautier’s inspiring, fascinating sentences had a habit of coming in the midst of some very tedious passages, in which the author would, for instance, spend an age describing a chateau, and show no interest in telling Marcel what to think of Sophocles, or whether he should join the foreign office or go into law.

  It was probably a good thing, as far as Marcel’s career was concerned. Gautier’s capacity for insights in one area did not necessarily mean that he was capable of worthwhile insights in another. Yet, how natural to feel that someone who has been extremely lucid on certain topics might turn out to be a perfect authority on other topics too, might indeed turn out to have the answers to everything.

  Many of the exaggerated hopes that Proust had harbored of Gautier as a boy came in time to be harbored of him. There were people who believed that he too might solve the riddle of existence, a wild hope presumably based on the evidence of nothing more than his novel. The staff of L’Intransigeant, those inspired journalists who had felt it appropriate to consult Proust on the consequences of global apocalypse, were supreme believers in the oracular wisdom of writers, and repeatedly bothered Proust with their questions. For example, they felt he might be the perfect person to answer this inquiry:

  If for some reason you were forced to take up a manual profession, which one would you choose, according to your tastes, your aptitudes and your capacities?

  “I think I would become a baker. It is an honourable thing to give people their daily bread,” replied Proust, who was incapable of making a piece of toast, after asserting that writing, in any case, constituted manual labor: “You make a distinction between manual and spiritual professions which I couldn’t subscribe to. The spirit guides the hand”—which Céleste, whose job it was to clean the toilet, might politely have contested.

  It was a nonsensical reply, but then again, it was a nonsensical question, at least when addressed to Proust. Why would an ability to write In Search of Lost Time in any way indicate an aptitude for advising recently dismissed white-collar workers on their careers? Why would the readers of L’Intransigeant need to be exposed to misleading notions of the baking life, put forward by a man who had never had a proper job and didn’t much like bread? Why not let Proust answer the questions in his area of competence, and otherwise admit the need for a well-qualified career adviser?

  S YMPTOM NO. 2:

  T HAT WE ARE UNABLE TO WRITE AFTER READING A GOOD BOOK

  This may seem a narrowly professional consideration, but it has wider relevance if one imagines that a good book might also stop us from thinking ourselves, because it would strike us as so perfect, as so inherently superior to anything our own minds could come up with. In short, a good book might silence us.

  Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn’t enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin’s assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And the difficulty for Virginia was that, for a time at least, she thought she had found one.

  M ARCEL AND V IRGINIA

  A short story

  Virginia Woolf first mentioned Proust in a letter she wrote to Roger Fry in the autumn of 1919. He was in France, she was in Richmond, where the weather was foggy and the garden in bad shape, and she casually asked him whether he might bring her back a copy of Swann’s Way on his return.

  It was 1922 before she next mentioned Proust. She had turned forty and, despite the entreaty to Fry, still hadn’t read anything of Proust’s work, though in a letter to E. M. Forster, she revealed that others in the vicinity were being more diligent. “Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience,” she explained, though appeared to be procrastinating out of a fear of being overwhelmed by something in the novel, an object she referred to more as if it were a swamp than hundreds of bits of paper stuck together with thread and glue: “I’m shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again.”

  She took the plunge nevertheless, and the problems started. As she told Roger Fry: “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that.”

  In what sounded like a celebration of In Search of Lost Time, but was in fact a far darker verdict on her future as a writer, she told Fry: “My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that?… How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp.”

  In spite of the gasping, Woolf realized that Mrs. Dalloway still remained to be written, after which she allowed herself a brief burst of elation at the thought that she might have produced something decent. “I wonder if this time I have achieved something?” she asked herself in her diary, but the pleasure was short-lived: “Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own.”

  But Woolf knew how to hate her sentences well enough even without Proust’s assistance. “So sick of Orlando I can write nothing,” she told her diary shortly after completing the book in 1928. “I have corrected the proofs in a week: and cannot spin out another phrase. I detest my own volubility. Why be always spouting words?”

  However, any bad mood she was in was liable to take a dramatic plunge for the worse after the briefest contact with the Frenchman. The diary entry continued: “Take up Proust after dinner and put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid and worthless.”

  Nevertheless, she didn’t yet commit suicide, though did take the wise step of ceasing to read Proust, and was therefore able to write a few more books whose sentences were neither insipid nor worthless. Then, in 1934, when she was working on The Years, there was a sign that she had at last freed herself from Proust’s shadow. She told Ethel Smyth that she had picked up In Search of Lost Time again, “which is of course so magnificent that I can’t write myself within its arc. For years I’ve put off finishing it; but now, thinking I may die one of these years, I’ve returned, and let my own scribble do what it likes. Lord what a hopeless bad book mine will be!”

  The tone suggests that Woolf had at last made her peace with Proust. He could have his terrain, she had
hers to scribble in. The path from depression and self-loathing to cheerful defiance suggested a gradual recognition that one person’s achievements did not have to invalidate another’s, that there would always be something left to do even if it momentarily appeared otherwise. Proust might have expressed many things well, but independent thought and the history of the novel had not come to a halt with him. His book did not have to be followed by silence; there was still space for the scribbling of others, for Mrs. Dalloway, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, and in particular, there was space for what these books symbolized in this context—perceptions of one’s own.

  S YMPTOM NO. 3:

  T HAT WE BECOME ARTISTIC IDOLATERS

  Aside from the danger of overvaluing writers and undervaluing oneself, there is a risk that we will revere artists for the wrong reasons, indulging in what Proust called artistic idolatry. In the religious context, idolatry suggests a fixation on an aspect of religion—on an image of a worshipped deity, on a particular law or holy book—which distracts us from, and even contravenes, the overall spirit of the religion.

  Proust suggested that a structurally similar problem existed in art, where artistic idolaters combined a literal reverence for objects depicted in art with a neglect of the spirit of art. They would, for instance, become particularly attached to a part of the countryside depicted by a great painter and mistake this for an appreciation of the painter; they would focus on the objects in a picture, as opposed to the spirit of the picture. Whereas the essence of Proust’s aesthetic position was contained in the deceptively simple yet momentous assertion that “a picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.”

  Proust accused his friend the aristocrat and poet Robert de Montesquiou of artistic idolatry, because of the pleasure he took whenever he encountered in life an object that had been depicted by an artist. Montesquiou would gush if he happened to see one of his female friends wearing a dress like that which Balzac had imagined for the character of the Princesse de Cadignan in his novel Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan. Why was this kind of delight idolatrous? Because Montesquiou’s enthusiasm had nothing to do with an appreciation of the dress and everything to do with a respect for Balzac’s name. Montesquiou had no reasons of his own for liking the dress; he hadn’t assimilated the principles of Balzac’s aesthetic vision or grasped the general lesson latent in Balzac’s appreciation of this particular object. Problems would therefore arise as soon as Montesquiou was faced with a dress that Balzac had never had a chance to describe, and that Montesquiou would perhaps ignore—even though Balzac, and a good Balzacian, would have been able to evaluate the merits of each dress appropriately had they been in Montesquiou’s shoes.

  S YMPTOM NO. 4:

  T HAT WE ARE TEMPTED TO INVEST IN A COPY OF L A C UISINE RETROUVÉE

  Food has a privileged role in Proust’s writings; it is often lovingly described and appreciatively eaten. To name but a few of the many dishes Proust parades past his readers, we can cite a cheese soufflé, a string bean salad, a trout with almonds, a grilled red mullet, a bouillabaisse, a skate in black butter, a beef casserole, some lamb in a béarnaise sauce, a beef Stroganoff, a bowl of stewed peaches, a raspberry mousse, a madeleine, an apricot tart, an apple tart, a raisin cake, a chocolate sauce, and a chocolate soufflé.

  The contrast between what we usually eat and the mouthwatering nature of the food Proust’s characters enjoy might inspire us to try to savor these Proustian dishes more directly. In which case it could be tempting to acquire a copy of a glossily illustrated cookbook entitled La Cuisine retrouvée, which contains recipes for every dish mentioned in Proust’s work; it was compiled by a top Parisian chef, and was first published in 1991 (by a company otherwise responsible for a comparably useful title, Les Carnets de cuisine de Monet). It would enable a moderately competent cook to pay extraordinary homage to the great novelist, and perhaps gain a deeper understanding of Proust’s art. It would, for instance, enable a dedicated Proustian to produce exactly the kind of chocolate mousse that Françoise served to the narrator and his family in Combray.

  F

  RANÇOISE

  ’

  S CHOCOLATE MOUSSE

  INGREDIENTS

  :

  100 g of plain eating chocolate, 100 g of caster sugar, half a litre of milk, six eggs

  Bring the milk to the boil, add the chocolate broken in pieces, and let it melt gently, stirring the mixture with a wooden spoon. Whip the sugar with the yolk of the six eggs. Preheat the oven to 130° C

  .

  When the chocolate has completely melted, pour it over the eggs and the sugar, mix rapidly and energetically, then pass through a strainer

  .

  Pour out the liquid into little ramekins 8 cm in diameter, and put into the oven, in a bain-marie, for an hour. Leave to cool before serving

  .

  But once the recipe had yielded a delicious dessert, in between mouthfuls of Françoise’s chocolate mousse we might pause to ask whether this dish, and by extension the entire volume of La Cuisine retrouvée, really constituted an homage to Proust, or whether it was not in danger of encouraging the very sin he had warned his readers about—artistic idolatry. Though Proust might have welcomed in principle a cookbook based on his work, the question is what form he would have wished it to take. To accept his arguments about artistic idolatry would mean recognizing that the particular foods featured in his novel were irrelevant when compared to the spirit in which the food was considered, a transferable spirit owing nothing to the exact chocolate mousse Françoise had prepared, or the particular bouillabaisse Madame Verdurin had served at her table—and might be as relevant when approaching a bowl of muesli, a curry, or a paella.

  The danger is that La Cuisine retrouvée will unwittingly throw us into depression the day we fail to find the right ingredients for a Proustian chocolate mousse or green bean salad, and are forced to eat a hamburger—which Proust never had a chance to write about.

  It wouldn’t, of course, have been Marcel’s intention: a picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

  S YMPTOM NO. 5:

  T HAT WE ARE TEMPTED TO VISIT I LLIERS -C OMBRAY

  Traveling by car southwest of the cathedral town of Chartres, the view through the windshield is of a familiar northern European arable landscape. One could be anywhere, the only feature of note being a flatness to the earth which lends disproportionate significance to the occasional water tower or agricultural silo asserting itself on the horizon above the windshield wipers. The monotony is a welcome break from the effort of looking at interesting things, a time to rearrange the twisted accordion-shaped Michelin map before reaching the châteaux of the Loire, or to digest the sight of Chartres Cathedral with its clawlike flying buttresses and weather-worn bell towers. The smaller roads cut through villages whose houses are shuttered for a siesta that appears to last all day; even the petrol stations show no sign of life, their Elf flags flapping in a wind blowing in from across vast wheat fields. A Citroën makes an occasional hasty appearance in the rearview mirror, then overtakes with exaggerated impatience, as if speed were the only way to protest against the desperate monotony.

  At the larger junctions, sitting innocuously among signs vainly asserting a speed limit of 90 and pointing the way to Tours and Le Mans, the motorist may notice a metal arrow indicating the distance to the small town of Illiers-Combray. For centuries, the sign pointed simply to Illiers, but in 1971 the town chose to let even the least cultured motorist know of its connection to its most famous son, or rather visitor. For it was here that Proust spent his summers from the age of six until nine and once again at the age of fifteen, in the house of his father’s sister, Élisabeth Amiot—and here that he drew inspiration for the creation of his fictional Combray.

  There is something eerie about driving into a town that has surrendered part of its claim to independent reality in favor of a role fashioned for it by a novelist who once spent a few summe
rs there as a boy in the late nineteenth century. But Illiers-Combray appears to relish the idea. In a corner of the rue du Docteur Proust, the patisserie-confiserie hangs a large, somewhat misleading sign outside its door:

  T

  HE HOUSE WHERE

  A

  UNT

  L

  ÉONIE USED TO BUY HER MADELEINES

  Competition is fierce with the boulangerie in the Place du Marché, for it too is involved in the “fabrication de la petite madeleine de Marcel Proust.” A packet of eight can be had for twenty francs, twelve for thirty. The boulangère—who hasn’t read it—knows that the shop would have had to close long ago had it not been for In Search of Lost Time, which draws customers from around the world. They can be seen with cameras and madeleine bags, heading for the house of Tante Amiot, an undistinguished, rather somber edifice that would be unlikely to detain one’s attention were it not for the fact that within its walls young Proust once collected impressions used to build the narrator’s bedroom, the kitchen where Françoise prepared lunch, and the garden gate through which Swann came for dinner.

  Inside, there is the hushed, semi-religious feel reminiscent of a church. Children grow quiet and expectant; the guide gives them a warm if pitying smile, while their mothers remind them to touch nothing along the way. There turns out to be little temptation. The rooms re-create in its full aesthetic horror the feel of a tastelessly furnished, provincial bourgeois nineteenth-century home. Inside a giant Perspex display cabinet on top of a table next to “Tante Léonie’s bed,” the curators have placed a white teacup, an ancient bottle of Vichy water, and a solitary, curiously oily-looking madeleine, which on closer inspection reveals itself to be made of plastic.