How Proust Can Change Your Life Read online

  Aunt Léonie would no doubt have preferred to die under torture rather than admit to harboring such “unnatural” thoughts—which does nothing to stop them from being very normal, if only rarely discussed.

  Albertine has some comparably normal thoughts. She walks into the narrator’s room one morning and experiences a rush of affection for him. She tells him how clever he is, and swears that she would rather die than leave him. If we asked Albertine why she had suddenly felt this rush of affection, one imagines her pointing to her boyfriend’s intellectual or spiritual qualities—and we would of course be inclined to believe her, for this is a dominant societal interpretation of the way affection is generated.

  However, Proust quietly lets us know that the real reason why Albertine feels so much love for her boyfriend is that he has had a very close shave this morning, and that she adores smooth skin. The implication is that his cleverness counts for little in her particular enthusiasm; if he refused to shave ever again, she might leave him tomorrow.

  This is an inopportune thought. We like to think of love as arising from more profound sources. Albertine might vigorously deny that she had ever felt love because of a close shave, accuse you of perversion for suggesting it, and attempt to change the subject. It would be a pity. What can replace a clichéd explanation of our functioning is not an image of perversity but a broader conception of what is normal. If Albertine could accept that her reactions only demonstrated that a feeling of love can have an extraordinary number of origins, some more valid than others, then she might calmly evaluate the foundations of her relationship and identify the role which she wished good shaving to play in her emotional life.

  In his descriptions both of Aunt Léonie and Albertine, Proust offers us a picture of human behavior that initially fails to match an orthodox account of how people operate, though it may in the end be judged to be a far more truthful picture than the one it has challenged.

  The structure of this process may, rather obliquely, shed light on why Proust was so attracted to the story of the Impressionist painters.

  In 1872, the year after Proust was born, Claude Monet exhibited a canvas entitled Impression, Sunrise. It depicted the harbor of Le Havre at dawn, and allowed viewers to discern, through a thick morning mist and a medley of unusually choppy brushstrokes, the outline of an industrial seafront, with an array of cranes, smoking chimneys, and buildings.

  The canvas looked a bewildering mess to most who saw it, and particularly irritated the critics of the day, who pejoratively dubbed its creator and the loose group to which he belonged “impressionists,” indicating that Monet’s control of the technical side of painting was so limited that all he had been able to achieve was a childish daubing, bearing precious little resemblance to what dawns in Le Havre really looked like.

  The contrast with the judgment of the art establishment a few years later could hardly have been greater. It seemed that not only could the Impressionists use a brush after all, but that their technique was masterful at capturing a dimension of visual reality overlooked by less talented contemporaries. What could explain such a dramatic reappraisal? Why had Monet’s Le Havre been a great mess, then a remarkable representation of a Channel port?

  The Proustian answer starts with the idea that we are all in the habit of

  giving to what we feel a form of expression which differs so much from, and which we nevertheless after a little time take to be, reality itself

  .

  In this view, our notion of reality is at variance with actual reality, because it is so often shaped by inadequate or misleading accounts. Because we are surrounded by clichéd depictions of the world, our initial response to Monet’s Impression, Sunrise may well be to balk and complain that Le Havre looks nothing like that, much as our initial response to Aunt Léonie and Albertine’s behavior may be to think that such comportment lacks any possible basis in “reality.” If Monet is a hero in this scenario, it is because he has freed him self from traditional, and in some ways limited, representations of Le Havre, in order to attend more closely to his own, uncorrupted impressions of the scene.

  In a form of homage to the Impressionist painters, Proust inserted one into his novel, the fictional Elstir, who shares traits with Renoir, Degas, and Manet. In the seaside resort of Balbec, Proust’s narrator visits Elstir’s studio, where he finds canvases that, like Monet’s Le Havre, challenge the orthodox understanding of what things look like. In Elstir’s seascapes, there is no demarcation between the sea and the sky, the sky looks like the sea, the sea like the sky. In a painting of a harbor at Carquethuit, a ship that is out at sea seems to be sailing through the middle of the town, women gathering shrimps among the rocks look as if they were in a marine grotto overhung by ships and waves, a group of holidaymakers in a boat look like they were in a cariole riding up through sunlit fields and down through shady patches.

  Elstir is not trying his hand at surrealism. If his work seems unusual, it is because he is attempting to paint something of what we actually see when we look around, rather than what we know we see. We know that ships don’t sail through the middle of towns, but it can sometimes look as if this is happening when we see a ship against the backdrop of a town from a certain light at a certain angle. We know there is a demarcation between the sea and the sky, but it can on occasion be hard to tell whether an azure-colored band is in fact part of the sea or the sky, the confusion lasting only until our reason reestablishes a distinction between the two elements which had been missing at first glance. Elstir’s achievement is to hang on to the original muddle, and to set down in paint a visual impression before it has been overruled by what he knows.

  Proust was not implying that painting had reached its apotheosis in Impressionism, and that the movement had triumphantly captured “reality” in a way that previous schools of art had not. His appreciation of painting ranged further than this, but the works of Elstir illustrated with particular clarity what is arguably present in every successful work of art: an ability to restore to our sight a distorted or neglected aspect of reality. As Proust expressed it:

  Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us

  .

  And what lies unknown within us includes such surprising things as ships that go through towns, seas that are momentarily indistinguishable from skies, fantasies that our beloved family will die in a major conflagration, and intense feelings of love sparked by contact with smooth skin.

  The moral? That life can be a stranger substance than cliché life, that goldfinches should occasionally do things differently from their parents, and that there are persuasive reasons for calling a loved one Plouplou, Missou, or poor little wolf.

  What did his friends think of him? He had a great number of them, and after his death, many were moved to publish accounts of what it had been like to know him. The verdict could hardly have been more favorable. They were almost unanimous in suggesting that Proust had been a paragon of companionship, an embodiment of friendship’s every virtue.

  Their accounts tell us:

  T HAT HE WAS GENEROUS :

  “I can still see him, wrapped in his fur coat, even in springtime, sitting at a table in Larue’s restaurant, and I can still see the gesture of his delicate hand as he tried to make you let him order the most extravagant supper, accepting the headwaiter’s biased suggestions, offering you champagne, exotic fruits and grapes on their vine-plant which he had noticed on the way in.… He told you there was no better way of proving your friendship than by accepting.” GEORGES DE LAURIS

  T HAT HE WAS MUNIFICENT :

  “In restaurants, and everywhere where there was a chance, Marcel would give enormous tips. This was the case even in the slightest railway station buffet where he would never return.” GEORGES DE LAURIS />
  T HAT HE LIKED TO ADD A 200 PERCENT SERVICE CHARGE :

  “If a dinner cost him ten francs, he would add twenty francs for the waiter.” FERNAND GREGH

  T HAT HE WAS NOT MERELY EXORBITANT :

  “The legend of Proust’s generosity should not develop to the detriment of that of his goodness.” PAUL MORAND

  T HAT HE DIDN ’ T TALK ONLY ABOUT HIMSELF :

  “He was the best of listeners. Even in his intimate circle his constant care to be modest and polite prevented him from pushing himself forward and from imposing subjects of conversation. These he found in others’ thoughts. Sometimes he spoke about sport and motor-cars and showed a touching desire for information. He took an interest in you, instead of trying to make you interested in himself.” GEORGES DE LAURIS

  T HAT HE WAS CURIOUS :

  “Marcel was passionately interested in his friends. Never have I seen less egoism, or egotism.… He wanted to amuse you. He was happy to see others laughing and he laughed.” GEORGES DE LAURIS

  T HAT HE DIDN ’ T FORGET WHAT WAS IMPORTANT :

  “Never, right up to the end, neither his frenzied work, nor his suffering made him forget his friends—because he certainly never put all his poetry into his books, he put as much into his life.” WALTER BERRY

  T HAT HE WAS MODEST :

  “What modesty! You apologised for everything: for being present, for speaking, for being quiet, for thinking, for expressing your dazzlingly meandering thoughts, even for lavishing your incomparable praise.” ANNA DE NOAILLES

  T HAT HE WAS A GREAT TALKER :

  “One can never say it enough: Proust’s conversation was dazzling, bewitching.” MARCEL PLANTEVIGNES

  T HAT ONE NEVER GOT BORED AT HIS HOUSE :

  “During dinner, he would carry his plate over to each guest; he would eat soup next to one, the fish, or half a fish besides another, and so on until the end of a meal; one can imagine that by the fruit, he had gone all the way around. It was testimony of kindness, of good will towards everyone, because he would have been distraught that anyone would have wanted to complain; and he thought both to make a gesture of individual politeness and to assure, with his usual perspicacity, that everyone was in an agreeable mood. Indeed, the results were excellent, and one never got bored at his house.” GABRIEL DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

  Given such generous verdicts, it is surprising to find that Proust held some extremely caustic views about friendship—in fact, to find that he had an unusually limited conception of the value of his, or indeed of anyone’s friendships. Despite the dazzling conversation and dinner parties, he believed:

  T HAT HE COULD JUST AS WELL HAVE BEFRIENDED A SETTEE :

  “The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive).”

  T HAT TALKING IS A FUTILE ACTIVITY :

  “Conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.”

  T HAT FRIENDSHIP IS A SHALLOW EFFORT :

  “… directed towards making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (otherwise than by means of art) to a superficial self.”

  A ND THAT FRIENDSHIP IS IN THE END NO MORE THAN :

  “… a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone.”

  It doesn’t mean he was callous. It doesn’t mean he was a misanthrope. It doesn’t mean he never had an urge to see friends (an urge he described as a “craving to see people which attacks both men and women and inspires a longing to throw himself out of the window in the patient who has been shut away from his family and friends in an isolation clinic).”

  However, Proust was challenging all the more exalted claims made on friendship’s behalf. Principal among these is the claim that our friends afford us a chance to express our deepest selves, and that the conversations we have with them are a privileged forum in which to say what we really think and, by extension and with no mystical allusion, be who we really are.

  The claim was not dismissed out of a bitter disappointment with the caliber of his friends. Proust’s skepticism had nothing to do with the presence at his dinner table of intellectually sluggish characters like Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld, who needed to be entertained while he circulated with a half-eaten plate of fish in his hand. The problem was more universal; it was inherent in the idea of friendship and would have been present even if he had had a chance to share his thoughts with the most profound minds of his generation, even if he had, for instance, been given the opportunity to converse with a writer of James Joyce’s genius.

  Which, in fact, he did. In 1922, both writers were at a black-tie dinner given at the Ritz for Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and members of the Russian Ballet, in order to celebrate the first night of Stravinsky’s Le Renard. Joyce arrived late and without a dinner jacket, Proust kept his fur coat on throughout the evening, and what happened once they were introduced was later reported by Joyce to a friend:

  Our talk consisted solely of the word “Non.” Proust asked me if

  I

  knew the duc de so-and-so

  .

  I

  said “Non.” Our hostess asked Proust if he had read such and such a piece of Ulysses. Proust said “Non.” And so on

  .

  After dinner, Proust got into his taxi with his hosts, Violet and Sydney Schiff, and without asking, Joyce followed them in. His first gesture was to open the window and his second to light a cigarette, both of which were life-threatening acts as far as Proust was concerned. During the journey, Joyce watched Proust without saying a word, while Proust talked continuously and failed to address a word to Joyce. When they arrived at Proust’s flat at the rue Hamelin, Proust took Sydney Schiff aside and said: “Please ask Monsieur Joyce to let my taxi drive him home.” The taxi did so. The two men were never to meet again.

  If the story has its absurd side, it is because of our awareness of what these two writers could have told one another. A conversation of cul-de-sacs ending in “Non” is not a surprising eventuality for many, but it is more surprising and far more regrettable when it is all that the authors of Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time can find to say to each other when they are seated together under the same Ritz chandelier.

  However, imagine that the evening had unfolded more successfully, as successfully as could have been hoped:

  PROUST [while taking furtive stabs at an homard à l’américaine, huddled in his fur coat]: Monsieur Joyce, do you know the Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre?

  JOYCE: Please, appelez-moi James. Le Duc! What a close and excellent friend, the kindest man I have met from here to Limerick.

  PROUST: Really? I am so glad we agree [beaming at the discovery of this common acquaintance], though I have not yet been to Limerick.

  VIOLET SCHIFF [leaning across, with a hostess’s delicacy, to Proust]: Marcel, do you know James’s big book?

  PROUST: Ulysses? Naturellement. Who has not read the masterpiece of our new century? [Joyce blushes modestly, but nothing can disguise his delight.]

  VIOLET SCHIFF: Do you remember any passages in it?

  PROUST: Madame, I remember the entire book. For instance, when the hero goes to the library, excuse my accent anglais, but I cannot resist [starting to quote]: “Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred …”

  And yet, even if it had gone as well as this, even if they had later enjoyed an animated cab ride home and sat up until sunrise exchanging thoughts on music and the novel, art and nationality, love and Shakespeare, there would still have been
a critical discrepancy between the conversation and the work, between the chat and the writing, for Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time would never have resulted from their dialogue, even though these novels were among the most profound and sustained utterances both men were capable of—a point that highlights the limitations of conversation, when viewed as a forum in which to express our deepest selves.

  What explains such limitations? Why would one be unable to chat, as opposed to write, In Search of Lost Time? In part, because of the mind’s functioning, its condition as an intermittent organ, forever liable to lose the thread or be distracted, generating vital thoughts only between stretches of inactivity or mediocrity, stretches in which we are not really “ourselves,” during which it may be no exaggeration to say that we are not quite all there as we gaze at passing clouds with a vacant, childlike expression. Because the rhythm of a conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we have said, and the missed opportunity of what we have not.

  By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment (“It’s true that there are people who are superior to their books, but that’s because their books are not Books”), because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time.