How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

  .

  The moral? To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

  There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most. Proust got very annoyed by the way some people expressed themselves. Lucien Daudet tells us that Proust had a friend who thought it chic to use English expressions when he was speaking French, and would therefore say “Good-bye” or, more casually, “Bye, bye” whenever he left a room. “It made Proust positively unhappy,” reports Daudet. “He would make the kind of pained, irritated grimace which follows when a stick of chalk has been scraped across a blackboard. ‘It really hurts your teeth, that kind of thing!’ he would exclaim plaintively.” Proust displayed similar frustration with people who referred to the Mediterranean as “the Big Blue,” to England as “Albion,” and to the French army as “our boys.” He was pained by people whose sole response to heavy rain was, “Il pleut des cordes,” to cold weather, “Il fait un froid de canard,” and to another’s deafness, “Il est sourd comme un panier.”

  Why did these phrases affect Proust so much? Though the way people talk has altered somewhat since his day, it is not difficult to see that here were examples of rather poor expression, though if Proust was wincing, his complaint was more a psychological than a grammatical one (“No one knows less syntax than me,” he boasted). Peppering French with bits of English, talking of Albion instead of England and the Big Blue instead of the Mediterranean were signs of wishing to seem smart and in-the-know around 1900, and relying on essentially insincere, overelaborate stock phrases to do so. There was no reason to say “Bye, bye” when taking one’s leave, other than a need to impress by recourse to a contemporary fad for all things British. And though phrases like “Il pleut des cordes” had none of the ostentation of a “Bye, bye,” they were examples of the most exhausted constructions, whose use implied little concern for evoking the specifics of a situation. Insofar as Proust made pained, irritated grimaces, it was in defense of a more honest and accurate approach to expression.

  Lucien Daudet tells us how he first got a taste of it:

  One day when we were coming out of a concert where we had heard Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, I was humming some vague notes which I thought expressed the emotion I had just experienced, and I exclaimed, with an emphasis which I only later understood to be ridiculous: “That’s a

  wonderful bit!” Proust started to laugh and said, “But, my dear Lucien, it’s not your

  poum, poum, poum

  that’s going to convey this wonderfulness! It would be better to try and explain it!” At the time, I wasn’t very happy, but I had just received an unforgettable lesson

  .

  It was a lesson in trying to find the right words for things. The process can be counted upon to go badly awry. We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so. We hear Beethoven’s Ninth and hum poum, poum, poum; we see the pyramids at Giza and go, “That’s nice.” These sounds are asked to account for an experience, but their poverty prevents either ourselves or our interlocutors from really understanding what we have lived through. We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

  Proust had a friend called Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld. He was an aristocratic young man, whose ancestor had written a famous short book in the seventeenth century, and who liked to spend time in glamorous Paris nightspots, so much time that he had been labeled by some of his more sarcastic contemporaries “le La Rochefoucauld de chez Maxim’s.” But in 1904 Gabriel forsook the nightlife in order to try his hand at literature. The result was a novel, The Lover and the Doctor, which Gabriel sent to Proust in manuscript form as soon as it was finished, with a request for comments and advice.

  “Bear in mind that you have written a fine and powerful novel, a superb, tragic work of complex and consummate craftsmanship,” Proust reported back to his friend, who might have formed a slightly different impression after reading the lengthy letter which had preceded this eulogy. It seems that the superb and tragic work had a few problems, not least because it was filled with clichés: “There are some fine big landscapes in your novel,” explained Proust, treading delicately, “but at times one would like them to be painted with more originality. It’s quite true that the sky is on fire at sunset, but it’s been said too often, and the moon that shines discreetly is a trifle dull.”

  We may ask why Proust objected to phrases that had been used too often. After all, doesn’t the moon shine discreetly? Don’t sunsets look as if they were on fire? Aren’t clichés just good ideas that have proved rightly popular?

  The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.

  The moon Gabriel mentioned might of course have been discreet, but it is liable to have been a lot more besides. When the first volume of Proust’s novel was published eight years after The Lover and the Doctor, perhaps Gabriel (if he wasn’t back ordering Dom Perignon at Maxim’s) took time to notice that Proust had also included a moon, but that he had skirted two thousand years of ready-made moon talk and uncovered an unusual metaphor better to capture the reality of the lunar experience:

  Sometimes in the afternoon sky, a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to “come on” for a while, and so goes “in front” in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself

  Even if we recognize the virtues of Proust’s metaphor, it is not necessarily one we could easily come up with by ourselves. It may lie closer to a genuine impression of the moon, but if we observe the moon and are asked to say something about it, we are more likely to hit upon a tired rather than an inspired image. We may be well aware that our description of a moon is not up to the task, without knowing how to better it. To take license with his response, this would perhaps have bothered Proust less than an unapologetic use of clichés by people who believed that it was always right to follow verbal conventions (“golden orb,” “heavenly body”), and felt that a priority when talking was not to be original but to sound like someone else.

  Wanting to sound like other people has its temptations. There are inherited habits of speech guaranteed to make us sound authoritative, intelligent, worldly, appropriately grateful, or deeply moved. As of a certain age, Albertine decides that she too would like to speak like someone else—like a bourgeois young woman. She begins to use a range of expressions common among such women, which she has picked up from her aunt, Madame Bontemps, in the slavish way, Proust suggests, that a baby goldfinch learns how to act like a grown-up by imitating the behavior of its parent goldfinches. She acquires a habit of repeating whatever one says to her, so as to appear interested and in the process of forming an opinion of her own. If you tell her that an artist’s work is good, or his house nice, she will say, “Oh, his painting’s good, is it?” “Oh, his house is nice, is it?” Furthermore, when she meets someone unusual, she now says, “He’s a character”; when you suggest a game of cards to her, she will say, “I don
’t have money to burn”; when one of her friends reproaches her unjustly, she will exclaim, “You really are the limit!”—all these expressions having been dictated to her by what Proust calls a “bourgeois tradition almost as old as the Magnificat itself,” a tradition laying down speech codes that the respectable bourgeois girl must learn, “just as she has learned to say her prayers and to curtsey.”

  This mockery of Albertine’s verbal habits explains Proust’s particular frustration with Louis Ganderax.

  Louis Ganderax was a leading early-twentieth-century man of letters and the literary editor of La Revue de Paris. In 1906 he was asked to edit the correspondence of Georges Bizet, and to write a preface for the collection. It was a great honor, and a great responsibility. Bizet, who had died some thirty years earlier, was a composer of worldwide significance, whose place in posterity was assured by his opera Carmen and his Symphony in C Major. There was understandable pressure on Ganderax to produce a preface worthy of standing at the head of a genius’s correspondence.

  Georges Bizet

  Unfortunately, Ganderax was something of a goldfinch, and in an attempt to sound grand—far grander than he must have thought himself naturally to be—he ended up writing a preface of enormous, almost comic pretension.

  Louis Ganderax

  Lying in bed reading the newspaper in the autumn of 1908, Proust came upon an extract of Ganderax’s preface, whose prose style annoyed him so much that he exorcised his feelings by writing a letter to Georges Bizet’s widow, his good friend Madame Straus. “Why, when he can write so well, does he write as he does?” wondered Proust. “Why, when one says ‘1871’, add ‘that most abominable of all years.’ Why is Paris immediately dubbed ‘the great city’ and Delaunay ‘the master painter’? Why must emotion inevitably be ‘discreet’ and goodnaturedness ‘smiling’ and bereavements ‘cruel’, and countless other fine phrases that I can’t remember?”

  These phrases were of course anything but fine, they were a caricature of fineness. They were phrases that might once have been impressive in the hands of classical writers, but were pompous ornamentation when stolen by an author of a later age concerned only to suggest literary grandeur.

  If Ganderax had worried about the sincerity of what he was saying, he might have resisted capping the thought that 1871 was a bad year with the melodramatic claim that it was in fact “that most abominable of all years.” Paris might have been under siege by the Prussian army at the beginning of 1871, the starving populace might have been driven to eat elephants from the Jardin des Plantes, the Prussians might have marched down the Champs-Élysées and the Commune imposed tyrannical rule, but did these experiences really stand a chance of being conveyed in an overblown, thunderous phrase like this?

  But Ganderax hadn’t written nonsensical fine phrases by mistake. It was the natural outcome of his ideas on how people should express themselves. For Ganderax, the priority of good writing was to follow precedent, to follow examples of the most distinguished authors in history, while bad writing began with the arrogant belief that one could avoid paying homage to great minds and write according to one’s fancy. It was fitting that Ganderax had elsewhere awarded himself the title of “Defender of the French Language.” The language needed to be protected against the assaults of decadents who refused to follow the rules of expression dictated by tradition, leading Ganderax to complain publicly if he spotted a past participle in the wrong place or a word falsely applied in a published text.

  Proust couldn’t have disagreed more with such a view of tradition, and let Madame Straus know it:

  Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own “tone”…. I don’t mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer—and perhaps it’s a weakness—those who write well. But they begin to write well only on condition that they’re original, that they create their own language. Correctness, perfection of style do exist, but on the other side of originality, after having gone through all the faults, not this side. Correctness this side—“discreet emotion,” “smiling good nature,” “most abominable of all years”—doesn’t exist. The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame Straus!

  Ganderax had overlooked the way that every good writer in history, a history he so strongly wished to defend, had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers. If Ganderax had been alive in Racine’s day, Proust mockingly imagined that the Defender of the Language would have told even this embodiment of classical French that he couldn’t write very well, because Racine had written slightly differently than those before him. He wondered what Ganderax would have made of Racine’s lines in Andromaque:

  I loved you fickle; faithful, what might I have done?…

  Why murder him? What did he? By what right?

  Who told you to?

  Pretty enough, but didn’t these lines break important laws of grammar? Proust pictured Ganderax delivering a rebuke to Racine:

  I understand your thought; you mean that since I loved you when you were fickle, what might that love have been if you had been faithful. But it’s badly expressed. It could equally well mean that

  you

  would have been faithful. As official defender of the French language, I cannot let that pass

  .

  “I’m not making fun of your friend, Madame, I assure you,” claimed Proust, who hadn’t stopped ridiculing Ganderax since the start of his letter. “I know how intelligent and learned he is. It’s a question of ‘doctrine.’ This man who is so sceptical has grammatical certainties. Alas, Madame Straus, there are no certainties, even grammatical ones.… [O]nly that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful.”

  And a personal imprint is not only more beautiful, it is also a good deal more authentic. Trying to sound like Chateaubriand or Victor Hugo when you are in fact the literary editor of La Revue de Paris implies a singular lack of concern with capturing what is distinctive about being Louis Ganderax, much as attempting to sound like the archetypal bourgeois Parisian young woman (“I don’t have money to burn”; “You really are the limit!”), when you are in fact a particular young woman called Albertine, involves flattening your identity to fit a constrained social envelope. If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

  The need to leave a personal imprint on language is rarely more evident than in the personal sphere. The better we know someone, the more the standard name they bear comes to seem inadequate, and the greater the desire to twist theirs into a new one, so as to reflect our awareness of their particularities. Proust’s name on his birth certificate was Valentin Louis Georges Eugene Marcel Proust, but because this was a dry mouthful, it was appropriate that those closest to him molded it into something more suited to who Marcel was for them. For his beloved mother, he was “mon petit jaunet” (my little yellow one), or “mon petit serin” (my little canary), or “mon petit benêt” (my little clod), or “mon petit nigaud” (my little oaf). He was also known as “mon pauvre loup” (my poor wolf), “petit pauvre loup” (poor little wolf), and “le petit loup” (the little wolf—Madame Proust called Marcel’s brother, Robert, “mon autre loup,” which gives us a sense of family priorities). To his friend Reynaldo Hahn, Proust was “Buncht” (and Reynaldo “Bunibuls”); to his friend Antoine Bibesco, Proust was “Lecram” and, when he got too friendly, “le Flagorneur” (the toady) or, when not straight enough, “le Saturnien.” At home, he wanted his maid to refer to him as “Missou” and he would call her “Plouplou.”

  If Missou, Buncht, and the petit jaunet are endearing symbols of the way new words and phrases can be constructed to capture new dimensions of a relationship, then confusing Proust’s name with someone el
se’s looks like a sadder symbol of a reluctance to expand a vocabulary to account for the variety of the human species. To people who didn’t know Proust very well, rather than making his name more personal, they had a depressing tendency to give him another name altogether, that of a far more famous contemporary writer, Marcel Prévost. “I am totally unknown,” specified Proust in 1912. “When readers write to me at Le Figaro after an article, which happens rarely, the letters are forwarded to Marcel Prévost, for whom my name seems to be no more than a misprint.”

  Using a single word to describe two different things (the author of In Search of Lost Time and the author of The Strong Virgins) suggests a disregard for the world’s real diversity which bears comparison with that shown by the cliché user. A person who invariably describes heavy rain with the phrase “Il pleut des cordes” can be accused of neglecting the real diversity of rain showers, much as the person who calls every writer whose name begins with P and ends in t Monsieur Prévost can be accused of neglecting the real diversity of literature.

  So if speaking in clichés is problematic, it is because the world itself contains a far broader range of rainfalls, moons, sunshines, and emotions than stock expressions either capture or teach us to expect.

  Proust’s novel is filled with people who behave in un-stock ways. It is, for example, a conventional belief about family life that old aunts who love their family will entertain benevolent daydreams about them. But Proust’s aunt Léonie loves her family greatly, and it doesn’t stop her from deriving pleasure in involving them in the most macabre scenarios. Confined to her bed on account of a host of imaginary ailments, she is so bored with life that she longs for something exciting to happen to her, even if it should be something terrible. The most exciting thing she can imagine is a fire that would leave no stone of her house standing and would kill her entire family, but from which she herself would have plenty of time to escape. She would then be able to mourn her family affectionately for many years, and cause universal stupefaction in her village by getting out of bed to conduct the obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect.