How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

  Furthermore, conversation allows us little room to revise our original utterances, which ill suits our tendency not to know what we are trying to say until we have had at least one go at saying it, whereas writing accommodates and is largely made up of rewriting, during which original thoughts—bare, inarticulate strands—are enriched and nuanced over time. They may thereby appear on a page according to the logic and aesthetic order they demand, as opposed to suffering the distortion effected by conversation, with its limits on the corrections or additions one can make before enraging even the most patient companion.

  Proust famously did not realize the nature of what he was trying to write until he had begun to write it. When the first volume of In Search of Lost Time was published in 1913, there was no thought of the work assuming the gargantuan proportions it eventually did. Proust projected that it would be a trilogy (Swann’s Way, The Guermantes’ Way, Time Regained), and even hoped the last two parts would fit into a single volume.

  However, the First World War radically altered his plans by delaying the publication of the succeeding volume by four years, during which time Proust discovered a host of new things he wanted to say, and realized that he would require a further four volumes to say it. The original five hundred thousand words expanded to more than a million and a quarter.

  It was not just the overall shape of the novel that changed. Each page, and a great many sentences, grew, or were altered in the passage from initial expression to printed form. Half of the first volume was rewritten four times. As Proust went back over what he had written, he repeatedly saw the imperfections in his initial attempt. Words or parts of sentences were eliminated; points that he had judged complete seemed, as he went back over the text, to be crying out for recomposition, or elaboration and development with a new image or metaphor. Hence the mess of the manuscript pages, the result of a mind perpetually improving on its original utterances.

  Unfortunately for Proust’s publishers, the revisions did not cease once he had sent his handwritten scrawls to be typed up. The publishers’ proofs, in which the scrawl found itself turned into elegant uniform letters, only served to reveal yet more errors and omissions, which Proust would correct in illegible bubbles, expanding into every stretch of white space available until, at times, they overflowed into narrow paper flaps glued onto the edge of the sheet.

  It might have enraged the publisher, but it served to make a better book. It meant that the novel could be the product of the efforts of more than a single Proust (which any interlocutor would have had to be satisfied with); it was the product of a succession of ever more critical and accomplished authors (three at the very minimum: Proust 1 who had written the manuscript + Proust 2 who reread it + Proust 3 who corrected the proofs). There was naturally no sign of the process of elaboration or of the material conditions of creation in the published version, only a continuous, controlled, faultless voice revealing nothing of where sentences had had to be rewritten, where asthma attacks had intruded, where a metaphor had had to be altered, where a point had had to be clarified, and between which lines the author had had to sleep, eat breakfast, or write a thank-you letter. There was no wish to deceive, only a wish to stay faithful to the original conception of the work, in which an asthma attack or a breakfast, though part of the author’s life, had no place in the conception of the work, because, as Proust saw it:

  A book is the product of another self to the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices

  .

  In spite of its limitations as a forum in which to express complex ideas in rich, precise language, friendship could still be defended on the grounds that it provides us with a chance to communicate our most intimate, honest thoughts to people and, for once, reveal exactly what is on our minds.

  Though an appealing notion, the likelihood of such honesty seems highly dependent on two things:

  F IRST : how much is on our minds—in particular, how many thoughts we have about our friends which, though true, could potentially be hurtful and, though honest, could seem unkind.

  S ECOND : our evaluation of how ready others would be to break off a friendship if ever we dared express these honest thoughts to them—an evaluation made in part according to our sense of how lovable we are, and of whether our qualities would be enough to ensure that we could stay friends with people even if we had momentarily irritated them by revealing our disapproval of their fiancée or lyric poetry.

  Unfortunately, by both criteria, Proust was not well placed to enjoy honest friendships. For a start, he had far too many true but unkind thoughts about people. When he met a palm reader in 1918, the woman was said to have taken a glance at his hand, looked at his face for a moment, then remarked simply, “What do you want from me, Monsieur? It should be you reading my character.” But this miraculous understanding of others did not lead to cheerful conclusions. “I feel infinite sadness at seeing how few people are genuinely kind,” he said, and judged that most people had something rather wrong with them.

  The most perfect person in the world has a certain defect which shocks us or makes us angry. One man is of rare intelligence, sees everything from the loftiest viewpoint, never speaks ill of anyone, but will pocket and forget letters of supreme importance which he himself asked you to let him post for you, and so makes you miss a vital engagement without offering you any excuse, with a smile, because he prides himself upon never knowing the time. Another is so refined, so gentle, so delicate in his conduct that he never says anything to you about yourself that you

  would not be glad to hear, but you feel that he suppresses, that he keeps buried in his heart, where they turn sour, other, quite different opinions

  .

  Lucien Daudet felt that Proust possessed

  an unenviable power of divination, he discovered all the pettiness, often hidden, of the human heart, and it horrified him: the most insignificant lies, the mental reservations, the secrecies, the fake disinterestedness, the kind word which has an ulterior motive, the truth which has been slightly deformed for convenience, in short, all the things which worry us in love, sadden us in friendship and make our dealings with others banal were for Proust a subject of constant surprise, sadness or irony

  .

  It is regrettable, as far as the cause of honest friendship was concerned, that Proust combined this heightened awareness of others’ faults with unusually strong doubts about his own chances of being liked (“Oh! Making a nuisance of myself, that has always been my nightmare”), and about the chances of retaining his friends if ever he were to express his more negative thoughts to them. His previously diagnosed case of low self-esteem (“If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible”) bred an exaggerated notion of how friendly he would need to be in order to have any friends. And though he was in disagreement with all the more exalted claims made on friendship’s behalf, he was still deeply concerned with securing affection (“My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved”). Under a heading of “thoughts that spoil friendship,” Proust confessed to a range of anxieties familiar to any quotidian emotional paranoiac: “What did they think of us?” “Were we not tactless?” “Did they like us?” as well as “the fear of being forgotten in favour of someone else.”

  It meant that Proust’s overwhelming priority in any encounter was to ensure that he would be liked, remembered, and thought well of. “Not only did he dizzy his hosts and hostesses with verbal compliments, but he ruined himself on flowers and ingenious gifts,” reported his friend Jacques-Émile Blanche, giving a taste of what this priority involved. His psychological insight, so great that it had threatened to put a palm reader out of her job, could be wholly directed toward identifying the appropriate word, smile, or flower to win others over. And it worked. He excelled at the art of making friends, he acquired an enormous number, they loved his company, were devoted to him, and wrote a pile of adulatory books after his death with titles like My Friend Marcel Proust (a volume by Maurice Duplay), My
Friendship with Marcel Proust (by Fernand Gregh), and Letters to a Friend (by Marie Nordlinger).

  Given the effort and strategic intelligence he devoted to friendship, it shouldn’t surprise us. For instance, it is often assumed, usually by people who don’t have many friends, that friendship is a hallowed sphere in which what we wish to talk about effortlessly coincides with others’ interests. Proust, less optimistic than this, recognized the likelihood of discrepancy, and concluded that he should always be the one to ask questions and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you with what was on his.

  To do anything else would have been bad conversational manners: “There is a lack of tact in people who in their conversation look not to please others, but to elucidate, egoistically, points that they are interested in.” Conversation required an abdication of oneself in the name of pleasing companions: “When we chat, it is no longer we who speak.… [W]e are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people, and not of a self that differs from them.”

  It accounts for why Proust’s friend Georges de Lauris, a keen rally driver and tennis player, could gratefully report that he had often talked to Proust about sport and motorcars. Of course, Proust cared little for either, but to have insisted on turning the conversation to Madame de Pompadour’s childhood with a man keener on Renault’s crankshaft would have been to misunderstand what friendship was for.

  It was not for elucidating, egoistically, things that one was interested in. It was primarily for warmth and affection, which is why, for a cerebral man, Proust had remarkably little interest in having overtly “intellectual” friendships. In the summer of 1920, he received a letter from Sydney Schiff, the friend who would, two years later, engineer his disastrous encounter with Joyce. Sydney told Proust that he was on a seaside holiday in England with his wife Violet, the weather was quite sunny, but Violet had invited a group of hearty young people to stay with them, and he had grown very depressed by how shallow these youngsters were. “It’s very boring for me,” he wrote to Proust, “because I don’t like to be constantly in the company of young people. I am pained by their naïvety, which I’m afraid of corrupting, or at least of compromising. Human beings sometimes interest me but I don’t like them because they are not intelligent enough.”

  Proust, cloistered in bed in Paris, had difficulty appreciating why anyone would be dissatisfied with the idea of spending a holiday on a beach with some young people whose only fault was not to have read Descartes: “I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it’s more or less irrelevant to me that they’re intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere etc.”

  When Proust did have intelligent conversations, the priority was still to dedicate himself to others, rather than to covertly introduce (as some might) private cerebral concerns. His friend Marcel Plantevignes, the author of yet another volume of reminiscence, this one entitled With Marcel Proust, commented on Proust’s intellectual courtesy, his concern never to be tiring, hard to follow, or categorical in what he said. Proust would frequently punctuate his sentences with a “perhaps,” a “maybe,” or a “Don’t you think?” For Plantevignes, it reflected Proust’s desire to please. “Maybe I’m wrong to tell them what they won’t like,” was his underlying thought. Not that Plantevignes was complaining; such tentativeness was welcome, especially on Proust’s bad days.

  These maybes were very reassuring to encounter in the light of certain rather surprising declarations Proust made on his pessimistic days, and without which, they would have made really too much of a shattering impression

  ,

  thoughts like: “Friendship doesn’t exist,” and “Love is a trap and only reveals itself to us by making us suffer.”

  Don’t you think?

  However charming Proust’s manners, they might unkindly have been described as overpolite, so much so that the more cynical of Proust’s friends invented a mocking term to describe the peculiarities of his social habits. As Fernand Gregh reports:

  We created among ourselves the verb to proustify to express a slightly too conscious attitude of geniality, together with what would vulgarly have been called affectations, interminable and delicious

  .

  A representative target of Proust’s proustification was a middle-aged woman called Laure Haymann, a well-known courtesan, who had once been the mistress of the Duc d’Orléans, the King of Greece, Prince Egon von Fürstenberg, and, latterly, Proust’s great-uncle, Louis Weil. Proust was in his late teens when he met and first began to proustify Laure. He would send her elaborate letters dripping with compliments, accompanied by chocolates, trinkets, and flowers, gifts so expensive that his father was forced to lecture him on his extravagance.

  “Dear friend, dear delight,” ran a typical note to Laure, accompanied by a little something from the florist. “Here are fifteen chrysanthemums. I hope the stems will be excessively long, as I requested.” In case they weren’t, and in case Laure needed a greater or more enduring token of affection than a collection of long-stemmed plants, he assured Laure that she was a creature of voluptuous intelligence and subtle grace, that she was a divine beauty and a goddess who could turn all men into devoted worshippers. It seemed natural to end the letter by offering affectionate regards and the practical suggestion that “I propose to call the present century the century of Laure Haymann.” Laure became his friend.

  Here she is, as photographed by Paul Nadar at around the time the chrysanthemums were delivered to her door:

  Another favored target of proustification was the poet and novelist Anna de Noailles, responsible for six collections of forgettable poetry, and for Proust, a genius worthy of comparison with Baudelaire. When she sent him a copy of her novel La Domination, in June 1905, Proust told her that she had given birth to an entire planet, “a marvellous planet won over for the contemplation of mankind.” Not only was she a cosmic creator, she was also a woman of mythic appearance. “I have nothing to envy Ulysses because my Athena is more beautiful, has greater genius and knows more than his,” Proust reassured her. A few years later, reviewing a collection of her poetry, Les Éblouissements, for Le Figaro, he wrote that Anna had created images as sublime as those of Victor Hugo, that her work was a dazzling success and a masterpiece of literary impressionism. To prove the point to his readers, he even quoted a few of Anna’s lines:

  Tandis que détaché d’une invisible fronde

  ,

  Un doux oiseau jaillit jusqu’au sommet du monde

  .

  “Do you know an image more splendid and more perfect than this one?” he asked—at which point his readers could have been forgiven for muttering, “Well, yes,” and wondering what had possessed their besotted reviewer.

  Was he an extraordinary hypocrite? The word implies that, beneath an appearance of goodwill and kindness, lay a sinister, calculating agenda, and that Proust’s real feelings for Laure Haymann and Anna de Noailles could not possibly have matched his extravagant declarations, and were perhaps closer to ridicule than adoration.

  The disparity may be less dramatic. No doubt he believed precious few of his proustifications, but he nevertheless remained sincere in the message that had inspired and underlay them: “I like you and I would like you to like me.” The fifteen long-stemmed chrysanthemums, the marvelous planets, the devoted worshippers, the Athenas, goddesses, and splendid images were merely what Proust felt he would need to add to his own presence in order to secure affection, in the light of his previously mentioned, debilitating assessment of his own qualities (“I certainly think less of myself than Antoine [his butler] does of himself”).

  In fact, the exaggerated scale of Proust’s social politeness should not blind us to the degree of insincerity every friendship demands, the ever-present requirement to deliver an affable but hollow word to a friend who proudly shows us a volume of her poetry or her newborn baby. To call such politeness hypocrisy is to neglect that we have lied in a local way not in order to conceal funda
mentally malevolent intentions, but rather, to confirm our feeling of affection, which might have been doubted if there had been no gasping and praising, because of the unusual intensity of people’s attachment to their verse and children. There seems a gap between what others need to hear from us in order to trust that we like them, and the extent of the negative thoughts we know we can feel toward them and still like them. We know it is possible to think of someone as both dismal at poetry and perceptive, both inclined to pomposity and charming, both suffering from halitosis and genial. But the susceptibility of others means that the negative part of the equation can rarely be expressed without jeopardizing the union. We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a level of malice far greater (or more critical) than the malice we ourselves felt in relation to the last person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our affection for them.

  Proust once compared friendship to reading, because both activities involved communion with others, but added that reading had a key advantage:

  In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to

  .

  Whereas in life, we are often led to have dinner because we fear for the future of a valued friendship were we to decline the invitation, a hypocritical meal forced upon us by an awareness of our friends’ unwarranted, yet unavoidable, susceptibility. How much more honest we can be with books. There, at least, we can turn to them when we want, and look bored or cut short a dialogue as soon as necessary. Had we been granted the opportunity to spend an evening with Moliere, even this comic genius would have forced us into an occasional fake smile, which is why Proust expressed a preference for communion with the page-bound, rather than the living, playwright. At least, in book form: