How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

  We laugh at what Molière has to say only so far as we find it funny; when he bores us we are not afraid to look bored, and once we have definitely had enough of him we put him back in his place as abruptly as if he had neither genius nor celebrity

  .

  How are we to respond to the level of insincerity apparently required in every friendship? How are we to respond to the two habitually conflicting projects carried on under the single umbrella of friendship: a project to secure affection, and a project to express ourselves honestly? It was because Proust was both unusually honest and unusually affectionate that he drove the joint project to breaking point and came up with his distinctive approach to friendship, which was to judge that the pursuit of affection and the pursuit of truth were fundamentally rather than occasionally incompatible. It meant adopting a much narrower conception of what friendship was for: it was for playful exchanges with Laure but not for telling Molière that he was boring and Anna de Noailles that she couldn’t write poetry. One might imagine that it made Proust a far lesser friend, but paradoxically, the radical separation had the power to make him both a better, more loyal, more charming friend, and a more honest, profound, and unsentimental thinker.

  An example of how this separation influenced Proust’s behavior can be seen in his friendship with Fernand Gregh, a onetime classmate and fellow writer. When Proust published his first collection of stories, Fernand Gregh was in an influential position on the literary paper La Revue de Paris. Despite the many flaws in Pleasures and Regrets, it was not too much to hope that an old school friend could put in a nice word for the book, but it did prove too much to hope of Gregh, who failed even to mention Proust’s writing to the readers of La Revue de Paris. He found space for a little review, but in it talked only of the illustrations, the preface, and the piano pieces that had come with the book and that Proust had had nothing to do with, and then added sarcastic jibes about the connections Proust had used in order to get his work published.

  What do you do when a friend like Gregh subsequently writes a book of his own, a very bad one at that, and sends you a copy asking for your opinion? Proust faced the question only a few weeks later, when Fernand sent him The House of Childhood, a collection of poems in the light of which Anna de Noailles’s work could truly have been compared to Baudelaire’s. Proust might have taken this opportunity to confront Gregh on his behavior, told him the truth about his poetry, and suggested he hold on to his day job. But we know this wasn’t Proust’s style, and we find him writing a generous letter of congratulation. “What I have read struck me as really beautiful,” Proust told Fernand. “I know you were hard on my book. But that no doubt was because you thought it bad. For the same reason, finding yours good, I am glad to tell you so and to tell others.”

  More interesting than the letters we send our friends may be the ones we finish, then decide not to post after all. Found among his papers after his death was a note Proust had written to Gregh a little before the one he actually sent. It contained a far nastier, far less acceptable, but far truer message. It thanked Gregh for The House of Childhood, but then limited itself to praising the quantity, rather than the quality, of this poetic output, and went on to make wounding reference to Gregh’s pride, distrustfulness, and childlike soul.

  Why didn’t he send it? Though the dominant view of grievances is that they should invariably be discussed with their progenitors, the typically unsatisfactory results of doing so should perhaps urge us to reconsider. Proust might have invited Gregh to a restaurant, offered him the finest grapes on a vine plant, pressed a five-hundred-franc tip into the waiter’s hand for good measure, and begun to tell his friend in the gentlest voice that he seemed a little too proud, had some problems with trust, and that his soul was a touch childlike, only to find Gregh turning red in the face, pushing aside the grapes, and walking angrily out of the restaurant, to the surprise of the richly remunerated waiter. What would this have achieved, aside from unnecessarily alienating proud Gregh? And anyway, had Proust really become friends with this character in order to share his palm reader’s insights with him?

  Instead, these awkward thoughts were better entertained elsewhere, in a private space designed for analyses too wounding to be shared with those who had inspired them. A letter that never gets sent is such a place. A novel is another.

  One way of considering In Search of Lost Time is as an unusually long unsent letter, the antidote to a lifetime of proustification, the flip side of the Athenas, lavish gifts, and long-stemmed chrysanthemums, the place where the unsayable was finally granted expression. Having described artists as “creatures who talk of precisely the things one shouldn’t mention,” the novel gave Proust the chance to mention them all. Laure Haymann might have had her ravishing sides, but she also had less worthy ones, and these migrated into the representation of the fictional Odette de Crécy. Fernand Gregh might have avoided a lecture from Proust in real life, but he received a covert one in Proust’s damning portrait of Alfred Bloch, for whom he was in part the model.

  Unfortunately for Proust, the attempt to be honest and keep his friends was somewhat marred by the vulgar insistence of members of Parisian society on reading his work as a roman à clef. “There are no keys to the characters of this book,” insisted Proust, but even so, the keys took grave offense, among them Camille Barrère for finding bits of himself in Norpois, Robert de Montesquiou for finding bits of himself in the Baron de Charlus, the Duc d’Albufera for recognizing his love affair with Louisa de Mornand in Robert de Saint-Loup’s affair with Rachel, and Laure for finding traits of herself in Odette de Crécy. Though Proust rushed to assure Laure that in fact Odette was “exactly the opposite of you,” it wasn’t surprising that she had difficulty believing him, given that even their addresses were the same. The Paris Yellow Pages of Proust’s time refers to “HAYMAN (Mme Laure), rue Lapérouse, 3,” and the novel to Odette’s “little hotel, on the rue La Pérouse, behind the Arc de Triomphe.” The only ambiguity seems to be the spelling of the street.

  Despite these hiccups, the principle of separating what belongs to friendship and what belongs to the unsent letter or novel can still be defended (albeit with a proviso that one changes the street names and keeps the letters well hidden).

  It may even be defended in the name of friendship. Proust proposed that “the scorners of friendship can … be the finest friends in the world,” perhaps because these scorners approach the bond with more realistic expectations. They avoid talking at length about themselves, not because they think the subject unimportant, but rather because they recognize it as too important to be placed at the mercy of the haphazard, fleeting, and ultimately superficial medium that is conversation. It means they feel no resentment about asking rather than answering questions, seeing friendship as a domain in which to learn about, not lecture, others. Furthermore, because they appreciate others’ susceptibilities, they accept a resultant need for a degree of false amiability, for a rose-tinted interpretation of an aging ex-courtesan’s appearance, or for a generous review of a well-intentioned but pedestrian volume of poetry.

  Rather than militantly pursue both truth and affection, they discern the incompatibilities, and so divide their projects, making a wise separation between the chrysanthemums and the novel, between Laure Haymann and Odette de Crécy, between the letter that gets sent and the one that stays hidden but nevertheless needs to be written.

  Proust once wrote an essay in which he set out to restore a smile to the face of a gloomy, envious, and dissatisfied young man. He pictured this young man sitting at table after lunch one day in his parents’ flat, gazing dejectedly at his surroundings: at a knife left lying on the tablecloth, at the remains of an underdone, rather tasteless cutlet, and at a half-turned-back tablecloth. He could see his mother at the far end of the dining room doing her knitting, and the family cat curled up on top of a cupboard next to a bottle of brandy being reserved for a special occasion. The mundanity of the scene would contrast with the young man�
��s taste for beautiful and costly things, which he lacked the money to acquire. Proust imagined the revulsion the young aesthete would feel at this bourgeois interior, and how he would compare it with the splendors he had seen in museums and cathedrals. He would envy those bankers who had enough money to decorate their houses properly, so that everything in them was beautiful, was a work of art, right down to the coal tongs in the fireplace and the knobs on the doors.

  To escape his domestic gloom, if he couldn’t catch the next train to Holland or Italy, the young man might leave the flat and go to the Louvre, where at least he could feast his eyes on splendid things, grand palaces painted by Veronese, harbor scenes by Claude, and princely lives by Van Dyck.

  Touched by his fate, Proust proposed to make a radical change in the young man’s life by way of a modest alteration to his museum itinerary. Rather than let him hurry to galleries hung with paintings by Claude and Veronese, Proust offered to lead him to a quite different part of the museum, to those galleries hung with the works of Jean-Baptiste Chardin.

  It might have seemed an odd choice, for Chardin hadn’t painted many harbors, or princes, or indeed palaces. He liked to depict bowls of fruit, jugs, coffeepots, loaves of bread, knives, glasses of wine, and slabs of meat. He liked painting kitchen utensils, not just pretty chocolate jars but saltcellars and strainers. When it came to people, Chardin’s figures were rarely doing anything heroic: one was reading a book, another was building a house of cards, a woman had just come home from the market with a couple of loaves of bread, and a mother was showing her daughter some mistakes she had made in her needlework.

  Yet, in spite of the ordinary nature of their subjects, Chardin’s paintings succeeded in being extraordinarily beguiling and evocative. A peach by him was as pink and chubby as a cherubim; a plate of oysters or a slice of lemon were tempting symbols of gluttony and sensuality. A skate, slit open and hanging from a hook, evoked the sea of which it had been a fearsome denizen in its lifetime. Its insides, colored with deep red blood, blue nerves, and white muscles, were like the naves of a polychrome cathedral. There was a harmony, too, between objects: in one canvas, almost a friendship between the reddish colors of a hearthrug, a needle box, and a skein of wool. These paintings were windows onto a world at once recognizably our own, yet uncommonly, wonderfully tempting.

  After an encounter with Chardin, Proust had high hopes for the spiritual transformation of his sad young man.

  Once he had been dazzled by this opulent depiction of what he called mediocrity, this appetising depiction of a life he had found insipid, this great art of nature he had thought paltry, I should say to him: Are you happy?

  Why would he be? Because Chardin had shown him that the kind of environment in which he lived could, for a fraction of the cost, have many of the charms he had previously associated only with palaces and the princely life. No longer would he feel painfully excluded from the aesthetic realm, no longer would he be so envious of smart bankers with gold-plated coal tongs and diamond-studded door handles. He would learn that metal and earthenware could also be enchanting, and common crockery as beautiful as precious stones. After he had looked at Chardin’s work, even the humblest rooms in his parents’ flat would have the power to delight him, Proust promised:

  When you walk around a kitchen, you will say to yourself, this is interesting, this is grand, this is beautiful like a Chardin

  .

  Having started on his essay, Proust tried to interest Pierre Mainguet, the editor of the arts magazine the Revue Hebdomadaire, in its contents:

  I have just written a little study in the philosophy of art, if I may use that slightly pretentious phrase, in which I have tried to show how the great painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world, how they are the ones “by whom our eyes are opened,” opened, that is, on the world. In this study, I use the work of Chardin as an example, and I try to show its influence on our life, the charm and wisdom with which it coats our most modest moments by initiating us into the life of still life. Do you think this sort of study would interest the readers of the

  Revue Hebdomadaire

  ?

  Perhaps, but since its editor was sure it wouldn’t, they had no chance to find out. Turning the piece down was an understandable oversight. This was 1895, and Mainguet didn’t know Proust would one day be Proust. What is more, the moral of the essay lay not too far from the ridiculous. It was only a step away from suggesting that everything down to the last lemon was beautiful, that there was no good reason to be envious of any condition besides our own, that a hovel was as nice as a villa and an emerald no better than a chipped plate.

  However, instead of urging us to place the same value on all things, Proust might more interestingly have been encouraging us to ascribe to them their correct value, and hence to revise certain notions of the good life which risked inspiring an unfair neglect of some settings and a misguided enthusiasm for others. If it hadn’t been for Pierre Mainguet’s rejection, the readers of the Revue Hebdomadaire would have benefitted from a chance to reappraise their conceptions of beauty, and could have entered into a new and possibly more rewarding relationship with saltcellars, crockery, and apples.

  Why would they previously have lacked such a relationship? Why wouldn’t they have appreciated their tableware and fruit? At one level, such questions seem superfluous. It just appears natural to be struck by the beauty of some things and to be left cold by others. There is no conscious rumination or decision behind our choice of what appeals to us visually; we simply know we are moved by palaces but not by kitchens, by porcelain but not by china, by guavas but not apples.

  However, the immediacy with which aesthetic judgments arise should not fool us into assuming that their origins are entirely natural or their verdicts unalterable. Proust’s letter to Monsieur Mainguet hinted as much. By saying that great painters were the ones by whom our eyes were opened, Proust was at the same time implying that our sense of beauty was not immobile, and could be sensitized by painters, who would, through their canvases, inculcate in us an appreciation of once neglected aesthetic qualities. If the dissatisfied young man had failed to consider the family tableware or fruit, it was in part out of a lack of acquaintance with images that would have shown him the key to their attractions.

  Great painters possess such power to open our eyes because of the unusual receptivity of their own eyes to aspects of visual experience: to the play of light on the end of a spoon, the fibrous softness of a tablecloth, the velvety skin of a peach, or the pinkish tones of an old man’s skin—qualities that can in turn inspire our impressions of beauty. We might caricature the history of art as a succession of geniuses engaged in pointing out different elements worthy of our attention, a succession of painters using their immense technical mastery to say what amounts to “Aren’t those back streets in Delft pretty?” or “Isn’t the Seine nice outside Paris?” And in Chardin’s case, to say to the world, and some of the dissatisfied young men in it, “Look not just at the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice, and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen, and the crusty bread loaves in the hall.”

  The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them. Appreciating the beauty of crusty loaves does not preclude our interest in a château, but failing to do so must call into question our overall capacity for appreciation. The gap between what the dissatisfied youth could see in his flat and what Chardin noticed in very similar interiors places the emphasis on a certain way of looking, as opposed to a mere process of acquiring or possessing.

  The young man in the Chardin essay of 1895 was not the last Proustian character to be unhappy because he couldn’t open his eyes. He shared important similarities wit
h another dissatisfied Proustian hero, who appeared some eighteen years later. The Chardin youth and the narrator of In Search of Lost Time were both suffering from depression and were both living in a world drained of interest when they were both rescued by a vision of their world which presented it in its true, yet unexpectedly glorious, colors, and which reminded them of their failure to open their eyes adequately until then—the only difference being that one of these glorious visions came from a gallery in the Louvre, and the other from a boulangerie.

  To outline the baking case, Proust describes his narrator sitting at home one winter’s afternoon, suffering from a cold and feeling rather dispirited by the dreary day he has had, with only the prospect of another dreary day ahead of him tomorrow. His mother comes into the room and asks if he’d like a cup of lime-blossom tea. He declines her offer, but then, for no particular reason, changes his mind. To accompany this tea, his mother brings him a madeleine, a squat, plump little cake that looks as if it had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. The dispirited, rheumatic narrator breaks off a morsel, drops it into the tea, and takes a sip, at which point something miraculous happens:

  No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disaster innocuous, its brevity illusory.… I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal

  .

  What sort of madeleine was this? None other than the kind that Aunt Léonie used to dip into her tea and give to the narrator’s childhood self, on Sundays when he would come into her bedroom and say good morning to her, during the holidays his family used to spend at her house in the country town of Combray. Like much of his life, the narrator’s childhood has grown rather vague in his mind since then, and what he does remember of it holds no particular charm or interest. Which doesn’t mean it actually lacked charm; it might just be that he has forgotten what happened. And it is this failure that the madeleine now addresses. By a quirk of physiology, a cake that has not crossed his lips since childhood, and therefore remains uncorrupted by later associations, has the ability to carry him back to Combray days, introducing him to a stream of rich and intimate memories. He recalls with newfound wonder the old gray house in which Aunt Léonie used to live, the town and surroundings of Combray, the streets along which he used to run errands, the parish church, the country roads, the flowers in Léonie’s garden and the water lilies floating on the Vivonne River. And in so doing, he recognizes the worth of these memories, which inspire the novel he will eventually narrate, which is in a sense an entire, extended, controlled “Proustian moment,” to which it is akin in sensitivity and sensual immediacy.