How Proust Can Change Your Life

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

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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.

If the incident with the madeleine cheers the narrator, it is because it helps him realize that it isn’t his life that has been mediocre so much as the image of it he possessed in memory. It is a key Proustian distinction, as therapeutically relevant in his case as it was for the Chardin young man:

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgement, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life—and therefore we judge it disparagingly

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These poor images arise out of our failure to register a scene properly at the time, and hence to remember anything of its reality thereafter. Indeed, Proust suggests that we have a better chance of generating vivid images of our past when our memory is involuntarily jogged by a madeleine, a long-forgotten smell, or an old glove, than when we voluntarily and intellectually attempt to evoke it.

Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring.… So we don’t believe that life is beautiful because we don’t recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears

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A few years before he died, Proust received a questionnaire asking him to list his eight favorite French paintings in the Louvre (into which he hadn’t stepped for fifteen years). His wavering answer: Watteau’s L’Embarquement or perhaps L’Indifférent; three paintings by Chardin: a self-portrait, a portrait of his wife, and Nature morte; Manet’s Olympia; a Renoir, or perhaps Corot’s La Barque du Dante, or maybe his La Cathédrale de Chartres; and finally, Millet’s Le Printemps.

So we have an idea of a good Proustian painting of spring, which he would presumably have judged to be as capable of evoking the actual qualities of spring as involuntary memory was of evoking the actual qualities of the past. But what does a good painter put into his canvases which an indifferent one leaves out, which is another way of asking what separates voluntary from involuntary memory? One answer is, not very much, or at least surprisingly little. It is remarkable to what extent bad paintings of spring resemble, though are still distinct from, good ones. Bad painters may be excellent draftsmen, good on clouds, clever on budding leaves, dutiful on roots, and yet still lack a command of those elusive elements in which the particular charms of spring are lodged. They cannot, for instance, depict, and hence make us notice, the pinkish border on the edge of the blossom of a tree, the contrast between storm and sunshine in the light across a field, the gnarled quality of bark or the vulnerable, tentative appearance of flowers on the side of a country track—small details no doubt, but in the end, the only things on which our sense of, and enthusiasm for, springtime can be based.

Similarly, what separates involuntary from voluntary memory is both infinitesimal and critical. Before he tasted the legendary tea and madeleine, the narrator was not devoid of memories of his childhood. It wasn’t as though he had forgotten where in France he went on holiday as a child (Combray or Clermont-Ferrand?), what the river was called (Vivonne or Varonne?), and with which relative he had stayed (Aunt Léonie or Lilie?). Yet these memories were lifeless because they lacked the equivalent of the touches of the good painter, the awareness of light falling across Combray’s central square in mid-afternoon, the smell of Aunt Léonie’s bedroom, the moistness of the air on the banks of the Vivonne, the sound of the garden bell, and the aroma of fresh asparagus for lunch—details that suggest it would be more accurate to describe the madeleine as provoking a moment of appreciation rather than mere recollection.

Why don’t we appreciate things more fully? The problem goes beyond inattention or laziness. It may also stem from insufficient exposure to images of beauty, which are close enough to our own world in order to guide and inspire us. The young man in Proust’s essay was dissatisfied because he only knew Veronese, Claude, and Van Dyck, who did not depict worlds akin to his own, and his knowledge of art history failed to include Chardin, whom he so badly needed to point out the interest of his kitchen. The omission seems representative. Whatever the efforts of certain great artists to open our eyes to our world, they cannot prevent us from being surrounded by numerous less helpful images that, with no sinister intentions and often with great artistry, nevertheless have the effect of suggesting to us that there is a depressing gap between our own life and the realm of beauty.

As a boy, Proust’s narrator develops a desire to go to the seaside. He imagines how beautiful it must be to go to Normandy, and in particular to a resort he has heard of called Balbec. However, he is under the thrall of some hazardously antiquated images of seaside life which appear to have come out of a book on the medieval Gothic period. He pictures a coastline shrouded in great banks of mist and fog, pounded by a furious sea; he pictures isolated churches that are as rugged and precipitous as cliffs, with their towers echoing to the sound of wailing seabirds and deafening wind. As for the locals, he imagines a Normandy inhabited by the descendants of the proud ancient mythical tribe of the Cimmerians, a people described by Homer as living in a mysterious land of perpetual darkness.

Such an image of seaside beauty explains the narrator’s travel difficulties, for when he gets to Balbec, he finds a typical early-twentieth-century beach resort. The place is full of restaurants, shops, motorcars, and cyclists; there are people going swimming and walking along the seafront with their parasols; there is a grand hotel, with a luxurious lobby, a lift, bellboys, and a huge dining room whose plate-glass window looks out onto a completely calm sea, bathed in glorious sunshine.

Except that none of this is glorious to the medieval Gothic narrator, who had been so looking forward to those precipitous cliffs, those wailing seabirds, and that howling wind.

The disappointment illustrates the critical importance of images in our appreciation of our surroundings, together with the risks of leaving home with the wrong ones. A picture of cliffs and seabirds wailing may be enchanting, but it will lead to problems when it is six hundred years out of line with the reality of our holiday destination.

Though the narrator experiences a particularly extreme gap between his surroundings and his internal conception of beauty, it is arguable that a degree of discrepancy is characteristic of modern life. Because of the speed of technological and architectural change, the world is liable to be full of scenes and objects that have not yet been transformed into appropriate images and may therefore make us nostalgic for another, now lost world, which is not inherently more beautiful but might seem so because it has already been widely depicted by those who open our eyes. There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life, which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.

Fortunately for the narrator and his holiday, the painter Elstir has also come to Balbec, ready to create his own images rather than rely on those from old books. He has been at work painting local scenes, pictures of women in cotton dresses, of yachts out at sea, of harbors, seascapes, and a nearby racecourse. Furthermore, he invites the narrator to his studio. Standing in front of a painting of a racecourse, the narrator shyly admits that he’s never been tempted to go there, which isn’t surprising, given that beauty for him lies solely with stormy seas and wailing seabirds. However, Elstir suggests that he has been hasty and helps him to take a second look. He draws his attention to one of the jockeys, sitting in a paddock, gloomy and grey-faced in a bright jacket, reining in a rearing horse, and then points out how elegant women look at race meetings when they arrive in their carriages and stand up with their binoculars, bathed in a particular kind of sunlight, almost Dutch in tone, in which you can feel the coldness of the water.

The narrator has been avoiding not only the racecourse but also the seashore. He has been looking at the sea with his fingers in front of his eyes, in order to blot out any modern ships that might pass by and spoil his attempt to view the sea in an immemorial state, or at least as it must have looked no later than the early centuries of Greece. Again, Elstir rescues him from his peculiar habit and draws his attention to the beauty of yachts. He points out their uniform surfaces, which are simple, gleaming, and grey, and which in the bluish haze reflecting off the sea take on a lovely creamy softness. He talks of the women on board, who dress attractively in white cotton or linen clothes, which in the sunlight, against the blue of the sea, take on the dazzling whiteness of a spread sail.

After this encounter with Elstir and his canvases, the narrator has a chance to update his images of seaside beauty by a vital few centuries, and thereby saves his holiday.

I realised that regattas, and race-meetings where well-dressed women could be seen bathed in the greenish light of a marine race-course, could be as interesting for a modern artist as the festivities which Veronese or Carpaccio so loved to depict

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The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht, or the contrast between the color of a jockey’s coat and his face. It also emphasizes how vulnerable we are to depression when the Elstirs of the world choose not to go on holiday and the pre-prepared images run out, when our knowledge of art does not stretch any later than Carpaccio (1450–1525) and Veronese (1528–1588), and we see a 200 horsepower Sunseeker accelerating out of the marina. It may genuinely be an unattractive example of aquatic transport; then again, our objection to the speedboat may stem from nothing other than a stubborn adherence to ancient images of beauty and a resistance to a process of active appreciation which even Veronese and Carpaccio would have undertaken had they been in our place.

The images with which we are surrounded are often not just out-of-date, they can also be unhelpfully ostentatious. When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes. Chardin opens our eyes to the beauty of saltcellars and jugs; the madeleine delights the narrator by evoking memories of an ordinary bourgeois childhood; Elstir paints nothing grander than cotton dresses and harbors. In Proust’s view, such modesty is characteristic of beauty.

True beauty is indeed the one thing incapable of answering the expectations of an over-romantic imagination.… What disappointments has it not caused since it first appeared to the mass of mankind! A woman goes to see a masterpiece of art as excitedly as if she was finishing a serial-story, or consulting a fortune teller or waiting for her lover. But she sees a man sitting meditating by the window, in a room where there is not much light. She waits for a moment in case something more may appear, as in a boulevard transparency. And though hypocrisy may seal her

lips, she says in her heart of hearts: “What, is that all there is to Rembrandt’s Philosopher?”

A philosopher whose interest is of course understated, subtle, calm … It all amounts to an intimate, democratic, unsnobbish vision of the good life, one safely within reach of someone earning a bourgeois salary and devoid of anything luxurious, imposing, or aristocratic.

However touching, this does sit somewhat uneasily with evidence that Proust himself had rather a taste for ostentation, and frequently behaved in ways diametrically opposed to the spirit of Chardin or Rembrandt’s Philosopher. The accusations run something like this:

THAT HE HAD ELABORATE NAMES IN HIS ADDRESS BOOK: Though he grew up in a bourgeois family, Proust acquired as friends a more than coincidental range of aristocratic figures with names like the Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre, Comte Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld, Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, Prince Edmond de Polignac, Comte Bertrand de Salignac-Fénelon, Prince Constantin de Brancovan, and Princesse Caraman-Chimay.

THAT HE WENT TO THE RITZ ALL THE TIME: Though he was well catered to at home, and had a maid adept at preparing wholesome meals, and a dining room in which to give dinner parties, Proust repeatedly ate out and entertained at the Ritz in the Place Vendôme, where he would order sumptuous meals for friends, add a 200 percent service charge to the bill, and drink champagne from fluted glasses.

THAT HE WENT TO MANY PARTIES: In fact, so many that André Gide first turned down his novel at Gallimard, for the well-founded literary reason that he believed this to be the work of a manic socialite. As he later explained, “For me, you had remained the man who frequented the house of Mme X, Y, Z, the man who wrote for the Figaro. I thought of you as—shall I confess it?—… a snob, a dilettante, a socialite.”

Proust was ready with an honest answer. It was true, he had been attracted to the ostentatious life, he had sought to frequent the house of Madame X, Y, and Z and had tried to befriend any aristocrats who happened to be there (aristocrats whose extraordinary glamour in Proust’s day should be compared to the subsequent glamour of film stars, lest it be too easy to acquire a self-righteous sense of virtue on the basis of never having taken an interest in dukes).

However, the end of the story is important—namely, that Proust was disappointed by glamour when he found it. He went to Madame Y’s parties, sent flowers to Madame Z, ingratiated himself with the Prince Constantin de Brancovan, and then realized he had been sold a lie. The images of glamour that had instilled the desire to pursue aristocrats simply did not match the realities of aristocratic life. He recognized that he was better off staying at home, that he could be as happy talking to his maid as to the Princesse Caraman-Chimay.

Proust’s narrator experiences a similar trajectory of hope and disappointment. He begins by being drawn to the aura of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, picturing them as belonging to a superior race infused with the poetry of their ancient name, dating back to the earliest, most noble families of France, and a time so distant that not even the cathedrals of Paris and Chartres were yet built. He imagines the Guermantes wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age; they make him think of forest hunting scenes in medieval tapestries, and seem to be made of a substance unlike that of other humans, existing like figures in a stained-glass window. He dreams of how exquisite it would be to spend the day with the Duchesse fishing for trout in her sumptuous ducal park, filled with flowers, rivulets, and fountains.

Then he has a chance to meet the Guermantes, and the image shatters. Far from being made of a substance different from that of other humans, the Guermantes are much like anyone else, only with less developed tastes and opinions. The Duc is a coarse, cruel, vulgar man; his wife is keener to be sharp and witty than sincere; and the guests at their table, whom he had previously imagined to be like the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle, are interested only in gossiping and exchanging trivialities.

Such disastrous encounters with aristocrats might encourage us to give up on our search for so-called eminent figures, who only turn out to be vulgar drones when we meet them. The snobbish longing to associate with those of superior rank should, it seems, be abandoned in favor of a gracious accommodation to our lot.

Yet there may be a different conclusion to be drawn. Rather than ceasing to discriminate between people altogether, we may simply have to become better at doing so. The image of a refined aristocracy is not false, it is merely dangerously uncomplicated. There are of course superior people at large in the world, but it is optimistic to assume that they could be so conveniently located on the basis of their surname. It is this the snob refuses to believe, trusting instead in the existence of watertight classes whose members unfailingly display certain qualities. Though a few aristocrats can match expectations, a great many more will have the winning qualities of the Duc de Guermantes, for the category of “aristocracy” is simply too crude a net to pick up something as unpredictably allocated as virtue or refinement. There may be someone worthy of the expectations that the narrator has harbored of the Duc de Guermantes, but this person might well appear in the unexpected guise of an electrician, cook, or lawyer.

It is this unexpectedness that Proust eventually recognized. Late in life, when a certain Madame Sert wrote and bluntly asked him whether he was a snob, he replied:

If, amongst the very rare friends who out of habit continue to come and ask for news of me, there still passes now and then, a duke or a prince, they are largely made up for by other friends, one of whom is a valet and the other a driver.… It’s hard to choose between them. Valets are more educated than dukes, and speak a nicer French, but they are more fastidious about etiquette and less simple, more susceptible. At the end of the day, one can’t choose between them. The driver has more class

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The scenario may have been exaggerated for Madame Sert, but the moral was clear: that qualities like education or an ability to express oneself well did not follow simple paths, and that one could not therefore evaluate people on the basis of conspicuous categories. Just as Chardin had illustrated to the sad young man that beauty did not always lie in obvious places, so too the valet who spoke lovely French served to remind Proust (or perhaps just Madame Sert) that refinement was not conveniently tethered to its image.

Simple images are nevertheless attractive in their lack of ambiguity. Before he saw Chardin’s paintings, the sad young man could at least believe that all bourgeois interiors were inferior to palaces, and could therefore make a simple equation between palaces and happiness. Before meeting aristocrats, Proust could at least trust in the existence of an entire class of superior beings, and could equate meeting them with acquiring a fulfilled social life. How much more difficult to factor in sumptuous bourgeois kitchens, boring princes, and drivers with more class than dukes. Simple images provide certainties; for instance, they assure us that financial expenditure is a guarantor of enjoyment.

One sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable, but who become convinced that they are—and also convinced of the rare quality of their wholly detached tastes—when they have agreed to pay a hundred francs a day for a room in a hotel which will enable them to enjoy this sight and sound

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Similarly, there are people who are doubtful whether someone is intelligent, but who rapidly become convinced that they are once they see them fit the dominant image of an intelligent person and learn of their formal education, factual knowledge, and university degree.

Such people would have had no difficulty determining that Proust’s maid was an idiot. She thought that Napoleon and Bonaparte were two different people, and refused to believe Proust for a week when he suggested otherwise. But Proust knew she was brilliant (“I’ve never managed to teach her to spell, and she has never had the patience to read even half a page of my book, but she is full of extraordinary gifts”). This isn’t to propose an equally, if more perversely, snobbish argument that education has no value, and that the importance of European history from Campo Formio to the battle of Waterloo is the result of a sinister academic conspiracy, but rather that an ability to identify emperors and spell aproximately is not in itself enough to establish the existence of something as hard to define as intelligence.

Albertine has never taken an art history course. One summer afternoon in Proust’s novel, she is sitting on a hotel terrace in Balbec talking to Madame de Cambremer, her daughter-in-law, a barrister friend of theirs, and the narrator. Suddenly, out at sea, a group of gulls who have been floating on top of the water take off noisily.

“I love them; I saw them in Amsterdam,” says Albertine. “They smell of the sea, they come and sniff the salt air even through the paving stones.”

“Ah, so you’ve been to Holland. Do you know the Vermeers?” asks Madame de Cambremer. Albertine replies that unfortunately she doesn’t know them, at which point Proust quietly shares with us Albertine’s even more unfortunate belief that these Vermeers are a group of Dutch people, not canvases in the Rijksmuseum.

Luckily, the lacuna in her knowledge of art history goes by undetected, though one can imagine Madame de Cambremer’s horror had she discovered it. Nervous about her own ability to respond correctly to art, the external signs of artistic awareness take on a disproportionate significance for an art snob like Madame de Cambremer. Much as for the social snob, unable to judge others independently, a title or reputation becomes the only guide to eminence, so too for the art snob, information is ferociously clung to as a marker of artistic appreciation—though Albertine would only need to make another, culturally aware trip to Amsterdam in order to discover what she had missed. She might even appreciate Vermeer far more than Madame de Cambremer, for in her naïveté, there would at least be a potential for sincerity absent from de Cambremer’s exaggerated respect for art, which ironically ends up treating canvases far more like a family of Dutch burghers whom one would be privileged to meet.

The moral? That we shouldn’t deny the bread on the sideboard a place in our conception of beauty, that we should shoot the painter rather than the spring and blame memory rather than what is remembered, that we should restrain our expectations when introduced to a Comte de Salignac-Fénelon-de-Clermont-Tonnerre and avoid fixating on spelling mistakes and alternative histories of imperial France when meeting those less elaborately titled.

Q: Would Proust really be someone to consult for advice on romantic problems?

A: Perhaps—in spite of the evidence. He outlined his credentials in a letter to André Gide:

Incapable though I am of obtaining anything for myself, of sparing myself the least ill, I have been endowed (and it’s certainly my only gift) with the power to procure, very often, the happiness of others, to relieve them from pain. I have reconciled not only enemies, but lovers, I’ve cured invalids while being capable only of worsening my own illness, I’ve made idlers work while remaining idle myself.… The qualities (I tell you this quite unaffectedly

because in other respects I have a very poor opinion of myself) which give me these chances of success on behalf of other people are, together with a certain diplomacy, a capacity for self-forgetfulness and an exclusive concentration on my friends’ welfare, qualities which are not often met with in the same person.… I felt while I was writing my book that if Swann had known me and had been able to make use of me, I should have known how to bring Odette round to him

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Q: Swann and Odette?

A: One shouldn’t necessarily equate the misfortunes of individual fictional characters with the author’s overall prognosis for human contentment. Trapped inside a novel, these unhappy characters would, after all, be the only ones unable to derive the therapeutic benefits of reading it.

Q: Did he think that love could last forever?

A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn’t lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around.

Q: What kind of difficulties?

A: Take the unemotive example of the telephone. Bell invented it in 1876. By 1900, there were thirty thousand phones in France. Proust rapidly acquired one (tel. 29205) and particularly liked a service called the “theater-phone,” which allowed him to listen to live opera and theater in Paris venues.

He might have appreciated his phone, but he noted how quickly everyone else began taking theirs for granted. As early as 1907, he wrote that the machine was

a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream

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Moreover, if the confiserie had a busy line or the connection to the tailor a hum, instead of admiring the technological advances that had frustrated our sophisticated desires, we tended to react with childish ingratitude.

Since we are children who play with divine forces without shuddering before their mystery, we only find the telephone “convenient,” or rather, as we are spoilt children, we find that “it isn’t convenient,” we fill Le Figaro with our complaints

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A mere thirty-one years separated Bell’s invention from Proust’s sad observations on the state of French telephone-appreciation. It had taken a little more than three decades for a technological marvel to cease attracting admiring glances and turn into a household object that we wouldn’t hesitate to condemn were we to suffer at its hands the minor inconvenience of a delayed glace au chocolat.

It points clearly enough to the problems faced by human beings, comparatively humdrum things, in seeking eternal, or at least life-long, appreciation from their fellows.

Q: How long can the average human expect to be appreciated?

A: Fully appreciated? Often, as little as quarter of an hour. As a boy, Proust’s narrator longs to befriend the beautiful, vivacious Gilberte, whom he has met playing in the Champs-Élysées. Eventually, his wish comes true. Gilberte becomes his friend, and invites him regularly to tea at her house. There she cuts him slices of cake, ministers to his needs, and treats him with great affection.

He is happy, but, soon enough, not as happy as he should be. For so long, the idea of having tea in Gilberte’s house was like a vague, chimerical dream, but after quarter of an hour in her drawing room, it is the time before he knew her, before she was cutting him cake and showering him with affection, that starts to grow chimerical and vague.

The outcome can only be a certain blindness to the favors he is enjoying. He will soon forget what there is to be grateful for because the memory of Gilberte-less life will fade, and with it, evidence of what there is to savor. The smile on Gilberte’s face, the luxury of her tea, and the warmth of her manners will eventually become such a familiar part of his life that there will be as much incentive to notice them as there is to notice omnipresent elements like trees, clouds, or telephones.

The reason for this neglect is that, like all of us in the Proustian conception, the narrator is a creature of habit, and therefore always liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar.

We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes

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Q: Why does habit have such a dulling effect?

A: Proust’s most suggestive answer lies in a remark about the biblical Noah and his Ark:

When I was a small child, no character in the Bible seemed to me to have a worse fate than Noah, because of the flood which kept him locked up in the Ark for forty days. Later on, I was often ill, and also had to stay in an “Ark” for endless days. It was then I understood that Noah would never have been able to see the world as well as from the Ark, even though it was shuttered and it was night on earth

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How could Noah have seen anything of the planet when he was sitting in a shuttered Ark with an amphibious zoo? Though we usually assume that seeing an object requires us to have visual contact with it, and that seeing a mountain involves visiting the Alps and opening our eyes, this may only be the first, and in a sense the inferior, part of seeing, for appreciating an object properly may also require us to re-create it in our mind’s eye.

After looking at a mountain, if we shut our lids and dwell on the scene internally, we are led to seize on its important details. The mass of visual information is interpreted and the mountain’s salient features identified: its granite peaks, its glacial indentations, the mist hovering above the tree line—details that we would previously have seen but not for that matter noticed.

Though Noah was six hundred years old when God flooded the world, and would have had much time to look at his surroundings, the fact that they were always there, that they were so permanent in his visual field, would not have encouraged him to re-create them internally. What was the point of focusing closely on a bush in his mind’s eye when there was abundant physical evidence of bushes in the vicinity?

How different the situation would have been after two weeks in the Ark, when, nostalgic for his old surroundings and unable to see them, Noah would naturally have begun to focus on the memory of bushes, trees, and mountains, and therefore, for the first time in his six-hundred-year life, begun to see them properly.

Which suggests that having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it. Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it, because we feel we have done all the work simply in securing visual contact.

Q: Should we spend more time locked up in Arks then?

A: It would help us pay more attention to things, lovers in particular. Deprivation quickly drives us into a process of appreciation, which is not to say that we have to be deprived in order to appreciate things, but rather that we should learn a lesson from what we naturally do when we lack something, and apply it to conditions where we don’t.

If long acquaintance with a lover so often breeds boredom, breeds a sense of knowing a person too well, the problem may ironically be that we do not know him or her well enough. Whereas the initial novelty of the relationship could leave us in no doubt as to our ignorance, the subsequent reliable physical presence of the lover and the routines of communal life can delude us into thinking that we have achieved genuine, and dull, familiarity; whereas it may be no more than a fake sense of familiarity that physical presence fosters, and that Noah would have felt for six hundred years in relation to the world, until the Flood taught him otherwise.

Q: Did Proust have any relevant thoughts on dating? What should one talk about on a first date? And is it good to wear black?

A: Advice is scant. A more fundamental doubt is whether one should accept dinner in the first place.

There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: “No, this evening I shan’t be free.”

If this response proves bewitching, it is because of the connection made in Noah’s case between appreciation and absence. Though a person may be filled with attributes, an incentive is nevertheless required to ensure that a seducer will focus wholeheartedly on these, an incentive which finds perfect form in a dinner rebuff—the dating equivalent of forty days at sea.

Proust demonstrates the benefits of delay in his thoughts on the appreciation of clothes. Both Albertine and the Duchesse de Guermantes are interested in fashion. However, Albertine has very little money and the Duchesse owns half of France. The Duchesse’s wardrobes are therefore overflowing; as soon as she sees something she wants, she can send for the dressmaker and her desire is fulfilled as rapidly as hands can sew. Albertine, on the other hand, can hardly buy anything, and has to think at length before she does so. She spends hours studying clothes, dreaming of a particular coat or hat or dressing gown.

The result is that though Albertine has far fewer clothes than the Duchesse, her understanding, appreciation, and love of them is far greater.

Like every obstacle in the way of possessing something…, poverty, more generous than opulence, gives women far more than the clothes they cannot afford to buy: the desire for those clothes which creates a genuine, detailed, thorough knowledge of them

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Proust compares Albertine to a student who visits Dresden after cultivating a desire to see a particular painting, whereas the Duchesse is like a wealthy tourist who travels without any desire or knowledge, and experiences nothing but bewilderment, boredom, and exhaustion when she arrives.

Which emphasizes the extent to which physical possession is only one component of appreciation. If the rich are fortunate in being able to travel to Dresden as soon as the desire to do so arises, or to buy a dress just after they have seen it in a catalog, they are cursed because of the speed with which their wealth fulfills their desires. No sooner have they thought of Dresden than they can be on a train there; no sooner have they seen a dress than it can be in their wardrobe. They therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less privileged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, hats, dressing gowns, and someone who isn’t free this evening.

Q: Was he against sex before marriage?

A: No, just before love. And not for any starchy reasons, simply because he felt it wasn’t a good idea to sleep together when encouraging someone to fall in love was a consideration.

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones

.

Q: Surely not?

A: Other women may of course be fascinating, the problem is that they risk not seeming so, given what the Duchesse de Guermantes has told us about the consequences of acquiring beautiful things too easily.

Take the case of prostitutes, a group more or less available every night. As a young man, Proust had been a compulsive masturbator, so compulsive that his father had urged him to go to a brothel, to take his mind off what the nineteenth century considered to be a highly dangerous pastime. In a candid letter to his grandfather, sixteen-year-old Marcel described how the visit had gone:

I so badly needed to see a woman in order to stop my bad habits of masturbating that papa gave me 10 francs to go to the brothel. But, 1st in my excitement, I broke the chamber pot, 3 francs, 2nd in this same excitement, I wasn’t able to have sex. So now I’m back to square one, constantly waiting for another 10 francs to empty myself and for 3 more francs for that pot

.

But the brothel trip was more than a practical disaster; it revealed a conceptual problem with prostitution. The prostitute is in an unfortunate position in the Proustian theory of desire, because she both wishes to entice a man and yet is commercially prevented from doing what is most likely to encourage love—namely, tell him that she is not free tonight. She may be clever and attractive, and yet the one thing she cannot do is foster doubts as to whether he will ever possess her physically. The outcome is clear, and therefore real, lasting desire unlikely.

If prostitutes … attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain

.

Q: So he believed that sex was everything men wanted to attain?

A: A further distinction might have to be made. The prostitute offers a man what he thinks he wants to attain; she gives him an illusion of attainment, but one which is nevertheless strong enough to threaten the gestation of love.

To return to the Duchesse, she fails to appreciate her dresses not because they are less beautiful than other dresses, but because physical possession is so easy, which fools her into thinking that she has acquired everything she wanted, and distracts her from pursuing the only real form of possession that is effective in Proust’s eyes—namely, imaginative possession (dwelling on the details of the dress, the folds of the material, the delicacy of the thread), an imaginative possession that Albertine already pursues, through no conscious choice, because it is a natural response to being denied physical contact.

Q: Does this mean he didn’t think much of making love?

A: He merely thought humans were missing an anatomical part with which to perform the act properly. In the Proustian scheme, it is impossible to love someone physically. Given the coyness of his age, he limited his thoughts to the disappointment of kissing:

Man, a creature clearly less rudimentary than the sea-urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and particularly possesses none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and perhaps he thereby achieves a result slightly more satisfying than caressing his beloved with a horny tusk. But a pair of lips, designed to convey to the palate the taste of whatever whets their appetite, must be content, without understanding their mistake or admitting their disappointment, with roaming over the surface and with coming to a halt at the barrier of the impenetrable but irresistible cheek

.

Why do we kiss people? At one level, merely to generate the pleasurable sensation of rubbing an area of nerve endings against a corresponding strip of soft, fleshy, moist skin tissue. However, the hopes with which we approach the prospect of an initial kiss typically extend beyond this. We seek to hold and savor not just a mouth but an entire beloved person. With the kiss, we hope to achieve a higher form of possession; the longing a beloved inspires in us promises to come to an end once our lips are allowed to roam freely over theirs.

But for Proust, though a kiss can produce a pleasurable physical tingle, it cannot grant us a true sense of amorous possession.

For example, his narrator is attracted to Albertine, whom he met as she walked along the Normandy Coast one brilliant summer’s day. He is attracted to her rosy cheeks, her black hair, her beauty spot, her impudent, confident manner, and to things she evokes and makes him nostalgic for—the summer, the smell of the sea, youth. Once he returns to Paris after the summer, Albertine comes to his flat. In contrast to her reserve when he tried to kiss her at the seaside, she now lies close to him on the bed and falls into an embrace. It promises to be a moment of resolution. Yet, whereas he had hoped the kiss would allow him to savor Albertine, her past, the beach, the summer, and the circumstances of their meeting, the reality is somewhat more prosaic. His lips brushing against Albertine’s allow him as much contact with her as a brush with a horny tusk. He can’t see her, because of the awkwardness of the kissing position, and his nose is so squashed he can hardly breathe.

It may have been a particularly inept kiss, but by detailing its disappointments, Proust points to a general difficulty in a physical method of appreciation. The narrator recognizes that he could do almost anything physically with Albertine—take her on his knees, hold her head in his hands, caress her—but that he would still be doing nothing other than touching the sealed envelope of a far more elusive beloved person.

This might not matter were it not for a tendency to believe that physical contact might in fact put us directly in touch with the object of our love. Disappointed with the kiss, we then risk ascribing our disappointment to the tedium of the person we were kissing, rather than to the limitations involved in doing so.

Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?

A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit. A word of advice for someone who has taken the fatal step of cohabitation:

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy

.

Nevertheless, the characters in Proust’s novel are inept at capitalizing on their jealousy. The threat of losing their partner may lead them to realize that they have not appreciated this person adequately, but because they only understand physical appreciation, they do no more than secure physical allegiance, which merely brings temporary relief before boredom sets in again. It means they are forced into a debilitating vicious circle: they desire someone, kiss them with a horny tusk, and get bored. If someone threatens the relationship, they get jealous, wake up for a moment, have another kiss with the horny tusk, and get bored once more. Condensed into a male heterosexual version, the situation runs like this:

Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her

.

Q: So what would Proust have told these unhappy lovers if he had been able to meet and help them, as he had boasted to André Gide?

A: At a guess, he would have sent them to think about Noah and the world he could suddenly see from his Ark, and about the Duchesse de Guermantes and the dresses she had never looked at properly in her closet.

Q: But what would he have said to Swann and Odette in particular?

A: A fine question—but there are limits to how far one can ignore the lesson of perhaps the wisest person in Proust’s book, a certain Madame Leroi, who, when asked for her views on love, curtly replies:

“Love? I make it often, but I never talk about it.”

How seriously should we take books? “Dear friend,” Proust told André Gide, “I believe, contrary to the fashion among our contemporaries, that one can have a very lofty idea of literature, and at the same time have a good-natured laugh at it.” The remark may have been throwaway, but its underlying message was not. For a man who devoted his life to literature, Proust manifested a singular awareness of the dangers of taking books too seriously, or rather of adopting a fetishistically reverent attitude toward them which, while appearing to pay due homage, would in fact travesty the spirit of literary production; a healthy relationship to other people’s books would depend as much on an appreciation of their limitations as of their benefits.

THE BENEFITS OF READING

In 1899, things were going badly for Proust. He was twenty-eight, he had done nothing with his life, he was still living at home, he had never earned any money, he was always ill, and, worst of all, he had been trying to write a novel for the last four years and it was showing few signs of working out. In the autumn of that year, he went on holiday to the French Alps, to the spa town of Évian, and it was here that he read and fell in love with the works of John Ruskin, the English art critic renowned for his writings on Venice, Turner, the Italian Renaissance, Gothic architecture, and alpine landscapes.

Proust’s encounter with Ruskin exemplified the benefits of reading. “The universe suddenly regained infinite value in my eyes,” explained Proust subsequently, because the universe had had such value in Ruskin’s eyes, and because he had been a genius at transmuting his impressions into words. Ruskin had expressed things that Proust might have felt himself but could not have articulated on his own; in Ruskin, he found experiences that he had never been more than semiconscious of raised and beautifully assembled in language.

Ruskin sensitized Proust to the visible world, to architecture, art, and nature. Here is Ruskin awakening his readers’ senses to a few of the many things going on in an ordinary mountain stream:

If it meets a rock three or four feet above the level of its bed, it will often neither part nor foam, nor express any

concern about the matter, but clear it in a smooth dome of water, without apparent exertion, the whole surface of the surge being drawn into parallel lines by its extreme velocity, so that the whole river has the appearance of a deep and raging sea, with only this difference, that torrent-waves always break backwards, and sea-waves forwards. Thus, then, in the water which has gained an impetus, we have the most exquisite arrangements of curved lines, perpetually changing from convex to concave, and vice versa, following every swell and hollow of the bed with their modulating grace, and all in unison of motion, presenting perhaps the most beautiful series of inorganic forms which nature can possibly produce

.

Aside from landscape, Ruskin helped Proust to discover the beauty of the great cathedrals of northern France. When he returned to Paris after his holiday, Proust traveled to Bourges and to Chartres, to Amiens and Rouen. Later explaining what Ruskin had taught him, Proust pointed to a passage on Rouen Cathedral in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which Ruskin minutely described a particular stone figure that had been carved, together with hundreds of others, in one of the cathedral’s portals. The figure was of a little man, no more than ten centimeters high, with a vexed, puzzled expression, and one hand pressed hard against his cheek, wrinkling the flesh under his eye.

For Proust, Ruskin’s concern for the little man had effected a kind of resurrection, one characteristic of great art. He had known how to look at this figure, and had hence brought it back to life for succeeding generations. Ever polite, Proust offered a playful apology to the little figure for what would have been his own inability to notice him without Ruskin as a guide (“I would not have been clever enough to find you, amongst the thousands of stones in our towns, to pick out your figure, to rediscover your personality, to summon you, to make you live again”). It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers—namely, bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.

Because he had been so impressed by Ruskin, Proust sought to extend his contact with him by engaging in the traditional occupation open to those who love reading: literary scholarship. He set aside his novelistic projects and became a Ruskin scholar. When the English critic died in 1900, he wrote his obituary, followed it up with several essays, and then undertook the immense task of translating Ruskin into French, a task all the more ambitious because he hardly spoke any English and, according to Georges de Lauris, would have had trouble correctly ordering a lamb chop in English in a restaurant. However, he succeeded in producing highly accurate translations of both Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and his Sesame and Lilies, adding an array of scholarly footnotes testifying to the breadth of his Ruskinian knowledge. It was work he carried out with the fanaticism and rigor of a maniacal professor; in the words of his friend Marie Nordlinger:

The apparent discomfort in which he worked was quite incredible, the bed was littered with books and papers, his

pillows all over the place, a bamboo table on his left piled high and more often than not, no support for whatever he was writing on (no wonder he wrote illegibly), with a cheap wooden penholder or two lying where it had fallen on the floor

.

Because Proust was such a good scholar and such an unsuccessful novelist, an academic career must have beckoned. It was his mother’s hope. After watching him waste years on a novel that had gone nowhere, she took pleasure in discovering that her son had the makings of a fine scholar. Proust could not have ignored his own aptitude, and indeed, many years later, expressed sympathy with his mother’s judgment:

I always agreed with maman that I could have done only one thing in life, but a thing which we both valued so much that it is saying a lot: namely, an excellent professor

.

THE LIMITATIONS OF READING

However, needless to say, Proust did not become Professor Proust, Ruskin scholar and translator. A significant fact, given how well suited he was to academic discipline, how ill suited he was to almost everything else, and how much he respected his beloved mother’s judgment.

His reservations could hardly have been more subtle. He was in no doubt as to the immense value of reading and study, and could defend his Ruskinian labors against any vulgar arguments in favor of mental self-sufficiency.

The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgement of part of its independence. “What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.” Such a view rests on a psychological error which will be discounted by all those who have accepted a spiritual discipline and feel thereby that their power of understanding and of feeling is infinitely enhanced, and their critical sense never paralysed.… There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his

.

Yet something in this forceful defense of reading and scholarship intimated Proust’s reservations. Without drawing attention to how contentious or critical the point was, he argued that we should be reading for a particular reason: not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity, not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because, to repeat with italics, “there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.” We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thoughts that help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves.

And herein lay Proust’s problem, because in his view, books could not make us aware of enough of the things we felt. They might open our eyes, sensitize us, enhance our powers of perception, but at a certain point they would stop, not by coincidence, not occasionally, not out of bad luck, but inevitably, by definition, for the stark and simple reason that the author wasn’t us. There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood, or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone. Proust’s respect for Ruskin was enormous, but having worked intensely on his texts for six years, having lived with bits of paper scattered across his bed and his bamboo table piled high with books, in a particular burst of irritation at continually being tethered to another man’s words, Proust exclaimed that Ruskin’s qualities had not prevented him from frequently “being silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous.”

The fact that Proust did not at this point turn to translating George Eliot or annotating Dostoyevsky signals a recognition that the frustration he felt with Ruskin was not incidental to this author, but reflected a universally constraining dimension to reading and scholarship, and was sufficient reason never to strive for the title of Professor Proust.

It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role at once essential

yet limited that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called “Conclusions” but for the reader “Incitements.” We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to do is provide us with desires.… That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it

.

However, Proust was singularly aware of how tempting it was to believe that reading could constitute our entire spiritual life, which led him to formulate some careful lines of instruction on a responsible approach to books:

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realise only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body

.

Because books are so good at helping us to become aware of certain things we feel, Proust recognized the ease with which we could be tempted to leave the entire task of interpreting our lives to these objects.

He gave an example in his novel of the dangers of this excessive reliance, in a vignette about a man reading the works of La Bruyère. He pictured him coming across the following aphorism in the pages of Les Caractères:

Men often want to love, without managing to do so: they seek their own ruin without being able to attain it, and, if I can put it thus, they are forced against their will to remain free

.

Because this suitor had tried unsuccessfully for years to make himself loved by a woman who would only have made him unhappy if she had loved him, Proust conjectured that the link between his own life and the aphorism would deeply move this unfortunate suitor. He would now read the passage over and over again, swelling it with meaning until it was ready to burst, appending to the aphorism a million words and the most stirring memories of his own life, repeating it with immense joy because it seemed so beautiful and so true.

Though it was undoubtedly a crystallization of many aspects of this man’s experience, Proust implied that such extreme enthusiasm for La Bruyère’s thought would at some point distract the man from the particularities of his own feelings. The aphorism might have helped him to understand part of his story, but it did not reflect it exactly; in order to fully capture his romantic misfortunes, the sentence would have had to read, “Men often want to be loved …” rather than “Men want to love.…” It wasn’t a major difference, but it was a symbol of the way that books, even when they brilliantly articulate some of our experiences, may nevertheless leave others behind.

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:

SYMPTOM NO. 1:

THAT 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?

SYMPTOM NO. 2:

THAT 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.

MARCEL AND VIRGINIA

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.

SYMPTOM NO. 3:

THAT 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.

SYMPTOM NO. 4:

THAT WE ARE TEMPTED TO INVEST IN A COPY OF LA CUISINE 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.

SYMPTOM NO. 5:

THAT WE ARE TEMPTED TO VISIT ILLIERS-COMBRAY

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 summers 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.

According to Monsieur Larcher, the author of a leaflet on sale at the tourist office:

If one wishes to grasp the deep and occult sense of In Search of Lost Time, one must, before starting to read it, devote an entire day to visiting Illiers-Combray. The magic of Combray can really only be experienced in this privileged place

.

Though Larcher displays admirable civic feeling and would no doubt be applauded by every patissier involved in the madeleine trade, one wonders after just such a day whether he is not at risk of exaggerating the qualities of his town and unwittingly diminishing those of Proust.

More honest visitors will admit to themselves that there is nothing striking about the town. It looks much like any other, which doesn’t mean it is uninteresting, simply that there is no obvious evidence of the privileged status that Monsieur Larcher accords it. It is a fitting Proustian point: the interest of a town is necessarily dependent on a certain way of looking at it. Combray may be pleasant, but it is as valuable a place to visit as any in the large plateau of northern France. The beauty that Proust revealed there could be present, latent, in almost any town, if only we made the effort to consider it in a Proustian way.

Ironically, however, it is out of an idolatrous reverence for Proust, and a misunderstanding of his aesthetic ideas, that we speed blindly through the surrounding countryside, through neighboring nonliterary towns and villages like Brou, Bonneval, and Courville, on our way to the imagined delights of Proust’s childhood locale. In so doing, we forget that had Proust’s family settled in Courville, or his old aunt taken up residence in Bonneval, it would have been to these places that we would have driven, just as unfairly. Our pilgrimage is idolatrous because it privileges the place Proust happened to grow up in rather than his manner of considering it, an oversight that the corpulent Michelin man encourages because he fails to recognize that the worth of sights is dependent more on the quality of one’s vision than on the object viewed, that there is nothing inherently three-star about a town Proust grew up in or inherently no-star about an Elf petrol station near Courville where Proust never had a chance to fill his Renault—but where if he had, he might easily have found something to appreciate, for it has a delightful forecourt with daffodils planted in a neat border and an old-fashioned pump that, from a distance, looks like a stout man leaning against a fence wearing a pair of burgundy dungarees.

In the preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Proust had written enough to turn the Illiers-Combray tourist industry into an absurdity had anyone bothered to listen:

We would like to go and see the field that Millet … shows us in his Springtime, we would like M. Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to

that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that gave … Millet or Claude Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world, is that they carry on them like some elusive reflection the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted

.

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not to look at his world through our eyes.

To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel that interest is so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not capture more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world that artists had not considered. As Proustian idolaters, we would have little time for desserts that Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, for nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest.

The moral? That there is no greater homage we could pay to Proust than to pass the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin—namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it

.

Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following: Marie-Pierre Bay, Marina Benjamin, Nigel Chancellor, Jan Dailey, Caroline Dawnay, Dan Frank, Minna Fry, Anthony Gornall, Nicki Kennedy, Ursula Köhler, Jacqueline and Marc Leland, Alison Menzies, Claudine O’Hearn, Albert Read, Jon Riley, Tanya Stobbs, Peter Straus, and Kim Witherspoon. I am particularly indebted to Miriam Gross for her encouragement and a weekly column. For their sharp-eyed proofreading, I would like to thank Mair and Mike McGeever, Noga Arikha, and, as ever, Gilbert and Janet de Botton. My greatest debts are to John Armstrong, for his friendship and two years of extraordinarily insightful conversation; and to Kate McGeever, who endured me throughout the project, and was unfailingly lovely.