How Proust Can Change Your Life

The frustration of the Roman beauty suggests that the poseur had violated a fundamental law of length stipulating the appropriate number of words in which an experience could be related. He had not written too much per se; he had digressed intolerably given the significance of the events under consideration. Falling asleep? Two words should cover it, four lines if the hero had indigestion or if a Labrador was giving birth in the courtyard below. But the poseur hadn’t digressed simply about sleep; he had made the same error with dinner parties, seductions, jealousies.

It explains the inspiration behind the “All-England Summarise Proust Competition,” once hosted by Monty Python in a south coast seaside resort, a competition that required contestants to précis the seven volumes of Proust’s work in fifteen seconds or less, and to deliver the results first in a swimsuit and then in evening dress. The first contestant was Harry Baggot from Luton, who hurriedly offered the following:

Proust’s novel ostensibly tells of the irrevocability of time lost, of innocence and experience, the reinstatement of extra-temporal values and time regained. Ultimately the novel is both optimistic and set within the context of human religious experience. In the first volume, Swann visits—

But fifteen seconds did not allow for more. “A good attempt,” declared the game-show host with dubious sincerity, “but unfortunately he chose a general appraisal of the work before getting on to specific details.” The contestant was thanked for his attempt, commended on his swimming trunks, and shown off stage.

Despite this personal defeat, the contest as a whole remained optimistic that an acceptable summary of Proust’s work was possible, a faith that what had originally taken seven volumes to express could reasonably be condensed into fifteen seconds or less, without too great a loss of integrity or meaning, if only an appropriate candidate could be found.

What did Proust have for breakfast? Before his illness became too severe, two cups of strong coffee with milk, served in a silver pot engraved with his initials. He liked his coffee tightly packed in a filter with the water made to pass through drop by drop. He also had a croissant, fetched by his maid from a boulangerie that knew just how to make them, crisp and buttery, and which he would dunk in his coffee as he looked through his letters and read the newspaper.

He had complex feelings about this last activity. However unusual the attempt to compress seven volumes of a novel into fifteen seconds, perhaps nothing exceeds, in both regularity and scope, the compression entailed by a daily newspaper. Stories that would comfortably fill twenty volumes find themselves reduced to narrow columns, competing for the reader’s attention with a multitude of once profound, now etiolated dramas.

“That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper,” wrote Proust, “thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty-thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of café au lait.”

Of course, it shouldn’t surprise us how naturally the thought of another sip of coffee could derail our attempt to consider with requisite care those closely packed, perhaps now crumb-littered pages. The more an account is compressed, the more it seems that it deserves no more space than it has been allocated. How easy to imagine that nothing at all has happened today, to forget the fifty thousand war dead, sigh, toss the paper to one side, and experience a mild wave of melancholy at the tedium of daily routine.

It was not Proust’s way. An entire philosophy, not only of reading but of life, could be said to emerge from Lucien Daudet’s passing remark, informing us:

He read newspapers with great care. He wouldn’t even overlook the news-in-brief section. A news-in-brief told by him turned into a whole tragic or comic novel, thanks to his imagination and his fantasy

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The news-in-brief in Le Figaro, Proust’s daily paper, were not for the fainthearted. On a particular morning in May 1914, readers would have been treated to some of the following: