How Proust Can Change Your Life

A swell affair. Proust is white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced. He asks me questions. Will I please tell him how the Committees work. I say, “Well we generally meet at 10.00, there are secretaries behind …” “Mais non, mais non, vous allez trop vite. Recommencez. Vous prenez la voiture de la Délégation. Vous descendez au Quai d’Orsay. Vous montez I’escalier. Vous entrez dans la Salle. Et alors? Précisez, mon cher, précisez.” So I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all: the handshakes: the maps: the rustle of papers: the tea in the next room: the macaroons. He listens enthralled, interrupting from time to time—“Mais précisez, mon cher monsieur, n’allez pas trop vite.”

It might be a Proustian slogan: n’allez pas trop vite. And an advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process. For Nicolson, an early morning that had been summed up by the terse statement “Well we generally meet at 10.00” had been expanded to reveal handshakes and maps, rustling papers and macaroons—the macaroon acting as a useful symbol, in its seductive sweetness, of what gets noticed when we don’t go by trop vite.

Less greedily, more importantly, going by slowly may entail greater sympathy. We are being a good deal more sympathetic to the disturbed Mr. van Blarenberghe in writing an extended meditation on his crime than in muttering “crazy” and turning the page.

And expansion brings similar benefits to noncriminal activity. Proust’s narrator spends an unusual number of pages of the novel describing a painful indecision; he doesn’t know whether to propose marriage to his girlfriend Albertine, whom he sometimes thinks he couldn’t live without, and at other times is certain he never wants to see again.

The problem could be resumed in under two seconds by a skilled contestant from the All-England Summarise Proust competition: Young man unsure whether or not to propose marriage. Though not as brief as this, the letter the narrator one day receives from his mother expresses his marriage dilemma in terms that make his previous, copious analysis look shamefully exaggerated. After reading it, the narrator tells himself:

I’ve been dreaming, the matter is quite simple.… I am an indecisive young man, and it is a case of one of those marriages where it takes time to find out whether it will happen or not. There is nothing in this peculiar to Albertine

.

Simple accounts are not without their pleasures. Suddenly, we are just “insecure,” “homesick,” “settling in,” “facing up to death,” or “afraid of letting go.” It can be soothing to identify with a description of a problem which makes a previous assessment look needlessly complicated.

But it usually isn’t. A moment after reading the letter, the narrator reconsiders and realizes that there must be more to his story with Albertine than his mother has suggested, and so once again sides with length, with the hundreds of pages he has devoted to charting every shift in his relation with Albertine (n’allez pas trop vite), and comments: