How Proust Can Change Your Life

One can of course reduce everything, if one regards it in its social aspect, to the most commonplace item of newspaper gossip. From outside, it is perhaps thus that I myself would look at it. But I know very well that what is true, what at least is also true, is everything that I have thought, what I have read in Albertine’s eyes, the fears that torment me, the problem that I continually put to myself with regard to Albertine. The story of the hesitant suitor and the broken engagement may correspond to this, as the report of a theatrical performance made by an intelligent reporter may give us the subject of one of Ibsen’s plays. But there is something beyond those facts that are reported

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The lesson? To hang on to the performance, to read the newspaper as though it were only the tip of a tragic or comic novel, and to use thirty pages to describe a fall into sleep when need be. And if there is no time, at least to resist the approach of Alfred Humblot at Ollendorf and Jacques Madeleine at Fasquelle, which Proust defined as “the self-satisfaction felt by ‘busy’ men—however idiotic their business—at ‘not having time’ to do what you are doing.”

A good way of evaluating the wisdom of someone’s ideas might be to undertake a careful examination of the state of their own mind and health. After all, if their pronouncements were truly worthy of our attention, we should expect that the first person to reap their benefits would be their creator. Might this justify an interest not simply in a writer’s work but also in their life?

Sainte-Beuve, the respected nineteenth-century critic, would have eagerly concurred:

Until such time as one has put to oneself a certain number of questions about an author, and has answered them, be it only to oneself alone and under one’s breath, one cannot

be sure of having grasped him completely, even though the questions may seem quite foreign to the nature of his writings: What were his religious ideas? How did the spectacle of nature affect him? How did he behave in the matter of women, of money? Was he rich, poor; what was his diet, his daily routine? What was his vice or his weakness? None of the answers to these questions is irrelevant

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Even so, the answers tend to be surprising. However brilliant, however wise the work, it seems that the lives of artists can be relied upon to exhibit an extraordinary, incongruous range of turmoil, misery, and stupidity.

It accounts for why Proust dismissed Sainte-Beuve’s thesis, and argued forcefully that it was the books, not the lives, that mattered. That way, one could be sure of appreciating what was important (“It’s true that there are people who are superior to their books, but that’s because their books are not Books”). Balzac may have been ill-mannered, Stendhal conversationally dull, and Baudelaire obsessive, but why should this color our approach to their works, which suffer from none of the faults of their creators?

Whatever the persuasiveness of the argument, it is easy to see why Proust should have been especially keen on it. Whereas his writing was logical, well constructed, often serene, even sagelike, he led a life of appalling physical and psychological suffering. While it is clear why someone might be interested in developing a Proustian approach to life, the sane would never harbor a desire to lead a life like Proust’s.

Could this degree of suffering really be allowed to pass by without raising suspicion? Could Proust really have known much, could he have had anything valid to say to us, and still have led such a difficult, unexemplary life? Can the proof be allowed to stand so far from Sainte-Beuve’s pudding?

The life certainly was a trial. The psychological problems were exhaustive enough: