How Proust Can Change Your Life

THE PROBLEM OF A JEWISH MOTHER: Proust was born into the clutches of a recklessly extreme example. “I was always four years old for her,” said Marcel of Madame Proust, otherwise known as Maman, or more usually “chère petite Maman.”

“He never said ‘ma mère’ nor ‘mon père’, but always only ‘Papa’ and ‘Maman’ in the tone of an emotional little boy, with tears automatically welling up in his eyes as soon as these syllables had been uttered, while the hoarse sound of a strangled sob could be heard in his tightened throat,” recalled Proust’s friend Marcel Plantevignes.

Madame Proust loved her son with an intensity that would have put an ardent lover to shame, an affection that created, or at the very least dramatically aggravated, her eldest son’s disposition toward helplessness. There was nothing she felt he could do properly without her. They lived together from his birth until her death, by which time he was thirty-four. Even so, her greatest anxiety was whether Marcel would be able to survive in the world once she had gone. “My mother wanted to live in order not to leave me in the state of anguish which she knew I was in without her,” he explained after her death. “All of our life had been simply a training, she for teaching me how to do without her the day she would leave me.… And I, for my part, I persuaded her that I could quite well live without her.”

Though well-meaning, Madame Proust’s concern for her son was never far from bossy intervention. At the age of twenty-four, in a rare moment when they were apart, Marcel wrote to tell her that he was sleeping quite well (the quality of his sleep, his stool, and his appetite was a constant concern in their correspondence). But Maman complained that he was not being precise enough: “My darling, your ‘slept so many hours’ continue to tell me nothing or rather nothing that counts. I ask and ask again:

“You went to sleep at …

“You got up at …”

Marcel was usually happy to fulfill his mother’s controlling desire for corporeal information (she and Sainte-Beuve would have had much to talk about). From time to time, Marcel spontaneously offered something up for general family consideration: “Ask Papa what it means to feel a burning sensation at the moment of peeing which forces you to interrupt, then to restart, five or six times in quarter of an hour. As I’ve been drinking oceans of beer these days, perhaps it comes from that,” he mused in a letter to his mother—at which point Maman was fifty-three, Papa was sixty-eight, and Marcel thirty-one.

In answer to a questionnaire asking him for “your notion of unhappiness,” Proust replied, “To be separated from Maman.” When he couldn’t sleep at night and his mother was in her bedroom, he would write letters that he would leave at her door for her to find in the morning: “My dear little Maman,” ran a typical example, “I am writing you a note while I’m finding it impossible to sleep, to tell you that I am thinking of you.”

Despite such correspondence, there were necessarily underlying tensions. Marcel sensed that his mother preferred him to be ill and dependent rather than healthy and peeing well. “The truth is that as soon as I am better, because the life which makes me get better annoys you, you ruin everything until I am ill again,” he wrote in a rare, though significant, outburst against Madame Proust’s crippling desire to enact a nurse-patient relationship with him. “It is sad not to be able to have at the same time affection and health.”

AWKWARD DESIRES: Then came the slow recognition that Marcel was not like other boys. “No one can tell at first whether he is an invert, or a poet, or a snob, or a scoundrel. The boy who has been reading erotic poetry or looking at obscene pictures, if he then presses his body against a schoolfriend, only imagines himself to be communing with him in an identical desire for a woman. How should he suppose that he is not like everybody else when he recognises the substance of what he feels in reading Mme de La Fayette, Racine, Baudelaire, Walter Scott?”

Yet gradually, Proust realized that the prospect of a night with Scott’s Diana Vernon held none of the attractions of being pressed up against a school friend, a difficult realization given the unenlightened state of the France of his day, and a mother who continued to hope that her son would marry, and displayed a habit of asking his male friends to bring along young women when they took Marcel out to the theater or a restaurant.