How Proust Can Change Your Life

THE INCOMPREHENSION OF FRIENDS: A characteristic problem for geniuses. When Swann’s Way was ready, Proust sent copies to his friends, many of whom had difficulty opening the envelope.

“Well, my dear Louis, have you read my book?” Proust recalled asking the aristocratic playboy Louis d’Albufera.

“Read your book? You’ve written a book?” answered a surprised d’Albufera.

“Yes of course, Louis, and I even sent you a copy.”

“Ah, my little Marcel, if you sent it to me, I’ve certainly read it. Only I wasn’t sure I’d received it.”

Madame Gaston de Caillavet was a more grateful recipient. She wrote to thank the author for his gift in the warmest terms. “I constantly re-read the passage in Swann about first Communion,” she told him, “as I experienced the same panic, the same disillusionment.” It was a touching thought for Madame Gaston de Caillavet to share; it might have been kinder had she taken the trouble to read the book and noticed that there was no such religious ceremony within it.

Proust concluded, “About a book published only a few months earlier, people never speak to me without mistakes proving either that they’ve forgotten it or that they haven’t read it.”

AT THIRTY, HIS OWN ASSESSMENT: “Without pleasures, objectives, activities or ambit ions, with the life ahead of me finished and with an awareness of the grief I cause my parents, I have little happiness.”

As for a list of the physical afflictions:

ASTHMA: Attacks start when he is ten, and continue all his life. They are particularly severe, the fits lasting over an hour, as many as ten a day. Because they occur more in the daytime than at night, Proust takes up a nocturnal routine: he goes to sleep at seven in the morning and wakes up at four or five in the afternoon. He finds it impossible to go outdoors much, particularly in the summer, and when he has to, it is only within the confines of a sealed taxi. The windows and curtains of his flat are kept perennially shut; he never sees the sun, breathes any fresh air, or takes any exercise.

DIET: He gradually becomes unable to eat more than a single, and unhelpfully gargantuan, meal a day, which has to be served at least eight hours before his bedtime. Describing a typical meal to a doctor, Proust details a menu of two eggs in a cream sauce, a wing of a roast chicken, three croissants, a plate of french fries, some grapes, some coffee, and a bottle of beer.

DIGESTION: “I go frequently—and badly—to the loo,” he tells the same doctor unsurprisingly. Constipation is quasi-permanent, relieved only by a strong laxative every two weeks, which usually brings on stomach cramps. Urinating is no easier: it is accompanied by a sharp burning sensation, isn’t possible often, and the results display an excess of urea and uric acid. His conclusion: “To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides.”

UNDERPANTS: Needs to have these circling him tight around the stomach before he has any chance of getting to sleep. They have to be fastened with a special pin whose absence, when Proust accidentally loses it early one morning in the bathroom, keeps him awake all day.

SENSITIVE SKIN: Can’t use any soap, or cream or cologne. He has to wash with finely woven, moistened towels, then pat himself dry with fresh linen (an average wash requires twenty towels, which Proust specifies must be taken to the only laundry that uses the right non-irritant powder, the blanchisserie Lavigne, which also does Jean Cocteau’s laundry). He finds that older clothes are better for him than new ones, and develops deep attachments to old shoes and handkerchiefs.

MICE: Proust has a terror of these. When Paris is bombed by the Germans in 1918, he confides that he is more terrified of mice than of cannons.

COLD: Is always feeling it. Even in midsummer, he wears an overcoat and four jumpers if forced to leave the house. At dinner parties, he usually keeps a fur coat on. Nevertheless, people who greet him are surprised to find how cold his hands are. Fearing the effects of smoke, he doesn’t allow his room to be properly heated, and keeps himself warm mostly through hot-water bottles and pullovers. It means he often has colds and, more particularly, a runny nose. At the end of one letter to his friend Reynaldo Hahn, he mentions that he has wiped his nose eighty-three times since starting the letter. The letter is three pages long.

SENSITIVITY TO ALTITUDE: On returning to Paris after visiting his uncle in Versailles, Proust experiences a malaise and is unable to climb the stairs to his apartment. In a letter to his uncle, he later attributes the problem to the change in altitude he has undergone. Versailles is eighty-three meters above Paris.