How Proust Can Change Your Life

COUGHING: Does it very loudly. He reports of one fit in 1917: “The neighbours, on hearing a continuous thundering and spasmodic barking, will think that I have bought either a church organ or a dog, or else that by some immoral (and purely imaginary) liaison with a lady, I have fathered a child who happens to have whooping cough.”

TRAVEL: Sensitive to any disruption of routine or habit, Proust suffers from homesickness and fears that every journey will kill him. He explains that in the first few days in a new place, he is as unhappy as-certain animals when night comes (it is not clear which animals he has in mind). He formulates a wish to live on a yacht and thereby move around without having to get out of bed. He suggests this idea to the happily married Madame Straus: “Would you like us to hire a boat in which there will be no noise and from which we shall watch all the most beautiful cities in the universe parade past us on the sea-shore without our leaving our bed (our beds)?” The proposal is not taken up.

UNWILLINGNESS TO GET OUT OF BED: Proust preferred to spend most of his time in bed. He turned it into his desk and office. Did it provide a defense against the cruel world outside? “When one is sad, it is lovely to lie in the warmth of one’s bed, and there, with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with one’s head under the blankets, surrender completely to wailing, like branches in the autumn wind.”

NOISE FROM THE NEIGHBORS: A manic sensitivity to it. Life in a Parisian block of flats is hellish, particularly when someone is doing a little music practice upstairs. “There is an inanimate object which has a capacity to exasperate which no human being will ever attain: a piano.”

He is nearly killed by aggravation when redecoration starts in the flat adjoining his in the spring of 1907. He explains the problem to Madame Straus: the workmen arrive at seven in the morning, “insist on manifesting their matinal high spirits by hammering ferociously and scraping their saws behind my bed, then idle for half an hour, then start hammering ferociously again so I can’t get back to sleep.… I’m at the end of my tether and my doctor advises me to go away because my condition is too serious to go on putting up with all this.” What is more, “(excuse me, Madame!) they are about to install a basin and a lavatory seat in her WC which is next to my bedroom wall.” And to finish him off: “There’s another gentleman who’s moving in on the fourth floor of the same house, from which I can hear everything as though it were in my bedroom.” He resorts to calling his neighbor a cow, and when the workmen alter the size of her toilet seat three times, insinuates that it is to accommodate her enormous behind. Such is the noise, he concludes that there must be a pharaonic dimension to the redecoration, and tells the keen Egyptologist Madame Straus: “A dozen workers a day hammering away with such frenzy for so many months must have erected something as majestic as the Pyramid of Cheops which passers-by must be astonished to see between the Printemps and Saint-Augustin.” No pyramid is sighted.

OTHER AILMENTS: “One thinks that people who are always ill don’t also have the illnesses of other people,” Proust tells Lucien Daudet, “but they do.” In this category, Proust includes fevers, colds, bad eyesight, an inability to swallow, tooth ache, elbow ache, and dizziness.

DISBELIEF OF OTHERS: Proust frequently has to suffer distressing insinuations that he is not as ill as he suggests. At the outbreak of the First World War, the medical army board calls him up for an examination. Though the man has been lying in bed more or less continuously since 1903, he is terrified that the severity of his illness will not be appropriately considered, and that he will be made to fight in the trenches. The prospect delights his stockbroker, Lionel Hauser, who sportingly tells Proust that he has not given up hope of one day seeing a Croix de Guerre on his chest. His client takes the remark badly: “You know very well that in my state of health, I would be dead in 48 hours.” He is not called up.

A few years after the war, a critic accuses Proust of being a worldly fop who self-indulgently lies in bed the entire day dreaming of chandeliers and grand ceilings, and only leaves his room at six in the evening to attend posh parties with nouveaux-riches types who would never buy his books. Enraged, Proust replies that he is an invalid, a man who is physically unable to get out of bed, either at six in the evening or at six in the morning, and is too ill even to walk around his own room (not even to open a window, he adds), let alone go to a party. A few months later, he nevertheless staggers to the opera.