How Proust Can Change Your Life

DEATH: Whenever he informs others of his health, Proust loses no time in declaring that he is about to die. He announces the fact with unwavering conviction and regularity for the last sixteen years of his life. He describes his customary state as “suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina pectoris, and, altogether between life and death every six days out of seven.”

Was he an extraordinary hypochondriac? His stockbroker, Lionel Hauser, thought so, and eventually decided to be frank with him in a way that no one else had dared. “Allow me to tell you,” he ventured, “that even though you are approaching fifty, you’ve stayed what you were when I first knew you, namely a spoilt child. Oh, I know you’re going to protest by seeking to show me that according to A + B – C, far from having been spoilt, you’ve always been a martyr child who no one has ever understood, but that is much more your fault than that of others.” If he had always been so ill, Hauser charged that the damage was largely self-inflicted, the result of staying in bed all the time with the curtains shut, and thereby refusing the two constituents of health: sun and fresh air. In any case, with Europe engulfed in chaos after the First World War, Hauser urged Proust to get a little distance from his physical afflictions: “You will have to admit that your health must be a lot better than that of Europe, even if it is still extremely precarious.”

Whatever the rhetorical power of the argument, Proust nevertheless succeeded in dying the following year.

Was Marcel exaggerating? The same virus can put one person to bed for a week, and only register in another as a mild drowsiness after lunch. Faced with someone who curls up in pain after scratching his finger, an alternative to condemning the theatrics is to imagine that this scratch may be experienced by the delicate-skinned creature as no less painful than a machete swing would be for us—and that we cannot therefore allow ourselves to judge the legitimacy of another’s pain simply on the basis of the pain we would have suffered had we been similarly afflicted.

Proust was certainly delicate-skinned; Léon Daudet called him a man born without a skin. It can be hard to fall asleep after a copious meal. The digestive processes keep the body busy, the food lies heavy on the stomach, it seems more comfortable to be sitting up than lying down. But in Proust’s case, the merest particle of food or liquid was enough to interrupt his sleep. He informed a doctor that he could drink a quarter of a glass of Vichy water before he went to bed, but that if he drank so much as a whole glass, he would be kept awake by intolerable stomach pains. A confrere of the princess whose nights were ruined by a single pea, the author was cursed by a mystic’s ability to detect every milliliter swilling in his intestinal sac.

Compare him to his brother, Robert Proust, two years younger than he, a surgeon like his father (the author of an acclaimed study of The Surgery of the Female Genitalia), and built like an ox. Whereas Marcel could be killed by a draft, Robert was indestructible. When he was nineteen, he was riding a tandem bicycle in Reuil, a village on the Seine a few miles north of Paris. At a busy junction, he fell from his tandem and slipped under the wheels of an approaching five-ton coal wagon. The wagon rolled over him, he was rushed to the hospital, his mother hurried from Paris in panic, but her son made a rapid and remarkable recovery, suffering none of the permanent damage the doctors had feared. When the First World War broke out, the ox, now a grown-up surgeon, was posted to a field hospital at Étain near Verdun, where he lived in a tent and worked in exhausting and unsanitary conditions. One day, a shell landed on the hospital, and shrapnel scattered around the table where Robert was operating on a German soldier. Though hurt himself, Dr. Proust single-handedly moved his patient to a nearby dormitory and continued the operation on a stretcher. A few years later, he suffered a grave car accident when his driver fell asleep and the vehicle collided with an ambulance. Robert was thrown against a wooden partition and fractured his skull, but almost before his family had had time to be informed and grow alarmed, he was back on the road to recovery and active life.