How Proust Can Change Your Life

Sometimes in the afternoon sky, a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to “come on” for a while, and so goes “in front” in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself

Even if we recognize the virtues of Proust’s metaphor, it is not necessarily one we could easily come up with by ourselves. It may lie closer to a genuine impression of the moon, but if we observe the moon and are asked to say something about it, we are more likely to hit upon a tired rather than an inspired image. We may be well aware that our description of a moon is not up to the task, without knowing how to better it. To take license with his response, this would perhaps have bothered Proust less than an unapologetic use of clichés by people who believed that it was always right to follow verbal conventions (“golden orb,” “heavenly body”), and felt that a priority when talking was not to be original but to sound like someone else.

Wanting to sound like other people has its temptations. There are inherited habits of speech guaranteed to make us sound authoritative, intelligent, worldly, appropriately grateful, or deeply moved. As of a certain age, Albertine decides that she too would like to speak like someone else—like a bourgeois young woman. She begins to use a range of expressions common among such women, which she has picked up from her aunt, Madame Bontemps, in the slavish way, Proust suggests, that a baby goldfinch learns how to act like a grown-up by imitating the behavior of its parent goldfinches. She acquires a habit of repeating whatever one says to her, so as to appear interested and in the process of forming an opinion of her own. If you tell her that an artist’s work is good, or his house nice, she will say, “Oh, his painting’s good, is it?” “Oh, his house is nice, is it?” Furthermore, when she meets someone unusual, she now says, “He’s a character”; when you suggest a game of cards to her, she will say, “I don’t have money to burn”; when one of her friends reproaches her unjustly, she will exclaim, “You really are the limit!”—all these expressions having been dictated to her by what Proust calls a “bourgeois tradition almost as old as the Magnificat itself,” a tradition laying down speech codes that the respectable bourgeois girl must learn, “just as she has learned to say her prayers and to curtsey.”

This mockery of Albertine’s verbal habits explains Proust’s particular frustration with Louis Ganderax.

Louis Ganderax was a leading early-twentieth-century man of letters and the literary editor of La Revue de Paris. In 1906 he was asked to edit the correspondence of Georges Bizet, and to write a preface for the collection. It was a great honor, and a great responsibility. Bizet, who had died some thirty years earlier, was a composer of worldwide significance, whose place in posterity was assured by his opera Carmen and his Symphony in C Major. There was understandable pressure on Ganderax to produce a preface worthy of standing at the head of a genius’s correspondence.

Georges Bizet

Unfortunately, Ganderax was something of a goldfinch, and in an attempt to sound grand—far grander than he must have thought himself naturally to be—he ended up writing a preface of enormous, almost comic pretension.

Louis Ganderax

Lying in bed reading the newspaper in the autumn of 1908, Proust came upon an extract of Ganderax’s preface, whose prose style annoyed him so much that he exorcised his feelings by writing a letter to Georges Bizet’s widow, his good friend Madame Straus. “Why, when he can write so well, does he write as he does?” wondered Proust. “Why, when one says ‘1871’, add ‘that most abominable of all years.’ Why is Paris immediately dubbed ‘the great city’ and Delaunay ‘the master painter’? Why must emotion inevitably be ‘discreet’ and goodnaturedness ‘smiling’ and bereavements ‘cruel’, and countless other fine phrases that I can’t remember?”

These phrases were of course anything but fine, they were a caricature of fineness. They were phrases that might once have been impressive in the hands of classical writers, but were pompous ornamentation when stolen by an author of a later age concerned only to suggest literary grandeur.