How Proust Can Change Your Life

In a form of homage to the Impressionist painters, Proust inserted one into his novel, the fictional Elstir, who shares traits with Renoir, Degas, and Manet. In the seaside resort of Balbec, Proust’s narrator visits Elstir’s studio, where he finds canvases that, like Monet’s Le Havre, challenge the orthodox understanding of what things look like. In Elstir’s seascapes, there is no demarcation between the sea and the sky, the sky looks like the sea, the sea like the sky. In a painting of a harbor at Carquethuit, a ship that is out at sea seems to be sailing through the middle of the town, women gathering shrimps among the rocks look as if they were in a marine grotto overhung by ships and waves, a group of holidaymakers in a boat look like they were in a cariole riding up through sunlit fields and down through shady patches.

Elstir is not trying his hand at surrealism. If his work seems unusual, it is because he is attempting to paint something of what we actually see when we look around, rather than what we know we see. We know that ships don’t sail through the middle of towns, but it can sometimes look as if this is happening when we see a ship against the backdrop of a town from a certain light at a certain angle. We know there is a demarcation between the sea and the sky, but it can on occasion be hard to tell whether an azure-colored band is in fact part of the sea or the sky, the confusion lasting only until our reason reestablishes a distinction between the two elements which had been missing at first glance. Elstir’s achievement is to hang on to the original muddle, and to set down in paint a visual impression before it has been overruled by what he knows.

Proust was not implying that painting had reached its apotheosis in Impressionism, and that the movement had triumphantly captured “reality” in a way that previous schools of art had not. His appreciation of painting ranged further than this, but the works of Elstir illustrated with particular clarity what is arguably present in every successful work of art: an ability to restore to our sight a distorted or neglected aspect of reality. As Proust expressed it:

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us

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And what lies unknown within us includes such surprising things as ships that go through towns, seas that are momentarily indistinguishable from skies, fantasies that our beloved family will die in a major conflagration, and intense feelings of love sparked by contact with smooth skin.

The moral? That life can be a stranger substance than cliché life, that goldfinches should occasionally do things differently from their parents, and that there are persuasive reasons for calling a loved one Plouplou, Missou, or poor little wolf.

What did his friends think of him? He had a great number of them, and after his death, many were moved to publish accounts of what it had been like to know him. The verdict could hardly have been more favorable. They were almost unanimous in suggesting that Proust had been a paragon of companionship, an embodiment of friendship’s every virtue.

Their accounts tell us:

THAT HE WAS GENEROUS:

“I can still see him, wrapped in his fur coat, even in springtime, sitting at a table in Larue’s restaurant, and I can still see the gesture of his delicate hand as he tried to make you let him order the most extravagant supper, accepting the headwaiter’s biased suggestions, offering you champagne, exotic fruits and grapes on their vine-plant which he had noticed on the way in.… He told you there was no better way of proving your friendship than by accepting.” GEORGES DE LAURIS

THAT HE WAS MUNIFICENT:

“In restaurants, and everywhere where there was a chance, Marcel would give enormous tips. This was the case even in the slightest railway station buffet where he would never return.” GEORGES DE LAURIS

THAT HE LIKED TO ADD A 200 PERCENT SERVICE CHARGE:

“If a dinner cost him ten francs, he would add twenty francs for the waiter.” FERNAND GREGH

THAT HE WAS NOT MERELY EXORBITANT:

“The legend of Proust’s generosity should not develop to the detriment of that of his goodness.” PAUL MORAND

THAT HE DIDN’T TALK ONLY ABOUT HIMSELF: