How Proust Can Change Your Life

By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment (“It’s true that there are people who are superior to their books, but that’s because their books are not Books”), because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time.

Furthermore, conversation allows us little room to revise our original utterances, which ill suits our tendency not to know what we are trying to say until we have had at least one go at saying it, whereas writing accommodates and is largely made up of rewriting, during which original thoughts—bare, inarticulate strands—are enriched and nuanced over time. They may thereby appear on a page according to the logic and aesthetic order they demand, as opposed to suffering the distortion effected by conversation, with its limits on the corrections or additions one can make before enraging even the most patient companion.

Proust famously did not realize the nature of what he was trying to write until he had begun to write it. When the first volume of In Search of Lost Time was published in 1913, there was no thought of the work assuming the gargantuan proportions it eventually did. Proust projected that it would be a trilogy (Swann’s Way, The Guermantes’ Way, Time Regained), and even hoped the last two parts would fit into a single volume.

However, the First World War radically altered his plans by delaying the publication of the succeeding volume by four years, during which time Proust discovered a host of new things he wanted to say, and realized that he would require a further four volumes to say it. The original five hundred thousand words expanded to more than a million and a quarter.

It was not just the overall shape of the novel that changed. Each page, and a great many sentences, grew, or were altered in the passage from initial expression to printed form. Half of the first volume was rewritten four times. As Proust went back over what he had written, he repeatedly saw the imperfections in his initial attempt. Words or parts of sentences were eliminated; points that he had judged complete seemed, as he went back over the text, to be crying out for recomposition, or elaboration and development with a new image or metaphor. Hence the mess of the manuscript pages, the result of a mind perpetually improving on its original utterances.

Unfortunately for Proust’s publishers, the revisions did not cease once he had sent his handwritten scrawls to be typed up. The publishers’ proofs, in which the scrawl found itself turned into elegant uniform letters, only served to reveal yet more errors and omissions, which Proust would correct in illegible bubbles, expanding into every stretch of white space available until, at times, they overflowed into narrow paper flaps glued onto the edge of the sheet.

It might have enraged the publisher, but it served to make a better book. It meant that the novel could be the product of the efforts of more than a single Proust (which any interlocutor would have had to be satisfied with); it was the product of a succession of ever more critical and accomplished authors (three at the very minimum: Proust 1 who had written the manuscript + Proust 2 who reread it + Proust 3 who corrected the proofs). There was naturally no sign of the process of elaboration or of the material conditions of creation in the published version, only a continuous, controlled, faultless voice revealing nothing of where sentences had had to be rewritten, where asthma attacks had intruded, where a metaphor had had to be altered, where a point had had to be clarified, and between which lines the author had had to sleep, eat breakfast, or write a thank-you letter. There was no wish to deceive, only a wish to stay faithful to the original conception of the work, in which an asthma attack or a breakfast, though part of the author’s life, had no place in the conception of the work, because, as Proust saw it:

A book is the product of another self to the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices

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In spite of its limitations as a forum in which to express complex ideas in rich, precise language, friendship could still be defended on the grounds that it provides us with a chance to communicate our most intimate, honest thoughts to people and, for once, reveal exactly what is on our minds.

Though an appealing notion, the likelihood of such honesty seems highly dependent on two things: