How Proust Can Change Your Life

It meant that Proust’s overwhelming priority in any encounter was to ensure that he would be liked, remembered, and thought well of. “Not only did he dizzy his hosts and hostesses with verbal compliments, but he ruined himself on flowers and ingenious gifts,” reported his friend Jacques-Émile Blanche, giving a taste of what this priority involved. His psychological insight, so great that it had threatened to put a palm reader out of her job, could be wholly directed toward identifying the appropriate word, smile, or flower to win others over. And it worked. He excelled at the art of making friends, he acquired an enormous number, they loved his company, were devoted to him, and wrote a pile of adulatory books after his death with titles like My Friend Marcel Proust (a volume by Maurice Duplay), My Friendship with Marcel Proust (by Fernand Gregh), and Letters to a Friend (by Marie Nordlinger).

Given the effort and strategic intelligence he devoted to friendship, it shouldn’t surprise us. For instance, it is often assumed, usually by people who don’t have many friends, that friendship is a hallowed sphere in which what we wish to talk about effortlessly coincides with others’ interests. Proust, less optimistic than this, recognized the likelihood of discrepancy, and concluded that he should always be the one to ask questions and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you with what was on his.

To do anything else would have been bad conversational manners: “There is a lack of tact in people who in their conversation look not to please others, but to elucidate, egoistically, points that they are interested in.” Conversation required an abdication of oneself in the name of pleasing companions: “When we chat, it is no longer we who speak.… [W]e are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people, and not of a self that differs from them.”

It accounts for why Proust’s friend Georges de Lauris, a keen rally driver and tennis player, could gratefully report that he had often talked to Proust about sport and motorcars. Of course, Proust cared little for either, but to have insisted on turning the conversation to Madame de Pompadour’s childhood with a man keener on Renault’s crankshaft would have been to misunderstand what friendship was for.

It was not for elucidating, egoistically, things that one was interested in. It was primarily for warmth and affection, which is why, for a cerebral man, Proust had remarkably little interest in having overtly “intellectual” friendships. In the summer of 1920, he received a letter from Sydney Schiff, the friend who would, two years later, engineer his disastrous encounter with Joyce. Sydney told Proust that he was on a seaside holiday in England with his wife Violet, the weather was quite sunny, but Violet had invited a group of hearty young people to stay with them, and he had grown very depressed by how shallow these youngsters were. “It’s very boring for me,” he wrote to Proust, “because I don’t like to be constantly in the company of young people. I am pained by their naïvety, which I’m afraid of corrupting, or at least of compromising. Human beings sometimes interest me but I don’t like them because they are not intelligent enough.”

Proust, cloistered in bed in Paris, had difficulty appreciating why anyone would be dissatisfied with the idea of spending a holiday on a beach with some young people whose only fault was not to have read Descartes: “I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it’s more or less irrelevant to me that they’re intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere etc.”

When Proust did have intelligent conversations, the priority was still to dedicate himself to others, rather than to covertly introduce (as some might) private cerebral concerns. His friend Marcel Plantevignes, the author of yet another volume of reminiscence, this one entitled With Marcel Proust, commented on Proust’s intellectual courtesy, his concern never to be tiring, hard to follow, or categorical in what he said. Proust would frequently punctuate his sentences with a “perhaps,” a “maybe,” or a “Don’t you think?” For Plantevignes, it reflected Proust’s desire to please. “Maybe I’m wrong to tell them what they won’t like,” was his underlying thought. Not that Plantevignes was complaining; such tentativeness was welcome, especially on Proust’s bad days.

These maybes were very reassuring to encounter in the light of certain rather surprising declarations Proust made on his pessimistic days, and without which, they would have made really too much of a shattering impression

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