How Proust Can Change Your Life

An effect of reading a book which has devoted attention to noticing such faint yet vital tremors is that once we’ve put the volume down and resumed our own life, we may attend to precisely the things the author would have responded to had he or she been in our company. Our mind will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness; the effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, and realizing that the silence only existed at a particular frequency and that all along we in fact shared the room with waves of sound coming in from a Ukrainian station or the nighttime chatter of a minicab firm. Our attention will be drawn to the shades of the sky, to the changeability of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend, or to a submerged sadness about a situation which we had previously not even known we could feel sad about. The book will have sensitized us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity.

Which is why Proust proposed, in words he would modestly never have applied to his own novel:

If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us

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Whatever the merits of Proust’s work, even a fervent admirer would be hard pressed to deny one of its awkward features: length. As Proust’s brother, Robert, put it, “The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time.” And as they lie in bed with their limb newly encased in plaster or a tubercle bacillus diagnosed in their lungs, they face another challenge in the length of individual Proustian sentences, snakelike constructions, the very longest of which, located in the fifth volume, would, if arranged along a single line in standard-sized text, run on for a little short of four meters and stretch around the base of a bottle of wine seventeen times:

Alfred Humblot had never seen anything like it. As head of the esteemed publishing house Ollendorf, he had, early in 1913, been asked to consider Proust’s manuscript for publication by one of his authors, Louis de Robert, who had undertaken to help Proust get into print. “My dear friend, I may be dense,” replied Humblot after taking a brief and clearly bewildering glance at the opening of the novel, “but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.”

He wasn’t alone. Jacques Madeleine, a reader for the publishing house Fasquelle, had been asked to look at the same bundle of papers a few months earlier. “At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript,” he had reported, “after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise to the surface—one doesn’t have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it! Impossible to say anything about it!”

Madeleine nevertheless had a go at summarizing the events of the first seventeen pages: “A man has insomnia. He turns over in bed, he recaptures his impressions and hallucinations of half-sleep, some of which have to do with the difficulty of getting to sleep when he was a boy in his room in the country house of his parents in Combray Seventeen pages! Where one sentence (at the end of page 4 and page 5) goes on for forty-four lines.”

Since all other publishers sympathized with these sentiments, Proust was forced to pay for the publication of his work himself (and was left to enjoy the regrets and contrite apologies that flowed in a few years later). But the accusation of verbosity was not so fleeting. At the end of 1921, his work now widely acclaimed, Proust received a letter from an American, who described herself as twenty-seven, resident in Rome, and extremely beautiful. She also explained that for the previous three years she had done nothing with her time other than read Proust’s book. However, there was a problem. “I don’t understand a thing, but absolutely nothing. Dear Marcel Proust, stop being a poseur and come down to earth. Just tell me in two lines what you really wanted to say.”