Why did these phrases affect Proust so much? Though the way people talk has altered somewhat since his day, it is not difficult to see that here were examples of rather poor expression, though if Proust was wincing, his complaint was more a psychological than a grammatical one (“No one knows less syntax than me,” he boasted). Peppering French with bits of English, talking of Albion instead of England and the Big Blue instead of the Mediterranean were signs of wishing to seem smart and in-the-know around 1900, and relying on essentially insincere, overelaborate stock phrases to do so. There was no reason to say “Bye, bye” when taking one’s leave, other than a need to impress by recourse to a contemporary fad for all things British. And though phrases like “Il pleut des cordes” had none of the ostentation of a “Bye, bye,” they were examples of the most exhausted constructions, whose use implied little concern for evoking the specifics of a situation. Insofar as Proust made pained, irritated grimaces, it was in defense of a more honest and accurate approach to expression.
Lucien Daudet tells us how he first got a taste of it:
One day when we were coming out of a concert where we had heard Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, I was humming some vague notes which I thought expressed the emotion I had just experienced, and I exclaimed, with an emphasis which I only later understood to be ridiculous: “That’s a
wonderful bit!” Proust started to laugh and said, “But, my dear Lucien, it’s not your
poum, poum, poum
that’s going to convey this wonderfulness! It would be better to try and explain it!” At the time, I wasn’t very happy, but I had just received an unforgettable lesson
.
It was a lesson in trying to find the right words for things. The process can be counted upon to go badly awry. We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so. We hear Beethoven’s Ninth and hum poum, poum, poum; we see the pyramids at Giza and go, “That’s nice.” These sounds are asked to account for an experience, but their poverty prevents either ourselves or our interlocutors from really understanding what we have lived through. We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
Proust had a friend called Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld. He was an aristocratic young man, whose ancestor had written a famous short book in the seventeenth century, and who liked to spend time in glamorous Paris nightspots, so much time that he had been labeled by some of his more sarcastic contemporaries “le La Rochefoucauld de chez Maxim’s.” But in 1904 Gabriel forsook the nightlife in order to try his hand at literature. The result was a novel, The Lover and the Doctor, which Gabriel sent to Proust in manuscript form as soon as it was finished, with a request for comments and advice.
“Bear in mind that you have written a fine and powerful novel, a superb, tragic work of complex and consummate craftsmanship,” Proust reported back to his friend, who might have formed a slightly different impression after reading the lengthy letter which had preceded this eulogy. It seems that the superb and tragic work had a few problems, not least because it was filled with clichés: “There are some fine big landscapes in your novel,” explained Proust, treading delicately, “but at times one would like them to be painted with more originality. It’s quite true that the sky is on fire at sunset, but it’s been said too often, and the moon that shines discreetly is a trifle dull.”
We may ask why Proust objected to phrases that had been used too often. After all, doesn’t the moon shine discreetly? Don’t sunsets look as if they were on fire? Aren’t clichés just good ideas that have proved rightly popular?
The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.
The moon Gabriel mentioned might of course have been discreet, but it is liable to have been a lot more besides. When the first volume of Proust’s novel was published eight years after The Lover and the Doctor, perhaps Gabriel (if he wasn’t back ordering Dom Perignon at Maxim’s) took time to notice that Proust had also included a moon, but that he had skirted two thousand years of ready-made moon talk and uncovered an unusual metaphor better to capture the reality of the lunar experience:
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.”