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:
FIRST: how much is on our minds—in particular, how many thoughts we have about our friends which, though true, could potentially be hurtful and, though honest, could seem unkind.
SECOND: our evaluation of how ready others would be to break off a friendship if ever we dared express these honest thoughts to them—an evaluation made in part according to our sense of how lovable we are, and of whether our qualities would be enough to ensure that we could stay friends with people even if we had momentarily irritated them by revealing our disapproval of their fiancée or lyric poetry.
Unfortunately, by both criteria, Proust was not well placed to enjoy honest friendships. For a start, he had far too many true but unkind thoughts about people. When he met a palm reader in 1918, the woman was said to have taken a glance at his hand, looked at his face for a moment, then remarked simply, “What do you want from me, Monsieur? It should be you reading my character.” But this miraculous understanding of others did not lead to cheerful conclusions. “I feel infinite sadness at seeing how few people are genuinely kind,” he said, and judged that most people had something rather wrong with them.
The most perfect person in the world has a certain defect which shocks us or makes us angry. One man is of rare intelligence, sees everything from the loftiest viewpoint, never speaks ill of anyone, but will pocket and forget letters of supreme importance which he himself asked you to let him post for you, and so makes you miss a vital engagement without offering you any excuse, with a smile, because he prides himself upon never knowing the time. Another is so refined, so gentle, so delicate in his conduct that he never says anything to you about yourself that you
would not be glad to hear, but you feel that he suppresses, that he keeps buried in his heart, where they turn sour, other, quite different opinions
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Lucien Daudet felt that Proust possessed
an unenviable power of divination, he discovered all the pettiness, often hidden, of the human heart, and it horrified him: the most insignificant lies, the mental reservations, the secrecies, the fake disinterestedness, the kind word which has an ulterior motive, the truth which has been slightly deformed for convenience, in short, all the things which worry us in love, sadden us in friendship and make our dealings with others banal were for Proust a subject of constant surprise, sadness or irony
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It is regrettable, as far as the cause of honest friendship was concerned, that Proust combined this heightened awareness of others’ faults with unusually strong doubts about his own chances of being liked (“Oh! Making a nuisance of myself, that has always been my nightmare”), and about the chances of retaining his friends if ever he were to express his more negative thoughts to them. His previously diagnosed case of low self-esteem (“If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible”) bred an exaggerated notion of how friendly he would need to be in order to have any friends. And though he was in disagreement with all the more exalted claims made on friendship’s behalf, he was still deeply concerned with securing affection (“My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved”). Under a heading of “thoughts that spoil friendship,” Proust confessed to a range of anxieties familiar to any quotidian emotional paranoiac: “What did they think of us?” “Were we not tactless?” “Did they like us?” as well as “the fear of being forgotten in favour of someone else.”
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).