No wonder Marcel should have felt somewhat unworthy next to his father, and feared that he had been the bane of this contented life. He had never harbored any of the professional aspirations that constituted a badge of normality in a late-nineteenth-century bourgeois household. Literature was the only thing he cared for, though he did not, for much of his youth, seem too willing, or able, to write. Because he was a good son, he tried at first to do something his parents would approve of. There were thoughts of joining the Foreign Ministry, of becoming a lawyer, a stockbroker, or an assistant at the Louvre. Yet the hunt for a career proved difficult. Two weeks of work experience with a solicitor horrified him (“In my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office”), and the idea of becoming a diplomat was ruled out when he realized it would involve moving away from Paris and his beloved mother. “What is there left, given that I have decided to become neither a lawyer, nor a doctor, nor a priest …?” asked an increasingly desperate twenty-two-year-old Proust.
Perhaps he could become a librarian. He applied and was chosen for an unpaid post at the Mazarine library. It might have been the answer, but Proust found the place too dusty for his lungs and asked for an ever-longer series of sick leaves, some of which he spent in bed, others on holiday, but few at a writing desk. He led an apparently charmed life, organizing dinner parties, going out for tea, and spending money like water. One can imagine the distress of his father, a practical man who had never displayed much interest in the arts (though he had once served in the medical corps of the Opéra Comique and had charmed an American opera singer, who sent him a picture of herself dressed as a man in frilly, knee-length pantaloons). After he repeatedly failed to report for work, showing up one day a year or less, even Marcel’s unusually tolerant library employers finally lost their patience and dismissed him five years after he had first been taken on. It had by this time become evident to all, not least his disappointed father, that Marcel would never have a proper job—and would remain forever reliant on family money to pursue his unremunerative and dilettantish interest in literature.
Which could make it hard to understand an ambition Proust confided to his maid once both his parents had died and he had finally started work on his novel.
“Ah, Céleste,” he said, “if I could be sure of doing with my books as much as my father did for the sick.”
To do with books what Adrien had done for those ravaged by cholera and bubonic plague? One didn’t have to be the mayor of Toulon to realize that Dr. Proust had it in his power to effect an improvement in people’s condition, but what sort of healing did Marcel have in mind with the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time? The opus might be a way to pass a slow-moving train journey across the Siberian steppes, but would one wish to claim that its benefits matched those of a properly functioning public sanitation system?
If we dismiss Marcel’s ambitions, it may have more to do with a particular skepticism about the therapeutic qualities of the literary novel than with all-encompassing doubts as to the value of the printed word. Even Dr. Proust, in many ways unsympathetic to his son’s vocation, was not hostile toward every published genre, and indeed turns out to have been a prolific author himself, for a long time far better known in the bookshops than his offspring.
However, unlike his son’s, the utility of Dr. Proust’s writings was never in question. Across an output of thirty-four books, he devoted himself to considering a multitude of ways in which to further the physical well-being of the population, his titles ranging from a study of The Defense of Europe against the Plague to a slim volume on the specialized and, at the time, novel problem of Saturnism as Observed in Workers Involved in the Making of Electric Batteries. But Dr. Proust was perhaps best known among the reading public for a number of books conveying in concise, lively, and accessible language all that one might wish to know about physical fitness. It would in no way have contravened the tenor of his ambitions to describe him as a pioneer and master of the keep-fit self-help manual.
His most successful self-help book was entitled Elements of Hygiene; it was published in 1888, was fully illustrated, and was aimed at teenage girls, who were deemed to need advice on enhancing their health in order to produce a vigorous new generation of French citizens, of whom there was a shortfall after a century of bloody military adventures.
With interest in a healthy lifestyle having only increased since Dr. Proust’s day, there may be value in including at least a few of the doctor’s many insightful recommendations.
HOW DR. PROUST
CAN CHANGE YOUR HEALTH
(I) BACKACHE
Almost always due to incorrect posture. When a teenage girl is sewing, she must take care not to lean forward, cross her legs, or use a low table, which will squash vital digestive organs, interrupt the flow of her blood, and strain her spinal cord, the problem illustrated in a cautionary drawing:
She should instead be following this lady’s example:
(II) CORSETS
Dr. Proust did not hide his distaste for these fashion items, describing them as self-destructive and perverse (in an important distinction for anyone worried about the correlation between slimness and attractiveness, he informed readers that “the thin woman is far from being the svelte woman”). And in an attempt to warn off girls who might have been tempted by corsets, Dr. Proust included an illustration showing their catastrophic effect on the spinal cord:
(III) EXERCISE
Rather than pretend to be slim and fit through artificial means, Dr. Proust proposed that girls follow a regime of regular exercise and included a number of practical, unstrenuous examples—like, for instance, jumping off walls …
hopping around …
swinging one’s arms …
and balancing on one foot.
With a father so masterful at aerobic instruction, at providing advice on corsets and sewing positions, it seems as if Marcel may have been hasty or simply overambitious in equating his life’s work with that of the author of Elements of Hygiene. Rather than blame him for the problem, one might ask whether any novel could genuinely be expected to contain therapeutic qualities, whether the genre could in itself offer any more relief than could be gained from an aspirin, a country walk, or a dry martini.