Though it was undoubtedly a crystallization of many aspects of this man’s experience, Proust implied that such extreme enthusiasm for La Bruyère’s thought would at some point distract the man from the particularities of his own feelings. The aphorism might have helped him to understand part of his story, but it did not reflect it exactly; in order to fully capture his romantic misfortunes, the sentence would have had to read, “Men often want to be loved …” rather than “Men want to love.…” It wasn’t a major difference, but it was a symbol of the way that books, even when they brilliantly articulate some of our experiences, may nevertheless leave others behind.
It obligates us to read with care, to welcome the insights books give us, but not to subjugate our independence or smother the nuances of our own love life in the process.
Otherwise, we might suffer a range of symptoms that Proust identified in the overreverent, overreliant reader:
SYMPTOM NO. 1:
THAT WE MISTAKE WRITERS FOR ORACLES
As a boy, Proust had loved reading Théophile Gautier. Certain sentences in Gautier’s Le Capitaine Fracasse had seemed so profound that he had started to think of the author as an extraordinary figure of limitless insight, whom he would have wanted to consult on all his significant problems.
I would have wished for him, the one wise custodian of the truth, to tell me what I ought rightly to think of Shakespeare, of Saintine, of Sophocles, of Euripides, of Silvio Pellico.… Above all, I would have wished him to tell me whether I would have had a better chance of arriving at the
truth by repeating my first-form year at school, or by becoming a diplomat, or a barrister at the Court of Appeal
.
Sadly, Gautier’s inspiring, fascinating sentences had a habit of coming in the midst of some very tedious passages, in which the author would, for instance, spend an age describing a chateau, and show no interest in telling Marcel what to think of Sophocles, or whether he should join the foreign office or go into law.
It was probably a good thing, as far as Marcel’s career was concerned. Gautier’s capacity for insights in one area did not necessarily mean that he was capable of worthwhile insights in another. Yet, how natural to feel that someone who has been extremely lucid on certain topics might turn out to be a perfect authority on other topics too, might indeed turn out to have the answers to everything.
Many of the exaggerated hopes that Proust had harbored of Gautier as a boy came in time to be harbored of him. There were people who believed that he too might solve the riddle of existence, a wild hope presumably based on the evidence of nothing more than his novel. The staff of L’Intransigeant, those inspired journalists who had felt it appropriate to consult Proust on the consequences of global apocalypse, were supreme believers in the oracular wisdom of writers, and repeatedly bothered Proust with their questions. For example, they felt he might be the perfect person to answer this inquiry:
If for some reason you were forced to take up a manual profession, which one would you choose, according to your tastes, your aptitudes and your capacities?
“I think I would become a baker. It is an honourable thing to give people their daily bread,” replied Proust, who was incapable of making a piece of toast, after asserting that writing, in any case, constituted manual labor: “You make a distinction between manual and spiritual professions which I couldn’t subscribe to. The spirit guides the hand”—which Céleste, whose job it was to clean the toilet, might politely have contested.
It was a nonsensical reply, but then again, it was a nonsensical question, at least when addressed to Proust. Why would an ability to write In Search of Lost Time in any way indicate an aptitude for advising recently dismissed white-collar workers on their careers? Why would the readers of L’Intransigeant need to be exposed to misleading notions of the baking life, put forward by a man who had never had a proper job and didn’t much like bread? Why not let Proust answer the questions in his area of competence, and otherwise admit the need for a well-qualified career adviser?
SYMPTOM NO. 2:
THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO WRITE AFTER READING A GOOD BOOK
This may seem a narrowly professional consideration, but it has wider relevance if one imagines that a good book might also stop us from thinking ourselves, because it would strike us as so perfect, as so inherently superior to anything our own minds could come up with. In short, a good book might silence us.
Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn’t enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin’s assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And the difficulty for Virginia was that, for a time at least, she thought she had found one.
MARCEL AND VIRGINIA
A short story
Virginia Woolf first mentioned Proust in a letter she wrote to Roger Fry in the autumn of 1919. He was in France, she was in Richmond, where the weather was foggy and the garden in bad shape, and she casually asked him whether he might bring her back a copy of Swann’s Way on his return.
It was 1922 before she next mentioned Proust. She had turned forty and, despite the entreaty to Fry, still hadn’t read anything of Proust’s work, though in a letter to E. M. Forster, she revealed that others in the vicinity were being more diligent. “Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience,” she explained, though appeared to be procrastinating out of a fear of being overwhelmed by something in the novel, an object she referred to more as if it were a swamp than hundreds of bits of paper stuck together with thread and glue: “I’m shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again.”
She took the plunge nevertheless, and the problems started. As she told Roger Fry: “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that.”
In what sounded like a celebration of In Search of Lost Time, but was in fact a far darker verdict on her future as a writer, she told Fry: “My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that?… How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp.”
In spite of the gasping, Woolf realized that Mrs. Dalloway still remained to be written, after which she allowed herself a brief burst of elation at the thought that she might have produced something decent. “I wonder if this time I have achieved something?” she asked herself in her diary, but the pleasure was short-lived: “Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own.”