Could this degree of suffering really be allowed to pass by without raising suspicion? Could Proust really have known much, could he have had anything valid to say to us, and still have led such a difficult, unexemplary life? Can the proof be allowed to stand so far from Sainte-Beuve’s pudding?
The life certainly was a trial. The psychological problems were exhaustive enough:
THE PROBLEM OF A JEWISH MOTHER: Proust was born into the clutches of a recklessly extreme example. “I was always four years old for her,” said Marcel of Madame Proust, otherwise known as Maman, or more usually “chère petite Maman.”
“He never said ‘ma mère’ nor ‘mon père’, but always only ‘Papa’ and ‘Maman’ in the tone of an emotional little boy, with tears automatically welling up in his eyes as soon as these syllables had been uttered, while the hoarse sound of a strangled sob could be heard in his tightened throat,” recalled Proust’s friend Marcel Plantevignes.
Madame Proust loved her son with an intensity that would have put an ardent lover to shame, an affection that created, or at the very least dramatically aggravated, her eldest son’s disposition toward helplessness. There was nothing she felt he could do properly without her. They lived together from his birth until her death, by which time he was thirty-four. Even so, her greatest anxiety was whether Marcel would be able to survive in the world once she had gone. “My mother wanted to live in order not to leave me in the state of anguish which she knew I was in without her,” he explained after her death. “All of our life had been simply a training, she for teaching me how to do without her the day she would leave me.… And I, for my part, I persuaded her that I could quite well live without her.”
Though well-meaning, Madame Proust’s concern for her son was never far from bossy intervention. At the age of twenty-four, in a rare moment when they were apart, Marcel wrote to tell her that he was sleeping quite well (the quality of his sleep, his stool, and his appetite was a constant concern in their correspondence). But Maman complained that he was not being precise enough: “My darling, your ‘slept so many hours’ continue to tell me nothing or rather nothing that counts. I ask and ask again:
“You went to sleep at …
“You got up at …”
Marcel was usually happy to fulfill his mother’s controlling desire for corporeal information (she and Sainte-Beuve would have had much to talk about). From time to time, Marcel spontaneously offered something up for general family consideration: “Ask Papa what it means to feel a burning sensation at the moment of peeing which forces you to interrupt, then to restart, five or six times in quarter of an hour. As I’ve been drinking oceans of beer these days, perhaps it comes from that,” he mused in a letter to his mother—at which point Maman was fifty-three, Papa was sixty-eight, and Marcel thirty-one.
In answer to a questionnaire asking him for “your notion of unhappiness,” Proust replied, “To be separated from Maman.” When he couldn’t sleep at night and his mother was in her bedroom, he would write letters that he would leave at her door for her to find in the morning: “My dear little Maman,” ran a typical example, “I am writing you a note while I’m finding it impossible to sleep, to tell you that I am thinking of you.”
Despite such correspondence, there were necessarily underlying tensions. Marcel sensed that his mother preferred him to be ill and dependent rather than healthy and peeing well. “The truth is that as soon as I am better, because the life which makes me get better annoys you, you ruin everything until I am ill again,” he wrote in a rare, though significant, outburst against Madame Proust’s crippling desire to enact a nurse-patient relationship with him. “It is sad not to be able to have at the same time affection and health.”
AWKWARD DESIRES: Then came the slow recognition that Marcel was not like other boys. “No one can tell at first whether he is an invert, or a poet, or a snob, or a scoundrel. The boy who has been reading erotic poetry or looking at obscene pictures, if he then presses his body against a schoolfriend, only imagines himself to be communing with him in an identical desire for a woman. How should he suppose that he is not like everybody else when he recognises the substance of what he feels in reading Mme de La Fayette, Racine, Baudelaire, Walter Scott?”
Yet gradually, Proust realized that the prospect of a night with Scott’s Diana Vernon held none of the attractions of being pressed up against a school friend, a difficult realization given the unenlightened state of the France of his day, and a mother who continued to hope that her son would marry, and displayed a habit of asking his male friends to bring along young women when they took Marcel out to the theater or a restaurant.
DATING PROBLEMS: If only she had poured her energies into inviting the other gender, for it wasn’t easy to find young men similarly disenchanted with Diana Vernon. “You think me jaded and effete. You are mistaken,” Proust protested to one recalcitrant candidate, a pretty sixteen-year-old classmate called Daniel Halévy. “If you are delicious, if you have lovely eyes …, if your body and mind … are so lithe and tender that I feel I could mingle more intimately with your thoughts by sitting on your lap …, there is nothing in all that to deserve your contemptuous words.”
Rebuffs led Proust to justify his desire with selective appeals to the history of Western philosophy. “I am glad to say that I have some highly intelligent friends, distinguished by great moral delicacy, who have amused themselves at one time with a boy,” Proust informed Daniel. “That was the beginning of their youth. Later on they went back to women.… I would like to speak to you of two masters of consummate wisdom, who in all their lives plucked only the bloom, Socrates and Montaigne. They permit men in their earliest youth to ‘amuse themselves,’ so as to know something of all pleasures, and so as to release their excess tenderness. They held that these at once sensual and intellectual friendships are better for a young man with a keen sense of beauty and awakened ‘senses’, than affairs with stupid, corrupt women.”
Nevertheless, the blinkered boy continued in his pursuit of the stupid and corrupt.
ROMANTIC PESSIMISM: Proust’s romantic pessimism was at least partly founded on the combination of an intense need for love and a tragicomic clumsiness in securing it. “My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved,” he declared, and defined his principal character trait as: “The need to be loved; more precisely, a need to be petted and spoilt more than a need to be admired.” But an adolescence filled with misguided seductions of school friends led to an equally fruitless adulthood. There were a succession of crushes on young men who didn’t call back. In the seaside resort of Cabourg in 1911, Proust expressed his frustration to the young Albert Nahmias: “If only I could change sex and age, take on the looks of a young and pretty woman in order to embrace you with all my heart.” For a time, there was a modicum of happiness with Alfred Agostinelli, a taxi driver who moved into Proust’s flat with his wife, but Alfred met a premature end in a plane crash off Antibes, and thereafter there were to be no profound emotional engagements, merely further pronouncements as to the inseparability of love and suffering: “Love is an incurable disease.” “In love, there is permanent suffering.” “Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”