The Reading Life: The Pleasures of Proust

I

On the very top of the front page of the Thanksgiving weekend edition of The Financial Times stood the familiar black and white photo-portrait of a mustachioed Marcel Proust. Tilted slightly to the left, his pensive head is resting on his hand in what was once considered a soulful, wistful pose. Under the picture was the following: “Christmas Books: The Best of the Century.” The same picture bearing the same words appeared on the front of the weekend insert. And on the fourth page of that same insert, there it was again, as soulful and dreamy as ever, this time blown up to occupy a third of the page.

For this issue, several writers and critics were invited to select their favorite authors of the century. There follows the usual roundup of books, as predictable as last year’s dinner guests, their presence livened by an unheard-of star or two and by the de rigueur company of titles: books we should really stop taking seriously if we want to be taken seriously at all.

But why Proust on the cover of a financial British daily? Wouldn’t Proust, the most lyrical novelist of our times, seem the most ill-suited to the clamor of world markets?

Two reasons.

Because he was the one most favored by the 10 or so panelists. In other words, Proust came out numero uno on this year’s hit parade.

And because such a ranking makes perfect sense in a paper whose readership represents (or thinks it represents) this decade’s cultured and privileged cosmopolitan elite. Proust is the most elitist and privileged author of the 20th century, the unmitigated class act who confers instant aesthetic, intellectual and social cachet. Proust chic is perhaps the crowning literary tribute of our millennium. The recently opened Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris has put up a sumptuous exhibit devoted to the world of Marcel Proust; two giant biographies are about to appear in English. And for those who do not read, Mont Blanc has just released its most recent luxury gift item: The Marcel Proust Pen.

Making fun of snobs may never have stopped a man like Proust from being himself the most coquettish snob of all. But there is no question that he is the darling of today’s snobs. One reads him to be seen reading him. And yet on a rush-hour bus, at the local library or in the park, you will spot occasional die hards so deeply immersed in their reading that they couldn’t be doing it for show. I want to reach out and exchange something with them, though I wouldn’t know what, and I know better than to try, especially with strangers. But I have been surprised. Proustians, like members of a secret guild, find each other in the most unlikely places.

Fortunately, Proust is also the darling of undergraduates. On a sunny day at Bard College, where I teach, you’ll find my students sitting on Stone Row reading Proust. Two or three of them are sitting on different benches, but they’re all reading the same volume. I walk by, wondering whether to break the spell; I never do. But I envy them, the way I envy everyone’s first “Hamlet” or their first “Casablanca” or even their youth. They’ll remember this, I think to myself, knowing that part of Proust’s magic is his way of getting under our skin, of grafting his memories onto ours. In this course, everyone has been asked to hand in a sample pastiche imitating Proust’s style. For one whole page, students were asked to walk in the shoes of the master, to think his peculiar thoughts and mime his way of spinning them around until the final revelation bursts out like a small miracle in prose. They are also encouraged to keep a journal of their semester with Proust. I want them to come back to their diaries and almost touch what they had felt the moment Swann kissed Odette after his carriage had given a jolt and thrown the would-be lovers forward in their seats. This for what Wordsworth would have called their afteryears.

II

But today’s world is very much aware of the other, more secular Proust. A reading club that does not include Proust at some point in its monthly meetings is not a reading group worth belonging to. A bookcase that does not showcase Proust, however discreetly, tells you more about its owner than the owner might want you to know. In 10 years, not everyone will have read “A la recherche du temps perdu”; but all serious readers will have read “Swann’s Way” or given it a generous try, the way everyone in the English-speaking world tries “Ulysses” at least once. Now, minutes into the new millennium, the matter seems quite settled: Proust is not only the best writer of the 20th century but he is also the best by far.

And in some peculiar way it makes sense that The Financial Times should do the honors. Proust may be worshiped as the loftiest and most introspective of writers but, as with Joyce, there is something irreducibly down-to-earth and nuts-and-bolts about his observations on people, politics and power. Monsieur Proust, as a short Wall Street Journal piece reported more than 20 years ago, may have spent his nights spinning out a tireless web of long introspective sentences in his proverbial dark, stuffy, cork-lined room, but this didn’t stop him from calling his broker in the morning.

For Proust’s novel may be 80 years old, but it is unflinchingly up-to-date, the way Garcia Marquez, Grass, Solzhenitsyn, Hemingway, Sartre, Calvino, Faulkner, Mahfouz, Saramago, Nabokov, Kafka, Kundera and Morrison are up-to-date the way Shakespeare, Dante, Thucydides, Stendhal, Machiavelli and Jane Austen are up-to-date, which is yet another way of saying that he would have been up-to-date back in their times as well.

Proust may have entered the modern literary world on a modernist stream-of-consciousness visa and with the dappered fussiness of an overstrung, fin de siecle-rich aesthete, but he had enough good sense to adapt to a changing world, to a changing readership, anticipating what came after one world war, a depression, another world war, outlasting victory, disenchantment, existentialism, the age of anxiety, deconstruction and political correctness, showing up long after his most impassioned imitators--Albert Camus, to name but one--had come and gone.

Of course, it’s not Proust who changes. We do.

Or let me put it this way: Proust changes us.

And in this he is probably like no other novelist of the 20th century.

If anything sums up the experience of reading Proust, it’s that he shows us things that are so thoroughly familiar to us that we don’t really see them until he’s pointed them out to us. Proust shows us the world the way we never thought anyone but us would be weird enough to see it: a private, self-conscious world where everyone, it seems, nurses the same weird thoughts we nurse, and where everyone is afraid of things we no longer own frighten us still. How many of us have desperately craved for what we’ll do anything to avoid? How many have courted fate with this or that silly ritual knowing there never was such a thing as fate? How many have preferred to wish for what was already granted or kept seeking what may never have been lost at all?

Here is Odette about to be kissed by Swann for the first time:

And in an attitude that was doubtless habitual to her, one which she knew to be appropriate to such moments and was careful not to forget to assume, she seemed to need all her strength to hold her face back, as though some invisible force were drawing it towards Swann. And it was Swann who, before she allowed it, as though in spite of herself, to fall upon his lips, held it back for a moment longer, at a little distance, in his hands. He had wanted to leave time for his mind to catch up with him, to recognize the dream which it had so long cherished and to assist in its realization, like a relative invited as a spectator when a prize is being given to a child of whom she is especially fond. Perhaps, too, he was fixing upon the face of an Odette not yet possessed, nor even kissed by him, which he was seeing for the last time, the comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveler hopes to bear away with him in memory a landscape he is leaving for ever.

I envy everyone’s first encounter with this sentence--a first time that is a last time as well. Very few can carry this off. Not James, not Woolf, not Conrad, not anyone really. No author can with such exquisite accuracy expose how we think about desire, or how we think about those we’re persuaded we desire or about those we wished we’d stop desiring if only we weren’t so busy thinking we had a choice in the matter. Proust is different from all other 20th century writers not because he writes about what we truly feel but because, in doing so, he rewrites what we feel. In Harold Bloom’s words, he reinvents the human in each of us, the way Plato, Ovid, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Racine, Rousseau, Dostoevski and T.S. Eliot redefined what it means to be human. In the process, they told us who we’ve always known and sometimes feared we were. You cannot read Nietzsche or Freud and expect to go on being who you were before you sat down to read them. This is why they are so dangerous. Not because they stun us or run us through a gantlet, but because they barge into our souls, lay waste everything there, and then, to cap the disturbance, make us wish they’d come sooner. Where were you all this time, we ask? St. Augustine said it better. Sero te amavi. I’ve come to love you so late. He was talking about God. I’m talking about Proust.

III

Those who feel this most about Proust are not just today’s lawyers, investment bankers or even your middle-aged intellectual finally old enough to appreciate the magic, the wisdom, the beauty and humor of Proust but your basic undergraduate in small American liberal arts colleges. And this precisely in an age when so many literature teachers are desperately trying to inject third-rate bromides in reader-friendly, feel-good curricula. True, students are known for reading all great authors as contemporaries, jumping across timelines with the fiery haste of reckless drivers speeding through a railroad crossing. But when it comes to Proust, these same undergraduates automatically stand on ceremony, recognizing that perhaps it is time to put aside facile notions dredged up from this or that bog of post-contemporary schools of criticism and simply watch themselves.

And the best part is that they get him. They get his irony in the face of sorrow, they get his slapstick and his wistful longings that are forever unsaddled by sobering reminders that the world was never made for people who spend their nights scribbling in cork-lined bedrooms. They get his wisdom, which would seem too underhanded for the unweathered sensibilities of American teenagers. They get his sentences--far too long for anyone brought up on Spielberg, MTV and chat-room cackle. Above all things they get his beauty. They get it all. And for that too I envy them.

I want to tell them that I envy them, that I even envy the fact that they probably have no idea why I envy them. I look for words. There are no words. And then it hits me: they’ll get this as well, and they’ll get it because they’ve read Proust.