How Proust Can Change Your Life

The title of the long book hinted as much. Though Proust never liked it, and referred to it variously as “unfortunate” (1914), “misleading” (1915), and “ugly” (1917), In Search of Lost Time had the advantage of pointing directly enough to a central theme of the novel: a search for the causes behind the dissipation and loss of time. Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, it was a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life.

Though the announcement of an imminent apocalypse could no doubt make this a concern uppermost in anyone’s mind, the Proustian guidebook held out a hope that the topic could detain us a little before personal or global destruction was at hand; and that we might therefore learn to adjust our priorities before it was time to have a last game of golf and keel over.

Proust was born into a family where the art of making people feel better was taken very seriously indeed. His father was a doctor, a vast, bearded man with a characteristic nineteenth-century physiognomy, who had the authoritative air and purposeful glance that might readily have made one feel a sissy. He exuded the moral superiority available to the medical profession, a group whose value to society is unquestionably apparent to anyone who has ever suffered from a tickly cough or ruptured appendix, and which may hence provoke an uncomfortable sense of superfluity in those with less certifiably worthwhile vocations.

Dr. Adrien Proust had started modestly, the son of a provincial grocer specializing in the manufacture of wax candles for the home and church. After pursuing brilliant medical studies, culminating in a thesis on The Different Forms of Softening of the Brain, Dr. Proust had devoted himself to improving standards of public sanitation. He was especially concerned with arresting the spread of cholera and bubonic plague, and had traveled widely outside France, advising foreign governments on infectious diseases. He was appropriately rewarded for his efforts, becoming a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and a professor of hygiene at the Medical Faculty in Paris. The mayor of the once cholera-prone port of Toulon presented him with the keys to the city, and a hospital for quarantined victims was named after him in Marseilles. By the time of his death in 1903, Adrien Proust was a doctor of international standing, who could almost be believed when he summed up his existence with the thought, “I have been happy all my life.”

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.