Writers as a mouthpiece for each other

A book is a product of another self to the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices – Alain de Botton

I

Alain de Botton's excellent How Proust Can Change Your Life was published in 1997.

De Botton is a British writer, Swiss-born in 1969, with important books such as Essays in Love (1993), The Art of Travel (2002), Status Anxiety (2004) and The Architecture of Happiness ( 2006) behind his name. He is Jewish, attended private schools, and is fluent in French and German.

His father was very wealthy and on occasion De Botton remarked how he would just laugh over his son's income as a writer. (Some Daddy issues, then.) But his most important skill is making complex philosophical concepts accessible to ordinary readers.

II

My hardcover Picador edition with Proust on the cover with a parrot on his shoulder and a telephone to the left with the sea behind already reveals something. On the back: a young Marcel, who all his life referred to Maman and Papa, and was emotionally held captive by the mother figure, as it were. And Papa who is fed up with his onanism and sends him to a brothel. With disastrous consequences.

Also a clock on the back.

Proust (Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, born 10 July 1871 and died 18 November 1922), was a French novelist, essayist, and critic. He is best known for À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).

And books can change a person's life, all bookworms know that.

This novel-cum-manual is a beautiful book. The description of the meeting between James Joyce and Proust is wonderful. Proust does not speak to him and at Proust's apartment on Rue Hamelin in Paris he asks his taxi driver to take Joyce home.

Of course, these great writers never met again. Then De Botton uses his imagination to envision how it might have turned out if the two had talked. And that Proust would have said Joyce's Ulysses was the masterpiece of the new century.

Jealousy, rivalry and the careful distance between writers.

III

In Proust's Swann's Way there's the anonymous letter he receives with the shocking news that Odette, his mistress, has had several lovers before him and visits brothels. Which friend sent it? Who was it?

He is confronted with his friends' dark side (jealousy and betrayal). He never finds the sender, but Proust warns: The real world behind the pretence is like a house with a beautiful façade filled with hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.

IV

Virginia Woolf was so deeply moved by Proust that she almost stopped writing! (Marcel and Virginia – A short history: 202-203)

“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 never come up again ..."

And further:

“He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom." (204)

Coming from a great writer, this is high praise for the time.

V

Proust was confined to his room due to illness and his bed was his study. And always with a coat on for the chill he constantly felt. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) was his researching passion. By reading and translating Ruskin, he caught the impact of his ability to notice the finest detail, and admired it.

Ruskin was an art critic and historian, philanthropist, expert in botany, and many other fields. Ruskin wrote about this.

The sharp Proustian eye and the emphasis on the small moment that can bring happiness are emphasised in De Botton's book. And time. Imagined versus real time. Present versus the past that sometimes comes to the fore.

The transience of everything and how memory brings back something, like the famous Madeleine cookie in the tea-drinking session. Read it here.

The importance of reading without idealising books is also described. Love (jealousy and unrequited love) is precisely what determines our identity. De Botton also points to conversations between André Gide (1869–1951) and Proust, with the view that Marcel Proust was a socialite. But Proust often dismissed conversations with high-ranking figures as boring and dull. And believed that ordinary people have much more to say than the gossips at parties, there only by invitation and full of empty pretence.

VI

Proust was generous when he went out, paying waiters exorbitant tips. 

Compared to the fragile Marcel, his brother, Robert, was strong. When Proust couldn't sleep, he would read a train timetable.

De Botton accompanies Proust excellently. A young writer who looks kaleidoscopically at an older one. There is even a photo of De Botton's friend, Kate, who prefers to read George Eliot and Marie Claire. 

♦ VWB ♦

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