16: How Proust Can Change Your Life

A book by Alain de Botton

Marcel Proust may have coped better with London at the moment than I am. According to Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, the French novelist responsible for In Search of Lost Time (also published in English as Remembrance of Things Past) was “always feeling” the cold. “Even in midsummer, he wears an overcoat and four jumpers if forced to leave the house.” The prospect of doing that right now, with the temperature in London heading towards 40 degrees C, makes me quite faint.

A much more pleasant pursuit in the current heat would be to spend a few hours in an industrial freezer re-reading De Botton’s curious book. I say curious because literary criticism/self-help is an irregular genre, at least to me. But that’s what this is. Just look at the chapter headings:

De Botton uses Proust and his output to solve these various problems, and to engrossing and revelatory effect.

What I knew about Proust before reading this book could have filled the back of a stamp. To be honest, a large part of my motivation to read De Botton’s book was the idea it might help me say something clever about Proust without me actually having to read In Search of Lost Time, which is 1,267,069 words long. And that’s what most people know about Proust, right? His book’s ridiculously long. And the madeleine thing. The Proustian moment. The thing that happens to Anton Ego in Ratatouille.

It turns out there was plenty more to him than that, both good and bad.

He was a monumental mama’s boy who gave regular updates to her about “the quality of his sleep, his stool and his appetite,” and who lived with his mother until her death when he was 34. He was remarkably generous and a superb tipper (“If a dinner cost him ten francs, he would add twenty francs for the waiter”). He was a man racked with insecurity, whose “overwhelming priority in any encounter was to ensure that he would be liked”. And as a result he could be a sycophant who treated a “forgettable” poet as a “genius worthy of comparison with [Charles] Baudelaire”. He was “the best of listeners” but once had an amusingly monosyllabic conversation with James Joyce. He had “spectacular gaps in his knowledge,” including who wrote The Brothers Karamazov. He was lacking an ego (“What modesty!” extolled one friend). And he loved his bed. “When one is sad,” Proust wrote, “it is lovely to lie in the warmth of one’s bed, and there, with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with ones head under the blankets, surrender completely to wailing, like branches in the autumn wind.”

The Proust presented by De Botton to his readers is hugely likeable, funny, and slightly tragic. As such, when the genuine profundity of which he was eminently capable is communicated regarding topics from noisy neighbours, to mice, to love, and to just taking a bit more time over things, it does not come across as preachy, or overly-intellectual, or smug, but as genuinely good advice that might be worth heeding. And with De Botton’s book, it is laid out in just 215 pages rather than 3,000. You’ll just need to find yourself a freezer to read in.