How the French Invented Love (32 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Desire and Despair

Proust’s Neurotic Lovers

T
HERE CAN BE NO PEACE OF MIND IN LOVE, SINCE WHAT ONE HAS OBTAINED IS NEVER ANYTHING BUT A NEW STARTING-POINT FOR FURTHER DESIRES.

Marcel Proust,
Within a Budding Grove,
1919

Painting of Marcel Proust by Jacques-Émile Blanche, 1892. Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Copyright Kathleen Cohen.

W
e have seen unhappy love before. French history and literature abound with stories of tormented lovers, the torment often inflicted by outside forces. Tyrannical parents. Malicious rivals. An odious husband. War. Accidents. Letters gone astray. But sometimes unhappiness is the product of one’s own imagination. With Proust, we encounter a writer and characters whose romantic sorrows are mainly self-inflicted, and arise from the author’s troubled psyche, from what he himself recognized as an incapacity for happiness in matters of the heart. With Proust, we enter into the domain of the neurotic lover.

Proust lays out the origins of his neurotic love at the beginning of the multivolume
Remembrance of Things Past
. There the narrator—called Marcel—traces his own adult angst to the childhood experience of waiting upstairs in his bedroom for his mother’s goodnight kiss. Even worse were the evenings when there was company for dinner and Marcel was obliged to kiss his mother downstairs: “that frail and precious kiss which Mamma used normally to bestow on me when I was in bed and just going to sleep had to be transported from the dining-room to my bedroom where I must keep it inviolate all the time that it took me to undress, without letting its sweet charm be broken, without letting its volatile essence diffuse itself and evaporate.”
¹
In a key episode, when Marcel was sent to bed without any kiss at all, his anguish was intolerable, and he made such a scene that his mother ended up spending the night in his room. But rather than revel in this concession, Marcel saw the event as a defeat: he knew that his parents had been obliged to recognize his difference from other boys and consequently relinquish their ideal picture of him.

That bedtime kiss! The narrator admits that the anxiety surrounding that ritual has never left him. He speaks knowingly of “that anguish which later emigrates into love, and may even become permanently inseparable from it.” Born from the filial love of a hypersensitive child, that angst finds its way into all of Proust’s love stories.

And yet, Proust so skillfully creates the psychological reality of his characters that we enter into their skins and appropriate their desire and despair. No other writer renders the misery of love so compellingly. Reader, beware. I am a Proustian. If I were cast on a desert island with the choice of only two authors, I would ask for the works of Shakespeare and Proust. If you too are already a Proustian, you know what I’m talking about. To others, I can only say: read Proust and see if he is for you.

Proust is not for everyone. Gide (of all people!) is known to have rejected Proust’s manuscript for publication by the prestigious publishing house Nouvelle Revue Française. Subsequently, in 1913, Grasset published the first volume,
Swann’s Way
, at the author’s expense. The second volume,
Within a Budding Grove
, had to wait until after World War I, but when it appeared in 1919, it won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for literature. Since then, Proust has had countless admirers worldwide, but also his detractors. Many find him long-winded or simply boring. Some are turned off by his endless ruminations, others by the increasing focus on homosexuality in the later volumes. There’s even a button asserting
MARCEL PROUST IS A YENTA
. But for me, Proust has been an ongoing source of beauty and truth (pace Keats), humor, and insight, even as I recognize his twisted view of love. One recent critic has aptly titled his book
Proust, les horreurs de l’amour
.
²
Proustian love always ends badly.

Consider “Swann in Love” (“Un amour de Swann,” volume 1, part 2), which constitutes Proust’s most compact treatment of love. Charles Swann, a close family friend, frequently visited Marcel’s father, mother, grandparents, and aunts, when they spent their Easter and summer holidays in Combray (based on the provincial town of Illiers, now renamed Illiers-Combray). As a child, the narrator was awed by this man of great wealth and impeccable taste, and he became infatuated with Swann’s daughter, Gilberte, from the moment he saw her through the fence of their impressive country property.

Swann’s love affair with Gilberte’s mother, Odette, took place before Marcel’s birth, yet the story is told as if Marcel had witnessed it himself. We watch as Swann slowly responds to Odette de Crécy’s charms, even though he knows she has a shady past, is not very intelligent or cultivated, and does not correspond to the type of woman he usually desires. She has a “kind of beauty that left him indifferent . . . her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones were too prominent, her features too tightly drawn.” For a long period he meets her only at night, after he has made love in his carriage to a more fleshy working-class woman. Odette does her best to arouse within Swann both physical desire and tender emotions. After one of his visits, she sends a message informing him that he has left his cigarette case behind, adding: “If only . . . you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have that back.”

Swann needs more than Odette’s encouragement to fall in love with her. Because she is not naturally his type, he needs aesthetic associations to prompt his desire. One day he is struck by her resemblance to the biblical figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, in a fresco by Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel. That association enhanced her beauty and made her more precious.

The second, even more important, association derives from a sonata played by a pianist at the home of the Verdurins, Odette’s habitual dinner hosts. Though the Verdurin milieu is decidedly inferior to the one Swann usually frequents, he manages to enjoy himself, especially during the musical portion of the evening, with Odette at his side. There he discovers the sonata by Vinteuil, with its recurring “little phrase,” that becomes “the national anthem of their love.” The little phrase awakens in Swann a longing that prompts, and ultimately becomes identical with, his feelings for Odette. In a film, the background music would have to be Camille Saint-Saëns’ Sonata no. 1 for piano and violin, opus 75, known to have been Proust’s inspiration for the little phrase.

The path to loving is strange indeed. First Swann falls in love with a painting that leads him to prize Odette because of her resemblance to the painting. Then he falls in love with a musical piece that energizes his feelings for her. One last psychological experience is necessary for him to fall fully in love. Because Odette has made herself so available to him, Swann has not prized her sufficiently. Why, he has not even tried to kiss her or sleep with her! But the night that he goes to the Verdurins and finds that she has left without waiting for him, he becomes frantic. He searches for her in numerous after-hours locations, his distress compounded by the fear that she is with someone else. When he finally sees her coming out of a restaurant alone and takes her home, he cannot resist kissing her in the carriage and adjusting the cattleya orchids at her bosom, all of which lead to their first night in bed together. Henceforth, their private expression for making love will be “do a cattleya” (
faire cattleya
). This is the happy time of their love affair. “Ah! in those earliest days of love, how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.”

This happy period is short-lived. Swann, who begins giving Odette money to help her over difficult periods, slowly realizes that the rumors about her being a “kept woman” are indeed true. Still, this doesn’t worry him as much as the jealousy he feels toward her past lovers and those who may still be lurking in the shadows. Jealousy becomes the sine qua non of Proustian love. Without it, Proust’s heroes do not know that they are in love. Without the fear of being supplanted by another, they cannot experience love’s cataclysmic upheavals. Proust seems to concur with the medieval view—remember Marie de Champagne and Capellanus—that jealousy is intrinsic to romantic love.

The more jealous Swann becomes, the more indifferently Odette behaves toward him. It’s the oldest rule of love: the one who loves more suffers more. Swann takes no comfort in being wealthy, fashionable, and connected to the “best people,” like the Prince of Wales and the president of the republic—people he never mentions to Odette and her circle, who pretend to find high society boring and secretly envy anyone within it. Swann is so eaten up by his jealousy for Odette that he devotes his whole life to being at her side, or spying on her, or thinking about her. Love becomes a malady, a sickness “so much a part of him, that one could not extract it without destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.”

Love-as-sickness is more dangerous than lovesickness. The lovesick person languishes from the absence or indifference of the loved one, but usually gets over it, either by winning the beloved or by moving on to another love. As opposed to lovesickness, love-as-sickness implies that the lover is beyond hope. He or she will always suffer while in love and never reach a “healthy” state of loving, which would demand, minimally, some concern for the other person’s well-being. Proust’s characters are too immersed in their own internal misery to be able to care for another in any mature fashion.

Swann’s experiences are the prototype for other love affairs in the novel, such as the narrator’s later jealous torments concerning Albertine and the Baron de Charlus’s relations with the young violinist Morel. No other piece of French literature contains such neurotic lovers—not even Alceste in
Le Misanthrope
or Des Grieux in
Manon Lescaut
. In describing his characters, Proust doesn’t shy away from expressions like neuropath (
névropathe
), neurasthenic (
neurasthénique
), neurotic (
névrosé
), nervous, abnormal, lunatic, hysterical, and pathological, reminding us that he was writing at a time when Charcot and Freud’s vocabulary was making its way into the popular discourse. His own father, Dr. Adrien Proust, was fully aware of the mental component of physical disorders. But Proust had to look no further than his own history of sexual jealousy, beginning with his teenage crushes on fellow students and his early love affair with the composer Reynaldo Hahn, to conjure up the green-eyed monster. Still, however personal or neurotic in origin, Proustian jealousy gives voice to the potential jealousy in everyone who has ever loved.

A
nother important aspect of Proustian love is its relation to the great theme of time, which girds the entire oeuvre. Swann is aware that what he feels for Odette during the period of his greatest love is not what he will feel in the future. As much as he tries to disentangle himself from the pain of loving Odette, he clings to her because he knows that when he is released from suffering, he will be another person.

    When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regretted, imagined; when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious turmoil that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection and gratitude, when normal relations that would put an end to his melancholy madness were established between them—then, no doubt, the actions of Odette’s daily life would appear to him as being of little intrinsic interest. . . . But the truth was that in the depths of his morbid condition he feared death itself no more than such a recovery, which would in fact amount to the death of all he now was.

At some level of consciousness, all lovers know this. If you cease to care for the person you love, you will give up a vital piece of your identity. You will become someone else. You will look back on your past love with tenderness or anger or some other combination of feelings, but you will not be able to recapture the same emotions you once felt. You may even begin to miss the pain you were once capable of feeling. Love, Proust tells us, is a mysterious intoxication, all-powerful yet fleeting, and sometimes expended on the wrong person. So Swann tells himself when his love has finally worn itself out: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me and who wasn’t even my type!” Epiphanies like this remain with Proust’s readers long after they have put his books back on the shelf.

W
e learn from
Within a Budding Grove
that Swann married Odette after he had ceased to love her. The reason for his marriage to his former mistress lay in the birth of their daughter, Gilberte. It was Swann’s dearest hope that someday he would be able to present both his wife and his daughter to his old friend, the Princess des Laumes (who became in time the Duchesse de Guermantes), but she steadfastly refused to meet them because of Odette’s past as a demi-mondaine—a kept woman. Not only did Swann’s female friends refuse to receive Odette, but they also declined invitations to his conjugal residence. That meant that he went alone to many social engagements, including dinner with the narrator’s family, and that even when some of his male friends dined at his home, they came without their wives. Such were the prejudices within the tight caste system that once prevailed in France.