FAILURE OF THEATRICAL CAREER: Despite the pitfalls of psychobiographical speculation, it seems that there were underlying emotional difficulties focused on the integration of amorous and sexual emotions, a claim best illustrated by quoting a proposal for a play which Proust sent to Reynaldo Hahn in 1906. It was to run as follows:
A couple adore each other, immense affection, saintly, pure (needless to say, chaste) of the husband for his wife. But this man is a sadist and, besides the love for his wife, he has relations with whores, where he finds pleasure in soiling his own feelings. Finally, the sadist, always needing something stronger, comes to soil his wife in talking to these whores, in asking them to say bad things about her, and to say them himself (he is sickened five minutes later). While
he is talking like this once, his wife comes into the room without him hearing. She can’t believe her eyes or ears, falls. Then she leaves her husband. He begs, to no avail. The whores want to come back, but sadism would be too painful for him now, and after a last attempt to reconquer his wife, who doesn’t even answer him, he kills himself
.
Sadly, no Paris theater expressed an interest.
THE INCOMPREHENSION OF FRIENDS: A characteristic problem for geniuses. When Swann’s Way was ready, Proust sent copies to his friends, many of whom had difficulty opening the envelope.
“Well, my dear Louis, have you read my book?” Proust recalled asking the aristocratic playboy Louis d’Albufera.
“Read your book? You’ve written a book?” answered a surprised d’Albufera.
“Yes of course, Louis, and I even sent you a copy.”
“Ah, my little Marcel, if you sent it to me, I’ve certainly read it. Only I wasn’t sure I’d received it.”
Madame Gaston de Caillavet was a more grateful recipient. She wrote to thank the author for his gift in the warmest terms. “I constantly re-read the passage in Swann about first Communion,” she told him, “as I experienced the same panic, the same disillusionment.” It was a touching thought for Madame Gaston de Caillavet to share; it might have been kinder had she taken the trouble to read the book and noticed that there was no such religious ceremony within it.
Proust concluded, “About a book published only a few months earlier, people never speak to me without mistakes proving either that they’ve forgotten it or that they haven’t read it.”
AT THIRTY, HIS OWN ASSESSMENT: “Without pleasures, objectives, activities or ambit ions, with the life ahead of me finished and with an awareness of the grief I cause my parents, I have little happiness.”
As for a list of the physical afflictions:
ASTHMA: Attacks start when he is ten, and continue all his life. They are particularly severe, the fits lasting over an hour, as many as ten a day. Because they occur more in the daytime than at night, Proust takes up a nocturnal routine: he goes to sleep at seven in the morning and wakes up at four or five in the afternoon. He finds it impossible to go outdoors much, particularly in the summer, and when he has to, it is only within the confines of a sealed taxi. The windows and curtains of his flat are kept perennially shut; he never sees the sun, breathes any fresh air, or takes any exercise.
DIET: He gradually becomes unable to eat more than a single, and unhelpfully gargantuan, meal a day, which has to be served at least eight hours before his bedtime. Describing a typical meal to a doctor, Proust details a menu of two eggs in a cream sauce, a wing of a roast chicken, three croissants, a plate of french fries, some grapes, some coffee, and a bottle of beer.
DIGESTION: “I go frequently—and badly—to the loo,” he tells the same doctor unsurprisingly. Constipation is quasi-permanent, relieved only by a strong laxative every two weeks, which usually brings on stomach cramps. Urinating is no easier: it is accompanied by a sharp burning sensation, isn’t possible often, and the results display an excess of urea and uric acid. His conclusion: “To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides.”
UNDERPANTS: Needs to have these circling him tight around the stomach before he has any chance of getting to sleep. They have to be fastened with a special pin whose absence, when Proust accidentally loses it early one morning in the bathroom, keeps him awake all day.
SENSITIVE SKIN: Can’t use any soap, or cream or cologne. He has to wash with finely woven, moistened towels, then pat himself dry with fresh linen (an average wash requires twenty towels, which Proust specifies must be taken to the only laundry that uses the right non-irritant powder, the blanchisserie Lavigne, which also does Jean Cocteau’s laundry). He finds that older clothes are better for him than new ones, and develops deep attachments to old shoes and handkerchiefs.
MICE: Proust has a terror of these. When Paris is bombed by the Germans in 1918, he confides that he is more terrified of mice than of cannons.
COLD: Is always feeling it. Even in midsummer, he wears an overcoat and four jumpers if forced to leave the house. At dinner parties, he usually keeps a fur coat on. Nevertheless, people who greet him are surprised to find how cold his hands are. Fearing the effects of smoke, he doesn’t allow his room to be properly heated, and keeps himself warm mostly through hot-water bottles and pullovers. It means he often has colds and, more particularly, a runny nose. At the end of one letter to his friend Reynaldo Hahn, he mentions that he has wiped his nose eighty-three times since starting the letter. The letter is three pages long.
SENSITIVITY TO ALTITUDE: On returning to Paris after visiting his uncle in Versailles, Proust experiences a malaise and is unable to climb the stairs to his apartment. In a letter to his uncle, he later attributes the problem to the change in altitude he has undergone. Versailles is eighty-three meters above Paris.
COUGHING: Does it very loudly. He reports of one fit in 1917: “The neighbours, on hearing a continuous thundering and spasmodic barking, will think that I have bought either a church organ or a dog, or else that by some immoral (and purely imaginary) liaison with a lady, I have fathered a child who happens to have whooping cough.”
TRAVEL: Sensitive to any disruption of routine or habit, Proust suffers from homesickness and fears that every journey will kill him. He explains that in the first few days in a new place, he is as unhappy as-certain animals when night comes (it is not clear which animals he has in mind). He formulates a wish to live on a yacht and thereby move around without having to get out of bed. He suggests this idea to the happily married Madame Straus: “Would you like us to hire a boat in which there will be no noise and from which we shall watch all the most beautiful cities in the universe parade past us on the sea-shore without our leaving our bed (our beds)?” The proposal is not taken up.
UNWILLINGNESS TO GET OUT OF BED: Proust preferred to spend most of his time in bed. He turned it into his desk and office. Did it provide a defense against the cruel world outside? “When one is sad, 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 one’s head under the blankets, surrender completely to wailing, like branches in the autumn wind.”