Charitably, one could suggest escapism. Marooned in familiar circumstances, there may be pleasure in buying a paperback at the station newsstand (“I was attracted by the idea of reaching a wider audience, the sort of people who buy a badly printed volume before catching a train,” specified Proust). Once we’ve boarded a carriage, we can abstract ourselves from current surroundings and enter a more agreeable, or at least agreeably different, world, breaking off occasionally to take in the passing scenery while holding open our badly printed volume at the point where an ill-tempered monocle-wearing baron prepares to enter his drawing room—until our destination is heard on the loudspeaker, the brakes let out their reluctant squeals, and we emerge once more into reality, symbolized by the station and its group of loitering slate-grey pigeons pecking shiftily at abandoned confectionery (in her memoirs, Proust’s maid Celeste helpfully informs those alarmed not to have made much ground in Proust’s novel that it is not designed to be read from one station to the next).
Whatever the pleasures of using a novel as an object by which to levitate into another world, it is not the only way of handling the genre. It certainly wasn’t Proust’s way, and would arguably not have been a very effective method of fulfilling the exalted therapeutic ambitions expressed to Céleste.
Perhaps the best indication of Proust’s views on how we should read lies in his approach to looking at paintings. After his death, his friend Lucien Daudet wrote an account of his time with him, which included a description of a visit they had once made together to the Louvre. Whenever he looked at paintings, Proust had a habit of trying to match the figures depicted on the canvases with people he knew from his own life. Daudet tells us that they went into a gallery hung with a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio. It was called Old Man and Boy, it had been painted in the 1480s, and it showed a kindly-looking man with a set of carbuncles on the tip of his nose.
Proust considered the Ghirlandaio for a moment, then turned to Daudet and told him that this man was the spitting image of the Marquis de Lau, a well-known figure in the Parisian social world.
How surprising to identify the Marquis, a gentleman in late-nineteenth-century Paris, in a portrait painted in Italy in the late fifteenth century. However, a snap of the Marquis survives. It shows him sitting in a garden with a group of ladies wearing the kind of elaborate dress you would need five maids to help you into. He has on a dark suit, a winged collar, cuff links, and a top hat, and despite the nineteenth-century paraphernalia and the poor quality of the photo, one imagines that he might indeed have looked strikingly similar to the carbuncled man painted by Ghirlandaio in Renaissance Italy, a long-lost brother dramatically separated from him across countries and centuries.
The possibility of making such visual connections between people circulating in apparently wholly different worlds explains Proust’s suggestion:
Aesthetically, the number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know
.
And such pleasure is not simply visual, for the restricted number of human types also means that we are repeatedly able to read about people we know, in places we might never have expected to do so.
For instance, in the second volume of Proust’s novel, the narrator visits the Normandy seaside resort of Balbec, where he meets and falls in love with someone I know, a young woman with an impudent expression, brilliant laughing eyes, plump matt cheeks, and a fondness for black polo caps. Here is Proust’s portrait of what Albertine sounds like when she is talking:
In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless and her nostrils pinched, and scarcely moved her lips. The result of this was a drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial heredity, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose. This enunciation which, as it happened, soon disappeared when she knew people better, giving place to a girlish tone, might have been thought unpleasant. But to me it was peculiarly delightful. Whenever I had gone for several days without seeing her, I would refresh my spirit by repeating to myself: “We don’t ever see you playing golf,” with the nasal intonation in which she had uttered the words, point blank, without moving a muscle of her face. And I thought then that there was no one in the world so desirable
.
It is difficult when reading the description of a fictional character not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintance whom he or she most closely, if often unexpectedly, resembles. It has, for example, proved impossible for me to separate Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes from the image of the fifty-five-year-old stepmother of an ex-girlfriend, even though this unsuspecting lady speaks no French, has no title, and lives in Devon. What is more, when Proust’s hesitant, shy character Saniette asks if he can visit the narrator in his hotel in Balbec, the proud defensive tone with which he masks his friendly intentions seems exactly that of an old college acquaintance of mine who had a manic habit of never putting himself in a situation where he might encounter rejection.
“You don’t happen to know what you’ll be doing in the next few days, because I will probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of Balbec? Not that it makes the slightest difference, I just thought I’d ask,” says Saniette to the narrator, though it could equally well have been Philip proposing plans for an evening.
How helpful of Proust to remark that “one cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.” It lends respectability to a habit of imagining that Albertine, last seen walking in Balbec with her brilliant laughing eyes and black polo cap, bears a striking resemblance to my girlfriend Kate, who has never read Proust and prefers George Eliot, or Marie-Claire after a difficult day.
Kate/Albertine
Such intimate communion between our own life and the novels we read may be why Proust argued:
In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have
experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity
.
But why would readers seek to be the readers of their own selves? Why does Proust privilege the connection between ourselves and works of art, as much in his novel as in his museum habits?
One answer is because it is the only way in which art can properly affect rather than simply distract us from life, and that there are a stream of extraordinary benefits attached to what might be termed the Marquis de Lau phenomenon (MLP), attached to the possibility of recognizing Kate in a portrait of Albertine, Philip in a description of Saniette, and, more generally, ourselves in badly printed volumes purchased in train stations.
THE BENEFITS OF THE MLP
(I) TO FEEL AT HOME EVERYWHERE