Marcel Proust, the person and his family – The enigma of the man

Unraveling the enigma of the man Marcel Proust behind the masterpiece 

Marcel Proust left an indelible mark on the literary world with his masterpiece, la Recherche (In Search of Lost Time, ISOLT). Yet, beyond his literary genius, Proust himself remains an enigma, a complex individual whose life and personality continue to fascinate and intrigue. 

Friends, acquaintances, fellow writers, artists, relatives and persons from his social circles published many pages of testimonials after his death in 1922. Together with the biographies already mentioned, these can be used to sketch a picture of the man Marcel Proust. 

However, there are several caveats to consider in this exercise. 

As the ancient Greeks wisely advised, “γνῶθι σαυτόν” (know thyself), the quest for self-understanding is a profound and often elusive endeavor. And if knowing yourself is already so difficult, you better put away the pretense of really knowing another person. It is wise -both for ourselves and for others around us- to limit our ‘knowing’ to ‘somewhat knowing’ or perhaps even accept that what we know of the other may say something about the knower rather than the known. Proust already knew this where he writes that every reader is in fact the reader of himself.  

What we extract from historical facts is never the one and only truth that has the same evidential value as the laws of gravity, the fact that water at sea level boils at a hundred degrees Celsius, that we are born and inevitably die. Every historiography writes history from a particular (and therefore limited) point of view. So what we say about Marcel Proust is not an ultimate and universal truth, but an opinion. That Proust created a universal work of art with the Recherche is a truth.  Proust already knew that too, because the whole Recherche is a plea for the supremacy of Art as truth over human intellect and its emotional vicissitudes. 

Proustophiles23 are not naive sanctifiers and they realize that each characteristic of a person can be viewed from different perspectives. Tenacious is stubborn, intense is absorbing, opinionated is creative, and vice versa. Every half-empty bottle is half-full while both contain the same reality. But with half-full bottles, it is just a little easier to survive in the desert of life. 

With these caveats in mind, we embark on a journey through Marcel Proust’s life, following his development from a frail infant to a literary genius and finally to an untimely elderly man who succumbed to illness at the age of 51. We skip over the all-too-familiar stories and form our opinions from less familiar angles. 

Childhood 

Due to lack of sources, little is known about his childhood. We assume that as a toddler and preschooler Marcel is a cheerful and playful boy that with his doe-like eyes fascinates and captivates those around him, his parents, wider family but also the servants. 

Puberty 

One anecdote from Proust’s adolescence sheds light on his character and his sensitivity to family dynamics. On a summer Sunday in Auteuil, Marcel was reading, as was his custom, while his 12-year-old brother Robert went rowing. The family was expecting guests for dinner. As the meal began, Robert was still absent, causing anxiety for their mother. Marcel suffers his mother’s anxiety while Dad chats happily with the visitors. Toward the end of dinner, Robert storms in. Mother doesn’t give him a glance and clearly shows him her displeasure. Marcel, observing his mother’s distress, felt physically unwell and retreated to his room, beckoning Robert to follow. Their mother followed suit. After ten minutes, everyone returned to the living room, relieved and reconciled. This incident suggests Marcel’s intolerance for tension or conflict within his family and his willingness to use his physical frailty to restore harmony24

During his high school years, Marcel’s frequent illnesses did not deter him from building a wide circle of friends and publishing his early writings in various magazines. His friends coined the term “proustify” to describe his tendency towards lengthy and detailed descriptions in his interactions. While his verbose nature could be overwhelming at times, his literary talent was undeniable, and his friends recognized him as their editorial leader. 

Adolescence 

Proust’s adolescence was marked by uncertainty about his identity, his abilities, and his future aspirations. The only thing that seems certain is that repeated physical symptoms will come to define his life, although it remains uncertain how disabling and how long the next asthma attack will last. However, this does not prevent him from gathering many friends around him, with varying degrees of closeness, from occasional contacts to very intense close relationships. He is known for his funny conversational style and the playful way he shares his erudition with his friends without seeming arrogant or pedantic. 

His charm extended to the parents of his friends, particularly the mothers, who found him endearing. Robert Dreyfus, a childhood friend, recalls: 

“But who Marcel Proust astonished even more were the people of more respectable age: they were unanimous in their marvel at the refinements of his politeness, the grace of his gentleness, the complications of his kindness. Yes, I can see him again, handsome and very chilly, wrapped in woolens, rushing to meet the ladies, young or old, bowing as they approached, and always finding the words that touched their hearts, whether he was broaching subjects usually reserved for grown-ups or simply inquiring about their health25”. 

This generation opened doors for Marcel into intellectual and artistic circles, providing him with material for his mondain newspaper articles. Little did he know at the time that these experiences would lay the groundwork for the content and form of his future masterpiece. 

Marcel’s refinement, good manners, and courtesy made him a welcome presence among others. He counterbalanced the selfishness and self-centeredness that could sometimes make social interactions unpleasant with his tenderness and tolerance. 

Young adulthood 

Family relations come to a head somewhat when Marcel fails to decide what he will study and what profession he will choose. Father insists because he knows from his own experience the importance of this. Mother encourages, adjusts where possible, and otherwise undergoes her eldest son’s waywardness.  Marcel studies law and literature before accepting an unpaid job at the Bibliothéque Mazarine, where he will spend exactly zero days. Writer, he wants to be, writer he will be. During his voluntary army service in 1889, he wriggles out from under parental supervision: “the best time of my life”.  

It does typify him, that willfulness, coupled with a stubborn insistence on pushing his own way. Throughout his life, Marcel Proust will do nothing against his will and not let anything or anyone dictate to him.  

At 23, asthma returns in full force, never to subside. His life from then on is defined by illness. He ends up in a reversed day-night rhythm, falls prey to medication use that later turns into abuse, becomes a prisoner in his bedroom and needs all his social skills not to lose contact with the outside world. 

Marcel is somewhat awkward and ‘accident prone’: when he goes to whores with money from his father (who, as a hygienist, hopes to curb his son’s overly frequent masturbation habit), the ‘act’ fails but he breaks a pisspot; on a trip, he loses the wallet with all his money and must ask mother to help him out of trouble. His mother regularly exhorts him to trim his hair and moustache. When he appears in church as a bridesmaid at his brother Robert’s wedding in 1903, he wears a dinner jacket stuffed with thermal insulating material and three more overcoats over it. At high society events, he appears, wrapped up as if it were the North Pole, in a giant overcoat with bottles of Contrexeville water in his pockets. 

Adulthood  

In 1903 (father) and 1905 (mother), he lost his parents and with them his anchor. For a long time, he went through a depressive period of deep mourning. For the first time in his life, he did not write. However, in his head and in his heart, he had continued to build on his oeuvre, even though he only started writing again in 1907. This loss was – never admitted by him – a liberation and the beginning of an disinhibition, both in the way he shaped his further life and in his literary production. These years of mourning were a period of loneliness and unfulfilled desires, of relationships that never developed into what he hoped for, of a relentless asthma that cumulated with all sorts of other ailments, of a totally unregulated and disrupted life that was filled with what his father would have defined as anti-hygienic (day/night rhythm shift, a worthless diet, a disturbed and disrupted sleep pattern – or rather a lack of sleep), of financial adventures with investments that looked more like gambling than good housekeeping. This cocktail of misery thrives within Marcel, who is also chained to his daily ritual alternation of stimulants (adrenaline, caffeine), hallucinogens (stramonium, belladonna) and hypnotics (veronal, trional)26

But he is liked by many. The doors of the most exclusive salons swing open to him. This would never have been the case if he had continually wallowed in his illness as a complaining and whining “oh-poor-me” or “a crybaby”. The opposite was true. Marcel always has interesting facts to tell about everyone and everything, gossips only with warm words, bores no one with his misery, and, along with Anne de Noailles, is given the honorary title of funniest person in Paris. His many friends visit him at his sickbed, willingly respecting his impossible reception hours. Fellow writer and devil-doer Jean Cocteau attests to the funny way Marcel read excerpts of his work to him, as seen in the YouTube clip27. Marcel Proust, however sick, however isolated, however tormented he is, remains a joyful person and that attracts people. He is a loner who cannot do without others. And he embraces the joy of life: We only have one life, so let’s live it and long live life!28‘.  

Between 1907 and 1909, Marcel increasingly withdraws from his mundane life and puts all his energy into his work. Despite his physical limitations and his emotional quest, the resilient go-getter that is Marcel Proust manages to channel the fiercely flowing lava of his creative outburst. Still doubtful and searching as to what his theme will be, what style he will adopt and what the structure of his work will be, the proto-texts of the ISOLT (Jean Santeuil, Pastiches et Mélanges, Les 75 pages, Dossier contre Sainte-Beuve) gush out of his pen that dance ‘au gallop’ across the paper faster and faster and becomes ever more illegible.   

Convinced that he does not have much time left, he perseveres and works, works, works for years, undaunted, unyielding, stubborn and persistent in a biblical effort: 

‘Did I tell you about a thought of Saint John’s: Work while you still have the light. Since I no longer have it, I’m now starting to work.29 

A life of investigating the world around him combined with self-observation from a meta position produces creative material that the talented Marcel Proust, once he has found his theme, style and structure in 1909, undauntedly molds into his masterpiece, using hard work, great patience and self-confidence. The construction plans of his cathedral were finished in 1913, including the first apse, ‘Swann’s Way’, and large parts of the seventh, ‘Time Regained’.  

The fact that Marcel refused to take shelter during the bombing of Paris but, on the contrary, undertook long night walks, is perhaps testament to courage (or is it a form of fatalism, “que sera, sera” or a pervasive search for aesthetic experience?). In any case, to design and systematically execute such a large body of work without knowing whether he will ultimately succeed in bringing it to fruition, shows his courage. However, he is so convinced of it that he is willing to sacrifice his personal life for it. 

The work [on the book] is what needs to be done; the rest comes or doesn’t come, it’s secondary30.’