Marcel Proust
From Philosopedia
Proust, Marcel (10 July 1871 - 18 November 1922)
Called by some one of the three major authors of the 20th century (along with Thomas Mann and James Joyce, who also were freethinkers), Proust was a novelist, essayist, and critic, the author of A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1937; English translation, Remembrance of Things Past, 1922–1931; however, In Search of Lost Time is a less careless translation).
Proust was born in Auteuil, near Paris. His father was a prominent physician and his mother was part of a prosperous Jewish family. One of his cousins married Henry Bergson. Although plagued by chronic asthma and well-publicized neuroses, Marcel completed his one-year stint of military service and studied law. He met Anatole France, who became Marcel's patron for a time. When Proust's first book of short stories, essays and poetry was not a success, he turned to translating the works of art historian John Ruskin. He then devoted much of his remaining life to Remembrance of Things Past, his 7-volume masterpiece
His father, Dr. Adrien Proust, was a writer of thirty-four books. His younger brother, Dr. Robert Proust, wrote The Surgery of the Female Genitalia, a work about prostatectomies so well-known that some physicians referred to them as “proustatectomies.”
Proust was actively involved on the side of Dreyfus, in the Dreyfus case of 1897–1899. In Proust’s view, time mocks man’s intelligence and his endeavors. Memory synthesizes yet distorts past experience. Most experience causes inner pain, and the objects of man’s desires are the chief causes of his suffering. In Proust’s scheme, man is isolated, society is false and ruled by snobbery, and artistic endeavor is raised to a religion and is superior to nature. His ability to interpret man’s innermost experience in terms of such eternal forces as time and death created a profound and protean world view, inspiring wide discussion.
A sickly child, Proust endured a lifelong bout with asthma. He was allergic to flowers, pollen, dust, perfume, smoke, dampness, and cold, and his attacks could also be triggered by emotional upsets. Some of his attacks were largely psychosomatic, and in the winter he slept fully clothed. Even in summer he wore sweaters, mufflers, stockings, gloves, and a nightcap to bed. He became so obsessed with his asthmatic condition that he often used more than twenty towels after bathing to avoid having a damp towel touch his body.
His skin, he felt, was so sensitive that instead of using soap, described writer Alain de Botton, he would wash with
- finely woven, moistened towels, then pat himself dry with fresh linen (an average wash requires twenty towels, which Proust specifics must be taken to the only laundry that uses the right non-irritant powder, the blanchisserie Lavigne, which also does Jean Cocteau’s laundry.
Truman Capote, ever the gossip, wrote that Colette had told him that she wore the same perfume that Empress Eugénie had worn, adding that Cocteau had told her Proust wore that same perfume, too.
Proust never married. He had such an attachment to his mother that although over thirty years old he would tell her about his “peeing” and bowel movements and how he had slept the night before. When his mother died in 1905, he withdrew from society, lived in a sound-proofed flat, and led a life of introspection.
Many assumed that Proust had sexual relationships with a number of men. However, the Baron de Charlus, the principal homosexual character in his A Race Accursed, is one of the most grotesque of the many characters he depicted.
Meanwhile, according to Edward White’s Marcel Proust (1998), Proust did have a major lover, a young waiter from the Ritz, a person who lived with him for two years.
By 1912 Proust was living in bed. In 1922 he suffered uremia, vertigo, speech difficulty, and an attack of bronchitis. While struggling for breath on 18 November 1922, he hallucinated that a large black woman was chasing him and, shortly afterwards, succumbed to the illness that had plagued him all of his life, an asthma attack.
As for any afterlife, Proust once wrote to the editor of L’Intransigeant,
- I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. . . . But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
Proust, according to David Tribe, was an outright freethinker.
