Adam Gopnik in 2021 on Proust:
‘Chekhov, born a decade earlier, is a writer of similar stature, and his plays are genuinely popular. But only specialists debate his translators, and there are no books delving into the originals of his characters, or providing recipes for Chekhovian blini, or explaining how Chekhov can change your life, or presenting photographs of his intimates. Proust, by contrast, is a sort of improbable Belle Époque Tolkien, the maker of a world with passports and maps and secret codes, to which many seek entry.’
(…)
‘The peripheral Proust may persist as part of our search for a skeleton key to all the others—a way inside. There are at least six Marcel Prousts to study, and, though we’d like to say that each feeds the others, the truth is that they exist in separate, sometimes baffling strata. There’s the Period Proust, the Toulouse-Lautrec-like painter of the high life of the Belle Époque, who offers an unmatched picture both of riding in the Bois and of visiting the brothels near the Opéra; and the Philosophical Proust, whose thoughts on the nature of time supposedly derived from the ideas of Henri Bergson and are argued to have paralleled those of Einstein. There’s the Psychological Proust, whose analysis of human motives—above all, of love and jealousy—is the real living core of his book; and the “Perverse” Proust (as the eminent scholar Antoine Compagnon refers to him), who was among the first French authors to write quite openly about homosexuality. Then there is the Political Proust, the Jewish writer who diagrammed the fault line that the Dreyfus Affair first cracked in French society, and that the war pulled apart. Finally, there’s the Poetic Proust, the pathétique Proust who writes the sentences and finds the phrases, and whose twilight intensity and violet-tinted charm make his Big Book one of the few that readers urge on friends rather than merely force on students.’
(…)
‘But the exchange with Gide also reminds us of a less high-minded truth: that Proust was part of the beau monde of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and that his enthusiasm for the high life—call it snobbery, as Gide did—was unmistakable. Part of the appeal of the novel is the era’s glamour. Swann goes to recover from his jealousies at the still extant swank restaurant Lapérouse; when the narrator realizes that “houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years,” it is the high season in the Bois de Boulogne, the most exactingly landscaped park in Paris. Proust had conventional Parisian haute-bourgeois tastes of the time, from dinner in the Ritz garden to sexual frolics in the Right Bank brothels. He wanted the Prix Goncourt (got it), the Légion d’Honneur (got it), and membership in the Académie Française (couldn’t get it). Along with everything else he did that was more academically respectable, he offered a picture of a particularly beautiful place and period in the world’s history.’
(…)
‘Proust suffered from a set of gay fact checkers, in the person of other French writers—Jean Cocteau and Gide among them—who scoffed regularly at the transparency of his disguises, pointing out that the narrator’s blithe claim to have made love to fourteen or so girls on the beach was absurd, given the realities of young women’s lives in the period, though it was entirely plausible with working-class boys. (And his intimates were often boys—sixteen and seventeen. We are vastly more tolerant of sexual difference today, but we police age differences far more aggressively.)’
(…)
‘This pattern of French manners, so different from the British upper-class habit of creating maximum awkwardness to display status, is not cosmeticized. The Duchess de Guermantes will soon blow past Swann’s confession that he is dying with her dismissive reply: “You must be joking. . . . Come and have lunch.” But manners matter, still. The most telling of the peripheral Prousts newly on hand might be found in that strange volume of letters to his upstairs neighbors (translated by Davis), where he filters his ornery neurasthenia through the sieve of good manners, constantly sending gifts and praise along with his complaints. “Madame: I had ordered these flowers for you and I am in despair that they are coming on a day when against all expectation I feel so ill that I would like to ask you for silence tomorrow Saturday,” he writes. “Yet as this request is in no way conjoined with the flowers, causing them to lose all their fragrance as disinterested mark of respect and to bristle with nasty thorns, I would like even more not to ask you for this silence.” One finds Proust here in pure, and necessarily comic, form. Courtesy is comedy: its elaborate euphemisms work like the slamming doors in a Feydeau farce, italicizing the elaborate network of ways in which we just avoid hurting one another’s feelings. For Proust, manners make humankind tolerable, as the one way to escape our own inevitable egotisms. We fall in love with ourselves, and the only way out is not through others—the standard ethical insistence—but through art, which connects us with others in a kind of psychic network of solipsisms. Part of Proust’s humanism lies in his ability to locate the world exclusively between our ears, without supposing that its residence there is necessarily to be regretted.’
(…)
‘“Be here now” is the mystic’s insistence. “Don’t be here now” is Proust’s material motto: be there then, again. Enjoy, emote, repeat, remember: there are worse designs for living.’
Read the article here.
Courtesy is comedy. Quite a few of Proust’s insights have been made more palatable, easier to swallow, by Gopnik, and he is one of the many scribes that got inspired by Proust, but this is so true. And important.. Heartfelt pity is also comedy but a less perfect one.
It’s one of the reasons why I value courtesy so much. Courtesy won’t save us like a God, and politeness and crime can go hand in hand, but still courtesy might be the savior that is present and ready to reach for most people.