Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [18]
Curiously, this deadly clear evaluation of other people was disguised by his elaborate politeness—addressed even to servants (unusual for the period, when most people were contemptuous of the social classes below them). Proust’s complicated way of talking was dubbed by his friends with the French made-up verb proustifier, “to Proustify.” Proust was quite capable of waking up in the middle of the night to worry that when Madame Straus’s husband had complained of a young man who never rose from his chair when older people entered the room he’d meant to reproach Proust for the same rudeness, despite the fact that he was clearly too ill to stand up repeatedly and was by that point an old friend of the family. Questions of etiquette and deeper matters of genuine kindness and respect haunted Proust all his life. Nevertheless, he could not tolerate polite clichés, which he and his friend Lucien Daudet termed louchonneries, by which they meant “expressions that make you cross your eyes”—e.g., falsely elegant variations such as “Albion” for England and “Green Erin” for Ireland, or obviously hypocritical expressions such as “those fine folks” (les braves gens) applied by aristocrats to peasants.
When he was twenty-one he responded to a second questionnaire (this one in French, printed in a friend’s album, something like a yearbook today), in which this time he identified as his principal trait “the need to be loved or, more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled rather than the need to be admired.” He sought in a man “feminine charms” and in a woman “masculine virtues.” His main fault was not wanting to know things and not being able to will himself into action—he lacked willpower.
According to the questionnaire, his favorite writers now included two living masters, Pierre Loti and Anatole France. Loti was an absurd member of the navy and the French Academy who loved to dress up (as a pharaoh, an Arab chieftain, a Japanese warlord) and whose house on the Atlantic coast in Rochefort was part Muslim mosque, part Turkish corner, and part medieval fortress. His novels were equally exotic: The Disenchanted, about the plight of modern Turkish women; To Morocco, about an overland trip in springtime from Tangier to Fez; and Madame Chrysanthème, about a Japanese geisha abandoned by a French naval officer. Anatole France, whom Proust knew well and who was a far more considerable novelist than Loti (France won the Nobel Prize), wrote The Red Lily, a psychological novel of great delicacy about adultery among artistically inclined French aristocrats on a trip to Florence, a book that lacks only amplitude and force to be a masterpiece on a level with Madame Bovary. It inspired Proust with its subtle psychology, its refined sensuality, its portrait of a poet much like Verlaine.
Anatole France’s work moved him with its tone of muted melancholy, gentle pessimism, and convinced solipsism. France’s classical style—straightforward and always lucid—steered Proust away from the deliberate obscurantism of symbolist poets and prose writers, just as Proust’s later discovery of the exalted Ruskin would influence him to abandon France’s materialism for a more congenial brand of spiritualism, one that Proust’s education had in any event predisposed him to embrace.
To be sure, neither Loti nor France was a writer as ambitious or as gifted as the earlier nineteenth-century masters Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert. Proust lived in a period of inferior writers but of a superior culture. If Paris for the moment was a city without great authors, it had plenty of great readers, connoisseurs alert to true achievement in the arts. More important for a social novelist (and weren’t almost all novels about society?), Proust half-belonged to a gossipy, cultivated, leisurely world. He knew all the secrets of the aristocracy and spent thirty years learning their rituals, feuds, genealogies, and vanities, but he was also distanced from this world by the fact he was