The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [313]
Proust: The little boy-hero who couldn't grow up
Not long after Chekhov's death, a doctor's son in his mid-30s retired from the world and took to his bed in a cork-lined room in Paris, to begin writing what was eventually to become the longest story ever published. Nearly a hundred years later, the 3,300-odd pages of Marcel Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu were to be widely described as `the greatest novel of the twentieth century.
One cannot see Proust's mountain of words in proper perspective without recognising the extent to which it reflected his own obsessively self-absorbed personality and the story of his own life. He was born in Paris, in the middle of the Prussian siege of 1870, into a typical haut-bourgeois French family. His imposing, bearded father was a distinguished pillar of the French medical establishment. But young Marcel's closest relationship, shaping his personality more than anything else, was that with his doting Jewish mother, who called him `mon petit loup'; and the peculiar degree to which this affected his character was notably illustrated, when he was seven, by what his biographer George Painter called `the most important event in Proust's life'.
This took place on an evening when his parents were out in the garden, entertaining a guest, and his mother failed to come up to her son's bedroom to give him his usual goodnight kiss. The anguished child watched the grown-ups from his window, could not sleep, and pleaded in vain with a family servant to call his mother upstairs. Eventually he leaned out and called `ma petite maman, I want you for a second'. When she entered the room, he broke into a fit of hysterical weeping, which he was to remember for the rest of his life as a sobbing inside him which had `never ceased': the moment when he pleaded for his mother's love and she had not come. Two years later he terrified his father with the first of the asthmatic attacks which again were to haunt him for the rest of his life; and which Painter was to link with his hysterical weeping fits as unconscious pleas for `his father's pity and his mother's love'. The fact was that Proust had already become the victim of a particularly acute `mother-complex': a sickly, spoiled, hypochondriac little boy who, even when he was briefly separated from his mother at the age of 16, fell into such melodramatic sobbing that his great-uncle contemptuously dismissed it as `sheer egotism'.
As a teenager, although he sometimes amused his schoolfriends with his clever remarks, he irritated them even more by his embarrassing attempts to curry favour and win their approval. As one, Daniel Halevy, put it:
`there was something about him we found unpleasant. His kindnesses and tender attentions seemed mere mannerisms and poses, and we took occasion to tell him so to his face. Poor, unhappy boy, we were beastly to him.'
But one or two of his well-connected schoolfriends, including the orphaned son of the composer Bizet, were to prove useful to him as an entree to Parisian high society. And at the age of 18, as a young dandy with a drooping moustache, a gift for flattery and some wit, young Monsieur Proust began to be invited to fashionable salons and the grand dinner parties of the intensely snobbish and decadent French aristocracy. In his mid-teens he had developed a crush on Marie de Bernardaky, a teenage girl he had met playing in the Champs Elysees. But now his transient passions for the opposite sex, which remained almost wholly in his own mind, were largely inspired, as Painter describes it, by women 20 years older than himself: either respectably married or `unattainable high class cocottes' like Laura Hayman, who called him `my little porcelain psychologist'. When, aged 19, he volunteered for a year in the army, he enjoyed what Painter described as `the discipline and