Marcel Proust on Love

Sometimes, in reading Marcel Proust’s great novel, it seems as if he is clueless on the subject of love. There are passages in In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past (the title changes depending on the translation), where the narrator seems oblivious to the realities of his own heart.

Portrait of Marcel Proust by Jacques-Émile Blanche in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris

For instance, in the second volume of the novel, Within a Budding Grove, the narrator gets the brush-off from his big crush, Gilberte: “On several occasions I sensed that Gilberte was anxious to put off my visits.” Duh! It took him this long to get the hint?

What about the fact that the narrator’s excitement in seeing Gilberte is ten times hers whenever they meet? And what about the reality that no one could possibly feel comfortable with the narrator’s overbearing love? He wanted to “smother” Gilberte with flowers every single day, until he found out by chance she had a boyfriend, when he glimpsed them walking together on the Champs-Elysées. How could he not have guessed?

In any case, it takes the narrator another 65 pages, closely spaced, finally to conclude, “I had arrived at a state of almost complete indifference to Gilberte.” Even then, incredibly, he’s still shlepping the torch for her—he is so pained by his beloved’s rejection that he can’t bear to set eyes on her.

Here is perhaps Proust’s most famous pronouncements on love, from this same section of the novel: “No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves."


But is love purely a subjective phenomenon? Is the beloved really only a phantom third person to the lover? Maybe some of the time, but then what is all this talk about, “I just wanna get next to you,” to quote the old soul tune, so often repeated in current rap songs. Not to mention the five billion condoms sold each year worldwide. I’m not convinced that the subjective nature of love is Proust’s most “penetrating” insight.

What I do love about Proust’s understanding of love are those passages where he has X-ray vision into the truth of human emotions. In the midst of the narrator’s angst about Gilberte, for instance, there are sentences that are so honest and full of close observation of the heart and its trickery, that no one else could untangle those feelings:

“We are, when in love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced.”

What an incredible description of someone in love—that altered state, where the presence of the beloved in the lover’s mind and body electrifies even trivial moments! And isn’t it so true that the excitement of love is partly the way it kicks over our everyday experience and makes us tremble with life for that very reason? This passage is an example of where Proust’s insights into love really hit home for me. You have to dig for those nuggets in his prose, rather than taking his theory about the subjective nature of love as his only dictum on the subject.

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Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 3: The Longer Work

Writing a full-length book of any genre is not like writing a chapter of a book of prose, or like writing a short story or poem. You can’t polish off a first draft of an entire book in one sitting. You’ve got to pace yourself.

You don’t actually know when you start to write a full-length book how long it will take. Most likely it will take years. To embark on and finish a project that lengthy you have to be patient with yourself. You’re not going to do your best work every day, or even every week. Maybe not even once a month, depending on your work habits.

Some books spill out of a writer like the Trevi Fountain, others an author has to gather one morsel at a time, like an ant carrying bits of ripe leaves to its nest. The novelist John Fowles once said in an interview that he wrote the entire first draft of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in three weeks. That's very unusual. Marcel Proust spent his entire adult life writing one many-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, also translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past. That's equally unusual.

However long it takes to write your book, keep at it, accumulate that manuscript one page at a time. Build towards the complete vision you have of the finished book.

If you start to get bored with your project, that’s a sign you’re heading down a dead end. You can’t get your reader interested in a part of your book that you don’t enjoy writing, or that doesn’t satisfy or fulfill some deep impulse in you. Go back to where you started to get bored, cut the part that doesn’t interest you, and find a more exciting direction. Do something unexpected, off-balance, kooky, kinky—as long as it fits with the rest of the project.

Writing about something that interests you may seem like a simple proposition, but there are times when that question can create an earthquake in your life, bursting all the pipes.

I once went to hear the New York School painter Larry Rivers speak. Larry Rivers was a friend of several writers, especially the poet Frank O’Hara. In fact, Rivers drew the cover illustration for The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, a sketch of the poet naked. That night I went to hear him, someone in the audience asked Larry Rivers a dumb question, probably one he’d heard a hundred times before: “Why do you paint?” But Larry Rivers’ answer deeply impressed me: “Because there’s something I want to see.”  So simple, but so precise. Yes, we write because there’s something we want to see in a book, there’s something we wish we could read. Write the book you want to read.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer