In Defence of Proust

Sir: I was saddened to read that a literary masterpiece sits unloved and unwanted on a shelf in Melbourne, especially when it has been described as “one of the greatest works of the imagination of all time” (André Maurois, 1950, The Quest for Proust, page 15).

It has been said that you get out of a book what is in it for you. In Melissa Coburn’s review (May 2017) of the six-volume revised edition of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, she is frank about her lack of enthusiasm. Over a period of eight years she picked it up just four or five times, “only to place it firmly aside”. Clive James’s admiration for the work and writer remains a mystery to her.

Coburn is not alone. Proust received similar responses when struggling to find a publisher in Paris before the First World War. A Monsieur Humblot, managing director of the publisher Ollendorff, wrote: “I may be thicker skinned than most, but I just can’t understand why anyone should take thirty pages to describe how he tosses about in bed because he can’t get to sleep. I clutched my head …”

Proust found Humblot’s remarks “completely idiotic”. He was, however, “afraid a great many readers may agree with him. But have people like that never bothered to read—well, Barrès, for instance?” He ultimately was forced to fund the first volume of 500 pages himself. It appeared on November 13, 1913, under the imprint of Bernard Grasset.

The work’s intimidating length was satirised by Monty Python in a spoof All England Summarise Proust Competition, allegedly held at a south coast seaside resort. Contestants had fifteen seconds. Harry Baggot from Luton was first on stage: “Proust’s novel ostensibly tells us of the irrevocability of time lost, of innocence and experience, the reinstatement of extra-temporal values and time regained. Ultimately the novel is both optimistic and set within the context of human religious experience. In the first volume, Swann visits—”

“A good attempt,” declared the game-show host, “but unfortunately he chose a general appraisal of the work instead of getting on to specific details.” (For the identity of winner, go to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IScaIp2fVIw.)

Antipathy towards Proust today, however, may have at least as much to do with lack of experience—or what Nietzsche called the right kind of experience—as with a lack of time. “Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, books included, than he already knows,” he wrote:

One has no ear for that which one has no access to through experience. Imagine a book that speaks of nothing but events which lie outside general or even rare experience—that it is the first language for a new range of experiences. In this case simply nothing will be heard, with the acoustical illusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing.

Proust gave us a language for describing a new range of experiences. In his treatment of love, for example, he forensically dissected the romanticism that preceded him. Even in our age of speed dating, marriage-at-first-sight game shows and cyber-porn, he still has something insightful to say on the subject, especially to folk of a certain age.

Nothing, he argued, “is further removed from love than the ideas we entertain concerning it”. Due to a “charming law of human nature which exists even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love”.

As for art, Proust believed all great works came from neurotics (like him):

The world will never know the debt that it owes them, nor the pain they have suffered while enriching us. We enjoy exquisite music, beautiful paintings, a thousand shades of thought, never realising the cost to those who created them in sleepless nights, tears, wild laughter, skin eruptions, asthmas, epilepsies and the dread of death which is the worst of all.

If Proust’s magnum opus can be described as a literary Everest, perhaps it is one most easily scaled by nocturnal introverted-feeling types. (Jung’s thinking-sensation types tend to prefer the real thing.)

Select the route that works best for you. Do not be discouraged by long sentences and pockets of rarefied air. Take along Alain de Botton’s clever How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997). It will cheer you up if you tire on the journey.

Clive James got to the summit and back again. Even if you make it only to Base Camp IV, it will be worth the effort, not to mention the view, for as Proust observed: “Most of the time we are only half-alive. Many of our faculties remain asleep because they rely on habit, which can perform without them.”

M.G. Kile
Crawley, WA   

Sir: I was pleased to read the two contributors on complex social policy issues in the May issue, Prof. John Whitehall (on childhood gender dysphoria) and Dr Jeremy Sammut (on small government and the challenges for the Centre-Right).

I write as a former social policy ministerial adviser in the Howard government confronted with complex, expensive to fix, sometimes insoluble social issues such as parents confronted by the sexual development of disabled children. It is pleasing that people like Prof. Whitehall are involved in dealing with an aspect of this issue.

I also have an economics and health policy background and was torn as to whether to comment on the suggestion of Dr Sammut to allow for health savings accounts. I would add that his suggestions about adoption of children in the so-called child protection system are controversial, but not without considerable merit, considering the complete mess the area is in. Always having had a civil liberties interest and human rights interest, I fully understand this conflict. His suggestion there exactly highlights the need for interventions to achieve improved community outcomes, which sits uncomfortably with the less interventionist logic of “small government”.

While I am in favour of a level of private health insurance to enable our health system to function (which even the ALP came to realise in the 1990s), health is not like education where charter schools may work, or market forces work and make the vast bulk of our economy and lives tick over daily. Health is shaped by information asymmetry (of informed providers and ill-informed consumers), moral hazard (implicit in any insurance system), and where payment/reward systems (such as fee for service) can’t be universally applied in a health system otherwise you end up in the United States situation. A monopsony (a single buyer) is the only way to contain health costs. The Medicare Benefits Schedule and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme are pretty good and give good value for money overall, for example.

I appreciate what Dr Sammut is saying about the need for improvements in health-care management. There is scope to increase services delivered from existing budgets, and I totally agree with him about the completely false notion of the level of the Medicare levy, which some believe fully finances health costs. But competitive provision and separate personal accounts are not the answer.

In terms of political advice there are certain policy areas that are potentially toxic politically for Centre-Right political parties and health is one of them. The next “Mediscare” campaign can be put together pretty easily.

Martin Gordon
Dunlop, ACT