How to Live Your Life in a Grand Way

In Seinfeldian terms, Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” is the 1.25-million word, seven-volume novel about nothing. The first volume’s logline might go something like this: The narrator remembers lying in bed as a child; a character--Swann--falls in love; the narrator remembers playing with Swann’s daughter in the gardens of the Champs-Elysees. The second volume’s key scene is a 117-page afternoon party. Plot-driven it is not.

But with Proust it’s all in the telling. Swann, a friend of the Prince of Wales and the Count of Paris and a Jew at the highest levels of French society, falls in love with Parisian cocotte Odette de Crecy. His obsessive pursuit culminates 220 pages later with his famous realization that “she wasn’t at all my type.” The long afternoon party is not some harmless tea but a viper’s nest of French aristocrats in the age of the Dreyfus affair. These were not nice people. Their idea of wit was to say of someone, “they were no one in the year 1000.” Their idea of sport was to count the casualties on the social ladder named after the street where many of them lived, the Faubourg St. Germain.

Were one to meet Proust, who died in 1922, one would soon forget him. Of course, getting to meet him wasn’t easy. Reclusive, he slept all day, wrote all night and got out of bed as rarely as possible during the last 14 years of his life. Compulsive, he needed 20 towels washed in nonirritating detergent to dry himself after a bath. Afraid of every draft, he never took off his coat, whether at a concert or in the dining room of the Ritz, and he always found a way to have a crisis and get back into bed.

Now this little package of agoraphobia and hypochondria has inspired a young English author, Alain de Botton, to write a study--not the clinical manual that one might expect but a totally original self-help book. But don’t think of “How Proust Can Change Your Life” (Pantheon) as a Tao for neurasthenics. It is a short and smart book that advances in a gale force of the breezy tone that Proust so admired in others because he was incapable of it himself.

The nine chapters are divided into ideals we should all have, ranging from “How to Love Life Today,” to “How to Take Your Time,” to “How to Open Your Eyes” to “How to Be a Good Friend.” In the slightly more Proustian chapter, “How to Suffer Successfully,” de Botton urges us to make our peace with misery. “The stubborn recurrence of misery,” he writes, “means that the development of a workable approach to it must surely outstrip the value of any utopian quest for happiness.”

No one is likely to mistake de Botton’s tone for that of self-help gurus Anthony Robbins or Deepak Chopra. Even so, it’s a bestseller in several cities and has sold more than 30,000 copies.

In the chapter titled “How to Read for Yourself,” de Botton’s advice for feeling connected to a work of art is to match characters with people we know. His personal example is to compare his girlfriend, Kate, to Proust’s narrator’s girlfriend, Albertine.

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Wishing to feel completely connected with “In Search of Lost Time,” we asked de Botton to take a walk with us to see how many characters from within the seven volumes we might be able to spot on the streets of Beverly Hills.

De Botton seemed delighted to be walking through the streets of the film capital of the world. The film stars of today are exactly who he likens to French aristocrats in terms of the social power they hold. “It’s easy to say, who cares about French aristocrats,” he says strolling on Wilshire, “until you realize that they had the appeal of film stars today. When you read in Proust about all the coachmen and cooks sitting in kitchens reading the social papers it’s sort of like us reading entertainment magazines.”

Though on his father’s side he is, in his own words, Sephardic (from Alexandria), and on his mother’s side Swiss, the author, the product of Harrow and Cambridge, is terribly English and terribly discreet. With a cocked eyebrow he points out a lady coming out of the bookstore with two bags of books. “Madame Verdurin,” he says, lowering his voice, “in her grand phase.”

Madame Verdurin is a character who never gets invited to the right parties. To compensate she creates her own intellectual salon, claims that aristocrats are too dull for her and that she’d rather die than go to one of their parties. Proust, always incisive, shows that the only danger to Madame Verdurin’s health would come if she ever actually received an invitation from society’s reigning couple, the Duke and Duchess de Guermantes. (Think Audrey Hepburn married to Cary Grant.)

With a book the length of “In Search of Lost Time,” any interpretation is by necessity selective. Still, one wonders how de Botton manages to avoid two of Proust’s most vividly detailed subjects, anti-Semitism and sex. There are blood-curdling passages where Jews remain silent while society swells make the most pointed anti-Dreyfus remarks. As for sex, with all the deception and self-deception, cross-dressing, cruising and whipping going on, it is hard to keep track of whose proclivities are whose.

“I didn’t want to write Cliff Notes to Proust,” he says. “But neither did I want one of those books that’s full of knowing allusions, that just tosses off a reference to Swann without explaining who he is. I was very keen on the idea of my book being enjoyed by people who’d never read Proust.”

Which wouldn’t include the French themselves. “The French,” de Botton says in a pointed way that would warm Proust’s heart, “never ‘read’ Proust, they always ‘reread’ him.”

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What’s fascinating about Proust’s aristocrats is that they knew that the game was up. The biggest snob in the book, Charlus, uses among his many titles the one of “baron” rather than the higher one of “prince.”

“Everyone is a prince today,” he rants. “I’ll take the title of ‘prince’ when I want to travel incognito.” He may well carry on about people who didn’t “scrape the mud off their shoes until Louis XIII,” but at the same time his nephew St. Loup is excusing the quality of some photographs because “I took them myself with my Kodak.”

History and the future meet in Proust like in no other novel. New social classes were constantly coming up against the ramparts of the Faubourg St. Germain. There’s something about the social quicksand of Los Angeles that makes de Botton think of it as “a very Proustian city.”

“You never know who’s going to write the next great screenplay, do you?” de Botton says, but he is sidetracked from this thought by another sighting. “Odette de Crecy,” he says nodding in the direction of a young woman in tight trousers and spiked heels standing at the corner of Camden and Brighton, “before she became Madame Swann.”

Once we’ve passed her he continues. “There’s the impression of slightly twilight lives, of beautiful young women sent out with a credit card for the day.” He stops and points out a valet parker holding a door. “And there’s a whole class of people whose job it is to maintain a certain lifestyle for others. The personal trainer,” he says, “very Proustian.”

It is amusing to stroll around like this. Suddenly every gleaming 4-by-4 is a horse-drawn carriage, every counterperson at Starbucks in six months time has a power table at Spago and every valet, like Proust’s coachmen, has the goods on half the city’s peccadilloes. But de Botton is looking at his watch. Unlike the author of “In Search of Lost Time,” de Botton, who has also written three well-received novels, has no time to lose. Not on an American book tour where every day is divided into interview time slots.

Before he has to go on to the next one we make a last attempt to spot the Duchess de Guermantes and go into Neiman Marcus. She isn’t on the ground floor or on the second floor among the racks of couture clothing. De Botton imagines her entrance. “She would come sweeping in. She would know exactly which salesperson to go to.”

“What do you think Proust would think of America?” I ask on the escalator as we head back down. De Botton smiles warmly, as if at the foibles of a close friend. “He would have loved it--all the health products. He would have specialists in every city.”

Just in case he ever got out of bed.