A Natural History of Love (21 page)

You’d think such a sybarite would fare well in love, savoring every moment, celebrating small pleasures. As a boy, waiting for love, Marcel is as ready as an archer with a full quiver of arrows, when to his amazement a target suddenly appears in the form of a red-haired, freckled girl holding a trowel. She is standing beside a hedge of jasmine, and he’s overwhelmed by her succulent, fragrant aura. They exchange a glance deep as a long kiss, and he experiences her with all of his senses open. He can feel his soul swim to her and blend with hers, experiencing what Freud would later call the “oceanic feeling” of love,
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and he wants to possess her, though he knows full well that nothing—not even sexual or mystic union—can solve the problem of how alone and separate we all feel.

As an adult, the narrator falls in love with a certain Albertine, a dark-haired, unremarkable-looking girl of the lower middle class (“let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination”) whom he adores, and who ultimately decides to leave him. She is fickle and runs off to carouse with both male and female lovers. He tries to entice her back by offering to buy her a Rolls-Royce and a yacht. She agrees, only to be thrown by a horse and killed before she has chance to return. In much of
Remembrance
, the narrator obsesses about Albertine with a fascination as disquieting and automatic as a hacking cough. She is the central planet in an unknown solar system. Every object she touches offers a glimpse of a bright new world. Fixated on her bicycle, her “pale cheeks like white slugs,” the dust that she stirs when she moves, he becomes consumed with possessive jealousy and grief. Every face reminds him of hers. Every object is a trip wire to an explosively painful memory. She is perpetually present in her absence. And that really is Proust’s point about love, that it doesn’t exist in real time, only in anticipated time or remembered time. The only paradise is the one that’s been lost. Love requires absence, obstacles, infidelities, jealousy, manipulation, outright lies, pretend reconciliations, tantrums, and betrayals. Meanwhile the lovers fret, hope, agonize, and dream. Torment whips them to a higher level of feeling, and from that mental froth comes love. Love is not a biological instinct, not an evolutionary imperative, but a feat of the imagination which thrives on difficulty. In
The Sweet Cheat Gone
, the narrator remembers how Albertine delicately cuddled with him face-to-face, entwining her eyelashes with his, and he nearly swoons at the memory of such intimate, delicate togetherness. But he also recalls feeling utterly powerless and trapped at that moment.

When the narrator confides that his passion for Albertine is really a reshaping of his childhood love for his mother, he sounds classically Freudian. He even confesses that none of his mistresses has loved him as dearly or made him as happy as his mother, whose love was absolute and dependable, a fixed point on the compass rose of his childhood. There are many parallels in
Remembrance
to Freudian thought, and though Proust may have encountered Freud’s work, there is no suggestion in his letters or other writings that he did. What makes his obsession with his mother so fascinating today is that it was an innocently occurring—if extreme—example of a child’s total fixation on one parent, what Freud labeled the Oedipus complex. But Proust’s general views about love differ greatly from Freud’s. Whereas Freud believes sublimated sex is the origin of love, Proust does not see love as a warped or disguised or reconstituted sex drive. For him, sex is an integral part of love because it encourages intimacy—but love springs from a need all its own. Love is not something you inherit; you must search for it. Why is it precious? Because it is the great enabler that allows us to commune with every aspect of being alive, with people and objects, animals and cities. One needs love to feel harmonious, to feel part of the rich landscape of one’s life. That’s why, when the narrator most appreciates the natural world, he simultaneously yearns for a woman to love. By loving a person and nature at the same time, he is able to heighten his passion for both. It puts his senses on active duty, smacks him to attention, and makes him ultrareceptive to every nuance around him. A forest is never drab, but when one is in love it throbs with even more color and sound. The beloved becomes an embodiment of that forest, and one can transfer all one’s sexual energy, devotion, and sheer rapture to the forest itself. It’s as if sexual excitement were a hard currency of the brain that you can spend wherever you wish.

Ecstasy is what everyone craves—not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn’t give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless. This results from the treachery of habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot. Proust uses the example of walking through one’s house in the dark—one doesn’t actually see the furniture in the hallway, but one knows where it is and instinctively avoids it. When we finally possess someone we start to take them for granted, and passion soon wanes. Only the inaccessible and elusive is truly alluring. Each person is attracted over and over again to a predictable “type” of lover. Each has a habitual pattern of loving, and of losing: “The men who have been left by a number of women have been left almost always in the same manner because of their character and of certain always identical reactions which can be calculated: each man has his own way of being betrayed …”

For Proust, human love is not a cameo of divine love. Rather, it is a conscious, deeply creative act of communion with the beloved, reaching into and through that person to all of life. As he says, “The fact is that the person counts for little or nothing; what is almost everything is the series of emotions, of agonies which similar mishaps have made us feel in the past in connexion with her …” Each time the narrator looks at Albertine, he summons his full powers of taste, smell, and touch, using her as the vehicle of his senses. She is merely “like a stone round which snow has gathered, the generating centre of an immense structure which rose above the plane of my heart.” Albertine becomes a means to extend himself, a magnifying lens that widens and refines his sensitivity. We do not love people for themselves, or objectively; quite the contrary, “we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears … they are only a vast and vague place in which our affections take root…. It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.” It is only because we need people in order to feel love that we fall in love with people.

For that matter, the mistresses whom I have loved most passionately have never coincided with my love for them. That love was genuine, since I subordinated everything else to seeing them, keeping them for myself alone, and would weep aloud if, one evening, I had waited for them in vain. But it was more because they had the faculty of arousing that love, of raising it to a paroxysm, than because they were its image. When I saw them, when I heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and could account for it. And yet my sole joy lay in seeing them, my sole anxiety in waiting for them to come. It was as though a virtue that had no connexion with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-electric power, had the effect upon me of exciting my love, that is to say of controlling all my actions and causing all my sufferings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the kindness of these women was entirely distinct. As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them. Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these relationships (I leave out of account the physical pleasure which is their habitual accompaniment but is not enough in itself to constitute them), beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to those invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities. It is they whose good will is necessary to us, with whom we seek to establish contact without finding any positive pleasure in it. The woman herself, during our assignation with her, does little more than put us in touch with these goddesses.

But love is also a titillating bout of agreed-upon suffering. If love requires difficulties to thrive, and torment is its dynamo, how could it be otherwise? “Love is a reciprocal torture,” Proust concludes. Proustian lovers tend to be tragically insecure, clinging and masochistic, as Proust was himself. They don’t start a love affair to avoid suffering; a state of privileged suffering is what they seek. It’s what we all seek, Proust says, because it makes shamans of us, allowing us to peer into life’s sacred and hidden heart.

Insecure about how likable he really was, Proust used to overtip waiters, give embarrassingly large presents to friends, and generally try to buy affection and win acceptance from people. He did it with such wit, intelligence, and style that people thoroughly enjoyed his company; but love was another matter. His parents kept telling him that he was “weak-willed” for not overcoming his illness and taking a serious job. They thought this tactic of severe criticism would inspire him to prove them wrong, but it had the opposite effect—in time he simply came to believe what he was told. Was it his low self-esteem that caused him to be such a snob? One of his biographers, Ronald Hayman, thinks so:

If snobbery is defined as addiction to the pleasure of associating with an elite, Proust was undeniably a snob. His desperate need for love made it impossible for him not to envy the aristocrats whose birth ensured them a place at the centre of other people’s attention and admiration.

A related compulsion was

the lifelong habit of trying to buy good will. Even when making love or when having love made to him, he couldn’t believe he was lovable.

So, as he aged, to play it safe, he forged

liaisons with footmen, waiters, and male secretaries, but in his friendships with young men who were socially his equals or superiors, jealousy was integral to the pleasure, even when sexual intimacy wasn’t integral to the friendship.

These were useful emotions for a novelist. “Even while living it,” Hayman points out, “Proust was developing his possessive jealousy into a work of art.”

In later years he enjoyed frequenting a brothel, where his habits were jotted down in a notebook by one of the young men who worked there. He preferred for the man to stand naked beside the bed and masturbate. Watching him, Proust would also masturbate. If Proust had trouble reaching a climax, the man was obliged to bring in two savage rats in cages, and “Immediately the two starving animals threw themselves at each other, emitting heart-rending cries and tearing at each other with their claws and teeth.” Proust once told André Gide about this sexual peculiarity of his, explaining it simply as his sometimes needing intense sensations to achieve orgasm, including watching warring rats. In any case, repeatedly wounded by rejection, he grew to prefer his sex partners anonymous and emotionally unappetizing, who made no demands on his heart. Otherwise he knew he’d be launched into a stratosphere of possessive jealousy, where the air was thin and unbreathable. Through a lifetime of illness and facing an early death, believing that his masturbation would shorten his life even if his asthma didn’t, lamenting the loss of his mother and others he loved, he understandably wondered if time was irrevocably lost.

Proust’s outlook on love is so negative and masochistic he finally concludes that only love of one’s art is worth the heart-wrenching effort, and it was in this way, in the closing years of his life, that he tried to sublimate his doting and insatiable passion. No doubt he would have agreed with Baudelaire’s definition of love as “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” But he replayed love voluptuously in his mind, caressed the memories with his pen.

Although he claimed that
Remembrance
was not autobiographical, most scholars believe it is, and that the narrator’s entanglements with Albertine echo Proust’s doings with his lover, Alfred Agostinelli, for whom he bought not a Rolls-Royce but an airplane. It was one of the first, and Alfred died in it, spinning into the Mediterranean where he drowned, which gave him the dubious honor of being one of the first people to die in an airplane crash.

Despite Proust’s pessimism, he contributed profoundly to our understanding of the psychology of love. He traced the patterns of relationships, and showed how each fresh heartache resonates with past ones, making our “suffering somehow contemporaneous with all the epochs in our life in which we have suffered.” We long to be loved in earnest, he argued. Otherwise we are as alone in life as if we were walking upon an empty beach. Otherwise the world would seem as flat as a postage stamp. Once the beloved is gone, through death or abandonment, grief fills all the seams of one’s life. But ultimately, if we wait long enough, grief will become oblivion. How should one wait? It’s best to develop a passion for the world itself, a revolving rapture that is both poetic and scientific. Natural and manmade objects can anchor one to the world, where we seem to have so little mooring. We enter into them, pathically, lovingly, and grow sturdier. Indeed, one can lose one’s self and become an Everyman, an artist who is powerful and keen-eyed and full of joy. Waiting for love to emerge, waiting to rendezvous with a lover, waiting for the lover to feel the same love in return, waiting jealously when the lover is out of one’s sight, waiting for the ex-lover one hopes will reappear. For Proust, each stage of love bridges time and is colored by a sensuality all its own, especially the final stage—waiting through grief for oblivion—which is perhaps the most welcome of all, since it restores one’s sanity until the next emotional uprising. As Virgil wrote in the
Eclogues
, “Time bears away all things, even the heart.”