A connoiisseur of degenerates?

"Well, you do get up," she said, wrinkling her nose at the faded red settee, the two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed laundering and the boy's size library table with the venerable magazines on it to give the place a professional touch. "I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust."

"who's he?" I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under strain

"A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn't know him."

"Tut, tut," I said. "Come into my boudoir."

from The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Well, we all need a métier.

 I think the thing we really have to grasp to even begin to get Proust is what a profoundly alienated man he was. We can easily forget that when we see what a successful social climber he was. The inescapable facts about the man are that he was weak and sickly, unable to do many of the things most of us would take as essential for living a full life. He was incapable of anything like a normal loving relationships and incapable of anything most of us would consider a satisfactory sexual relationship.

If Proust has anything worthwhile to say about human relationships—and I think he has quite a bit that is worthwhile to say—he came by that knowledge by observing others from the outside.

And that opens up a rather odd contradiction. For an awful lot of what Proust writes is based on the analysis of consciousness. That is to say, a lot comes from the belief that we all have a consciousness and that we can analyze our consciousness the same way we might analyze a chess problem. I can sit around and think about how I experience things and make an analysis. Further, this analysis is generalizable. Everyone has a consciousness and we all experience, among other things, time, smells, pain and love. On this model, we analyze our own consciousness and extrapolate from that "research" to reach conclusions what others are like.

I could go on quite a bit about this, but the short version is this: Proust tends to write in a solipsistic manner. He doesn't deny that things exist outside of the individual consciousness but he often writes as if it didn't matter that they have independent existence. And he is at his worst when he gets going about erotic love. He writes as if falling in love has nothing to do with the person we love and everything to do with what we project on them driven by our emotions, particularly jealousy. (He is heavily influenced in this by Stendhal, by the way, but that is a subject for another day.)

Now that sort of talk isn't crazy. A long time ago, I had a girlfriend cheat on me and I reacted by clinging to her as if my life depended on it. That a not uncommon reaction. But is it love? For Proust the answer is often "yes" because he thinks that is all erotic love is. And his alter-ego Marcel can go on for pages—hundreds of pages—talking about his obsessive need for Albertine. Much of this stuff is worth skimming over if not skipping entirely.

But his observations about people and manners are so good you don't want to miss them. You can pop the Novel open just about anywhere and be pretty certain that you will hit a gem somewhere. Here, I'll do it ... okay, got one. Proust is describing Mme de Villeparisis's, who is an aristocrat very much born to the manner, attitudes towards art:

She gave the impression that the only paintings worth inheriting are the ones you inherit.

That's lovely. Not necessarily because it is a unique observation about human beings that no one else could have made. It's lovely because it is at once bitchy and loving about its subject.