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In the back pages of Vanity Fair each month, readers find The Proust Questionnaire, a series of questions posed to famous subjects about their lives, thoughts, values and experience. A regular reference to Proust in such a major publication struck me as remarkable, and it was only until I'd read Andre Maurois's Proust: Portrait of a Genius that I understood what this was all about.
The young Marcel was asked to fill out questionnaires at two social events: one when he was 13, another when he was 20. Proust did not invent this party game; he is simply the most extraordinary person to respond to them. At the birthday party of Antoinette Felix-Faure, the 13-year-old Marcel was asked to answer the following questions in the birthday book, and here's what he said:
- What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
To be separated from Mama
- Where would you like to live?
In the country of the Ideal, or, rather, of my ideal
- What is your idea of earthly happiness?
To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater
- To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
To a life deprived of the works of genius
- Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
Those of romance and poetry, those who are the expression of an ideal rather than an imitation of the real
- Who are your favorite characters in history?
A mixture of Socrates, Pericles, Mahomet, Pliny the Younger and Augustin Thierry
- Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
A woman of genius leading an ordinary life
- Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
Those who are more than women without ceasing to be womanly; everything that is tender, poetic, pure and in every way beautiful
- Your favorite painter?
- Your favorite musician?
- The quality you most admire in a man?
Intelligence, moral sense
- The quality you most admire in a woman?
Gentleness, naturalness, intelligence
- Your favorite virtue?
All virtues that are not limited to a sect: the universal virtues
- Your favorite occupation?
Reading, dreaming, and writing verse
- Who would you have liked to be?
Since the question does not arise, I prefer not to answer it. All the same, I should very much have liked to be Pliny the Younger.
This questionnaire tells us much about two things, the character of petiit Marcel, and the amusement of the young in the Belle Epoque. We see Marcel as a sweet and dreamy Mama's boy, brainy, aesthetic, a young citizen of the world with much sympathy for the feminine. What he sees in Pliny the Younger, famous only for speaking and writing letters, is hard to grasp.
What is fascinating about this questionnaire is that it was considered so great an amusement to very young people in Proust's time. It is hard to imagine a party of 13-year-olds in these times being quizzed about their favorite virtues, painters or characters of fiction and history. If the questionnaire were not to smack of exam, it would have to ask "what's your favorite TV show?" or "what's your favorite band?"
Seven years after the first questionnaire, Proust was asked, at another social event, to fill out another; the questions are much the same, but the answers somewhat different, indicative of his traits at 20:
- Your most marked characteristic?
A craving to be loved, or, to be more precise, to be caressed and spoiled rather than to be admired
- The quality you most like in a man?
- The quality you most like in a woman?
A man's virtues, and frankness in friendship
- What do you most value in your friends?
Tenderness - provided they possess a physical charm which makes their tenderness worth having
- What is your principle defect?
Lack of understanding; weakness of will
- What is your favorite occupation?
- What is your dream of happiness?
Not, I fear, a very elevated one. I really haven't the courage to say what it is, and if I did I should probably destroy it by the mere fact of putting it into words.
- What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
Never to have known my mother or my grandmother
- What would you like to be?
Myself - as those whom I admire would like me to be
- In what country would you like to live?
One where certain things that I want would be realized - and where feelings of tenderness would always be reciprocated. [Proust's underlining]
- What is your favorite color?
Beauty lies not in colors but in thier harmony
- What is your favorite flower?
Hers - but apart from that, all
- What is your favorite bird?
- Who are your favorite prose writers?
At the moment, Anatole France and Pierre Loti
- Who are your favoite poets?
Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny
- Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
- Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
Phedre (crossed out) Berenice
- Who are your favorite composers?
Beethoven, Wagner, Shuhmann
- Who are your favorite painters?
Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt
- Who are your heroes in real life?
Monsieur Darlu, Monsieur Boutroux (professors)
- Who are your favorite heroines of history?
- What are your favorite names?
I only have one at a time
- What is it you most dislike?
- What historical figures do you most despise?
I am not sufficiently educated to say
- What event in military history do you most admire?
My own enlistment as a volunteer!
- What reform do you most admire?
- What natural gift would you most like to possess?
Will power and irresistible charm
- How would you like to die?
A better man than I am, and much beloved
- What is your present state of mind?
Annoyance at having to think about myself in order to answer these questions
- To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
- What is your motto?
I prefer not to say, for fear it might bring me bad luck.
The second set of questions and answers give us Proust as a young man, mad for conquest, drawn to love crossing conventional sexual lines, still fixated on Mama. His aesthetic sensibilities have grown more serious (I, however, would not give up Mozart for Schumann, with all his interminable faux endings.) In these responses are early threads of character found in the narrator of Remembrance.
The Vanity Fair Story...When the editors of Vanity Fair gathered to discuss a regular interview format for coming issues, one staff member suggested creating a "Vanity Fair Questionnaire." The magazine's London editor, Henry Porter, and Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter, brought up the idea of the Proust Questionnaire, which met with the hearty approval of the numerous Proust afficianados on the staff. Senior Editor Aimee Bell , a fan herself, took on the task of researching and producing this feature, with the assistance of the University of Kansas professor Theodore Johnson, a noted authority on Proust. Since July of 1993, a major celebrity has responded to a version of the questionnaire, found in the back pages of each issue.
I mentioned to Ms. Bell that I had not dared to contact Professor Johnson, or any of the other university Proustians, because my own work was so unacademic. "Why?" she said, "Proust would have liked it."
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