Balbec

After a lengthy period of what can only be described as dithering, summer seems finally to have settled on Chicago. So it's appropriate that the mail has brought me correspondence from a vacation getaway: my mysterious Texan correspondent has appeared again, this time with a postcard of the seaside.



The ascription to Calais locates it in place, and the other elements let us locate it in time: somewhere in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, definitely pre-war, when bathing tended to yield to strolling, and the costumes for either were full-coverage and heavy.

But Calais carries insufficient romance for my correspondent, who prefers to imagine it as elsewhere.



Balbec! The name Proust gave to Cabourg, the oceanfront town where he spent every summer from 1907 to 1914, and where his fictional alter ego, Marcel, first sets eyes on Albertine and her set. It is on the way to Balbec that he realizes he has become indifferent to his first love, Gilberte:

There are instances, albeit infrequent, in which, the passing days having been immobilized by a sedentary way of life, the best way to gain time is to change place. My journey to Balbec was like the first outing of a convalescent who has not noticed until that moment that he is completely cured.

To be well in that way, however, is not in Marcel's character, so the freedom from Gilberte only opens the door for his next obsession--one that he would alternately fight and embrace through the rest of his life: Albertine, whom he first sees with her set on the promenade in Balbec.

Balbec plays a part as well in A Dance to the Music of Time, its appearance Anthony Powell's most open acknowledgment (aside, perhaps, from the title) of his debt to Proust. Late in The Military Philosophers, the final volume of the war sequence, Nick Jenkins is traveling through recently liberated France with a contingent of English and foreign military officers, and an officer asks where they are:

"C-A-B-O-U-R-G, sir."

As I uttered the last letter, scales fell from my eyes. Everything was transformed. It all came back--like the tea-soaked madeleine itself--in a torrent of memory . . . Cabourg . . . We had just driven out of Cabourg . . . out of Proust's Balbec. Only a few minutes before, I had been standing on the esplanade along which, wearing her polo cap and accompanied by the little band of girls he had supposed the mistresses of professional bicyclists, Albertine had strolled into Marcel's life. Through the high windows of the Grand Hotel's dining-room--conveying to those without the sensation of staring into an aquarium, was to be seen Saint-Loup, at the same table Bloch, mendaciously claiming acquaintance with the Swanns. A little further along the promenade was the Casino, its walls still displaying tattered playbills, just like the one Charlus, wearing his black straw hat, had pretended to examine, after an attempt at long range to assess the Narrator's physical attractions and possibilities. Here Elstir had painted; Prince Odoacer played golf. Where was the little railway line that had carried them all to the Verdurin's villa? Perhaps it ran in another direction to that we were taking; more probably it was no more.

Jenkins's colleagues, unaware of the flood of literary memory that has swept over him, continue their practical inquiries, but Proust resurfaces as soon as his thoughts are his own once more:

Proustian musings still hung in the air when we came down to the edge of the water. It had been a notable adventure. True, an actual night passed in one of hte bdrooms of the Grand Hotel itself--especially, like Finn's an appropriately sleepless one--might have crowned the magic of the happening. At the same time, a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.

Or, as Howard Moss puts it in The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust,

Actuality contends with the haunted coastline of the imagination. . . . Place, then, is one of the first instigators of expectation and, therefore, one of the cornerstones of disenchantment.

In my reading of Dance, that scene also represents something larger: the moment when the strain and fear of war finally begin to ebb, and the possibilities of a normal life returning begin to seem less improbable. The war sequence of Dance is justly praised, but critics rarely note what I think is its most impressive quality: the sense Powell conveys of how disruptive the war was, even for those who came through it with relatively small losses. Even if you don't count the daily strain of the late 1930s, Nick Jenkins essentially lost six years of his life to forces beyond his control. Not only can he not find the time or emotional clarity to write, but he also can barely find anyone who is even slightly sympathetic to the world of books and ideas. The resulting deprivation is thrown into stark relief when he meets Pennistone, and the two talk books like men sharing a canteen while lost in a desert.

Thus, when Balbec breaks upon him, I see it as a release, a reminder that, despite the losses entailed by war, literature--and the whole world of books and culture that it signifies--remains, can be called up. And if it can remains, then it can be re-inhabited. V-E Day is in the offing; after some unquestionably doubtful moments, life, it turns out, will go on.

Proust, his mother, and humor

The March 22 issue of the London Review of Books features a piece by Michael Wood on Proust and his mother that has reads as if Wood is actively thinking through the problem he's set for himself as he writes. I know that's not what's going on, actually, that any essay along those lines that is even halfway readable is going to be much more a performance of thought than a representation of actual thought processes, but it's a quality I love to find in criticism nonetheless, that sense that, rather than bring us a settled question or a completed argument, the writer is letting us see his mind at work. It's familiar, in more slapdash fashion, from the blogosphere, and even in the more formal confines of the LRB it retains one of the key animating qualities of the blogosphere: the feeling that even as we're doing nothing but read, we're participating in this projet of thought.

Wood opens with a couple of lines that I'll be carrying with me for a good while:

There are texts that seem to require a certain craziness of us, a mismeasure of response to match the extravagance of their expression.

Proust, clearly, is one. Another that comes to mind--despite the stagnation of the World's Least Popular Book Club--is Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling. How, after all, but by craziness can one respond to the extravagance of this passage?

Thus in that night of my fourteenth birthday, night which should be greater revelation than the sunlight which conceals so much--I stood by the tumultuous sea, listening to the long, melancholy roarings of the waters under the near sky where, in the partings of the curtain of streaked fog, the bloodless moon was like a white, thin skull drifting without purpose over the many roofs, the dark towers, the abandoned golf course, the grassy tennis courts, the hidden archery ranger, over the foaming headlands, the saddle of rock, the spur. The waves broke like primal memories of things unknown breaking on my consciousness. I was filled with an almost unbearable excitement as I realized the immensity of life, that which, through its necessary imperfections, might weave a higher perfection than the faultless and restricted days such as I had known. What if everything should be false and nothing true, nothing true of these humped, naked dunes wreathed with seaweed, patched with bayberry and beach rose and meadows of billowing Queen Anne's lace and clumps of wild grass, nothing true of the low, stunted, blackened spruce and hemlock, the leaping tides, the tongues of surf, the sudden sparks of diminished stars? Then all false things should be true, I thought, as true as Miss Macintosh who was so very truthful, her red hair gleaming in the sunlight, in the stale nimbus of familiarity, her eyes severe with a resigned but cheerful purpose, her ways methodical even though the winds should blow her athwart. If all false things were true, however, then all true things should be false like my false mother who postulated merely as her theory the outer world, the blowing cherry trees beyond the surf line, the lanes where she had never walked. Where was the truth which should not fail?

But I'm getting sidetracked. Wood applies that lens of mismeasured response to Proust, and, specifically to Proust's relationship to his mother. It's a wonderfully interesting essay, bringing in a number of different critical and biographical opinions on Proust and drawing on letters to and from his mother, including this one, which Jeanne Proust wrote to Marcel after a vigorous family quarrel that had ended with Marcel slamming the door hard enough to break the glass in its panels:

My dear little one,

Your letter did me good--your father and I were left with a very painful sense of things. I must tell you that I had not thought for a moment of saying anything at all in the presence of Jean [the servant] and that if that happened it was absolutely without my knowledge. Let's think no more and talk no more about it. The broken glass will merely be what it is in the temple--the symbol of an idissoluble union.

Your father wishes you a good night and I kiss you tenderly.

J.P.

I do however have to return to the subject in order to recommend that you don't walk without shoes in the dining room because of the glass.

Wood points to the episode's fictional analogue in Jean Santeuil and cites a couple of different opinions from critics and biographers on the significance of the episode and Jeanne Proust's invocation of the broken glass of Jewish marriage ceremonies. Of the postscript, he writes, "there is something about [it] that makes it a sort of mockery, probably just a bit of what we would now call passive aggression: patent further talk about what we are not going to talk about." But I'm inclined--without, mind you, a shred of actual evidence--to take that a step further: what I hear when I read that postscript is perfect Proustian humor. Proust's mother is making a sort of joke that Marcel would make in In Search of Lost Time, a combination of the joke built simultaneously on what we can't help but say even as we're boldly proclaiming that we won't be saying it and on the kernel of absurdity that lies at the heart of our grandest, most self-important gestures. It's the part of Proust that I think would have enjoyed this passage from Edward St. Aubyn's Bad News:

Diplomats, thought Nicholas, long made redundant by telephones, still preserved the mannerisms of men who were dealing with great matters of state. He had once seen Jacques d'Alantour fold his overcoat on a banister and declare with all the emphasis of a man refusing to compromise over the Spanish Succession, "I shall put my coat here." He had then placed his hat on a nearby chair and added with an air of infinite subtlety, "But my hat I shall put here. Otherwise it may fall!" as if he were hinting that on the other hand some arrangement could be reached over the exact terms of the marriage.

It's easy to see that absurdity in others, much harder to acknowledge it in ourselves, as Jeanne Proust is doing by deflating the passion of the family argument. Her joke is nonetheless most obviously at Marcel's expense, and, in context, is unlikely to have been seen as funny. But at this remove what it suggests to me is that mother and son shared not just all the emotional ties and dependencies we know about, but also (even more so?) a sense of humor.

Jealousy

In Arthur Phillips's smart, funny, touching The Tragedy of Arthur, a book that cleverly delights in ambiguity, playing with the distinctions between fiction and memoir, real and fake, the protagonist--successful novelist Arthur Phillips--writes,

[T]he evaporation of jealousy is as pleasurable an emotion as any I know; it is a release as profound and shuddering as any physical sensation. It is the erasure of fear, the removal of worry, the shimmering tingle once danger--for which your body has tensed--is past. It is not the arrival of permanent courage or trust; jealousy is tidal, and it flows and ebbs forever; and acceptance that it will return is part of the pleasure while it recedes. There is no happy ending, but nor is there eternal pain. Something is still going to happen, so the timing of the dropping of a curtain is largely arbitrary.

Even though my nature tends not to jealousy--I'm much more made of blood and phlegm than black or yellow bile--I recognize what Phillips describes: the rinse of relief that accompanies a certainty, however temporary that you were worrying over nothing.

The arch-anatomist of jealousy, of course, is Proust, but I don't immediately call to mind any passages where he describes the pleasure of its assuaging so clearly. I haven't had much time to investigate today, so I certainly would welcome additional citations, but this passage from Swann's Way, describing one of the many tidal movements of Swann's jealousy over Odette, does at least edge up to the same territory:

And if--instead of letting her go off on bad terms with him, without having seen him again--he were to send her this money, if he were to encourage her to undertake this journey and go out of his way to make it agreeable for her, she would come running to him, happy and grateful, he would have the joy of seeing her which he had not known for a week and which nothing else could replace. For once Swann could picture her to himself without revulsion, could see once again the friendliness in her smile, once the desire to tear her away from every rival was no longer imposed by his jealousy upon his love, that love became, once again, more than anything a taste for the sensations which Odette's person gave him, for the pleasure he took in admiring as a spectacle, or examining as a phenomenon, the dawn of one of her glances, the formation of one of her smiles, the emission of a particular vocal cadence.

With jealousy out of the way for the moment, Swann can see Odette again, remember why he cares in the first place--and start the cycle over again.

I suspect that Phillips--or at least the "Phillips" within the book--would probably also agree with this thought of Marcel (or "Marcel"), from elsewhere in Swann's Way:

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion.It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each one of which is ephemeral, though by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

Our self is but a unity achieved by main force applied to successive states of perpetual change, our passions the same, and both are deployed without quarter--self on the passions, passions on the self--as needed to keep the whole in line.

"Our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep," or, In dreams

"I had dreams, not nightmares but musical dreams, dreams about transparent questions . . . "--from Amulet, by Roberto Bolano

1 I was reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which I've not read.

"I think dreams have a great many sorts of explanation. Once the Freud virus has, as it were, got into you, you keep on looking at things in that way. But surely there's a lot of pure accident in dreams. One has kinds of obsessions and fears that can't be given a sexual meaning. I think the inventiveness and details of dreams are amazing."--from From a Small Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch

2 I am playing basketball with the Chicago Bulls. I take a pass and fling up an outside shot, which misses abysmally. I turn around to find Michael Jordan shaming me by wagging a long finger, while Dennis Rodman is doubled over, gripping his knees in helpless laughter.

"The Atlantes, according to my sources, never eat any living thing, and never dream, either."--from The Histories, by Herodotus

3 At my nephew's ninth birthday party I was surprised to notice two guests whose attendance I certainly had not expected: Marcel Proust and Eloise of the Plaza. I got the sense that they'd somehow been invited in error, that it was quite possible that they knew no one at the party aside from each other. That wasn't really a problem, however, as they gave the impression of being the sort of close friends who need little to no outside contact. Huddled together in a corner, they sipped from the tiny teacups of my niece's tea set and quietly shared private, gossipy jokes that caused them now and again to break out in skeins of poorly muffled giggles.

"I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel."--from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust

4 I am running a marathon in some anonymous but lovely European mountain town. The course, which winds through the narrow, wandering late-medieval streets of the town, is convoluted and difficult to follow, but that difficulty, in the early part of the race, is a help, giving my mind something to focus on aside from the details of my exertion. But around mile twelve I realize quite suddenly that I'm all alone, the body of fellow runners having silently slipped away somewhere along the course. It's clear that I've take a wrong turn and left the course behind. Worried, I look around, hoping to find a guide or a map. All I see is a quaint-looking pastry shop spilling a warm glow of candlelight onto the crooked sidewalk. I enter the pastry shop, conscious of the salty sweat caking my body, and, with apologies for my gross condition, I ask the baker whether he might happen to have a map of the marathon course. Smiling, he reaches into the display case and selects a cookie baked in the shape of an elephant balancing on a ball. He pokes a pudgy finger at the intricate lines that, pressed into the cookie, make up the design. In a voice tinged with a vaguely Germanic accent, he says, "You simply follow these lines." The cookie is a map of the route; the route forms the shape of an elephant balancing on a ball.

With a smile on my face and a cookie in hand, I leave the shop and begin to trot back toward the course.

"It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for being unusually restless, and unusually real. He dreams of lying there, asleep, and yet counting his companion's footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon advances in her course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes of light--really changed, much as he had dreamed--and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet."--from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens

5 One of the editors at my workplace had arranged for some prominent authors to give lectures on their craft to the entire office. First up were Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. They took turns speaking, and they actually had fairly interesting things to say about each other’s work. Hemingway was surprisingly self-effacing, and Conrad was exactly as I expected: formal, precise, and thoroughly serious.

It was only after I’d returned to my office following the lecture that I remembered that both Hemingway and Conrad were long dead. “Of course!” I thought. “Those must have been professional impersonators!”

I ran for the front desk, hoping to catch them before they left. Conrad was gone by the time I got there, but Hemingway was just stepping into the elevator. “Wait!” I shouted. “Who do you do when you’re not doing Hemingway?”

Hemingway turned. Then, smiling, he ripped off his mask, held it aloft, and jauntily shouted, "Yourcenar!”

"Against fearful and troublesome dreams, nightmare and such inconveniences, wherewith melancholy men are molested, the best remedy is to eat a light supper, and of such meats as are easy of digestion; no Hare, Venison, Beef, &c. not to lie on his back, not to meditate or think in the day time of any terrible objects, or especially talk of them before he goes to bed. For, as he said in Lucian after such conference, I seem to dream of Hecate, I can think of nothing but Hobgoblins; and, as Tully notes, for the most part our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep, which Ennius writes of Homer: as a dog dreams of an hare, so do men dream on such subjects they thought on last."--from The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton

6 I was at the zoo, watching a gorilla very close up through the bars of his cage. He gave me a quizzical look, tugged at his earlobe, then pointed at my earlobes while mouthing the word, "Earring?" I stared for a second, then remembered that I was wearing a big, gold pirate-style hoop in each ear.

"There is no great difference, says Proust, between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality. When the sleeper awakes, this emissary of his habit assures him that his 'personality' has not disappeared with his fatigue."--from Proust, by Samuel Beckett

7 I am reading James Boswell's Life of Johnson and find a typo that somehow turns an ordinary sentence into some sort of prognostication about my brother's life. As I read it I am amused but impressed, and I remember that Johnson himself left a cryptic note about dreams and brothers in his diary. The entry for January 23, 1759, the day of his mother's funeral, includes the line, "The dream of my Brother I shall remember." Johnson's brother, Nathanael, had died at only twenty-four, a possible suicide; his sole surviving letter is an indictment of Samuel for his harsh treatment.

"It makes a difference whether your dreams usually come true or not. . . . See then if you can follow my example, and give a happy interpretation to your dream."--from a letter to Suetonius Tranquillus by Pliny the Younger

8 I was at Wrigley Field to watch a Cubs game, and, as game time approached, I got out my scorebook to take down the starting lineup. The public address announcer began to rattle off the Cubs lineup. "Leading off, and playing right field . . . a sesame ball." I wrote it down. "Batting second, and playing second base, a furry kitten." I wrote it down. "Batting third, and playing first base, Stacey Shintani." On hearing my wife's name, I threw down my pencil and exclaimed to my seatmate, "They're trying to throw this game!"

"My earliest memory is of a dream. It was in the house where we lived when I was three or four years of age. I dreamed I was asleep in the house in an upper room.

Then I awoke and came downstairs and stood in the living room. The lights were on in the living room, although it was hushed and empty. The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls. It was the same old living room as ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad."--from "Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)," by Anne Carson

9 I was reading—and greatly enjoying—Anthony Powell's’s biography of Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. It was only after I woke up that I remembered that Powell never wrote a biography of Burton; that was Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, who serves as Powell’s stand-in.

"In some ways a narrative is like a dream. You don't analyze a dream--you just pass through it. A dream is sometimes healing and sometimes makes you anxious. A narrative is just the same--you are just in it. A novelist is not an analyst. He just transforms one scene into another. A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away, then wraps it into a package called fiction which allows other people to dream. Fiction warms the hearts and minds of the readers. So I believe that there is something deep and enduring in fiction, and I have learned to trust the power of narrative."--Haruki Murakami, from a lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2005

10 I dreamed that Van Morrison was at a dinner party I was attending with about a dozen other friends. After dinner, he got up to play a few songs. He ran through a somewhat perfunctory "Moondance," then asked me if I would accompany him on vocals and guitar for a couple of numbers. I don't play guitar, and while I do like to sing, I'm far from a good singer. But, unwilling to refuse Van Morrison, I got up and faked my way through "The Way Young Lovers Do," strumming and singing along. I was sufficiently nervous that I forgot nearly half the lyrics, but Van sang them all beautifully.

Then he launched into Sam Cooke's "That's Where It's At," and suddenly everything was right: I happened across the right chords, was even able to throw in some simple, but convincing finger-picked flourishes, and Van and I sounded stunningly good singing together.

"He was also terrified with manifest warnings, both old and new, arising from dreams, auspices, and omens. He had never been used to dream before the murder of his mother. After that event, he fancied in his sleep that he was steering a ship, and that the rudder was forced from him: that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into a prodigiously dark place; and was at one time covered over with a vast swarm of winged ants, and at another, surrounded by the national images which were set up near Pompey's theatre, and hindered from advancing farther; that a Spanish jennet he was fond of, had his hinder parts so changed, as to resemble those of an ape, and having his head only left unaltered, neighed very harmoniously. The doors of the mausoleum of Augustus flying open of themselves, there issued from it a voice, calling on him by name."--from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius

11 I was rereading Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, in the pages of which I encountered a book I hadn't noticed on my first reading: Ghost Whim, by Robin Anne Powter.

According to Nabokov's narrator, Ghost Whim is a cultural history of dreaming . . . but before I could learn what would happen if I read a nonexistent cultural history of dreaming inside an actual novel inside a dream, I woke up.

"Night comes when you least expect it. You are making dinner or working late, you look out the window and the sky is already dark. The arrival of night can be elusive, mysterious, and in the city we don't often see it, though we always know when it has fallen. In the country night takes its time. A glorious sunset might flag its approach, yet it seems we can never pinpoint its exact arrival. Nightfall is a subtle process."--from Acquainted with the Night, by Christopher Dewdney

In Search of Lost Nuance, or, Twitter and Proust

I quoted the following line from Francisco Goldman's moving, awkwardly intimate memoir Say Her Name (2011) on my Twitter feed today:

Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.

Stephen Mitchelmore, a blogger and critic I enjoy reading both for his perceptiveness and for his well defined taste and point of view, replied

What do you mean? Proust is as much about forgetting as remembering; habit and the sudden ending of habit.

Realizing I'd been quoting, he wrote that he presumed Goldman hadn't read In Search of Lost Time. I explained that I'd quoted the line because I liked the idea of an author who was as identified with forgetting as Proust is with remembering, but Mitchelmore wasn't convinced, writing:

I think it's awful; it's based on what's at best a misrepresentation, at worst a philistine refusal to understand.

It's nothing new to point out that Twitter's 140-character limit can kill nuance, but I do think this question deserves a bit more delving. First off, Mitchelmore is unquestionably right; in fact, what most surprised me about reading In Search of Lost Time for the first time fourteen years ago was that it was at least as much about losing the past, losing those things and people that we for so long in our lives take for granted as perpetual, as it was about retention. The famous memory-laden madeleine, which for the general literary public has essentially become a synecdoche for the whole sprawling novel, is itself as much a token of forgetting and neglect as it is of memory: it brings the past to life precisely because the mind has let it languish, unthought of. As Proust explains later in the second volume, Within a Budding Grove,

Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we have forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exists outside of us, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourself in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never recapture it. Or rather we should never recapture it had not a few words . . . been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unattainable.

Funes the Memorious aside, it simply isn't possible to retain everything--much less to retain everything with its full emotional valence. Proust recognized that, and he explained and even dramatized it, along with the concomitant bursts of overwhelming recall that such selective memory enables, better than anyone.

Yet Proust is known as the writer of retention, of holding tight to memory. That's his public, madeleine-soaked image. Mitchelmore is right that such a thumbnail description is a misapprehension or misrepresentation, but I don't think those of us who have read, and loved, Proust have any chance of actually changing that perception now. The madeleine is Proust is the madeleine is Proust. Maybe Mitchelmore would disagree, or say that it's our duty to try nonetheless, but I tend to think, rather, that all we can do is encourage people to actually read Proust, engage with his prose and his mind, and be surprised by what they find.

And that's why I like Goldman's line, wrong as it is: given that we aren't likely to make the public acknowledge a more nuanced Proust, I like imagining a writer whose public persona, wanted or unwanted, is as closely tied to forgetting as Proust's is to remembering. What pleasures such a writer could offer! What nuances of the relationship between remembering and forgetting could he or she explore--informed, we would hope, by Proust's--and what mixed melancholy and joy such a writer could evoke!

"Some suggestion . . . that things could have been even better."

As I mentioned last week, I came to my current re-reading of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time straight from Proust, so I was particularly open to narrator Nick Jenkins's many references to In Search of Lost Time as he's reading it during The Military Philosophers, the last of the war volumes. The following one, which comes at the end of a trip through Cauberg--Proust's Balbec--with a group of foreign military attaches, is worth particular attention:

At the same time, a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.

Jenkins's--and thus Powell's--take on that disappointment hews closer to my experience than does Proust's, however much I might enjoy it. Being not, by nature, an idealist or a dreamer--I'm essentially a pragmatist, and (were it not for the unavoidable hint of self-congratulation contained in the description) might even call myself a realist--I find neither the ideal so high nor the actual so low as does Proust. Nick's more middling, muddling route--and the melancholy pleasure to be found therein--is closer to my style.

That relative calm also comes through in Jenkins's tendency to meditation, or reverie, a characteristic of the novel that is really standing out in this, my fourth or fifth time through Dance: a scene or a person or an exchange will remind Nick of a book or a painting, perhaps an old memory, and he will pause for a moment to suss out the similarities and differences, and what those might teach him about the current moment. What's struck me this time through is the inherent calm required for that approach, a fundamental wholeness of or confidence in himself that allows him to simultaneously operate on two timescales, that of the moment and the much longer, more lasting one of literature, friendship, and personal history.

It's a deeply appealing characteristic, one that allows Powell to perpetually remind us of the reason we read books, the insight that only they can offer. Acknowledgment of the fact that such insight is unavailable to large swaths of our fellow humans is something else that sets Powell apart from most novelists; I've quoted this passage from The Valley of Bones before, but it remains the most succinct statement of that fact that I know, and thus bears repeating:

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

That thought arises from the fact that, in the Army, Jenkins encounters a situation that will be familiar to anyone who has worked a job that mixes classes: being identified, usually skeptically, as a reader. Jenkins eventually surrenders to being pegged as such:

I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications. At least admitting to it put one into a recognisably odd category of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run.

I'll close out my Powellian musings for the week by noting another aspect of Nick's character--and thus Powell's understanding--that I appreciate: the simple fact that anecdotes that will stun some friends will fall entirely flat with others, and that one of the greatest--if simplest--joys of friendship is the eager anticipation of a chance to tell certain friends certain stories that you know will leave them gobsmacked. Those of you who haven't read Dance but might should skip this next passage, which reveals more than you ought to know in advance, but which illustrates my point:

I had not set eyes on Widmerpool myself since the day Farebrother had recoiled from saluting him in Whitehall. Although, as an archetypal figure, one of those fabulous monsters that haunt the recesses of the individual imagination, he held an immutable place in my own private mythology, with the passing of Stringham and Templer I no longer knew anyone to whom he might present quite the same absorbing spectacle, accordingly with whom the present conjuncture could be at all adequately discussed.

E-mail, cell phones, and other electronic communication aids have brought those crucial friends closer to us, made the stories that are the stuff of friendship easier than ever to share, but of course nothing will ever bridge that final gap, which puts me in mind of two passages I first discovered in D. J. Enright's marvelous anthology The Oxford Book of Death (1983). The first, from "Tam Cari Capitas," by Powell's contemporary Louis MacNeice, reminds us that "When a friend dies out on us and is not there," we miss him most "not at floodlit moments," but

. . . in killing
Time where he could have livened it, such as the drop-by-drop
Of games like darts or chess, turning the faucet
On full at a threat to the queen or double top.

Then there's this from the ever-helpful Samuel Johnson, as recounted by Hester Lynch:

The truth is, nobody suffered more from pungent sorrow at a friend's death than Johnson, though he would suffer no one else to complain of their losses in the same way; "for (says he) we must either outlive our friends you know, or our friends must outlive us; and I see no man that would hesitate about the choice."

A sentiment which I believe neither Nick Jenkins nor the long-lived Anthony Powell would dispute.

Proust and Powell

In the rush of artistic exhilaration and literary speculation that makes the last half of the last book of In Search of Lost Time such a moving, memorable experience, the following passage, where Marcel first lays out his nascent narrative approach in detail, stood out:

It would not be possible to recount our relationship, even with a person we hardly knew, without recreating a succession of the most diverse settings of our life. So each individual--and I was one of these individuals myself--became a measure of duration for me each time he completed a revolution not just around himself, but around other people, and in particular by the successive positions he occupied in relation to me. And no doubt all these different planes, in relation to which Time, as I had just grasped in the course of this party, arranged my life, by giving me the idea that in a book whose intention was to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use, in contrast to the flat psychology people normally use, a sort of psychology in space, added a new beauty to the resurrections that had taken place in my memory, by bringing the past into the present without making any changes to it, just as it was at the moment when it was the present, suppresses precisely this great dimension of Time through which a life is given reality.

Proust's description of a character making "a revolution around himself" and "the successive positions he occupied in relation to me" called to mind Anthony Powell, a writer who openly acknowledged his debt to Proust.

The well-known opening scene of A Question of Upbringing, the first novel in Powell's sequence A Dance to the Music of Time shows that influence as clearly as any other passage in Powell's work; after a description of some workmen warming their hands over a trash-barrel fire, Powell's narrator slips into a meditation:

[S]omething in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked graybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality; of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

As with Proust, I'm in some sense always reading Dance: I'd been thinking already of someday soon picking up where I'd last left off--with the third volume--and seeing Powell again through the lens offered by Proust has convinced me that now's the time.

Proust in the blackout

My knowledge of wartime blackouts mostly comes from World War II London, from Anthony Powell's furtive rooftop conversations and Julian MacLaren-Ross's drunken pub crawls. Neither offers a moment of beauty like that found in this description of the blackout in Paris during World War I, taken from Finding Time Again, in the recent translation by Ian Patterson:

The moonlight created effects that are normally unknown in the city, even in the middle of winter; its beams spreading across the snow on the boulevard Haussmann that there was nobody now to shovel away, just as they might have done on a glacier in the Alps. The outlines of the trees were revealed, sharp and pure against the golden-blue snow, with all the delicacy of a Japanese painting or a Raphael background; as shadows, they stretched out over the ground from the very foot of each tree, as one often sees them in the country when the rays of the setting sun flood the meadows, creating reflections of their evenly spaced trees. But by a wonderfully delicate subtlety, the meadows over which these tree shadows, weightless as souls, extended was a paradisal meadow, not green but of a white so dazzling, by virtue of the moonlight which shone on to the jade snow, that it might have bee woven entirely from the petals of flowering pear trees. And in the squares, the divinities of the public fountains holding jets of ice in their hands looked like statues made of some twofold material, for whose creation the artist had set out to make a pure marriage of bronze and crystal. On rare days such as these the houses were all completely dark.

Lyricism in Proust is usually associated with memory or emotion, or with scenes that evoke the two; this freestanding bit of appreciation of beauty is rare enough to make the reader stop and admire.

Then it gets even better, as the human element re-enters the scene:

But in the spring, on the other hand, every now and then, in defiance of police regulations, a private town house, or just one floor of a house, or even just one room of one floor, not having closed its shutters, appeared, as if independently supported by the impalpable darkness, like a projection of pure light, like an apparition without substance. And the woman whom, lifting up one's eyes, one could make out in that gilded shadow, took on, in this night in which one was lost and in which she too seemed cloistered, the veiled and mysterious charm of an oriental vision.

I don't usually think of Proust having much in common with Borges, but am I wrong in linking the wisftul, romantic tone of that passage with some of Borges's suggestions of fleeting moments of knowledge, even of prescience? Or, if you don't buy that comparison, how about the urbane, modernist evening pleasures of Jacques Tati's Playtime?

Finally, as in life, the vision must end:

Then one walked on, and nothing else interrupted the monotonous tramp of one's constitutional in the rustic darkness.

But the walk continues with the knowledge--always there, but most often dormant--that the stars and the shadows are all around us, silent sharers of the city night.

"All are sick with some form of the ideal," or, It's time again for Proust

August is waning, and the air carries a feeling that, as Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence pointed out earlier this week, Tove Jansson described perfectly in The Summer Book:

It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin.

The weather suits my annual August return to Proust, a tradition I copied from a poet friend, Carrie Olivia Adams; this year, I'm closing out my second time through the whole cycle, reading Finding Time Again in the 2002 translation by Ian Patterson.

In anticipation, I turned last week to Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise (1948), because I vaguely remembered Connolly expressing dissatisfaction with In Search of Lost Time. I was surprised at how close he comes to outright dismissal:

He exhibits, beyond all others, the defect of the Mandarin style; the failure of the writer's intellectual or emotional content to fill the elaborate frame which his talent plans for it. The honeycombs continue to develop, but fewer and fewer pollen-bags are emptied into them. There are many great passages where the complexity is worthy of the emotion expended on it, where very subtle and difficult truths are presented in language that could only express them if difficult and subtle.

Notwithstanding, now that the element of novelty and cult-snobbery has worn off, much of Proust, as of his master Ruskin, must stand condemned. He is often repetitive and feeble; the emotions of envy, jealousy, lust, and snobbishness around which his book is built, though they generate an enormous impetus, are incapable of sustaining it through twenty or thirty volumes; Swann's jealousy of Odette is enough without Proust's jealousy of Albertine, Saint-Loup's of Rachel and Charlus's of Morel and if the emotions repeat themselves, so also do the stories, the situations, the comments, parentheses, and cliches. Proust will remain a great writer, but his titles to fame my have to be reconsidered.

Few would argue that there are not parts of In Search of Lost Time that could be trimmed or tightened, but Connolly's critique is far, far too broad. In so coolly dismissing the repetitive patterns of the book, he reduces what is in reality recurrence, echo, and commentary to something akin to laziness or failure of imagination. More important, what he identifies as "envy, jealousy, lust, and snobbishness" might more productively be grouped together under the more general--and more important, for far more empathetic--concept of longing, an emotion with which one would assume the perpetually dissatisfied Connolly to be quite familiar.

Edmund Wilson is far more generous, and far closer to correct, in his treament of Proust in Axel's Castle (1931):

All [Proust's characters] alike are suffering from some form of unsatisfied longing or disappointed hope: all are sick with some form of the ideal. Legrandin wants to know the Guermantes; Vinteuil is wounded in his love for his daughter; Swann, associating the beauty of Odette with that of the women of Boticelli, ridiculously and tragically identifies his passion for her with his neglected aesthetic interests.

Connolly is much closer to the mark in his indictment of the slash-and-burn nature of Proust's satire:

He was modern enough to attack the values of this world but he had nothing to put in their place, for their values were his own, those of the narrator in the book who spends his life in going to parties and watching snobs behave but is never a snob himself. . . . [W]hat in fact he declares is that nothing changes except the small social set which he admired in his youth and which fell to pieces. . . . There was a new face with an old title in a box at the opera--but the title and the box are always there, coveted and prized by the ruling class of six or seven countries; there are no new ideas, no revolution in wisdom, no reversals of taste, nobody to declare that they never want to see an opera again.

This is a version of the common criticism of the satirist: that by destroying everything and offering nothing to replace what he's savaged, he leaves the reader feeling inclined, not to revolution or fundamental change, but to resignation. If it's all really that bad, why bother trying to change anything?

Here, too, Wilson provides a strong rebuttal. After describing some of the scenes of greatest cruelty in the novel--including the Guermantes's callous disregard of Swann's awkward confession of his impending death--Wilson first offers a more suitable and balanced assessment of the aims of Proust's satire:

Proust has destroyed, and destroyed with ferocity, the social hierarchy he has just been expounding. Its values, he tells us, are an imposture: pretending to honor and distinction, it accepts all that is vulgar and base; its pride is nothing nobler than the instinct which it shares with the woman who keeps the toilet and the elevator boy's sister, to spit upon the person whom we happen to have at a disadvantage. And whatever the social world may say to the contrary, it either ignores or seeks to kill those few impulses toward justice and beauty which make men admirable. It seems strange that so many critics should have found Proust's novel "unmoral"; the truth is that he was preoccupied with morality to the extent of tending to deal in melodrama. Proust was himself (on his mother's side) half-Jewish; and for all his Parisian sophistication, there remains in him much of the capacity for apocalyptic moral indignation of the classical Jewish prophet.

From there, he reminds us that, contrary to Connolly's assertion, Proust does offer us counter-examples:

[W]e begin to understand why Proust finds these realities so inacceptable, as we become aware of the standards by which he judges them. These standards are supplied, on the one hand, by such artists as Bergotte, the novelist, and Vinteuil, the composer; but on the other hand, by Swann and by the narrator's mother and grandmother. . . . The world is different from Combray, not merely because Combray is provincial, but because the world is the world and occupied with the things of the world. It is not really Combray itself, but the example of his mother and grandmother, with their kindness, their spiritual nobility, their rigid moral principles and their utter self-abnegation, from which Proust's narrator sets out on his ill-fated adventures among men.

Against the cynical and grasping world of society, Proust sets a conception of strength of character, of a kindness and dignity so fundamental that even when our longings make us ridiculous--as Swann's pursuit of Odette can't help but do--they can never make us cruel or small.

It is, as Wilson notes, a deeply moral vision, and while its backwards-looking, conservative vision may not be the first step towards the revolution for which Connolly seems to be asking, it unquestionably answers his charge that Proust offered no alternative to the values of the society he condemns.

And now to submit to Proust's obsessions and watch this late-summer Saturday slip away.

Sinking the Submarine Library

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Thinking about the Invisible Library over the past couple of weeks reminded me that I never got around to sharing a memorable passage in MacDonald Harris's Mortal Leap (1964) when I wrote briefly about that novel earlier this summer.

Harris's novel is about a man who, having lost his identity to a shipwreck while serving in the Merchant Marine during World War II, is given a chance at a new life when a woman claims him as her husband, a naval officer who died in the same battle; Harris uses the man's story--and his choice to allow this unexpected new life to become his own--to explore basic yet essential questions of identity, individuality, and purpose. It was brought to my attention by the Neglected Books Page, whose editor raved about it:

I first read Mortal Leap almost thirty years ago, and I remember how the narrative seized my attention. It was one of those books you begrudge the rest of your life for taking you away from. When you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, you feel as if you are hurtling forward along with the protagonist.

When I reread the book recently, it seemed even more powerful and affecting. I knew how it would turn out, but now the suspense was in seeing how Harris could make it plausible. What I saw this time around was how he manages to make this wildly improbable situation into a very basic lesson about being. So the man learns how to imitate Ben Davenant without getting caught–or at least, so he thinks. The man has made the leap and a new bar is in his hands. But he still has to confront the question, “Now what?”

I wasn't as taken with it as he was: the set-up was smartly conceived, and the narrative voice was strong and distinctive, but the book's second half, when the man begins to decide what sort of life he wants to lead, felt a bit flat--as the philosophical questions driving the narrative began to find answers, the story itself lost some of its inherent interest. Regardless, I'm glad I read it, and it's well worth the push the Neglected Books Page has given it--it's made me want to search out more of MacDonald Harris's novels.

But what has caused it to resurface in my mind tonight is a scene early in the novel, when the sailor, having fled the Utah home of his boyhood for a directionless life at sea, begins to use the dead hours in his bunk to become an autodidact. At each port, he takes on more books:

During those five years I read on the average two or three books a week, but I had never been educated properly or shown how to read books and I would get things all mixed up and twisted in my head. I never could get it straight that there were two Samuel Butlers and what the difference was between Malraux, Maurois, and Mauriac. I didn't read Conrad anymore because I had decided he was a sentimentalist. In San Francisco or Melbourne I would buy a box of books and when we got out to sea I would take them out one by one and read the first ten pages. If it didn't interest me I would throw it overboard or give it to Sailors' Relief. In this way I discovered Malthus, Ricardo, Gibbon, Veblen, Spencer, Bakunin, Kierkegaard, Vico, Mencken, Fourier. I didn't like Hegel or Kant or any author who got involved in abstractions, and any kind of speculation or general theorizing made me impatient; I wanted the books that had the answers. I read everything, biography and fiction, but it was the same with the novelists; I threw away books by tea-party fairies like Proust and read the naturalists, Zola, Crane, Dreiser, Celine, Steinbeck, Dos Passos. Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific is a copy of The Forsyte Saga I heaved overboard one afternoon. I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book.

Now, anyone who calls Proust a "tea-party fairy" is planting his feet firmly on my bad side, and though I have never been willing to commit the time to attempting Galsworthy (perhaps in part due to the influence of Anthony Powell, who argued that The Forsyte Saga "cannot hold a candle to Vanity Fair," and that Galsworthy "lacks the pitiless knowledge of human nature to be found in, say, Proust or James"), I'm fairly confident it doesn't quite deserve burial at sea. But I will admit to enjoying the image . . . rather than an Invisible Library, a submarine library, pages slowly swaying in the silent currents of the trackless deep, read in that pitchy blackness only by those fish with the good sense to have evolved their own light sources.

I have a water-damaged copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, victim of a careless roommate and a bathtub, that I'm happy to contribute. Anyone else have books with which to help me outfit a soon-to-be-scuttled submarine library?

A question of translation

Reading Carol Clark's 2002 translation of The Prisoner, the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time, yesterday, I was brought up short by one passage. It comes midway through the volume, at the outset of an evening party at the Verdurins' house. Madame Verdurin's sparkling guest list for the party has been assembled by--and therefore subject to the hatreds and feuds of--the Baron de Charlus. In the midst of that process Madame Verdurin makes the mistake of suggesting that they invite the Comtesse de Mole, to whom the Baron has taken a vigorous public dislike. In response, the Baron casually lets loose with some disdain:

"Well, well, there's no accounting for tastes," M. de Charlus had replied, and if yours, dear lady, is to spend your time with Mrs Todgers, Sarah Gamp and Mrs Harris I have nothing to say, but please let it be on an evening when I am not here."

Fans of Dickens will recognize these three women as characters from Martin Chuzzlewit--and their names, you can surely imagine, were quite a surprise coming out of the Baron's mouth.

A note accompanying the line explains:

M. de Charlus's reference in the original is to Mme Pipelet, Mme Gibout and Mme Joseph Prudhomme, minor creations of hte nineteenth-century writers Eugene Sue and Henri Monnier. They are chosen as examples of women utterly lacking in social distinction: Mme Pipelet, for example, is a concierge. Three comparable characters from Dickens have been substituted.

I understand that Carol Clark wanted to make sure that we didn't miss the Baron's point--and I think Clark is right to guess that your average reader of Proust in translation isn't going to know the characters the Baron actually cites. But am I alone in thinking that translating them to characters we know is overdoing it a bit? Couldn't the context have been provided in a note instead--especially since this more invasive solution didn't even eliminate the need for a note?

That was the solution opted for in the Moncrieff, Enright, and Kilmartin translation, which also manages to offer in the note the names of the novels from which the minor characters are taken: Pipelet from Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris, Gibout from Monnier's Scenes populaires, and Prudhomme from Monnier's Les Memoires de Joseph Prudhomme. The result is both cleaner and more informative, resting in a confidence that the reader will check the note, a confidence that doesn't seem unreasonable in such a lightly annotated text.

Even if I disagree with it, Clark's decision obviously isn't that big a deal: it distracted me briefly, but the moment passed quickly in the rush of the ensuing party. It does, however, serve as a good reminder of the difficulty of the job translators take on, of all the similar decisions like they have to make in a book, page after page. As a reader with no languages other than English at my command, the fact that nearly all of those decisions are pass more or less unnoticed in a good translation is an achievement that I greatly appreciate.

"The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

One night last week I dreamed that a previously unknown and unpublished story by Vladimir Nabokov, called "H. H. in Eden," had come to light. Even as I was dreaming, I was trying deliberately to remember the details of the story as I read it; the usual half-lucidity of my dreaming self allowed me to know that the only place "H. H. in Eden" actually existed was in my head. Though on waking I lost the rich language of Nabokov--which, heartbreakingly, was fully realized in the dream--I retained the basic outline of the tale.

What I remember of it is this:

Humbert Humbert, having somehow escaped the fate described for him in the introduction to Lolita, manages to trick the Archangel Michael into letting him slip into the long-vacant Eden to escape the hash he has made of his life. Once past Michael and his flaming sword, however, Humbert is surprised to discover that Eden, rather than being depopulated . . . is full of other Humberts. Somehow {and here is where my ability to translate the logic of dreamlife begins to break down} that brings home to Humbert the painful realization that Michael hadn't been fooled at all, and that he'd let Humbert, not into Eden, but into Purgatory.

And there, with that somewhat metaphysical take on an O. Henry twist, the story ended. If only I could get back to that specific dream--but we so rarely find our way back to the same dreams twice, to what Proust called the "second apartment that we have, into which, abandoning our own, we go in order to sleep." I fear that the summary above is all our world is likely to enjoy of "H. H. in Eden."

The dream reminded me that I haven't yet presented a link to a pleasantly strange article by Hilary Mantel that appeared in the Guardian a while back, in which she tells of a story that, Coleridge-like, she pulled straight from a dream. Explains Mantel,

Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4am and typed it on to the screen. The story was called "Nadine at Forty". In its subject matter, in its tone, its setting, it bore no relation to anything I have ever written before or since. It extended itself easily into paragraphs, requiring little correction and not really admitting any; how could my waking self revise what my sleeping self had imagined? By 6am I had finished. I was shaking with fatigue.

Part of what draws me to Mantel as a writer is her ability to plausibly--and yet chillingly--convey, both in fiction or memoir, uncanny moments; in this particular tale, there's still another unexpected creepy turn to come once she's transcribed the story from her dream brain to her computer.

I should also point out the nice recent piece on sleep in the London Review of Books by regular contributor Jenny Diski. Diski is a lover of sleep, while I only reluctantly make my daily peace with its necessity, but her column is wonderfully decriptive and anecdotal, her description of the borderlands of sleep--forevermore owned by Proust though they may be--sufficiently enchanting to justify reading the whole article:

Coming to, coming round. Slowly. Holding onto sleep, then hovering in hypnoland for as long as you can. Jung almost redeems himself from creepy spiritus munditude with the story in which he asks his new patient, a pathologically anxious, blocked writer, to describe his day in detail. ‘Well, I wake, get up and . . .’ ‘Stop,’ Jung says. ‘That’s where you’re going wrong.’ Not likely to be true, but perfectly correct. The hinterland between sleeping and waking is what compensates for having to start and get through the day, blocked writer, besieged schoolteacher or sullen secretary as I’ve been in my time.

Finally, a prize* awaits the first person who can tell me where I took this post's headline from.

*Prize to be your choice of one of two books I've discovered multiple copies of recently in my house: Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles or the second volume of Tolstoy's letters. This is, after all, a low-rent blog, which fact prizes will necessarily reflect.

Unexpected connections

Pleasantly surprising rhymes of tone and subject like this one are the primary reason for my habit of reading a couple of novels at once.

From Sodom and Gomorrah (1921), by Marcel Proust, translated by John Sturrock

A demon of perversity had driven her, despising a ready-made position, to flee the conjugal home, and to live in the most scandalous fashion. Then, the world she had despised as a twenty-year-old, when it was at her feet, failed her cruelly at thirty, when, for the last ten years, no one, bar a few faithful woman friends, any long acknowledged her, and she had undertaken painstakingly to reconquer, bit by bit, what she had possessed at her birth (a not uncommon return journey).

From Do Everything in the Dark (2003), by Gary Indiana

"I want to forget all this," Jesse says, "but what if one day I want to remember?" Frivolous options.

"A thoroughly nasty piece of work" or, Parties and some lessons in the glories of cattiness

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I apologize in advance for the vulgarity of this first scene, but it was too good to pass up. It comes from Gary Indiana's Do Everything in the Dark (2003):

From a fat manila envelope bursting at the seams, Jesse fishes snapshots of Millie Ferguson. He remembers her green eye shadow, glassy Mylar dresses, high wiry whore-blond hair, the array of indelible expressions that wacky woman wore instead of jewelry. Millie exuded an air of hoarding astounding secrets and spiriting special people into dark corners to examine her pussy (which Jesse'd always imagined the lair of rare African snakes or fantastic Amazonian orchids) or to snuffle up an Everest of cocaine. The dope addict rictus, the born sneak's irresistible smirk, the stolid Teutonic jawline that slackened like rubber after two a.m. Millie Ferguson got ambushed by mirrors, stuck to them like a pinned butterfly, and who wouldn't if they looked like her? People wanted either to be Millie or to fuck her, or both.

Such sterling cattiness Indiana pulls off there, reaching heights only scaleable with the aid of real longing and undeniable praise. It's nearly worthy of the master, Proust, whose way with a cutting comment is so easy that he doesn't even have to save them all for Marcel, instead distributing them freely to all manner of characters, worthy and unworthy alike. Here, for example, is Madame de Guermantes, taking her oily leave of a party, in Sodom and Gomorrah:

"Goodbye, I've hardly spoken to you, that's how it is in society, we don't meet, we don't say the things we'd like to say to one another; anyway it's the same everywhere in life. Let's hope it'll be better organized after we're dead. At least we won't always have to wear low-cut dresses. Yet who knows? Perhaps we shall show off our bones and our worms on big occasions. Why note? I say, look at old mother Rampillon, d'you see any great difference between that and a skeleton in an open dress? It's true she has every right, she's at least a hundred years old. She was already one of those sacred monsters I refused to curtsy to when i was starting out in society. I thought she'd died long since; which would as it happens be the one explanation for the spectacle she's offering us. It's impressive and liturgical."

Or this, which he gives to Madame de Gallardon, spurned cousin of the Duchesse de Guermantes:

"I'm not in the least anxious to see her," she had replied. "I caught sight of her just now, in any case, she's beginning to age; it seems she can't come to terms with it. Basin himself says so. And I can well understand that, because, since she's not intelligent, is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and has a bad way with her, she certainly feels that, once she's no longer beautiful, she'll have nothing left at all."

It is one of Proust's greatest achievements to reveal the emptiness and ridiculousness of society life while simultaneously making us very glad that he took us along to these parties. We love being there because, unlike all the guests Proust depicts, we can simply relax and enjoy the spectacle through his eyes, without worrying about the figure we cut or the connections we make. Which makes Proust's eye for the ridiculous and the silly all the more fun. Here he offers us the words of the frivolous and self-regarding Madam de Citri, at the same party:

"Do you like listening to that, music? Good Lord, it depends on the moment. But it can be so very tedious! I mean, Beethoven, la barbe!" With Wagner, then with Franck, and Debussy, she did not even trouble to say 'la barbe' but was content to pass her hand across her face, like a barber. Soon, what was tedious was everything. "Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad . . . How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!" In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.

Which puts me in the mind of that great apostle of both cattiness and list-making, Sei Shonagon. Here she combines her two strengths, with a list of "Things That Have Lost Their Power" from her Pillow Book, which itself is definitely belongs on a list of life's pleasing things:

A large boat which is high and dry in a creek at ebb-tide.

A woman who has taken off her false locks to comb the short hair that remains.

A large tree that has been blown down in a gale and lies on its side with its roots in the air.

The retreating figure of a sumo wrestler who has been defeated in a match.

A man of no importance reprimanding an attendant.

An old man who removes his hat, uncovering his scanty topknot.

A woman, who is angry with her husband about some trifling manner, leaves home and goes somewhere to hide. She is certain that he will rush about looking for her; but he does nothing of the kind and shows the most infuriating indifference. Since she cannot stay away forever, she swallows her pride and returns.

Or, for a more straightforward baring of her teeth, how about this:

Masahiro really is a laughing-stock. I wonder what it is like for his parents and friends. If people see him with a decent-looking servant, they always call for the fellow and laughingly ask how he can wait upon such a master and what he thinks of him. There are skilled dyers and weavers in Masahiro's household, and when it comes to dress, whether it be the colour of his under-robe or the style of his cloak, he is more elegant than most men; yet the only effect of his elegance is to make people say, "What a shame someone else isn't wearing thse things!"

Ouch. And double ouch when you remember that Sei Shonagan surely smiled to Masahiro's face as she composed these lines in her head. Then there's this, from a list of "Hateful Things":

A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.

There's enough of an implicit warning in that to make me close this post; I'll wrap up by including a video for one of my favorite songs of last year, the languid, scandalously unimpressed Pierces singing "Boring." Enjoy . . . or, as the mood strikes you, be bored:

The Man Without Qualities

I spent far too much time tonight making a pizza to write a proper post, but I can at least share a couple of standout passages from The Man Without Qualities (1930). First, an arresting image from a description of Bonodea, the past and future love of Ulrich, the book's focus (and Robert Musil's stand-in):

She was once again the dear old Bonadea whose curls hung down over her none-too-wise brow or were swept back from it, depending on the dictates of fashion, and in whose eyes there was always something reminiscent of the air rising above a fire.

That sort of piercing image--so perfect as to bring the reader up short--turns up reliably in The Man Without Qualities, and, along with a plethora of aphoristic expressions, completely makes up for the occasional longuers of Ulrich's indecisive overthinking. To be fair, Musil himself seems to know that Ulrich's mental and emotional crises needs a gentle deflation at times. During what Ulrich views as "the worst crisis of his life," which sees him boiling the entire question of his life down to,

A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

--Musil, while clearly supportive of Ulrich's quest, offers this description:

If one wants to imagine how such a man lives when he is alone, the most that can be said is that at night his lighted windows afford a view of his room, where his used thoughts sit around like clients in the waiting room of a lawyer with whom they are dissatisfied.

And then there's the interleavings of satire, aimed at all sorts of humbuggery and self-importance in the ruling class of prewar Vienna. Here's Section Chief Tuzzi, an official in the foreign affairs ministry:

Tuzzi was laconic on principle. He felt that pun and the like, even if one could not do entirely without them in witty conversation, had better not be too good, because that would be middle-class.

I love the offering of puns as the antithesis of laconicism, as if more expansive conversation doesn't even exist beyond wordplay. Or take this account of Ulrich's Aunt Jane's whispered-about first husband:

He had of course been an artist, although, because of the rotten luck of small-town, provincial circumstances, only a photographer. But a short time after they were married he was already running up debts like a genius and drinking furiously. Aunt Jane made scarifices for him, she fetched him home from the tavern, she wept in secret and openly at his knees. He looked like a genius, with an imperious mouth and flamboyant hair, and if Aunt Jane had been able to infect him with the passion of her despair, he would have become, with his disastrous vices, as great as Lord Byron.

By informing us that Aunt Jane "wept in secret and openly at his knees," Musil transforms what could be straight comedy into something greater, reminding us that what is ridiculous to us remains all too real to those we're chuckling at. He doesn't manage that synthesis as often as Proust, and the various strands of thought in the book overall don't cohere as organically as Proust's themes--but at times he can be both as funny and as perceptive. A book this capacious also has room for occasional flights of beautifully observed visual detail, and I'll close with one. To end a chapter that has seen Walter and Clarissa, married friends of Ulrich, engaged in a brutal verbal battle, Musil essentially borrows a move from cinema, pulling the camera back to reveal the darkening room, suffused with emotion, as the pair quietly feels the unexpectedly renewed power of their union:

Dusk had fallen. The room was black. The piano was black. The silhouettes of two people who loved each other were black. Clarisse's eyes gleamed in the dark, kindled like a light, and in Walter's mouth, restless with pain, the enamel on a tooth shone like ivory. Regardless of the greatest affairs of state occurring in the world outside, and despite its vexations, this seemed to be one of those moments for which God had created the earth.

Jane and Marcel

Yesterday I mentioned that I was deciding between returning to Proust and starting Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen: A Life (1997). Well, I chose Austen, but I unexpectedly encountered a Proustian moment as well, in a passage from Austen's epistolary novel Lesley Castle (1791), written when she was sixteen and never published. Tomalin quotes the following lines from the book, representing a letter by the sister of a woman who, on her wedding day, has just learned that her bridegroom has been thrown from a horse and is expected to die:

Dear Eloisa (said I) there's no occasion for your crying so much about such a trifle (for I was willing to make light of it in order to comfort her) I beg you would not mind it--You see it does not vex me in the least; though perhaps I may suffer most from it after all; for I shall not only be obliged to eat up all the Victuals I have dressed already, but must if Henry should recover (which is however not very likely) dress as much for you again; or should he die (as I suppose he will) I shall still have to prepare a Dinner for you whenever you marry any one else. So you see that tho' perhaps for the present it may afflict you to think of Henry's sufferings, Yet I dare say he'll die soon, and then his pain will be over and you will be easy, whereas my Trouble will last much longer for work as hard as I may, I am certain that the pantry cannot be cleared in less than a fortnight.

Tomalin says that the woman's self-centered obsession, reaching its comic peak at the casual acknowledgment of, "as I suppose he will," compares favorably to Dickens. I don't think it has the overflowing richness of language of Dickens at his best, but considering that Austen was but a teenager when she wrote Lesley Castle, the fact that the comparison can even be made is astonishing.

Rather than Dickens, though, I found myself reminded of Proust, and specifically the scene at the end of The Guermantes Way (1921) where Swann, exasperated by the intransigence of the Duchesse de Guermantes, reveals to her and the Duc that his doctors have told him that he will be dead in mere months. The astonished response of the Duchesse is perhaps her most unguarded moment in the book, revealing her to be temporarily foundered:

"What on earth are you telling me?" the Duchesse broke out, stopping short for a second on her way to the carriage and raising her handsome, melancholy blue eyes, her gaze now fraught with uncertainty. Poised for the first time in her life between two duties as far removed from each other as getting into her carriage to go to a dinner-party and showing compassion for a man who was about to die, she could find no appropriate precedent to follow in the code of conventions and, not knowing which duty to honour, she felt no choice but to pretend to believe that the second alternative did not need to be raised, thus enabling her to comply with the first, which at that moment required less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that there was one. "You must be joking," she said to Swann.

"It would be a joke in charming taste, replied Swann ironically. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. I've never mentioned my illness to you before. But since you asked me, and since now I may die at any moment . . . But please, that last thing I want to do is to hold you up, and you've got a dinner-party to go to," he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations mattered more than the death of a friend, and as a man of considerable politeness he put himself in her place. But the Duchesse's own sense of manners too afforded her a confused glimpse of the fact that for Swann her dinner-party must count for less than his own death.

To her (limited) credit, the Duchesse hesitates, but that very hesitation angers the Duc, who brushes off Swann's revelation with a reminder to his wife that they are in danger of being late--only to abruptly change his mind when he realizes the Duchesse is wearing the wrong shoes. He sends her back to change, then dismisses Swann with a brusque obliviousness that is breathtaking:

"Good-bye, my dear boys, he said, thrusting us gently away, off you go, now, before Oriane comes down. It's not that she doesn't like seeing you both. on the contrary, she's too fond of seeing you. If she finds you still here, she'll start talking again. She's already very tired, and she'll be dead by the time she gets to that dinner. And quite frankly, I have to tell you that I'm dying of hunger."

While the sixteen-year-old Austen plays her scene solely as comedy, Proust is master of a wider range of effects: the startling callousness of the Duc and Duchesse set against the self-effacing frankness and honor of Swann render the scene both pathetically comic and deeply moving. But the resemblance between the scenes is undeniable, revealing an unexpected affinity, both of thought and apprehension of the social self, between Austen and Proust--a pleasant surprise on a day when time's perpetual insufficiency forced me to choose.

On some prose styles

There I was, dithering between Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen and a return to Proust, with Ron Powers's Mark Twain bio lurking about as a bushy-haired alternative, when my friend Jim convinced me to open Clive James's Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007). I did, to the piece on Edward Gibbon, a writer with whom I've never been able to get on, despite Silas Wegg's enthusiasm in Our Mutual Friend. A couple of hundred pages into The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the summit still shrouded in distant clouds, I've always turned away in search of lesser, more rewarding peaks.

Clive James, despite having made a far more honorable attempt than I, feels the same. Here he is on Gibbon's prose, which is unnecessarily baroque (even when set against the work of his contemporaries) and, what is worse, tic-laden:

[T]here is still something to the assumption that a sentence, however the reader gets to the end of it, should be intelligible by the time he does, and that if he is forced to begin again he has been hoodwinked into helping the writer do the writing. Readers of Gibbon don't just help: they join a chain gang, and the chain gang is in a salt mine, and the salt mine is reached after a long trip by galley, during which they are never excused the feel of the oar of the snap of the lash.

Ah, how refreshing are the hatred and disdain that can only come of a serious attempt to address a writer on his own terms!

Then I opened the book again at random and happened across the following lines about the prose style--memorable and effective, though frequently ungrammatical--of my favorite novelist, Anthony Powell:

Powell . . . was the arch-perpetrator of the dangling modifier. At least Waugh had got over the influence of Latin constructions. Powell, to the end of his career, wrote as if English were an inflected language, and at least once per page, in Powell's prose, the reader is obliged to rearrange the order of a sentence so that a descriptive phrase, sometimes a whole descriptive clause, can be re-attached to its proper object. In a book review I once mentioned Powell's erratic neo-classical prosody. He sent me a postcard quoting precedent as far back as John Aubrey.

Now, as much joy as there is to be found in Aubrey--no small part of which comes from the way he presses his brief, scattershot biographical insights into curving and complicated sentences--a writer who adduces him as favorable evidence in a question of contemporary usage is essentially pleading guilty and hoping he's drawn a kindly judge.

I can see that I'm going to have to spend some time with Cultural Amnesia. But it's at heart a bedside book, broken as it is into essays of comfortable length, so I'm still left in need of an answer to my initial question: Tomalin or Proust? I guess I'll have to let today's commute decide. I have a hunch that Proust will win out because, well, when does he not?

"So inly swete a sweven," or, A passel of dreams

{The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of, John Anster Fitzgerald (1858)}

1 Saturday was my nephew's ninth birthday, and that night I dreamed about the party we'd attended for him that afternoon. The dream, however, featured two guests who hadn't attended the actual party: Marcel Proust and Eloise. The two of them seemed--not, I think, inaptly--to be great friends, spending the whole party sitting next to each other, sipping from the tiny teacups of a child's tea set and quietly sharing private jokes that caused them to break out in skeins of shared giggles. I'm sure you can imagine the smile I wore on waking.

Proust himself would have me doubt their identities--might they have been other people, real people from my life, in masquerade? He takes up the question in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919, translated by James Grieve in 2002):

I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel.

But the underlying simplicity and gentleness of this dream belie Proust's natural suspicions: the dream seemed to have no hidden message, was transmuting no disguised anxiety. In this case, I find myself agreeing with what Iris Murdoch said in a 1983 interview with John Haffenden, collected in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003):

I think dreams have a great many sorts of explanation. Once the Freud virus has, as it were, got into you, you keep on looking at things in that way. But surely there's a lot of pure accident in dreams. One has kinds of obsessions and fears that can't be given a sexual meaning. I think the inventiveness and details of dreams are amazing.

I'm sure Eloise and Proust were simply Eloise and Proust, linked, I can only imagine, because while in New York in September I read a few pages of Mary Ann Caws's Proust while in view of the Plaza Hotel, where Eloise presumably still makes her home. And from now on I'll imagine her there taking catty, gleeful tea with her friend Marcel.

2 Murdoch was a master of employing believably obscure, layered, and organic dreams in her novels; at their best, their richness allowed her to obliquely suggest reams about her characters in remarkably compressed form. But she wasn't interested, at least on the day of the above interview, in sharing her own dreams. When asked to supply an example, Murdoch--usually a very accommodating and open interview subject--responded, "I don't think I will." And she didn't.

3 Though it's hard to imagine Samuel Johnson having much truck with Freud, perhaps Freud could have reassured Johnson on the place of sexual dreams, if the following anecdote, first recounted by one of Johnson's closest friends, Hester Thrale, in her Anecdotes (1765), is to be believed. Here's how Richard Holmes relates it in his Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993):

Johnson came fretfully back from seeing Hester's son to school, suddenly immersed in memories of his own adolescence. "'Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption that entered my heart was communicated in a dream.' 'What was it, Sir?' said I. 'Do not ask me,' replied he, with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation.

Again, this may just be the Freud virus speaking, but I think I have to disagree with the good Doctor: not every dream should be shared with one's mother.

4 A far more enigmatic dream turns up in Johnson's diary entry for January 23, 1759, the day of his mother's burial. The bulk of the entry is a prayer for his mother's soul and for the improvement, through meditation on her example, of his own. But Johnson closes with a brief, suggestive, unforgettable line:

The dream of my Brother I shall remember.

Donald Greene's note to that line in the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Major Works offers a partial explanation:

Nathanael Johnson died suddenly and mysteriously at the age of twenty-four, just at the time Samuel and David Garrick left for London; suicide has been suspected. His one surviving letter, written not long before his death, complains of his harsh treatment by his brother.

The dream itself, however, goes unannotated and unexplained. Boswell doesn't note it--and quite possibly didn't even know about it; Nathanael barely registers in the Life of Johnson, rating five mentions, the first of which flatly states that he "died in his twenty-fifth year."

Perhaps the dream was the travail of a single night, relatively unimportant. But just as Johnson resolved to remember the dream, by the troubling simplicity of that final line he has guaranteed that I will remember it, undreamt and unknown, as well.

5 I'll close with some lines from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370) that are never far from my mind because on first reading them fifteen years ago, I fell for the Middle English word for dream, "sweven," and have never forgotten it. It seems an appropriate way to end this post, since my dreams, like my daily life, are shot through with words--the magical, intoxicating power of which forms the one sweven from which I expect I'll never have to wake.

I hadde unneth that word y-sayd
Right thus as I have told hit yow,
That sodeynly, I niste how,
Swich a lust anoon me took
To slepe, that right upon my book
I fil aslepe, and therwith even
Me mette so inly swete a sweven,
So wonderful, that never yit
I trowe no man hadde the wit
To conne wel my sweven rede.