THE UNREADABLE BOOK CLUB Proust 1
“As he will discover over and over in love, what is imagined and yearned for is more exciting than what is possessed; anticipation is a more pleasant state than occupation. Almost all the love affairs in Proust are variations on Groucho Marx’s insight that any club that wants you is not a club you want to join.” The Year of Reading Proust, Phyllis Rose
Cartoon Caption: Proust buys a memory foam mattress but is disappointed.
Noel Coward – “What a tiresome, affected ass he must have been, but what extraordinary, meticulous perception.”
And in that vein, wink wink nudge nudge say no more Monty Python’s sketch: The All-England Summarize Proust Competition. “As you may remember, each contestant has to give a brief summary of Proust’s ‘A La Recherge du Temps Perdu’, once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress,”
What’s next, a cross dressing Benny Hill chasing Proust and other wan, sickly young authors in jerky cartoonish motion through fields of posies? Oh, someone did that already? Kidding.
Somehow there are one or two things that have stuck in the popular conscious about Proust. He was a bubble boy, allergic to everything, stayed in his cork lined room in Paris, curtains drawn while patrons and fans supported him in his writing. Remembrance of Things Past is a title we have heard, though the current translation is In Search of Lost Time. It’s long, and it’s French. There’s something about a pastry.
We might have even heard that the book arises out of the taste of a petite madeline. This is a French pastry, but let’s just say we bite into a donut that we loved above all others as a child, and a cascade of memories associated with that time, that child, that taste come pouring out. (Don’t back out now, it’s not that long.)
"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind. And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. . . And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. . . so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea."
Proust is hard to read, and hard to surrender one’s attention to. My granddaughter gave me some advice about my own writing when she was 15, to the effect of ‘ Something has to happen every so often or you lose your audience, teenagers have a short attention span.” Even adults have trouble with that problem, and certainly if you are expecting a thrill a minute predictable screenplay in the making, you will never get to the madeleine. But teenagers are also famously obsessive, angst ridden and oh so tedious when it comes to love.
Endless bad poetry has been written and circular narratives spun in the service of tragic first loves as experienced or as remembered at the end of life. So, a worthy subject, and one that eventually will speak to you in the first person as you recognize it, ”That happened to me!” And so much of our love lives play out in imagination and memory, so little of it is articulated at the time, that it is almost comforting to have evidence of the wholly interior life of others. Without that, we have no proof that we, singularly, are not the only sentient mind in the universe.
See Part 2
far. Nobody likes a wan, asthmatiNobody likes a wan, asthmatic, shut in in a bad suit.