Daydreaming Proust

Every day, I take my copy of Proust to the pool. It is the perfect place for such immersive reading. We were the first people in the pool this season, despite the rain. The water was 69°F, hardly too cold: though the weather was chilly for the Americans, it was quite normal for us English. Within a day or two, the sun came back and we were swimming and lying by the pool for hours at a time, and I was reading, reading, re-reading Proust. (When Albertine arrived, I had to reread the same half-a-dozen pages four times. There was hardly anyone at the pool, so I could just pace round and read it aloud under my breath.) And as I read, I daydream, and as I daydream, the beginnings of paragraphs come into my mind. Every day, I read more Proust by the pool in the evening, and then go home and read more Proust, and then realise I have to write about Proust.

If I didn’t write, how much of myself would I lose? Even though I write, I still lose so much. I once heard Knausgaard say that he had drunk in Proust like water and had not realised it had affected him, until he began to write My Struggle. We must hope that our reading is like this—not that it will lead to our own writing of similar proportions, as if we could become architects after visiting cathedrals,—but that it will leave some trace within, undetectable until it is provoked, however little we seem to remember. How often I put Guermantes Way down at the pool, to daydream about some instance of my own life, to wonder about some echo I heard, to just dwell on a passage, and then to listen to a paragraph compose itself in my mind. All of that is gone: none of the actual words of those paragraphs are remembered; someone splashed, a bird called out, a child wanted me, the dream was broken. I can only hope that it will recur without my being conscious of the recurrence. That is the faith we all keep. Writing is a method of remembering, a daydream of its own: it is not until we move the pen or type the keys that we realise what we knew.

Proust begins his book with a dream, and dreams recur throughout. In a Dickensian passage set in a hotel restaurant, Proust identifies the only server who is able to help him find his table—a man who is lost in thought.

And similarly, in the big dining-room which I crossed the first day before coming to the smaller room in which my friend was waiting for me, it was of some feast in the Gospels portrayed with a mediaeval simplicity and an exaggeration typically Flemish that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, pullets, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid over the polished floor to gain speed and set them down on the huge carving table where they were at once cut up but where—for most of the people had nearly finished dinner when I arrived—they accumulated untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of those who brought them in were due not so much to the requirements of the diners as to respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed in the letter but quaintly illustrated by real details borrowed from local custom, and to an aesthetic and religious scruple for making evident to the eye the solemnity of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and the assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought at the far end of the room by a sideboard; and to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our table had been laid, making my way forward among the chafing-dishes that had been lighted here and there to keep the late comers’ plates from growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the centre of the room, from being piled on the outstretched hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of crystal, but really of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), I went straight—at the risk of being knocked down by his colleagues—towards this servitor, in whom I felt that I recognised a character who is traditionally present in all these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the blunt features, fatuous and ill-drawn, the musing expression, already half aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect.

How Dickensian to feel so much life in a character who appears only for a sentence. For a moment, we almost wonder if the breathless waiters will skid into each other, spill the feast, break the elegant dream of civilisation. Perhaps Proust’s narrator will be knocked down. Dickensian farce lurks within the syntax, and it is the genius of Proust to keep tight hold of the reins so that it remains a latent presence.

It is inherent to Proust’s (and James’s) elongated sentences to express the civilized and expose the over-civilized, (an ancient screen for weakness and wickedness, the charming and exclusive smile of decadence ), and Dickens had done as much before them, but whereas Proust’s elegance is haunted by farce, images of death are contained in Dickens’ humour—

As they made the exclamation, the general, attired in full uniform for a ball, came darting in with such precipitancy that, hitching his boot in the carpet, and getting his sword between his legs, he came down headlong, and presented a curious little bald place on the crown of his head to the eyes of the astonished company. Nor was this the worst of it; for being rather corpulent and very tight, the general being down, could not get up again, but lay there writhing and doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history.

Of course there was an immediate rush to his assistance; and the general was promptly raised. But his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, that he came up stiff and without a bend in him like a dead Clown, and had no command whatever of himself until he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, when he became animated as by a miracle, and moving edgewise that he might go in a narrower compass and be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes by brushing them against anything, advanced with a smiling visage to salute the lady of the house.

How almost-Jamesian is this passage. We might find it absurd to think of the author of The Sacred Fount compared with Dickens in this regard, but here it is, both of them are masters of control, not allowing their prose to overbalance, not quite giving full lease to the emotional force beneath the passage, so that when the snap comes, it comes sharply; Dickens is always building and releasing tension, whereas James works to make it build without diffusing, so that it is constrained by a silken rope, the image he uses in The Golden Bowl, but the essential technique is the same: to hold the reins just tightly enough to create a dynamic. Whether this is a line of inheritance or a process of joint-discovery, that dynamic tension—used now for farce, now for the plangency of ordinary life, now for the smiling villains of the rising rich—is the heart of the accomplishment that James and Proust share with Dickens. And it is part of the ordinary stuff of life—the way we conduct ourselves day-to-day is often a question of keeping irrelevant or unsuitable associations submerged, so that we can move between children, neighbours, colleagues, and spouses, each with their own ability to understand, tolerance to accept, and willingness to know us, so that we must keep our own hold on the reins, rather than act with our work superiors in the same manner we play with our children. We are forever entering different dreams, playing along with the tensions that make those stories real.

Proust loved Dickens, I believe; I do not know, for I have read no biography of Proust (other than How Proust Can Change Your Life, which I read out of morbid semi-professional curiosity recently, and if it mentioned Dickens then that passed through me like water); but I love Dickens, and I can sense him here, a background presence, and whether I sense him from Proust’s love or my own hardly matters. Reading Proust reminds me of reading Dickens. Searching online, I find that Edmund Wilson felt the same in 1928 when the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past was published.

In the descriptive parts of the early volumes, we have recognized the rhythms of Ruskin; and in the social scenes which now engage us, though Proust has been compared to Henry James, who was deficient in precisely those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, we shall look in vain for anything like them outside the novels of Dickens. We have already been struck, in Du côté de chez Swann, with the singular relief into which the characters were thrown as soon as they began to speak or act.

I feel sure that Proust had read Dickens and that this almost grotesque heightening of character had been partly learned from him. Proust, like Dickens, was a remarkable mimic: as Dickens enchanted his audiences by, dramatic readings from his novels, so, we are told, Proust was celebrated for impersonations of his friends; and both, in their books, carried the gift of caricaturing habits of speech and of inventing things for their personages to say which are almost invariably outrageous without ever ceasing to be characteristic, to a point where it becomes impossible to compare them to anybody but each other. As, furthermore, it has been said of Dickens that his villains are so amusing—in their fashion, so generously alive—that we are reluctant to see the last of them, so we acquire a curious affection for even the most objectionable characters in Proust

James was, perhaps, deficient in those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, (though I think the point is arguable when it comes to vividness, at least), but he was holding the reins in a Dickensian way, just as Proust was, as here, in The Sacred Fount—

One of the men of our company had come out by himself for a stroll, and the man was Gilbert Long. He had paused, I made out, in his walk; his back was to the house, and, resting on the balustrade of the terrace with a cigarette in his lips, he had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom. He moved so little that I was sure—making no turn that would have made me draw back; he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him. I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. It had for my imagination a value, for my theory a price, and it in fact constituted an impression under the influence of which this theory, just impatiently shaken off, perched again on my shoulders.

We have moved from gaiety in Dickens to the brink of sanity in James, but we see the same way in which the sentences are allowed to come close to some alternative mood—will “fragrant gloom” lead us in the direction of Wodehouse?, can you not hear Wooster saying to Jeeves, ah, what a shame, the old boy had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom; are we not, in the phrase he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him on the edge of a vast, Proustian, digression?—which James keeps suppressed by the succession of images, and the tightness of the syntax.

In all three, this style of writing is a means of being lost in thought: James knows this, and has his narrator voice the idea directly: I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. This is exactly the sensation of reading a novel: that we do not yet know what it all means, but that we can sense it forming some purpose in the overall picture. Dickens manages that with his succession of phrases about the general’s attire: attired in full uniform, hitching his boot, getting his sword between his legs, doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history, his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes. We do not know why it matters that he is attired in full uniform at the start of the passage, but by the time the general is saluting the lady, taking care not to fray his epaulettes, the latent farce of such a uniform has been brought out more fully than any other writer might have managed.

by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader |  Read more:

Image: TLS: "Café in Paris by Night" by Konstantin Korovin, 1936