On Being a Font of Mis-information -- Disastrous Name-Dropping

Sara James

Always eager for a conversation piece I was tickled when in Provincetown in the seventies someone told me that an acquaintance, Sara James, was the grand-daughter of one of our country's pre-eminent novelists, Henry James.  I couldn't wait to spread this information in a letter to my friend Dennis back in Michigan.  Dennis, like me, loved reading, and could be dazzled by even a small brush with celebrity.

Not long after my report, Dennis was invited to visit an old friend who'd moved to Chicago and become a librarian.  I'd met this friend and nick-named him Half-Irish. I didn't like him much.  Half-Irish, comfortable in society, had a dinner party so that his friends might meet Dennis.  The friends were mostly librarians, mostly gay, mostly pretentious, and suave chatters at an elegant table.  Dennis felt a little out of place; he was smart, but these weren't the kind of people he was comfortable around, and he was left without much to say.  Finally, amongst the literary talk,  he managed to edge in that his friend George, who lived in Provincetown, knew the grand-daughter of Henry James.

Someone aimed a gun of put-down at Dennis' country-bumpkin-ness.  "Henry James never had children so just how does he have grand-children?  He was as queer as a three-dollar bill even if he might not have accepted it in himself.  Sorry, but your friend is full of shit."   

Ouch!  Dennis wanted to crawl under the table and never come out.

Once I got to know Sara James better I asked her about her literary connections.  She is the grand-daughter not of Henry, but of his brother William, who was a psychologist and philosopher, and the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that has not been out of print since its publication.

To this day Sara and her sister Jemima get some nice royalty checks from both their grandfather's and their great-uncle Henry's literary estates.  Or at least I was told such by a friend who used to live with Jemima in Los Angeles.  He said, in fact, in an old 1997 email, "'Washington Square' is opening this week; they will get gads from it."

Cats

Back in the early eighties Mark had a cat named Ernie. Poor Ernie died on the operating table after he ate a lot of nylon. So Mark went to visit his parents; they knew people who had kittens. Mark narrowed his choice down to two which looked exactly alike, a male and a female. He couldn't decide so took them both. He named them Simon and Shuster. Then just days later Mark and I were having breakfast at Pronto Restaurant in Provincetown when our friend Tom Rosenkampf came in. That was out of the ordinary; Tom didn't really like restaurants.  He sat down next to us and said to Mark, "I heard you might be looking for a new cat." Mark said he had got two over the weekend. Tom pulled from his Army fatigue coat's pocket the tiniest little kitten.  "I was out in that storm last night and I heard this meowing and ...." Mark couldn't resist taking it. It got named Emma Gray. It was too young to have been weaned; we fed it with an eye-dropper.  Because it was so young it identified with we who fed it and so spent her entire life thinking she was not a cat but a human. She was different!

Friends: Howard Gruber

Autumn is for nostalgia. I look through old scrapbooks and come across an ad for my friend Howard Gruber's second Provincetown restaurant -- he'd been co-owner of Front Street, one of Provincetown's coolest places.   ... I love that he dug out his old Bar Mitzvah picture to announce the opening of his new place.  (It didn't remain a "deli" for long ... Howard was a fine cook and soon the place was advertising fine dining.

Howard was one of those gone too soon --- born in 1941, died in 1993.  RIP Howard ... I remember sweet things you said to me and I remember a promise you asked me to make.  I made it, and I've kept it.

Friendship

I met Richard, above, in Germany in 1961 at Camp Muenchweiler. He was from Michigan. After we were discharged I had a job with Western Union, going around to various cities, mostly in Michigan, to fill in as a teletype operator or bookkeeper or manager when someone went on vacation or was sick. From several sites in Michigan, on free weekends, I would visit Richard in Lansing. Soon he introduced me to Jim (with me in top picture). Eventually Richard and Jim shared an apartment on Ionia Street; it was above a barber shop; there was a back deck (sort of) behind their apartment. One Sunday, exactly fifty years ago this past week, I was visiting Richard and Jim. We were sitting out on the sort-of-deck. We noticed some guys moving into an apartment across the alley. One was Rodney (with me in middle picture). He told us he was going to paint his new apartment the coming week and would be having a house-warming party the next weekend. We were invited. I returned to Lansing the next weekend and went to the party. Then I returned the following weekend and the party was still going on!

We four have remained friends all these years. Friday night we met at Fanizzi's Restaurant in Provincetown to have dinner and celebrate fifty years of friendship.

RIP: Seamus Heaney - Apr. 13, 1939 - Aug. 30, 2013

The first time I heard of Seamus Heaney was while listening to NPR in the spring of 1979; he was being interviewed, and he read a few poems from his recently published collection Field Work.  Then, in the early eighties, when he'd crossed the ocean to teach at Harvard, he actually came to Provincetown, where I was living, to give a reading at the Fine Arts Work Center.  I invited a friend to go with me.  He wasn't interested.  I said, "You could be seeing someone who might someday win the Nobel Prize for Literature." My friend remained un-impressed, but, there being not much else to do in February, did go with me.  We were part of a small crowd of twenty or so.  My friend didn't care for it at all.  Frankly, I didn't like it that much either; Heaney read mostly poems he'd translated from the Gaelic, published later as Sweeney Astray, and I was lost trying to make any sense of them; nothing charmed me -- plus Heaney had a really stupid hairstyle.

Eventually he wised up about the hair.  And, in 1995, he did win the Nobel Prize.  

And while I didn't care for Sweeney, I do love many of Heaney's poems, including one he read that spring afternoon in 1979. 

Digging


Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Indonesian Cemetery

A person in Indonesia left a nice comment on my blog and sent me photos of what is called Taman Kenangan Lestari Memorial Park there. 

The Parkington Sisters

I saw this poster at a cafe where I sometimes have breakfast; the date July 18th had already passed so I asked the cafe's owner if I could have the poster. "I have a crush on all four of the Parkington sisters," I said. (I think there are more sisters and brothers that aren't in the group.)

I've seen them in concert twice. And when my friend was in the hospital he introduced me to his nurse and said, because I used to live in Wellfleet, "She's from Wellfleet and her daughters are musicians, maybe you know them."

"Oh, you must be the mother of the Parkington Sisters!" "Yes!" "I just love them!"  It was like being introduced to ... oh, say, John Lennon's Aunt. The Parkington mother looked way too young to have children over 10 or 12.

 I can't imagine growing up in a house with so much musical talent laying around. They all write songs. They all play multiple instruments.  It would be bliss.

Evolution

"I was wondering when you'd notice there's lots more steps."

Happy Birthday Philip Larkin - Born August 9, 1922

I don't have a favorite poet ... I have several favorite poets. Still, if someone asks me who my favorite poet is, I usually say, just for the sake of convenience, "An English guy named Philip Larkin." His poems amaze me; the images he draws, the situations and emotions he depicts, the anythings he chooses to wrap in words, are precise, accurate, and always original.

He had a thirty-years-plus career as a librarian, most notably at Hull University in Yorkshire; his friends wondered why he would wish to go to such a non-hip location. He made the library there one of the best in all of England, a destination.

He wasn't especially nice; he seems to have turned into a grumpy old man at somewhere around the age of sixteen. He was snide. He was arrogant. He was dour. He was a racist. He loved pornography, especially if it involved spanking. He was a misogynist. He had lengthy affairs with three different women -- simultaneously for a good bit of the time, with preciously small regard for their feelings, and, despite each of their wishes, would not promise faithfulness to any one of them. Add, therefore, along with racist and misogynist, that he was a solipsist. 

But, yes, a marvelous poet. Indeed, he was offered the Poet Laureateship in 1984, but, because he had long ceased writing poems, turned it down; he felt it would be a sort of cheating; further, it is believed that he was not feeling well and expected to be dead sooner than later. (It could be said that this was pretty much a life-long stance since he was a hypochondriac.)  If, when the Laureateship was offered, he did really believe that he was not to last much longer, he was, as it turned out, at last correct. He died on December 2, 1985. 

Some twenty years after his death, the Poetry Book Society in England conducted a survey in which members were asked to name the person whom they considered to be the nation's "best-loved" poet. The winner: Philip Larkin. 

(When did I run across Larkin? In the mid-sixties a friend in Michigan, despite a sort of dyslexia that made it almost impossible for him to read easily, got -- through friendship -- a job as a publisher's representative. He didn't last long at the job, but long enough to slip me a few brand-spanking-new hardback books, one of which was Larkin's third volume of poetry, The Whitsun Weddings.)

Of Larkin's lengthy poems, the last, a contemplation on death, was written seven years before his own death:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. 

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. 

In time the curtain-edges will grow light. 

Till then I see what's really always there: 

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, 

Making all thought impossible but how 

And where and when I shall myself die. 

Arid interrogation: yet the dread 

Of dying, and being dead, 

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. 

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse 

- The good not done, the love not given, time 

Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because 

An only life can take so long to climb 

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; 

But at the total emptiness for ever, 

The sure extinction that we travel to 

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, 

Not to be anywhere, 

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. 

This is a special way of being afraid 

No trick dispels. Religion used to try, 

That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade 

Created to pretend we never die, 

And specious stuff that says No rational being 

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing 

That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound, 

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, 

Nothing to love or link with, 

The anasthetic from which none come round. 

And so it stays just on the edge of vision, 

A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill 

That slows each impulse down to indecision. 

Most things may never happen: this one will, 

And realisation of it rages out 

In furnace-fear when we are caught without 

People or drink. Courage is no good: 

It means not scaring others. Being brave 

Lets no one off the grave. 

Death is no different whined at than withstood. 

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. 

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, 

Have always known, know that we can't escape, 

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. 

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring 

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring 

Intricate rented world begins to rouse. 

The sky is white as clay, with no sun. 

Work has to be done. 

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Statue of Larkin at Hull University

Happy Birthday Marcel Proust: Born July 10, 1871

On August 28 2009 I did a blogpost about Hoosier-born Marguerite Young, who wrote the gigantic novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.  I recently received an email message from a young British woman who is in the midst of reading Miss MacIntosh and who came across my post about Marguerite Young through a Google search.  I always like it when I hear from someone about a post I did a long time ago, and especially like being in touch with a newly discovered devoted reader.  She's on page 503 of Miss MacIntosh's some 1200 pages; I call that devotion.  She has such good things to say about the novel.

"Miss MacIntosh is, well, I'm not quite sure which words to use in describing what I think of it, describing how it makes me feel to sit on my couch wrapped up in it like I do. I will tell you that in my opinion she OWNED the English language in its entirety and that she most likely still, to this very day, owns it despite the fact she no longer lives. The English language was her toy, a spinning top if you will, which she commanded in a way I've never before seen (if you had even a notion of how much I have read, how many wonderful, amazing authors I've got under my belt you'd know I've just said a lot.)  George, though her book is a Buick in size I wish it were two Buicks, nay, ten Buicks, because her vocabulary, her selection of exactly the precise words to use when penning each sentence, well, just imagine one of those thin and half naked men with a big white turban upon his head and a slender flute at his lips, visualize the entranced snake rising up out of its basket and you'll get an idea of how her words wrap me up in the most incredible melody I've ever "heard" in a book not comprised of sheet music; I'm entranced.  She's probably the most lyrical author I've read yet and I wish I could explain to you just how dreamy and high reading her book makes me feel. I really think I'm getting some sort of belated contact opium high with this thing."

I'd told her I'd twice not gotten much beyond 100 pages when I tried ti read it in my late twenties and early thirties.

"You know, I was thinking maybe you were too young the first time you read it and that's why you didn't stick with it, that perhaps now that you're a grown-up you'll have no problem with it. I know I could've NEVER read this book when I was in my 20s or 30s, no way in hell could I have. I've not read any of it for about five days now so I'm only on page 503, not even half way through it yet, but as you know it's pretty deep reading, so. I clicked on another critic to see what he had to say about it the same night I discovered you and he said it's not a book to be blown through, that one should take a year to read it. I'm not sure I agree with the year part, but I do agree with what he said about not reading it too quickly. He said it was beautiful and that one should take a year and read slowly so as not to miss any of the feelings the book will evoke in the reader."

In looking around my blog she noticed that I am devoted most to Marcel Proust.  "This letter," she writes, "has gotten long and I apologize to you for that but I have an important favor to ask of you. In your bio I discovered you like Marcel Proust. I'm proud, passing proud, to tell you I've read the gods of literature and not a little of their writings but a great deal of almost all of them. I dig them up so to speak. I like being able to say 'Yes, of course I've read that...you're talking to a professional reader here, you are', so truly I've read heaps and heaps. Behold: Thomas Mann, Camus, Kafka, Virginia Woolfe, Emile Zola, Anatole France, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Anton Chekov, Evelyn Waugh, Wilkie Collins, Hemingway (I've been to his house in Cuba and I touched the Pilar), William Faulkner, Twain, Sartre, Goethe, Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, Stendhal, Maupassant, Thomas Hardy, Bulwer-Lytton, Ambrose Bierce, Nabokov (don't really like him much for some reason), I've read so much Alexandre Dumas it's not even funny because I really dig swords : ), George Elliot, Laurence Stern, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Beckett, Joyce, Somerset Maugham (I have an autographed copy of a speech he gave here during WWII), Winston Churchill (both his fiction and non-fiction), John Steinbeck, Casanova, Sir H. Rider Haggard, RLS, William Harrison Ainsworth, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Ann Radcliffe, Choderlos de Laclos, Sheridan Le Fanu, Aeschylus, Livy, Pliny, Ovid, Sophocles, Virgil, Petronius, Caesar, and would you believe the list goes on, ad nauseum??? Now here's the favor I want to ask of you: Please, would you help me with Proust? By help I mean tell me which of his novels to read first, which would be the easiest read to get me acquainted with him? I've read several if his short stories but when I tried to read Swann's Way I had trouble getting into it so I put it down. When I saw in your bio that you liked him I truly crossed my fingers and hoped like all hell you'd write me back so I could ask your advice on what to do with him. As you see from the list naming a few of my beloved (except for Nabokov) authors, I'm not afraid of any of the heavy hitters, not scared off by any lack of quotation marks, but dammit I had trouble with Proust and I really want to learn 'how' to read him! With Faulkner I accidentally picked up The Sound And The Fury first and don't mind telling you that book drove me out of my mind, so insane in fact I was never ever ever going to read anything else by him; I thought I was going to pull my hair out trying to figure out what was going on. Then I met a friend's very old father who happened to be one of William Faulkner's young friends and he told me to start with The Unvanquished, told me The Sound And The Fury was not the one to begin with, that Faulkner required getting used to. I did as he told me and now I've read almost everything Faulkner wrote and consider him to be one of my most favorite authors ever. I'm wondering if maybe the same is true with Proust, wondering if there's a way to get acquainted with him? I'd be deeply indebted to you if you could teach me to read him, George. You see, I like bragging about my reading because reading's the only thing I'm good at and how am I to be justified in bragging when I can't say I've read Proust?"

Appreciating her letter and her love of good reading, I pondered a little essay about guiding someone to an appreciation of Proust; I'd enjoy composing it; I'd bring in the example of the by-far-funniest passage I've ever read in anything; I'd mention the astonishing puzzling out of a telegram the narrator receives in Venice, etc. etc.  But I wasn't getting it done.  I don't get much done lately.  I think I've let myself become lazy and listless: I work my eight hour shift, then come home and collapse in a chair in front of "Hardball" during which I fall asleep, hoping to wake up in time for what is my favorite show:"Jeopardy".  So, yes, I wasn't getting a little essay on Proust accomplished.  I made vows.  I wouldn't turn the TV on at all one night.  I kept my word and did get some things straightened out on my desk. Then the next night I returned to my old habit, turned on the TV, fell asleep, woke up, fed myself, watched "Jeopardy", walked the dog, and went to bed at 9 o'clock or shortly thereafter.

Then, on June 5th, I was cruising the Internet and came upon a Drexel University site which was full of beautifully written short essays about culture; luckily, that day's essay by a woman named Morgan Meis happened to be an appreciation of Proust.  It is better than anything I would have been able to come up with, so off it went, copied and emailed to a young British woman named Lily.

Surrender to Proust

By Morgan Meis

     It is a hundred years since Marcel Proust finished his novel Swann’s Way. The novel became the first volume of Proust’s seven-volume work Remembrance of Things Past. Remembrance of Things Past is now one of the accepted masterpieces of 20th century literature. But that greatness was not so easy to see a hundred years ago. Publishers initially rejected Swann’s Way.
     By the virtues of critical hindsight, we like to make fun of the supposed misjudgments of the past. Van Gogh could never sell a painting. Moby Dick was barely read during Melville’s lifetime. Proust’s writing was met with initial disregard. But all that changes when an artist is recognized as a master. We now approach a painting by Van Gogh as something holy, something preordained to be great. It is likewise nearly impossible, today, to pick up Proust without preconceptions, without already knowing that you are holding a “great work of literature” in your hands. Knowing that you are reading a work of genius, it is difficult to recognize that Swann’s Way is strange.
     The opening line of Swann’s Way is about falling asleep. Proust writes, “For a long time I used to go to bed early” (C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1922 translation). There follow many pages about Proust sleeping, about the ease and difficulty of falling asleep, about snatches of dreams and brief bouts of wakefulness, about how his mother used to tuck him into bed, about sleep in ancient man and in the more recent past, about the philosophical essence of sleep as the temporary loss of ego, and finally, memories of M. Swann, “poor old Swann” a friend of Proust’s family and the ostensible subject of the novel.
     Early readers of the novel can be forgiven for not immediately liking Swann’s Way. In a recent article for The New York Times, Edward Rothstein quotes an evaluation of Swann’s Way from the publishers who first rejected the book. The evaluator complains, “I cannot understand how a man can take 30 pages to describe how he turns round in his bed before he finally falls asleep.”
     Many readers of Proust have noticed that he was a writer who took his time. Walter Benjamin once observed that Proust, as a man and writer, loved to multiply complications. Benjamin compares Proust’s love of complication to an anonymous letter that goes: “My dear Madam, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.”
     Proust wrote literature with the same sensibility as the man who composed that letter. This can make it difficult to read Proust unless you are attuned to that sensibility. “Attunement” is a good word for what it takes to learn to read Proust — music played a significant role in Proust’s life and writing. The critic Edmund Wilson was one of the first writers to notice the importance of music in understanding Proust. Wilson wrote an essay about Remembrance of Things Past for The New Republic back in 1928. In the essay, Wilson argued that, “Like so many other important modern writers, Proust had been reared in the school of symbolism and had all the symbolist's preoccupation with musical effects. Like many of his generation, he was probably as deeply influenced by Wagner as by any writer of books.” Wilson goes on to note that the opening chapter of Remembrance of Things Past is titled “Overture.” Proust was structuring his giant work of literature like a symphony. Over the last few generations of literary scholarship there have been countless attempts to explain just how to interpret each chapter and volume of Remembrance of Things Past along musical lines. You can read, for instance, that Swann’s Way can be broken down into the exposition, development, and capitulation of the sonata-allegro form of musical composition.
     But these works of scholarship probably take the musical influence too literally. Wilson is right that Proust was heavily influenced by Symbolism and that he loved music. All this means is that Proust listened to the music of his time, particularly works from composers like Saint-Saens and Gabriel Fauré. He liked the way this music made him feel and he wanted to write literature that evoked the same feeling. What is that feeling? I’d recommend listening to works like Fauré’s First Violin Sonata and Saint-Saens’ Sonata No. 1 for Piano and Violin. Either of those works (there are other candidates) may have been the inspiration for the famous “little phrase” of music by the fictional composer Vinteul in Swann’s Way. In the novel, M. Swann becomes obsessed with this piece of music and asks his beloved, Odette, to play it for him over and over again.
     The little phrase of music becomes important to Swann because it reminds him that his love for Odette is not a “digression without importance,” but something, “on the contrary, so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worthy of the trouble of expressing it.” Proust goes on to explain that, “Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by the human mind, which none the less were perfectly distinct one from another, unequal among themselves in value and in significance.”
     The subject of Swann and the little musical phrase by Vinteul inspired Proust into one of his rhapsodies of language. Such rhapsodies break out every few chapters in Remembrance of Things Past. Swann, wrote Proust, “knew that his memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which, here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by certain great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have found, of shewing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration, of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and waste and void.”
     The passage does not stop there. The discussion of music and the “little phrase” goes on for several more pages of equally breathless prose. When Proust writes like this, when he breaks into his rhapsodies, the sentences get longer. He uses more (and lengthier) subordinate clauses. The sentences are like great piles of words with all the folds and layers of an unspooled bolt of fabric spilling onto the floor. Those sentences, those great unspooling sentences, are the “little phrases” of Proust’s novel. Proust figured out how to write in a way that could create the same emotions that he felt when listening to the contemporary composers he loved. Proust was experimenting with sentences just as the composers were experimenting with musical phrases. Fauré, for instance, was messing around with whole tone scales and various early techniques of polytonality to create a specific emotional feel in his music. Just listen to this clip of Michelangeli playing Debussy’s Danseuses de Delphes (Debussy was a student of Fauré) to hear the dreamy effect of whole tone scales.
     The point is that composers in Proust’s time were experimenting with the “syntax” of music in order to capture a specific feeling. That feeling is dreamy and indistinct by nature. So, it is hard to talk about. Just listen to the Debussy again. Proust has his own words to describe the feeling that this music evokes. He lays it out in the passage quoted above. He says this music awakens in us, “the emotion … of … richness … [that] lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great black impenetrable night … of our soul.”
     It is not that Proust wanted to structure his novel exactly like a symphony or that he was looking for a one-to-one correspondence between music and writing. Proust was simply looking for a way to get that same feeling that would wash over him as he listened to certain kinds of music. Proust says that the “little phrase” of music existed latent in Swann’s mind, “in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness.”
The entire structure of Remembrance of Things Past, insofar as it has a structure, is meant to create a loose scaffolding for these incredible sentences, for these moments when Proust burrows his prose deepest into the murky core of his own existence and shines a light on aspects of his being, and thus our own experience, that we rarely get to see. For this reason, reading Swann’s Way can feel like falling into a dream. Pages will drift by light as ether. You sometimes forget you are reading. You get lost in the stories, the memories. Is Proust still unfolding that memory of his grandmother in Combray or have we moved back to the present tense again? You have to re-read Proust more than you do other authors. You have to move back and forth in the text, finding your place again. The dream world puts you to sleep. That’s okay. Let it do that. Let yourself fall away into the sleepy prose and then you will have the experience of snapping awake, suddenly, when Proust goes into one of his rhapsodies. The prose itself will shake you awake. “Now,” Proust will say, “now, I really have something to tell you.”
     You cannot have an entire book of luminous sentences, just as you cannot have an entire musical composition made of poignant “little phrases.” The endless trivial babble of Proust’s various great-aunts provides necessary resting places, stretches of boredom from which extraordinary moments of Being can finally be plucked. But that is how experience is. Proust found a way to make his prose as numbing as the emptiest of conversations. And then, when you’ve started to lose the thread of the narrative completely, the urgency of his writing will start to jump and tremble on the page again and you’ll feel yourself convulsed “in one of those sobs which a fine line of poetry or a piece of alarming news will wring from us.”
     This makes for strange reading, dreamy reading, reading that ebbs and flows, never submitting to anything definite. It is reading that demands surrender. It is reading that obliterates preconceptions. Swann’s Way is still as disconcerting as it must have been one hundred years ago. And it is still beautiful, still unique, still as precious as when Proust first delivered it to his baffled publishers one day in 1913 on a street in Paris, in an age that is as remote to us, now, as the pyramids of Egypt, but that can come rushing back to us in streams of vivid and hallucinatory memories from the mind of one of the strangest, most delicate, most relentlessly reflective men of his, or any, time.