What it is like to daydream about Proust
This is the second piece in a series of experiments about reading Proust. You can read the first installment here.
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.
Likewise, as James can keep the hints of absurdity suppressed in a manner that allows for psychological tension, so Dickens can approach melodrama and keep it suspended for the effect of high drama, as here, from Pickwick.
He had hardly spoken the words, when a sound resembling a faint groan, appeared to issue from the interior of the case. It startled him at first, but thinking, on a moment’s reflection, that it must be some young fellow in the next chamber, who had been dining out, he put his feet on the fender, and raised the poker to stir the fire. At that moment, the sound was repeated; and one of the glass doors slowly opening, disclosed a pale and emaciated figure in soiled and worn apparel, standing erect in the press. The figure was tall and thin, and the countenance expressive of care and anxiety; but there was something in the hue of the skin, and gaunt and unearthly appearance of the whole form, which no being of this world was ever seen to wear. “Who are you?” said the new tenant, turning very pale; poising the poker in his hand, however, and taking a very decent aim at the countenance of the figure. “Who are you?”
Who’s there, of course, are the opening words of Hamlet, which Dickens knew as well as he knew the feeling of his own fingernails, and it is one of the central questions of great literature, which Proust and James, in their oddly parallel Dickensian manners, make the center of their inquiries. Here is how Proust continues his scene with the server who was lost in thought…
I should add that, in view probably of the coming fair, this presentation was strengthened by a celestial contingent, recruited in mass, of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician, whose fair hair enclosed a fourteen-year-old face, was not, it was true, playing on any instrument, but stood musing before a gong or a pile of plates, while other less infantile angels flew swiftly across the boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless fluttering of the napkins which fell along the lines of their bodies like the wings in “primitive” paintings, with pointed ends.
Some of this could have been written by Dickens—beating the air with the ceaseless fluttering of the napkins—but it retains that Jamesian quality of control, the use of persnickety qualifications (A young angel musician, whose fair hair enclosed a fourteen-year-old face, was not, it was true, playing on any instrument, but stood musing) to achieve an overall effect that would be beyond simple description, and becomes greater than the sum of its parts. James works his art towards the discovery of evil, not the Dickensian jubilation of life, nor the quiet Proustian demonstration of what it means to experience life, but the same careful management is there, the same hold on the reins, which achieves equally a sense of restraint, a sense of coherence, a sense that more sense will be made of all of this later on.
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him…
How much that phrase She waited, Kate Croy, will keep coming back to haunt the reader throughout The Wings of the Dove. How much will be revealed to lurk within her waiting.
In all three writers, we are transported not exactly to the world they describe, but to the world of their prose, just as when we watch a great movie, we are not taken to the world it depicts, exactly, but to the world of the images. The final similarity this prose style results in between Dickens, James, and Proust is that they create a world all of their own.
Proust often brings in supernatural or phantasmagorical images: as well as angels, he talks of fairies, ogres, giants. In the famous madeleine scene, he writes, It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. He is unabashed about telling us a fairy tale. The life of the novel exists in an in-between world, the prose world, just as the experience of reading exists in the vagaries of individual consciousness—the day-dreams, the forgotten memories, the paragraphs we compose in our minds on a sun-lounger before falling asleep and waking only to the general feeling that it was something that would have been worth writing down.
When Proust’s narrator’s grandmother is dying—that unbearable sequence at the end of the first part of The Guermantes Way—the image of an ogre is used, not only to invoke the sense we all feel of still being, to some extent, a child in front of our grandparents, but to show the impossibility of describing what was happening: no matter how accurately he might have described what was said and done, the presence of death and final illnesses remains impossible to accommodate.
To ease her pain my grandmother was given morphine. Unfortunately, if this relieved her in other ways, it increased the quantity of albumen. The blows which we aimed at the wicked ogre who had taken up his abode in my grandmother were always wide of the mark, and it was she, her poor interposed body that had to bear them, without her ever uttering more than a faint groan by way of complaint. And the pain that we caused her found no compensation in a benefit which we were unable to give her. The savage ogre whom we were anxious to exterminate we barely succeeded in touching, and all we did was to enrage him still further, and possibly hasten the moment at which he would devour his luckless captive.
This reliance on ogres is a recognition of the impossibility of being able to describe experience in words. This is a small and clichéd idea in the abstract, in the currency of memes and quotations, as when people pass around T.S. Eliot’s intolerable struggle to say just what I mean, but in the particulars, this is one of the most vital issues in literary art. The inability to match experience to language is why literary art is valuable, and the splendour of Proust is that he gets closer than we had thought possible.
James, in his conscious re-working of the old tropes of Romances, plays with the idiom of fairy-tales as well, such as here, when the deluded narrator of The Sacred Fount recalls the enchanted castles of his childhood.
The last calls of birds sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again. I scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in the grounds of some castle of enchantment. I had positively encountered nothing to compare with this since the days of fairy-tales and of the childish imagination of the impossible. Then I used to circle round enchanted castles, for then I moved in a world in which the strange “came true.” It was the coming true that was the proof of the enchantment, which, moreover, was naturally never so great as when such coming was, to such a degree and by the most romantic stroke of all, the fruit of one's own wizardry.
This is, as well as being an account and a set of images of the narrator’s decline into madness, a description of literary art: a world in which the strange “came true.” James writes about those moments when we cannot quite say what we mean, or when we mean or know more than we can say, or when we know there is something that we mean or that we are aware of, but that thing is only apparent to us tacitly. His characters are forever looking at each other, seeing themselves reflected back to themselves in each other’s eyes, expressions, reactions, and coming not to some thundering revelation of themselves, but to the new, dim, half-awareness that there is more to be known. They are entering the realm of strangeness, in which we must find our faith doubted that everything will come to be relevant in time, as we are often left in a state of suspense.
For the reader, this is a calm and pleasurable experience. While the characters are held in the moment, we can put the book down. We may not wish to—we may wish to do anything but put the book down—but we are voyeurs, and what is gripping to us is precisely the fact of the scene being at our command. We read along in a compulsion, knowing that we can read it again and again, find out the little secrets of its prose, enjoy it once more, keep it in our memory. When the book is put down, and we emerge back into the world, it is like waking up, and so we are moving from one sleep to another, and neither of them feel like sleep, but like a vanishing—wherever we just were has gone: the book languishes forgotten on our chest while we daydream, and then, when the page is before our eyes once more, the daydream is another lost memory, to which, perhaps, we will at some point return.
When Proust’s narrator’s mother wakes him up early one morning, close to his grandmother’s death, he claims not to have been asleep.
I said this in good faith. The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of introducing us to the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of that other, rather more diffused light in which our mind has been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought, half veiled from our perception, over which we were drifting still a moment ago, kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakenings produce an interruption of memory. A little later we describe these states as sleep because we no longer remember them. And when shines that bright star which at the moment of waking illuminates behind the sleeper the whole expanse of his sleep, it makes him imagine for a few moments that this was not a sleeping but a waking state; a shooting star, it must be added, which blots out with the fading of its light not only the false existence but the very appearance of our dream, and merely enables him who has awoken to say to himself: “I was asleep.”
Reading is like this: it is a state of motion perfectly sufficient to make it a form of consciousness, but it is always succeeded by an interruption, which is like an interruption of memory, the coming back from a day-dream. Sitting by the pool, pacing round the table and chairs, lying almost flat on a lounger, I am aware of my surroundings, but am aware of them as part of my reading, the way I feel the hot sun despite being off in a day dream, somewhere else, my own grandmother’s house, perhaps, or the London Library where I first read Proust, and used, until recently, to do so much of my reading.
The desks in the London Library where I used to work, listening to the tintinnabulations of London’s noise, which I now think of most, sitting in the strong Virginia sun by the pool, are the ones that looked out onto white walls and metal doorways which seemed to emerge straight into the openness, because I did not know what purpose there could be to a door opening out of roofs onto narrow walkways. I think of the sun making the whiteness of the walls, and the silver of the metal, shine with such a brightness they seemed to be doorways into the fantastical.
Is it because we live over our past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but in a memory that fastens upon the coolness or sun-parched heat of some morning or afternoon, receives the shadow of some solitary place, is enclosed, immovable, arrested, lost, remote from all others, because, therefore, the changes gradually wrought not only in the world outside but in our dreams and our evolving character…
In the London Library, I read my way into a career as a literary critic, and the sunny morning when I read Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World is unforgettable to me now, as are the days when I sat in the literature building, the clanky metal floors with gaps in always making me feel uneasy, where the desks are pushed into dark spaces and fitted with bright lamps, where I read half the Shakespeare section, Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism, Lukács, John Aitkin Carlyle’s prose translation of Dante, which gave me more mornings which changed my horizon of awareness than I had had since my undergraduate days, and probably far more than I had as an undergraduate, so that I was becoming immersed in the ideas of Jane Austen as a member of the Enlightenment, Shakespeare’s rivalry with other playwrights, debates over Johnson’s involvement in the 1745 rebellion, and was also becoming aware of the great vast dullness—what James might call a great alkali desert—of so much that passes for criticism. The days that have stayed with me, and which were truly the most productive, were the ones I spent upstairs in the members’ room, drinking machine coffee in a styrofoam cup next to a circular window, reading Félix Fénéon, The Lives of the Engineers, Clare Carlisle’s biography of George Eliot.
This was the real calling of my time in the library. I was going home with bag-fulls of Iris Murdoch, the complete tales of D.H. Lawrence, and a miscellany of novels by writers like Edna O’Brien, which attract one’s attention as one passes the shelves, or reads an obituary, or hears some chatter. Writers like Walter Jackson Bate, various histories of literature and language, long-outdated classic studies, works from John Bayley and David Cecil, scholars like Anne Barton. I never left the library without some sense of exhaustion, even if I was often exhilarated.
My inner map of literary history was slowly coming into view, with side-streets, underground rivers, architectural ruins, buildings with sections from every century, and radically new impositions in incongruous places all starting to form part of the nuanced view of the past I was developing, with an ability beginning to form of reacting to a book not only in personal terms, but by placing it in comparison to all the rest. It was part of my quest, a dream into which I woke, and out of which I woke back into my life every afternoon. And it was in that dream that I discovered The Golden Bowl and Swann’s Way. In the London Library, I lived in a great sleep of reading.
And in this sleep, I had come to see the library in totally different terms. Far from the remote and fairy-tale institution it had been when I heard about it second-hand, or visited to collect a book as a stranger, an aspiring member of the library’s novitiate, it had become something familiar, detailed, a place I knew shelf by shelf, where I could go to Italian Literature trans. or Fiction S-Z (kept in a submerged floor that conceals itself) without a second thought. I could now walk myself to Hayek’s essays, Napoleonic history, or, as I did one afternoon, to Proust, as if I had never not belonged here. All these new images I had formed of the library were now held in perspective with the old, remote images, just as my sense of the ghosts of J.S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle (whose bust was removed) followed me around in my imagination; when I went to the section with Dickens’ novels, I thought of Mill writing in anger to Harriet Taylor
That creature Dickens, whose last story, Bleak House, I found accidentally at the London Library the other day & took home & read—much the worst of his things, & the only one of them I altogether dislike—has the vulgar impudence in this thing to ridicule rights of women. It is done too in the very vulgarest way—just the stile in which vulgar men used to ridicule “learned ladies” as neglecting their children & household &c.
And picking up Virginia Woolf, I thought of her diary entries, like: “I spent one afternoon at the L.L., looking up quotes.” But I also knew, more now, what she meant by entries like this one:
Yesterday in the Public Library I took down a book of X.’s criticism. This turned me against writing my book. London Library atmosphere effused. Turned me against all literary criticism; these so clever, so airless, so fleshless ingenuities and attempts to prove — that T. S. Eliot for example is a worse critic than X. Is all literary criticism that kind of exhausted air? — book dust, London Library, air. Or is it only that X. is a second hand, frozen fingered, university specialist, don trying to be creative, don all stuffed with books, writer? Would one say the same of the Common Reader?
No, no-one would say the same of the Common Reader, which still sits, in its original binding on the Library shelves. But I had realised how slow and stifled a place it was, as well as a place of wonders, and how many of the books were dull: dull, dull, dull. It is an institution of greatness and an institution of Casaubons. For every A.N. Wilson, there are a clutch of those who produce so clever, so airless, so fleshless ingenuities. Good Lord, I was always becoming a Casaubon myself, trying to sell book ideas to publishers that were hopelessly uncommercial. After all, was not I one of those clever and airless and fleshless writers, concerned with questions like whether T. S. Eliot for example is a worse critic than X? There I was, arrogating material into my notes, second hand, frozen fingered, like Casaubon himself,
Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labors. With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.
Was not my book being researched, but not being written? Was I not at risk of getting lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness? All of this became a part of how I understood the library. It was no longer a remote institution in the corner of St. James’ Square, but a complex picture of the sort that Proust describes when Albertine returns to visit him in the second part of The Guermantes Way,
Apart from the most recent applications of the art of photography—which set crouching at the foot of a cathedral all the houses which, time and again, when we stood near them, have appeared to us to reach almost to the height of the towers, drill and deploy like a regiment, in file, in open order, in mass, the same famous and familiar structures, bring into actual contact the two columns on the Piazzetta which a moment ago were so far apart, thrust away the adjoining dome of the Salute, and in a pale and toneless background manage to include a whole immense horizon within the span of a bridge, in the embrasure of a window, among the leaves of a tree that stands in the foreground and is portrayed in a more vigorous tone, give successively as setting to the same church the arched walls of all the others…
What I dream of now when I become distracted from Proust and think of the Library is a whole immense horizon within the span of a building, those warrened buildings that house a million books on the open shelves, the young people gossiping in the corridors, A.N. Wilson working harder than any of us, the anxious middle-aged father who used to come up to the members’ room and talk about the novel he was spending a year writing to a former novelist turned (as I assumed from his daily reading matter) theologian, the ones who sat on their phones while galleys of the new Sally Rooney novel languished unread in front of them, the nice lady in her headband who searched up books about nineteenth century Blackheath for me, and all the things I left undone there, the days I spent wandering around looking not for anything useful—those small, quiet, well-spent days when I merely wanted something good to read.
Can you remember pain? My daughter, without saying anything, but with a mute communication (as James has it in Wings), got me to put down my book, put aside my day-dreaming, so we could discuss this question as we sat by the pool. There is a difference, I said, in remembering the pain as it was felt, and remembering the idea of the pain. My son was next to us, reading, and I gave that as an example. I have memories of reading, I know where I was, I can see it now, and I remember the sensation, both of the space and of the book, but I do not remember it in anything like the same intensity that my son was then experiencing his own book. We are left with so little. My daughter described being able to bring the taste of foods into her mouth, such as scrambled eggs, whenever she wished, but in a smaller way than the experience of the real taste, and as if it was on a tongue “just over there”, she gestured to her side; I knew what she meant, that there is a shadow world inside us all, where memories arise, sensations of sensations, the ideas of experience. I can remember having memories, my father once told me, when he was perhaps a decade older than me, or less: the original memory was gone, but he remembered remembering it, like the idea of pain, the sensation of scrambled eggs, the recollection of a life in a library, a dream we know we had but to which we can no longer return.
There is another form of remembering pain, I added, which is that when we get a new pain, we not only feel that fresh hurt, but we think oh I remember this, it will be awful, like last time, and there is an additional and different sort of suffering, such as when I trapped my toes in the door recently, and I was aware, as well as of the immediate pain, of the time a few months ago when I stubbed my toe on a concrete step so badly I got a black spot of blood growing under my nail, or the time a few months before that when I stubbed another toe on some scaffolding. Each new instance of pain brings memories—realisations—of what pain is, just as each instance of reading re-immerses us in the sensation of knowing what it means to read, what it is like to read, and just as the pain of a paper cut is distinct from an oven burn, so the sort of memories we awake reading Proust or Dickens or James are not the same as when we read other books.
In all these instances of memory, we are experiencing something strange: something not the thing we are directly experiencing. And when some new event occurs to remind us ah yes this is pain then we are in the situation James described: a world in which the strange “came true.” The great majority of our experiences, of the time we pass, is not eventful though, and there are no memories of this nature. Instead, we have calm and simple memories. Whether or not I remember the question Can you remember pain? (though I surely will), I will remember days spent in the sun, by the pool, with the sort of questions and discussion topics that ten-year-olds bring up, just as, whether or not I remember the details of the Dreyfus salon, or of what a particular character said, I will always keep the impressions of Proust, and in all these words I write to try and help me retain more of those impressions, what will be most precious in my memory is something beyond words, a sensation, an impression, a mood.
Sitting by the pool, thinking about this with my book in my lap, later on, after the conversation is over, while I stare into the vast blue Arlington sky, I think of a line from a Jack Gilbert poem, and which I often think about on those days when I have both argued with my children and enjoyed those indescribable hours when nothing is happening but everyone is happy.
We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.
So it is with reading. What remains after all the quotations and plot details and close analysis is the commonplace we can no longer remember.
When Proust’s narrator’s grandmother is dying, the Duc de Guermantes comes over and wishes to see the boy’s father, imposing himself upon the household.
One of those “extra helps” whom people engage at exceptional times to relieve the strain on their servants (a practice which gives deathbeds an air of being social functions) had just opened the front door to the Duc de Guermantes, who was now waiting in the hall and had asked for me: I could not escape him.
“I have just, my dear Sir, heard your tragic news. I should like, as a mark of sympathy, to shake hands with your father.” I made the excuse that I could not very well disturb him at the moment. M. de Guermantes was like a caller who turns up just as one is about to start on a journey. But he felt so intensely the importance of the courtesy he was shewing us that it blinded him to all else, and he insisted upon being taken into the drawing-room. As a general rule, he made a point of going resolutely through the formalities with which he had decided to honour anyone, and took little heed that the trunks were packed or the coffin ready.
Here, again, I hear the echo of Dickens’ deathly comedy—the general rising from the floor like a dead clown—in the juxtaposition of trunks and coffins, which is one of the many ways in which Proust maintains his theme, as in a great symphony, with cells of rhythm and recurrence: life is a journey to death: that is the journey that the grandmother is about to begin, but whenever we travel, or read, or dream, we are undertaking a new part of that journey ourselves, and the suitability of James and Proust and Dickens, and their prolonged prose, to life is that life, too, is like that, it elaborates, circumlocutes, repeats, and finds itself moving from one state of strangeness to another.
The effect of Proust is not found in the parts, but in the whole, in this experience of his holding the reins to maintain our sensation that whatever is happening it will all fit in, so that when we read a passage of particular relevance or significance to us, it will not stand out the way a great speech in Shakespeare stands out, but will be revealed with the luminosity of a jellyfish in the water or a star in the sky, continuous, somehow, with its surroundings, but also distinct, like the patchwork of memories, selves, and dreams—waking sleeps—we all live among. How many people will have experienced something like this heart-breaking passage about Proust’s narrator’s dying grandmother:
Françoise, with innocent savagery, brought her a glass. I was glad for the moment that I had managed to snatch it from her in time, before my grandmother, whom we had carefully kept without a mirror, could catch even a stray glimpse of a face unlike anything she could have imagined. But, alas, when, a moment later, I leaned over her to kiss that dear forehead which had been so harshly treated, she looked up at me with a puzzled, distrustful, shocked expression: she did not know me.
But this works not as a quotation, an extract, but as part of the continuous stream of experience. The strange has “come true” not merely because it is true to life, but because, like all dreams, consciousness, the sense of self, it is true to itself as well. With the death of the grandmother, I had to wake up from Proust a while. I had spent pages and pages anticipating the moment. My own grandmother died like this. Not with leeches and servants, but increasingly behind the veil of unconsciousness.
When my lips touched her face, my grandmother’s hands quivered, a long shudder ran through her whole body, reflex perhaps, perhaps because certain affections have their hyperaesthesia which recognises through the veil of unconsciousness what they barely need senses to enable them to love. Suddenly my grandmother half rose, made a violent effort, as though struggling to resist an attempt on her life.
We all live with a veil of unconsciousness. James and Dickens and Proust developed an art of making that veil less opaque, of convoluting narrative to make it resemble the difficulty of knowing ourselves, and to keep shocking us out of egotism. When someone slips entirely behind that veil, and is living only as a set of reflexes, so that we can no longer be sure what sort of consciousness, how much consciousness, they experience, they become a living grief, something out of a fairy tale, a dream into which we cannot—yet—follow them.
Our social existence, says Proust’s narrator, is like an artist’s studio, filled with abandoned sketches. We read in fragments as we live in fragments, and what we write can only save so much of what we remember, and what we remember can only be so many fragments of our lives. And so I put the book aside, after only two dozen pages, not as one of the many half-abandoned half-read books on which it sits on my desk, nor to become one of the distant memories of reading, as in the London Library, fragments of my past, but as something which will dwell in my mind, “just over there”, a strange place which becomes clearer in retrospect, upon revisiting, and I begin to write, thinking, These fragments I have shored against my ruins, and it is not until I reach the end of this essay, the writing, editing, rethinking, deleting, that I realise which lines I have been almost remembering ever since I started reading Proust,
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
