Fixing to Die

Proust’s description of the last days of Bergotte is written with much personal authority. First, Proust was perpetually cold and covered himself with all manner of clothing, giving little or no attention to his appearance. Regardless of the season, all windows had to be shut wherever he visited. And Bergotte…

I have said that Bergotte never went out-of-doors, and when he got out of bed for an hour in his room, he would be smothered in shawls, rugs, all the things with which a person covers himself  before exposing himself to intense cold or going on a railway journey. He would apologise for them to the few friends whom he allowed to penetrate to his sanctuary; pointing to his tartan plaids, his travelling-rugs, he would say merrily: “After all, my dear fellow, life, as Anaxagoras has said, is a journey.” (V,240)

Proust self-medicated himself with barbituates and opium to sleep and caffeine and adrenaline to stay awake.

Bergotte tried them all. Some of these drugs may be of a different family from those to which one is accustomed, by-products, for instance of amyl and ethyl. When one absorbs a new drug, entirely different in composition, it is always with a delicious expectancy of the unknown. One’s heart beats as at a first assignation. To what unknown forms of sleep, of dreams, is the newcomer going to lead one? It is inside one now, it is in control of one’s thoughts. In what way is one going to fall asleep? And, once asleep, by what strange paths, up to what peaks, into what unfathomed gulfs will this all-powerful master lead one? What new group of sensations will one meet with on this journey? Will it lead to illness? To blissful happiness? To death? Bergotte’s death came to him the day after he had thus entrusted himself to one of these friends (a friend? an enemy?) who proved too strong. (V,243-244)

On May 1, 1922, Proust accidentally took too strong a dose of adrenaline, which burned his digestive tract. From then on he consumed only ice cream and cold beer, a diet that left him weakened. He died of pneumonia on Nov. 18.

Bergotte’s Organ

When the narrator gives an aesthetic judgement, its total lack of irony signals that this view is also that of the author. Here Bergotte is redeemed and in a way that may be read as Proust’s apologia for his writing style. At first Bergotte’s speech seems annoyingly mannered.

 I understood then the impression that M. de Norpois had formed of him. He had indeed a peculiar “organ”; there is nothing that so alters the material qualities of the voice as the presence of thought behind what is being said: the resonance of the diphthongs, the energy of the labials are profoundly affected, as is the diction. (II,169)

More than intelligence, Marcel hears in his speech something of the brilliance of his writing.

So it is with all real writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of–as opposed to thinking about themselves–and to which they have not yet given expression….Moreover the quality, always rare and new, of what he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so subtle a manner of approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it that was already familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an unimportant detail, to be off the point, to be indulging in paradox, so that his ideas seemed as often as not to be confused, for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. Besides, as all novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotyped attitude to which we had grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself, any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (II,171)

Another fine characterization of reading Proust.

 

Old Snail Shell

One of the sources of ISOLT was an essay, Contre Saint-Beueve, which argued against connecting a work of literature too closely with its author. Who, he might be thinking defensively, expects a great work from a social butterfly? The dangers of relying on these connections is evident in the scene where Marcel finally gets to meet his idol, Bergotte.

The name Bergotte made me start, like the sound of a revolver fired at me point blank, but instinctively, to keep my countenance, I bowed: there, in front of me, like one of those conjurers whom we see standing whole and unharmed, in their frock-coats,  in the smoke of a pistol shot out of which a pigeon had just fluttered, my greeting was returned by a youngish, uncouth, thickset and myopic little man, with a red nose curled like a a snail-shell and a goatee beard. I was cruelly disappointed, for what had just vanished in the dust of the explosion was not only the languorous old man, of whom no vestige now remained, but also the beauty of an immense work which I had contrived to enshrine in the frail and hallowed organism that I had constructed , like a temple, expressly for it, but for which no room was to be found in the squat figure, packed tight with blood vessels, bones, glands, sinews, of the little man with the snub nose and black beard who stood before me. (II,164)

…he smiled as he bore his mind back to the idea of his books; which at once began to fall in my estimation (bringing down with them the whole value of Beauty, of the world, of life itself), until they seemed to have been merely the casual recreation of a man with a goatee beard….An then I asked my self whether originality did indeed prove that great writers are gods, ruling each over a kingdom that is his alone, or whether there is not an element of sham in it all, whether the differences between one man’s books and another’s were not the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and essential difference between diverse personalities. (II,167)

 Marcel, as we will see, gets over this shock but not without damage to his estimation of Bergotte. The point as I take it is not so much the disparity between the idealization of the author and the physical reality, but that we should ignore the writer as a person when we read his book. Otherwise, I know that I would not have picked up Proust after reading about some the nastier erotic amusements he engaged in in brothels.