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.

Madness

Albertine is at once a creation of Marcel’s jealous obsession, rooted in childhood trauma, and a person that he has chosen to live with. Morel enjoys a similar dual existence for Charlus. This unstable duality carries the risk of resolution by madness and even death, a conclusion Marcel both acknowledges and is reluctant to accept.

Jealousy is thus endless, for even if the beloved, by dying for instance, can no longer provoke it by her actions….There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even though she is dead. (V,107)

“I beg of you, my darling girl, no more of that trick riding you were practising the other day. Just think, Albertine, if you were to have an accident!”  Of course I did not wish her any harm. But how delighted I should have been if, with her horse, she had taken it into her head to ride off somewhere, wherever she chose, and never come back to my house again! (V,153)

 It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one’s own like a bomb which one holds in one’s hands, unable to get rid of it without committing  a crime. But one has only to  compare this with the ups and downs, the dangers, the anxieties, the fear that false but probable thing will come to be believed when we will no longer be able to explain them–feelings that one experiences if one lives on intimate terms with a madman. For instance, I pitied M. de Charlus for living with Morel (immediately the memory of the scene that afternoon made me feel that the left side of my chest was heavier than the other); leaving aside the relations that may or may not have existed between them, M. de Charlus must have been unaware at the outset that Morel was mad….But all this  is only a comparison. Albertine was not mad. (V,236)

Many years later Marcel was to learn just how close to madness Morel had driven Charlus. This is from a letter meant to be read after his death.

This divine prudence it was that made him resist the appeals to come back and see me which I conveyed to him, and I shall have no peace in this world or hope of forgiveness in the next if I do not confess the truth to you. He was, in resisting my appeals, the instrument of divine wisdom, for I was resolved, had he come, that he should not leave my house alive. One of us two had to disappear. I had decided to kill him. (VI,168)

 

 

 

Proust’s Monty Python Contest Entry

Swann’s Way opens with a prelude that prefigures the novel’s themes of time and establishing an authentic identity. Marcel is older, perhaps staying at Gilberte’s country estate. He describes what it is like to go to bed at a good hour and what it is like to awaken during the night without a secure knowledge to time and place.

…I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. (I,1)

“Lay like scales upon my eyes” applies nicely to Marcel’s youthful struggles to see people and places as they are after first having imagined them, often in exalted terms. Imagination will also be central in how he loves; it might be said that his love exists only in imagination and only when time erodes the imaginative vision does love end.

Sometimes, too, as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, a woman would be born during my sleep from some misplacing of my thigh. Conceived from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that pleasure. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake….And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away. (I,3)

Marcel never finds a new bedroom inviting. The thought that its contents existed without him before his arrival awakens the fear of death because he is forced to imagine a world in which he does not exist. He is saved by the Janus-faced Habit, which will eventually keep him from seeing the strangeness of things. Good for getting used to new bedrooms but bad for seeing the world as an artist.

I was convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; in which a strange and pitiless rectangular cheval-glass, standing across one corner of the room, carved out for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the soft plenitude of my normal field of vision; in which my mind, striving for hours on end to break away from its moorings, to stretch upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room and to reach to the topmost height of its gigantic funnel, had endured many a painful night as I lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils flaring, my heart beating; until habit had changed the colour of the curtains, silenced the clock, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of the vetiver, appreciably reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable. (I,8)

There you  have it: In Search of Lost Time in nine pages, though not quite a winner by Monty Python standards.

 

The Dragon Within

The concluding pages of The Guermantes Way is one very long riff on the essence of the nobility, a subject that has little currency for me. The prose, as always, is lively, but I am not engaged by long passages on the distinctions between the Courvoisiers and the Guermantes. Marcel’s fascination with names, names of the aristocracy in this case and their places of origin, is amply documented. The Charlus interlude is very welcome. Yet there are occasions where we recognize ourselves. Take the case of Swann’s announcement of his impending death and how it is received, filtered by the listeners’ preoccupations, lack of reference and, yet, love for the man.

 Swann cryptically talks of death. He has brought a picture for the Duchess to see.

“But, my dear Charles, I’m longing to see your photograph.”

“Ah! Extinctor diraconis latrator Anubis,”said Swann.

“Yes, it was so charming what you said about that apropos of San Giorgio at Venice. But I don’t understand why Anubis?” (III,810)

The Duchess gets the reference to the dragon and how it is famously associated with Venice. The last part of the phrase is from Vergil, referring to the “baying jackal Anubis,” a carrier of corpses across the Charon. Swann is content to leave himself unexplained. She invites Swann to accompany her and the Duke on a visit to Italy.

“Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can’t come to Italy,” the Duchess put it to Swann as she rose to say good-by to us.

“But my dear lady, it’s because I shall then have been dead for several months. According to the doctors I’ve consulted, by the end of the year the thing I’ve got–which may, for that matter carry me off at any moment–won’t in any case leave me more than three or four months to live, and even that is a generous estimate,” replied Swann with a smile, while the footman opened the glazed door of the hall to let the Duchess out.

“What’s that you say?” cried the Duchess, stopping for moment on her way to the carriage and raising her beautiful, melancholy blue eyes, now clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing compassion for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow; not knowing which to choose, she felt obliged to pretend not to believe that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, in order to comply with the first, which at the moment demanded less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. “You’re joking,” she said to Swann. (III,816)

Death Masks

The grandmother’s illness sculpts her face at it moves to conclusion.

The work of the sculptor was nearing its end, and if my grandmother’s face had shrunk in the process, it had at the same time hardened. The veins that traversed it seemed those not of marble, but of some more rugged stone. Permanently thrust forward by the difficulty that she found in breathing, and as permanently withdrawn into itself by exhaustion, her face, worn, diminished, terrifyingly expressive, seemed like the rude, flushed, purplish, desperate face of some wild guardian of a tomb in a primitive, almost prehistoric sculpture. But the work was not yet completed. Afterwards, the sculpture would have to be broken, and into that tomb–so painfully and tensely guarded–be lowered. (III,44)

For some days she could not see at all. Her eyes were not at all like those of a blind person, but remained just the same as before. And I gathered  that she could see nothing only from the strangeness of a certain smile of welcome which she assumed the moment one opened the door, until one had come up to her and taken her hand, a smile which began too soon and remained stereotyped on her lips, fixed, but always full-faced, and endeavouring to be visible from every quarter, because it could no longer rely on the eyes to regulate it…(III,452)

Cottard, to her disappointment, gave the preference, though without much hope, to leeches. When, a few hours later, I went into my grandmother’s room, fastened to her neck, her temples, her ears, the tiny black reptiles were writhing among her bloodstained locks, as on the head of Medusa. (III,455)

All this agitation was not addressed to us, whom she neither saw nor knew. But if it was only a beast that was stirring there, where was my grandmother? Yes, I could recognise the shape of her nose, which bore no relation now to the rest of her face, but to the corner of which a beauty spot still adhered…(III,458)

An  hour of two later Françoise was able for the last time, and without causing it any pain, to comb that beautiful hair which was only tinged with grey and hitherto had seemed less old than my grandmother herself. But now, on the contrary, it alone set the crown of age on a face grown young again, from which had vanished the wrinkles, the contractions, the swellings, the strains, the hollows which pain had carved on it over the years. As in the far-off days when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had the features, delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with a chaste expectation, with a dream of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl. (III,470)

Desperate Resistance

If habit does weaken everything, familiarity also keeps us from being overwhelmed by the novel.

It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us. Space there was none for me in my bedroom (mine in name only) at Balbec; it was full of things which did not know me, which flung back at me the distrustful glance I cast at them, and, without taking any heed of my existence, showed that I was interrupting the humdrum course of theirs. The clock–whereas at home I heard mine tick only a few seconds in a week, when I was coming out of some profound meditation–continued without a moment’s interruption to utter, in an unknown tongue, a series of observations which must have been most uncomplimentary to myself, for the violet curtains listened to them without replying, but in an attitude such as people adopt who shrug their shoulders to indicated that the sight of a third person irritates them. (II,333)

Then my grandmother came in, and to the expansion of my constricted heart there opened at once an infinity of space. (II,334)

Although habit will make the new room comfortable, eventually, the source of Marcel’s discomfort is more elementary. If his presence means nothing to the new setting, then this is a foretaste of mortality, of a world that can exist without him.

Perhaps this fear that I had–and that is shared by so many others–of sleeping in a strange room, perhaps this fear is only the most humble, obscure, organic, almost unconscious form of that great and desperate resistance put up by the things that constitute the better part of our present life against our mentally acknowledging the possibility of a future in which they are to have no part; a resistance which was at the root of the horror that I had so often been made to feel by the thought that my parents would die some day…a resistance which was also at the root of the difficulty that I found in imagining my own death…(II,338)