World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  4 Nothing went to waste: this music-hall life too, almost accidentally arrived at, would provide the background and some of the form for Mitsou (where a playlet is inadequately digested), as well as for Music Hall Sidelights (a series of vivid sketches), and The Vagabond, perhaps her first fully realized fiction—a novel in which the sexual dilemma of the “working woman” is beautifully defined.

  5 Robert Cottrell’s suggestion that not all this sexual leering can be blamed on Willy is correct, I think: “Titillation resulting from an artful toying with debauchery is one of the veins Colette worked, and it crops up even in the books of her maturity” (Colette, Frederick Ungar, 1974, p. 23). This is perhaps the best critical introduction to Colette: brief, clear, balanced, and very perceptive. Marvin Mudrick makes a similar complaint in his Hudson Review article, “Colette, Claudine, and Willy” (XVI, No. 4, pp. 559–72), but Mudrick’s sometimes eloquent piece is also peevish, and his drearily old-fashioned conception of what counts in fiction leads him to overlook the virtues of these books while somewhat misstating their flaws.

  Proust at 100

  Proust’s mother, everyone immediately said—(and the echo is with us yet, for it was the kind of conjecture we talebearers love)—was marked before she bore him by that foolish war the inept French were diddled into waging against Bismarck and his Boche, much as the mother of Thomas Hobbes was marked, and infected the future philosopher with the fear she felt at the approach of the Spanish Armada. And certainly the siege of Paris was no picnic: citizens ate the horses and the dogs, then the animals in the zoos; cats cost six francs, rats one; streets were crowded with defeated soldiers, carts of dead and wounded, insurrectionists, and, in the days before the cannonading scattered them, an audience of gossips. The section of the city where Madame Proust was shortly to seek refuge in order to procure for Marcel his welcome from the world received from Edmond de Goncourt, whose prize her son would one day win, a grim Journal invocation: “Cursed Auteuil! This suburb will have been deprived of communication with the rest of Paris, sacked by the Mobiles, starved out, shelled, and now is to have the misfortune of being occupied by the Prussians.”

  Sick, weak from the start, marked, everybody said. There may have been an apprehension in the fetus that not all was well, a feeling for the thinness of the cord with which it was fed, the precariousness of the silence which cushioned it. At his birth, not everyone expected Marcel Proust to live, and, indeed, with what was to be characteristic perverseness, the little fellow grew as sturdily as if weakness were the purpose of the plant.

  He became allergic to pollen, dust, damp, smoke, odors of all sorts, especially perfumes and the scents of his favorite flowers; he was easily chilled, easily fatigued, easily offended, thinking often of duels; he frequently gave way to weeping, or had tantrums in which he broke things or crushed his friends’ hats; he suffered prolonged spells of melancholy, grew pale, lost weight, and went into mourning the way, ideally, one ought to put on plays; attacks of anxiety made him sweat, gave him cramps; he complained of indigestion, later of dizziness and a paralysis which disturbingly resembled the sort which seized his mother just before her death: it required him to wobble when he walked—to bump most awkwardly into things—and, what was worse, made it difficult to talk, to pronounce well and clearly his sacred French.

  He feared for his heart, his sight which was failing, the affections of his friends, those love affairs which could not last, arrangements which could not be consummated—to have a party, pay a visit, take a train, make a move, or love, a purchase, dine—without infinite trouble, endless doubts and consequently paralyzing bouts of indecision, countless pleas for assistance (he wrote many letters so obsequious, so grotesquely ceremonial, they were like spit in the face).

  Then there were those floating pains like underwater mines … in his back, his wrists, behind the eyes … and there was the noise … the demanding clamor of the world outside; thus he was, of course, in his condition, prone to flus, rheums, fevers, lung congestions, laryngitis; he wheezed, he coughed, he choked, he sneezed—the continual shuddering of his chest enlarged the cage.

  So it became necessary to cork the walls, draw the blinds, to sleep surrounded by comforters and quilts, warm rubber bottles; he went out in furs, more and more at night, in carriages carefully closed against the weather, to sit in late cafés, to watch, eavesdrop, interrogate, or to attend parties where, very weary, with drug-enlarged eyes, his head supported by his palms as you might prop the heavy bloom of a spindly plant, he talked and talked, his voice going slowly and remotely on as if he were oozing.

  Colette remembered, in those last late days, “the sooty telltale traces that an absent-minded malady had smeared haphazardly across his face.”

  Yet despite his precautions, he often took alarm and turned back, apologizing to his hosts by post and messenger: even the happiest streets can be strange, the most familiar of them foreign, while his health was insecure, all knew—how he regretted it—and besides there were patches of fog, there were menacing rooms, disappointments, chills; and Proust put balls of ivory in his ears, burned Legras powder, took bicarbonate of soda, iodide, drank tisanes, and for his sore throat swallowed, of all things, cascara, a purge with a name like a river.

  He lay down for the day to go over the night, placing immense weights on small things, sliding his eyes from tea tray to ribbon, flounce to hairdo, when he remembered the soirées; watching, listening for those nuances of language—word, tone, gesture—which would turn over his feelings as if each were a page, even though he would always discover that the opposing leaf involved a volte-face which confirmed his suspicions; and in this insomniac’s way he filled up the blanks and hollows of his graveside life with nervous reflection.

  It pleased Proust to have the critic, Paul Souday, remark while writing of Within a Budding Grove: “Few novelists have expressed, more forcefully or more bitterly, the feeling of change and incessant instability that makes human life an uninterrupted series of partial deaths.” A series of partial deaths: that was good. Yes. His body made a drama of its dying. It wrote its own script, although its owner was not above offering some editorial assistance now and then: “Ma chère petite Ma-man, I have come in so exhausted by an incessant cough that I tried it discreetly outside your door to see whether you were asleep. But there was no response to ‘that voice of the heart,’ which, Lamartine says, ‘alone reaches the heart.’ ”

  Well it was true, in a way, that his heart coughed. I cannot breathe, it also said. I am being smothered. Everything is heavy, close, stifling. Just as the first breath of life is an out-cry, so I’ve drawn myself up to scream, to howl, to bellow like a baby for its mother; but somehow the cry is suppressed, and I gasp as one who feels the floor fall beneath him, as a child may at the top of his father’s toss, as one about to climax; yet how cold I am in this close, warm room; I need my robe, more blankets; I shiver from a lack of love, from fright; I say I cannot swallow, I cannot stomach things, and my gorge rises, meals empty out.

  His body insisted that it could not bear the burdens of its life; see how my bones, my back aches—every aperture—ears, eyes … How much did it have to pain him to prove it? And though Proust spent much of his time in bed, like a mountain climber in a nightmare, he could never reach sleep. He swallowed amyl, Trional, Veronal, and then to revive himself received adrenalin in injections, took caffeine. Often unshaven, his linen far from fresh, he allowed his entire apartment to settle into dinginess like dust, and, like his bed, to rumple. His friends could not decide how best to describe him: as a young or aged invalid, a dandy or a maiden aunt, an animal, an addict, a hypocrite or, if sincere, a madman.

  The Greeks had ascribed living motion—soul—to breath, and Proust behaved as if they had been right. Hadn’t he said that invalids feel closer to their souls? And it was breath which hollowed our primal clay. Although his asthma required him always to be holding his, clinging to the life he both loathed and loved (and of which he was so insecure and
jealous) with the same grip he used to hang on to the past, to the world as it was when his mother was alive, nevertheless his vocation as a novelist demanded that all he’d taken in be given its release, so that his writing was really like a repeated sigh—an expiration—and since his book was actually that vital latter half of breathing, he could not finish it while he lived.

  He wrote as a river builds a delta—by overlay and accretion. His galleys were as black with corrections as Balzac’s. The first section, “Combray,” and the last, an afternoon party with music at the house of the Princess de Guermantes, were written first, the rest of the book was middle. To write in inter-leaf and interline, around the rim as Joyce would do, that was his method. It was our curious good fortune, too, that another war with the Germans interrupted the appearance of the work which Proust himself called, simply, “Swann,” allowing it in the meantime to more than double.

  This should not surprise us, for it was the untiming of time itself that was Proust’s project. He lifted ticks from the clock and froze them as the furniture and lights are frozen in those Vermeers which he favored with some of his best pages. It was not to rescue time itself that he started out, but to redeem himself, to save all that life which he had let so worthlessly flow by—every moment of it—to reclaim it and then invest it with a verbal value it had never had as a human happening; for who knew better than he the genius in him, blooming like the rose which Mallarmé had suggested was absent from every bouquet, the genius who was to display his excellence … when?… well, every day it was still tomorrow.

  Who knew better his baseness, his guilt, the crimes he had contrived? He was, after all, a useless idler, ill half the time and a fake for a fourth of that; he was a jealous whiner and a faithless sycophant, a purchaser of favors and a false friend, a social trifler and a snob. He had a dilettante’s interest in music and painting, a brat’s love of mama, a fairy’s fondness for furbelows, finery, and female life, and a love of gossip that would have left him, had he indulged it fully, without a single back to bite.

  How did the great call come? It came, of course, in those celebrated moments when the past rushed back open-armed, contrite, forgiving, like a lover who has quarreled and wishes to make amends; when, in the novel, the narrator tastes the madeleine dipped in tea; when he studies the steeples of Martinville or catches sight of those three trees; when he stumbles on a pair of paving stones or touches a shoe button, feels a napkin on his lips, smells a moldy odor, hears the sound of water in a pipe or a spoon rung by a servant against a plate. Taste, touch, sound, sight, smell: through each of the senses at one point or other the past is recaptured, but noticeably without the anxieties and disappointments of the original occasion, so that even the most shameful times, in these remembrances of them, lack that threatening immersion in immediate emotion they first had; now they can be held like a blossom; they can actually—even the most trivial, the most fearful of them—be transformed, not by the Marcel who experienced them originally, but by another, the Marcel who holds a poet’s pen and can contrive a line so beautiful its author can claim a virtue for every vice it limns.

  Before and After. Yes, with a little work, they can be saved. It is the present, the immediate moment—the During—that is doomed. Before the narrator watches the actress, Berma, play Phèdre, before he sees the little church in Balbec, both are perfect (inaccessible, he says of the church, intact, ideal, endowed with universal value), such is the art of romantic expectations. But Balbec was a name, he has to confess, that he should have kept hermetically sealed, somewhat like a private letter or perhaps his writing room, because the moment it was broken into, there were loosed—to sully the church and its illustrious Virgin—the images of a branch bank, omnibus office, pastry shop, café.

  Experience was in constant danger from these contrasts—the sublime and the sordidly commercial, for example—the kind of undercutting contradiction which delighted Flaubert (who counted the scratches of the wedding plates) and which could never have dismayed more robust men (our Balzacs and our Zolas, they have their strengths). Nor could the rarer objects—refined tastes, sharp wit, the right people and their real accomplishments, the precious effects he so dearly loved—always be protected by the bibelots of fashionable parlors, where, as likely as not, the wealthy hostess was a bourgeois whore, or the clever baron an affected pederast, while in the glitter of his company the rest were sniveling sycophants and bores. Nor could he come to terms with himself, for what was one to say of an intermittently fastidious though aging and increasingly puffy-faced fop who had a yen, sometimes, at the homo house he helped to suit out with his family’s furniture, for strong young men who worked in butcher shops?

  In short, then, Proust planned to replace his life with language, to restore it to beauty as you might restore a church, and thus to pull it out of time and seal it like a freezer package, protecting it from every vulgarity as the Balbec church in his book was not. Though he was half a Catholic, it wasn’t confession he was after. Confession might suit Gide. Gide had a compulsion in that direction. He thought it allowed him everything. So Gide would complain of Proust’s work that it wasn’t honest, and that Proust, so close to the edge already, should have cried “I”; that he should have spoken of loving Albert, and not, as he wrote, of loving Albertine (Gide had a point, because these disguises did not work; they merely obstructed, obscured, and lamed).

  But it was not in the recovery of any actual past that Proust’s genius lay; his was not a novel of remembrance, as I’ve pointed out, but a novel of analysis and reflection (Proust returned to his childhood the way a modern primitive returns to the woods: with his books, his bankroll, and a stash of pot); and Remy de Gourmont’s saying that “one only writes well about things one hasn’t experienced” remained importantly true, because what Proust intended to write was not so much an account of his life (he would, of course, condense, amalgamate, rearrange, select), but something that would give it meaning and worth.

  Remembrance of Things Past is, like most great examples of the novelist’s art, an act of love, of hate and revenge, and finally, of reparation. Proust lives in it as he failed to live in life, and it would be more appropriate to celebrate the hours in which he began it, were there such moments, than the confused and frightened days of his confinement. But before he could embark upon its composition, Proust had to devise a fictional strategy that would radically single his mind, slow the drain of neurasthenia on his spirit, and by indulging his deepest nature find employment for all his vagrant energies; in this way permitting, for example, his morbid suspicion and excessive possessiveness, his inclination to symbolic cruelty and ritual desecration, to have a constructive outlet; and allowing him to exercise exactly the painstaking and painful reappraisal of every occasion which was his constant bedtime occupation.

  For then his mind was not one wolf but twenty, it could bring down anything; there his jealous instability was a law of love; and in the scheme he finally settled on, his obsessive concerns (homosexuality, snobbery and the break-up of classes, the pleasures and anxieties of being “in society,” the religion of art) became recurrent themes in an enormous Mahleresque composition in which these subjects, themselves, were entered, overcome, and eventually replaced by the style of their own depiction. Remember that description of Madame Swann’s gowns which is more laced and bowed and ruffled, more exquisitely daring, more utterly elaborated, than they are, and beneath which she sinks from sight as a thread of grass does in a bouquet of daisies?

  Proust was always ready to have his friends defend the organization of Remembrance of Things Past, and there can be no doubt his tapestry is intricate and cunningly worked; yet much of the so-called form in Proust is meaningless—an excuse. Like the elaborate Homeric correspondence in Ulysses, it is meant only for the mind. It placates critics who chase relations like lawyers trying to settle rich estates. An unfeelable form is a failure. Furthermore, it is hard to imagine what the architecture of this novel would have excluded, since form
s, like fences, are meant to keep the cows out as well as the corn in. No, it is largely a wonderful wallow; it can accommodate anything, including little essays on art, love, literature, and life. Nor should we too readily accept the idea that the fuses of those involuntary memories (the madeleine, the shoe button, the paving stone, etc.) really set off the rest of the text; otherwise we should have to believe that, when those little powdered strings are lit, a miracle of physics occurs—one in which the boom blows up the bomb.

  Proust despised the esthete with all the hate hog has for hog, and believed that his novel would uncover, in a way no other method could manage, the essential truth of his life; but he was a liar like all the others, a master of dissimulation and subterfuge; there is no special truth in him; he would capture our consciousness if he could and give us a case of his nerves. Still—no danger. When the fuss over Proust’s theories about memory and time has faded; when we have taken what we can for psychology from his own reflections on his characters; when we have faithfully observed, as Proust did, the intrusion, like a second row of teeth, of the middle into the upper classes; when we have ceased to be shocked by inversion or amused by period dress and manners (and it’s been well past “when” now for many years); then it is only Proust’s style that will carry this enormous book: the style of his mind, his sight and hearing, touch and feeling, and above all, the unique character of his language and its extraordinary composition—a style where image and object, like Jack and Jill, go up and down together.

  Carry it? The standard French edition is in 15 volumes; the Random House is a pair comprising 2,265 pages; and each page should be sounded, each sentence thought slowly over as a mind on a walk for pleasure. So taken, the pace of every one of them is slow, the path of every one of them is lengthy. When reading, one wonders first if the book will ever end, and then, in despair, if it will ever begin. In comparison, the Russian steppes—were they so vast? Or winters in upper Michigan prolonged? Lawrence said it was like tilling a field with knitting needles, and James, reading Swann’s Way, confessed to an inconceivable boredom.