False Papers

by André Aciman

  The next day, sitting in the sun on a metal chair in Square Lamartine, I opened Proust for the first time. That evening, when my father asked how I had liked what I’d read, I feigned indifference, not really knowing whether I intended to spite a father who wanted me to love the author he loved most or to spite an author who had come uncomfortably close. For in the eighty-odd pages I had read that day I had rediscovered my entire childhood in Alexandria: the impassive cook, my bad-tempered aunts and skittish friends, the buzz of flies on sunny afternoons spent reading indoors when it was too hot outside, dinners in the garden with scant lights to keep mosquitoes away, the “ferruginous, interminable” peal of the garden bell announcing the occasional night guest who, like Charles Swann, came uninvited but whom everyone had nevertheless been expecting. Every year, thousands of Prousto-tourists come to the former Illiers, which extended its name in honor of Proust’s fictional town Combray, in 1971, on the centennial of his birth. The town knows it, proclaims it, milks it.

  Today, Illiers-Combray sells around two thousand madeleine pastries a month. The shell-shaped cakes are displayed in the windows of pastry shops like propitiatory offerings to an unseen god and are sold by the dozen—in case one wants to take some home to friends or relatives, the way pilgrims take back holy water from the Jordan or an olive twig from Gethsemane.

  For the reader on a Proustian pilgrimage, tasting a madeleine is the supreme tribute to Proust. (As no pâtisserie fails to remind the tourists, it was on tasting a madeleine, now the most famous sponge cake in the history of world literature, that the adult narrator of Proust’s novel was transported to his boyhood days in Combray.) It is also a gesture of communion through which readers hope, like Proust, to come home to something bigger, more solid, and ultimately, perhaps, truer than fiction itself. Anne Borrel often tells these Proust groupies that the cult of the madeleine is blasphemous, as are the claims made by one of the pâtissiers that members of the famille Proust used to purchase their madeleines on his premises. (In earlier drafts of the novel, Proust’s madeleines may have been slices of melba toast, which evolved into toasted bread, only later to metamorphose into the sponge cakes.) But no one listens. Besides, going to Illiers-Combray and not tasting a madeleine would be like going to Jerusalem and not seeing the Western Wall, or to Greenwich and not checking your watch. Luckily, I was able to resist temptation: during my visit, on a Sunday just a few days before Christmas, all the pastry shops were closed. Before going to the Proust Museum, Anne Borrel and I had lunch at a tiny restaurant called Le Samovar. Plump and middle-aged, Borrel is the author of a cookbook and culinary history titled Dining with Proust. She told me that some of the tourists come from so far away and have waited so long to make the trip that as soon as they step into Proust’s house they burst into tears. I pictured refugees getting off a ship and kneeling to kiss the beachhead. I asked about Proust’s suddenly increasing popularity. “Proust,” Borrel replied, “is a must.” (She repeated these four words, like a verdict, several times during the day.) She reminded me that there were currently six French editions of A la recherche du temps perdu in print. I told her that a fourth English-language edition was due to appear in 2001. And that wasn’t all: trade books on Proust and coffee-table iconographies were everywhere; in Paris, I had seen at least half a dozen new books that bore Proust’s name or drew on Proustian characters occupying precious space on the display tables of bookstores and department stores. Even Proust’s notes, manuscripts, and publishing history had been deemed complicated enough to warrant a book of their own, called Remembrance of Publishers Past. Add to that T-shirts, watches, CDs, concerts, videos, scarves, posters, books on tape, newsletters, and a comic-strip version entitled Combray, whose first printing, of twelve thousand copies, sold out in three weeks. Not to mention the 1997—98 convention in Liège celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Proust’s death, with sessions on music and Proust, eating and Proust, a writing competition (on the subject of “Time Lost and Time Regained”), and a colloquium on asthma and allergies.

  This kaleidoscope of Proustophernalia is matched by as many testimonials and tributes to Proust, in which he takes many forms. There is Proust the élitist and high-society snob; Proust the son of a Jewish mother; Proust the loner; Proust the dandy; Proust the analytical aesthete; Proust the soulful, lovelorn boy; Proust the tart, the dissembling coquette; the Belle Epoque Proust; the professional whiner; the prankster; the subversive classicist; the eternal procrastinator; and the asthmatic, hypochondriacal Proust. But the figure who lies at the heart of today’s Proust revival is the intimate Proust, the Proust who perfected the studied unveiling of spontaneous feelings. Proust invented a language, a style, a rhythm, and a vision that gave memory and introspection an aesthetic scope and magnitude no author had conferred on either before. He allowed intimacy itself to become an art form. This is not to say that the vertiginous spate of memoirs that have appeared recently, with their de rigueur regimens of child, spouse, and substance abuse, owe their existence, their voice, or their sensibility to Proust—clearly, they owe far more to Freud. But it does help to explain why Proust is more popular today, in the age of the memoir, than he has been at any other time in the century.

  Like every great memoirist who has had a dizzying social life and a profoundly lonely one, Proust wrote because writing was his way of both reaching for an ever-elusive world and securing his distance from it. He was among the first writers in this century to disapprove of the critics’ tendency to seek correspondences between an artist’s work and his private life. The slow, solitary metamorphosis of what truly happened into what, after many years, finally emerges in prose is the hallmark of Proust’s labor of love. Proust is at once the most canonical and the most uncanonical author, the most solemnly classical and the most subversive, the author in whom farce and lyricism, arrogance and humility, beauty and revulsion are indissolubly fused, and whose ultimate contradiction reflects an irreducible fact about all of us: we are driven by something as simple and as obvious as the desire to be happy, and, if that fails, by the belief that we once have been.

  My conversation with Anne Borrel was interrupted by the arrival of customers outside Le Samovar. “Take a look at those four,” Borrel said, pointing to two couples dawdling at the entrance. “I’ll bet you anything they’re proustiens.” She referred to all tourists as proustiens—meaning not Proust scholars but individuals whom the French like to call les amis de Proust, Proustologues, Proustolaters, Proustocentrics, Proustomaniacs, Proustophiles, Proustophiliacs, Proustoholics … or fiddles (to use a term dear to Proust’s malevolent archsnob, Mme Verdurin). One of the four opened the door of the restaurant and asked in a thick Spanish accent whether lunch was still being served. “Pintades”—guinea hens—“are all that’s left,” snapped the owner of Le Samovar. Borrel and I exchanged a complicitous glance, because talk of fowl immediately brought to mind a discussion we’d had in the car about Proust’s servant Françoise, who in Swann’s Way butchers a chicken and then curses it for not dying fast enough.

  The four tourists were shown to a table. One asked the proprietor what time the Proust Museum would open that afternoon, and he regretfully informed them that the museum was closed for the holidays. They were crestfallen “What a pity! And we’ve come all the way from Argentina.”

  Anne Borrel had heard every word of the exchange. She reminded me of a teacher who with her back turned to the class while she’s writing on the blackboard knows exactly who’s whispering what to whom. She leaned over and told one of the Argentines, “You may have come to the right place.” Overjoyed, the Argentine blurted out, “You mean Marcel Proust used to eat here, in this restaurant?” “No,” Borrel answered, smiling indulgently. She told them that an improvised tour of the house could be arranged after coffee, and the Argentines went back to talking softly about Proust, staring every once in a while at our table with the thrilled and wary gaze of people who have been promised a miracle.

  By the time our coffee wa
s served, we had also acquired two English and three French proustiens, and a warm, festive mood permeated Le Samovar. It was like the gathering of pilgrims in Chaucer’s Tabard Inn. Introductions were unnecessary. We knew why we were there, and we all had a tale to tell.

  By then, some of us would have liked nothing more than a fireplace, a large cognac, and a little prodding to induce us to recount how we had first come to read Proust, to love Proust, how Proust had changed our lives. I was, it dawned on me, among my own. After dessert, Borrel put on her coat. “On y va?” she asked, rattling a giant key chain that bore a bunch of old keys with long shafts and large, hollowed oval heads. She led us down the rue du Docteur Proust, named after Proust’s father, who by the turn of the century had helped to halt the spread of cholera in Europe. The sidewalks and streets were empty. Everyone seemed to be away for the holidays. Franco-jazz Muzak emanated from loudspeakers, mounted on various lampposts, that were apparently intended to convey a festive Yule spirit, but otherwise Illiers-Combray was deserted and gray—a dull, cloying, humdrum, wintry, ashen town, where the soul could easily choke. Small wonder that Marcel developed asthma, or that he had the heebie-jeebies on returning home after long evening walks with his parents, knowing that by the time dinner was served life would hold no surprises—only the inevitable walk up the creepy staircase and that frightful drama called bedtime. Borrel stopped at one of many nondescript doors along the empty street. She stared at it for a moment, almost as though she were trying to remember whether this was indeed the right address, then took out her keys, inserted one into the lock, and suddenly gave it a vigorous turn, yanking the door open.

  “C’est ici que tout commence,” she said. One by one, we filed into Proust’s garden. Fortunately, no one cried.

  Borrel pointed to a little bell at the top of the gate. I couldn’t contain myself “Could this be the ferruginous bell?” I asked. It was a question she’d heard before. She took a breath. “You mean not the large and noisy rattle which deafened with its ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who set it off by coming in ‘without ringing,’ but the double peal, ‘timid, oval, gilded,’ of the visitor’s bell, whereupon everyone would exclaim, ‘A visitor! Who on earth could it be?’” (She was quoting from memory, and every time one of us asked a question after that she would recite the answer.) Next she led us into the restored, relatively humble middle-class house—by no means the large villa I’d always imagined. The kitchen, where I’d envisaged Françoise cooking the chicken she had viciously butchered, was a sunless alcove. The dining room, with a small round table and dark wood paneling, was a depressing melee of browns. Then we came to Marcel’s bedroom, with its tiny Empire-style bed, the magic lantern that kept him company at night when he dreaded sleep, and nearby the George Sand novel bound in red. In another room was the sofa that Proust had given to his maid Céleste Albaret, which her daughter had donated to the museum—and was perhaps the inspiration for the fictional sofa that Marcel inherited from his Tante Léonie, made love on, and eventually passed along to the owner of a brothel.

  When Borrel indicated another room, on the second floor, I interrupted her to suggest that it must surely be the room where, under lock and key, Marcel discovered the secret pleasures of onanism. Borrel neither confirmed nor denied my allegation. She said only, “‘The little room that smelt of orrisroot … [where] I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which I thought was deadly.’” In this way, I was summarily put in my place—for presuming to show off and for implying that I could make obvious what Proust’s oblique words had made explicit enough.

  Back in the garden, I told her that the way she had opened the main door had reminded me of the moment in the novel when, after a long, moonlit family walk, Marcel’s father pretends to be lost. Everyone in our group suddenly remembered the episode, and, excited, one of the Englishmen described it to his friend, explaining that it was only after making everyone else panic in the dark that Marcel’s father had finally taken a key out of his pocket and quietly inserted it in what the others until then had failed to see was the back gate to their very own house. According to the Englishman, Marcel’s admiring mother, stunned by her husband’s ability to save the day, had exclaimed, “Tu es fantastique!”

  “Tu es extraordinaire!” Borrel corrected him.

  I had always liked that scene: the family wandering in the moonlight, the boy and his mother convinced that they’re lost, the father teasing them. It reminded me of the way Proust’s sentences roam and stray through a labyrinth of words and clauses, only to turn around—just when you are about to give up—and show you something you had always suspected but had never put into words. The sentences tell you that you haven’t really drifted far at all, and that real answers may not always be obvious but aren’t really hidden, either. Things, he reminds us, are never as scary as we thought they were, nor are we ever as stranded or as helpless as we feared.

  Borrel left us for a moment to check on something inside the museum, and we spent some time discussing our favorite Proust passages. We all wondered which gate Swann’s prototype would come through in the evenings, and where the aunts had been sitting when they refused to thank him for his gift but finally consented to say something so indirect that Swann failed to realize that they actually were thanking him.

  “It all seems so small,” said the Englishman, who was visibly disappointed by the house. My thoughts drifted to a corner of the garden. The weather was growing colder, and yet I was thinking of Marcel’s summer days, and of my own summer days as well, and of the garden where, deaf to the world, I had found myself doing what Proust described in his essay “On Reading”:

  giving more attention and tenderness to characters in books than to people in real life, not always daring to admit how much I loved them … those people, for whom I had panted and sobbed, and whom, at the close of the book, I would never see again, and no longer know anything about … I would have wanted so much for these books to continue, and if that were impossible, to have other information on all those characters, to learn now something about their lives, to devote mine to things that might not be entirely foreign to the love they had inspired in me and whose object I was suddenly missing … beings who tomorrow would be but names on a forgotten page, in a book having no connection with life.

  The guided tour took more than two hours. It ended, as all guided tours do, in the gift shop. The guests were kindly reminded that, despite the impromptu nature of today’s visit, they shouldn’t forget to pay for their tickets. Everyone dutifully scrambled to buy Proust memorabilia. I toyed with the idea of a Proust watch on whose dial were inscribed the opening words of A la recherche du temps perdu: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” But I knew I’d never wear it. The visitors began talking of heading back to Paris. I was almost tempted to hitch a ride with one of them, but Borrel had promised to take me for a night walk through the streets of Illiers-Combray and then accompany me to the train station. The others stood idly about in the evening air, obviously reluctant to put Illiers-Combray behind them. They exchanged addresses and telephone numbers. “Proust is a must,” I heard the Argentine say, an infatuated giggle in his voice. When Borrel left the shop to lock the back door, I was suddenly alone.

  As I looked out the window at the garden where the Proust family had dined on warm summer evenings, I was seized with a strange premonition of asthma. How could Marcel have ever loved such a place? Or had he never loved it? Had he loved only the act of returning to it on paper, because that was how he lived his life—first by wanting to live it, and later by remembering having wanted to, and ultimately by writing about the two? The part in between—the actual living—was what had been lost. Proust’s garden was little more than a place where he had once yearned to be elsewhere—never the primal scene or the ground zero. Illiers itself was simply a place where the young Proust dreamed of a better life to come. But, because the dream never came true, he had learned to
love instead the place where the dream was born. That life did happen, and happened so intensely, to someone who seemed so reluctant to live it is part of the Proustian miracle.

  This is the irony that greets all Proust pilgrims: they go in search of things that Proust remembered far better than he had ever really known them, and which he yearned to recover more than he had ever loved them. In the end, like the boy mentioned by Freud who liked to lose things because he enjoyed finding them, Proust realized that he couldn’t write about anything unless he thought he had lost it first. Perhaps I, too, had come here in order to lose Combray, if only to rediscover it in the pages I knew I would read on the way home.

  My train wasn’t due for an hour and a half, and Anne Borrel invited me to have a cup of tea at her house before our walk. We closed the door to the museum and set off down dark and deserted alleys.

  “Illiers gets so empty,” she said, sighing.

  “It must be lonely,” I said.

  “It has its pluses.”

  Her house was bigger than Proust’s and had a far larger garden and orchard. This seemed odd to me—like finding that the gatekeeper owns a faster car and has better central heating than the owner of the palace.

  As we headed back to the train station after our tea, I walked quickly. Borrel tried to stop long enough to show me the spot where the Prousts had returned from their Sunday promenades, but I didn’t want to miss my connection to Paris. It seemed a shame that, after so many years, this longed-for moonlit walk, so near at hand, should be the very thing I’d forfeit. But the last thing I needed was to be sentenced to a sleepless night in Proust’s boyhood town. I alluded to a possible next time. Borrel mentioned spring, when Proust’s favorite flower, the hawthorn, would be in bloom. But I knew, and perhaps she knew, too, that I had no plan to return.