Pleasures and Days Page 2
And not only the Duchesse. The young Proust begins and ends his Pleasures with stories that, although uncertain in tone, still manage to be searing depictions of the loneliness of death (‘Baldassare Silvande’ has been compared with Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’, though it does not have – does anything? – the pity and awe of the great Russian story); the mature Proust, amid the social ballet of the end of The Guermantes Way, shows how ineptly his characters cope with (or simply ignore) impending mortality. How crassly selfish are the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes in the way they brush off Swann’s announcement of his imminent death! And yet, here again, the text is more dialectical than it seems, and the Search is more consistently nuanced in its “lessons” (lessons that, despite a tendency to theorizing, to the essayistic, work best when seen as inseparable from the moment and mode of their discovery and the needs and limitations of their discoverer) than Pleasures and Days, which have an occasional tendency to the didactic, to the unsituated aphorism or maxim, or the wagging of a moralistic finger (but then, Proust was still only a very young man). When someone you love (and the affection of the Guermantes for Swann is, in spite of everything, quite real) announces that he will soon be dead, it is not only the Duchesse who can’t find the right words to say in the little book of etiquette she carries around in her head. What do you say to the dying? How would delaying her own pleasures actually help Swann? And while all the bother over her outfit may seem to turn her into a wicked witch (“I must have those red slippers!”), a monster of egotism, it is not only her husband who has noticed she’s still wearing her black shoes: Swann may be dying, but in all his dying he has spotted it too (and is still refined enough in his aesthetic appreciation not to be shocked by her somewhat daring, if involuntary, fashion statement). Even on the edge of the void, he notices things (in ‘The End of Jealousy’, Honoré on his deathbed will notice the buzzing fly and wonder idly whether it will land on the bedsheet): it is not that the aesthetic (or the mere being-there of things) is trivialized by the proximity of death, that majestic abstract universal; it gains in intensity and perhaps value from it. They are indeed cruel in their thoughtlessness, these foolish and self-obsessed characters; but Swann has chosen to live by the code of worldliness and he dies by it too – being as he is “polite” enough to realize that individual people come and go, but dinners in town go on for ever. The Duchesse’s uncertain blue eyes seem to express a will to “live all you can” that communicates with something in Swann himself, and whose power he acknowledges, like the epiphany of some demanding and yet strangely intimate deity. And one day, like Swann, they will all die, even the Duc and the Duchesse de Guermantes, and perhaps their attention for detail will be tenderly remembered: “Ah, the fuss he made when his wife went out improperly dressed! What an eye for detail he had! Husbands have their uses, you know!”
True, Proust does not spare the denizens of his world from moral condemnation: sæva indignatio is never far away. In one of the texts in the Pleasures (‘A Dinner in Town’), he details the fatuous preoccupations of a group of well-heeled diners and their casual and ignorant tattle about the recent anarchist attacks, and he comments that not one of them had an income of less than a hundred thousand pounds. Brecht once commented that Kafka, for all his mysticism, was the truest Bolshevik of them all: it would be a little simplistic to summon Proust to the barricades too, but the link between class and sensibility is precisely documented in the Search, and his embrace of the aristocracy could be perfectly murderous: he was the archetypal “smiler with the knife under the cloak” (or with a pen under the voluminous folds of his many layers of overcoats, as he tottered out from his cork-lined room to carry out fieldwork for his novel in the Ritz). The complex syntax, those long sentences with their coiling clauses that he was already practising in the Pleasures (with varied success – many of these pieces were dashed down in a couple of spare hours and never revised) is deployed in the Search to make us slow down and take the time to notice the world and the richness of its interconnections. But this slowness is not just that of wistful elegy (the doe-eyed Marcel gazing out of all those photographs with such infinite nostalgia). It conceals a message of extreme urgency, like the prophets at their most lapidary: “all compound things are subject to decay”, “seek out your end with diligence”, “repent!” Like the Rilke poem which presents us with an ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, it concludes “you must change your life”. Not for nothing did Proust consider calling his vast epic La Colombe poignardée, for his meditative sentences often launch a dove into the air (in his preface to the Pleasures he makes much of the need to venture forth from the maternal Ark) only to stab it to death. The aesthetic has its decorative moment, but it is in the service of a stringent and at times alarming ethic – one in which truth seems achievable only through purgatorial detachment from life. Flaubert, the Flaubert of “l’art pour l’art”, is supposed to have returned from a routine social visit in an unusually reflective mood: “ils sont dans le vrai”, he said of the family he had just seen. (He was not usually so mellow about ordinary life.) But Proust sometimes thought art itself was a way of living in the truth. Sometimes this produces a certain triumphalism. When in the Search the writer Bergotte dies after visiting an exhibition of Vermeer paintings, the narrator imagines that his books, opened in the windows of the bookshops as a tribute to him, are like a sign of his resurrection. The appropriation of religious imagery in such a context, and the use of sacramental language in Proust’s work as a whole (the “petite madeleine” that in Swann’s Way signals the living return of the apparently dead past – like its namesake Mary Magdalen), may give us pause: the Bergotte episode is made more poignant and personal by the fact that it is the near-transcription of Proust’s own experience, since he himself attended a Vermeer exhibition shortly before his death – there is, as it were, a delightfully modest little cough and a questioning, smiling “me too?” in this meditation on the immortality of the artist, and it is all kept in a relatively low key (the rococo rustle of those angels with their paper wings…). The negative side of this is the way that, from the Pleasures to the very end of the Search, Proust seems at times to be adumbrating the idea that only artists (the “creative”) are saved: it’s the cork-lined room and the three-thousand page epic or nothing – thus says the Gospel of St Marcel. There is harshness as well as empathy in his attitude towards the failures and wasters he depicts, starting with Baldassare Silvande and Violante and Honoré in the Pleasures and extending to almost everyone in the Search. Art is a strenuous deity, much less forgiving than other gods, and the service of art, he seems to be saying, is the only authentic life in a world given over to illusion and gossip and what Pascal called “divertissement”. But it is far from sure that this is really a creed that can be deduced from Proust’s work as a whole (he could be just as harsh on the “idolaters” of art as on the philistines; and while philistinism is a shame, idolatry is a sin). The epigrams of the Pleasures and the theorizing of the Search are one thing, but the text itself indicates something quite different. Proust’s characters, whether or not they are artists, whether or not they find some truth amid the trivia, whether they are callous and footling time-servers or examples of the most solicitudinous loving-kindness (the narrator’s mother and grandmother in the Search), have what dignity they have, not because of the way they look at life but because of the way they are looked at by others (as the Pleasures repeatedly point out, we are often quite unaware of the effect we have on other people, who may understand our lives better than we do) – looked at by one other in particular, by the novelist who notices everything, and for whom, as for Kierkegaard, all things are fraught with mystery, from the Incarnation to the buzzing of a fly – or the importance of wearing the “right” shoes. His characters live because he has brought them into being: his eye (the eye of someone simply more human than most of us) has rested on them and seen them for what they are. The clarity of this gaze, which through its tenderness, amusement an
d indignation cares even about those who have signally failed to live in the truth, has something maternal about it.
– Andrew Brown
This translation is dedicated, with much love, to the memory of my mother (d. January 2004).
Pleasures and Days
Preface
Why did he ask me to present his book to curious minds? And why did I promise to take on this highly agreeable but quite unnecessary task? His book is like a young face full of rare charm and elegant grace. It is self-recommending, tells us about itself and presents itself in spite of itself.
True, it is a young book. It is young as its author is young. But it is an old book too, as old as the world. It is the spring of leaves on ancient branches, in the age-old forest. One is tempted to say that the new shoots are saddened by the long past of the woods and are wearing mourning for so many dead springs.
The grave Hesiod recited his Works and Days to the goatherds of Helicon.* It is a more melancholy task to recite Pleasures and Days to our high society gentlemen and ladies if, as the well-known English man of state claims, life would be quite tolerable if it were not for pleasures.* So our young friend’s book has weary smiles and postures of fatigue that are deprived neither or beauty nor of nobility.
Even his sadness will be found to be pleasing and full of variety, conducted as it is and sustained by a marvellous spirit of observation, and a supple, penetrating and truly subtle intelligence. This calendar of Pleasures and Days marks both the hours of nature, in its harmonious depictions of the sky, the sea and the woods, and the hours of humankind in its faithful portraits and its genre paintings, with their wonderful finish.
Marcel Proust delights equally in describing the desolate splendour of the sunset and the agitated vanities of a snobbish soul. He excels in recounting the elegant sorrows and the artificial sufferings that are at least the equal in cruelty of those which nature showers on us with maternal prodigality. I must confess that I find these invented sufferings, these pains discovered by human genius, these sorrows of art, enormously interesting and valuable, and I am grateful to Marcel Proust for having studied and described a few choice examples.
He lures us into a greenhouse atmosphere and detains us there, amid wild orchids that do not draw the nourishment for their strange and unhealthy beauty from this earth. Suddenly there passes, through the heavy and languid air, a bright and shining arrow, a flash of lightning which, like the ray of the German doctor,* can go right through bodies. At a stroke the poet has penetrated secret thoughts and hidden desires.
This is his manner, and his art. He here shows a sureness of touch surprising in such a young archer. He is not at all innocent. But he is so sincere and so authentic that he appears naive, and as such we like him. There is something in him of a depraved Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and an ingenuous Petronius.*
What a fortunate book is his! It will go all round the town adorned and perfumed by the flowers strewn on it by Madeleine Lemaire,* with that divine hand which scatters the roses with their dew.
– Anatole France
Paris, 21st April 1896
To My Friend Willie Heath
Died in Paris 3rd October 1893*
From the lap of God in which you rest… reveal to me those truths which conquer death, prevent us from fearing it and almost make us love it.*
The ancient Greeks brought cakes, milk and wine for their dead. Seduced by a more refined illusion, if not by one that is any wiser, we offer them flowers and books. If I am giving you this one, it is first and foremost because it is a book of images. Despite the “legends”, it will be, if not read, at least looked at by all the admirers of that great artist who has given me, without any affectation, this magnificent present, the woman of whom we might well say, adapting Dumas’s words, “that she is the one who has created the most roses after God”.* M. Robert de Montesquiou* has also celebrated her, in poems as yet unpublished, with that ingenious gravity, that sententious and subtle eloquence, that rigorous form which at times in his work recalls the seventeenth century. He tells her, speaking of flowers:
Posing for your paintbrush encourages them to bloom […]
You are their Vigée* and you are Flora too,
Who brings them immortality, where she brings only doom!
Her admirers are an elite, and there is a host of them. It was my wish that on the first page they should see the name of the man they had no time to become acquainted with and whom they would have admired. I myself, dear friend, knew you for only a very short time. It was in the Bois de Boulogne that I would often meet you in the mornings: you had spotted me coming and were waiting for me beneath the trees, erect but relaxed, like one of those great lords painted by Van Dyck,* whose pensive elegance you shared. And indeed their elegance, like yours, resides less in clothes than in the body, and their bodies seem to have received it and to continue ceaselessly to receive it from their souls: it is a moral elegance. And everything, moreover, helped to bring out that melancholy resemblance, even the background of foliage in whose shadow Van Dyck often caught and fixed a king taking a stroll; like so many of those who were his models, you were soon to die, and in your eyes as in their eyes one could see alternately the shades of presentiment and the gentle light of resignation. But if the grace of your pride belonged by right to the art of a Van Dyck, you were much closer to Leonardo da Vinci by the mysterious intensity of your spiritual life. Often, your finger raised, your eyes impenetrable and smiling at the sight of the enigma you kept to yourself, you struck me as Leonardo’s John the Baptist. Then we came up with the dream, almost the plan, of living more and more with each other, in a circle of magnanimous and well-chosen men and women, far enough from stupidity, vice and malice to feel safe from their vulgar arrows.
Your life, as you wished it to be, would comprise one of those works of art which require a lofty inspiration. Like faith and genius, we can receive this inspiration from the hands of love. But it was death that would give it to you. In it too and even in its approach reside hidden strength, secret aid, a “grace” which is not found in life. Just like lovers when they start to love, like poets at the time when they sing, those who are ill feel closer to their souls. Life is hard when it wraps us in too tight an embrace, and perpetually hurts our souls. When we sense its bonds relaxing for a moment, we can experience gentle moments of lucidity and foresight. When I was still a child, no other character in sacred history seemed to me to have such a wretched fate as Noah, because of the flood which kept him trapped in the ark for forty days. Later on, I was often ill, and for days on end I too was forced to stay in the “ark”. Then I realized that Noah was never able to see the world so clearly as from the ark, despite its being closed and the fact that it was night on earth. When my convalescence began, my mother, who had not left me, and would even, at night-time, remain by my side, “opened the window of the ark”, and went out. But, like the dove, “she came back in the evening”. Then I was altogether cured, and like the dove “she returned not again”.* I had to start to live once more, to turn away from myself, to listen to words harder than those my mother spoke; what was more, even her words, perpetually gentle until then, were no longer the same, but were imbued with the severity of life and of the duties she was obliged to teach me. Gentle dove of the flood, seeing you depart, how can one imagine that the patriarch did not feel a certain sadness mingling with his joy at the rebirth of the world? How gentle is that suspended animation, that veritable “Truce of God” which brings to a halt our labours and evil desires! What “grace” there is in illness, which brings us closer to the realities beyond death – and its graces too, the graces of its “vain adornments and oppressive veils”, the hair that an importunate hand “has carefully gathered”,* the soft mild acts of a mother’s or friend’s faithfulness that so often appeared to us wearing the very face of our sadness, or as the protective gesture that our weakness had implored, and which will stop on the thresho
ld of convalescence; often I have suffered at feeling that you were so far away from me, all of you, the exiled descendants of the dove from the ark. And who indeed has not experienced those moments, my dear Willie, in which he would like to be where you are? We assume so many responsibilities towards life that there comes a time when, discouraged at the impossibility of ever being able to fulfil them all, we turn towards the tombs, we call on death, “death who comes to the aid of destinies that are difficult to accomplish”.* But if she unbinds us from the responsibilities we have assumed towards life, she cannot unbind us from those we have assumed towards ourselves, the first and foremost in particular – that of living so as to be worth something, and to gain merit.
More serious than any of us, you were also more childlike than anyone, not only in purity of heart, but in your innocent and delightful gaiety. Charles de Grancey had a gift which I envied him, that of being able, with memories of your schooldays, to arouse all of a sudden that laughter that never slumbered for long within you, and that we will hear no more.
If some of these pages were written at the age of twenty-three, many others (‘Violante’, almost all the ‘Fragments from Italian Comedy’, etc.) date from my twentieth year. All of them are merely the vain foam of a life that was agitated but is now calming down. May that life one day be limpid enough for the Muses to deign to gaze at themselves in it and for the reflection of their smiles and their dances to dart across its surface!