Muriel Spark, “A Far Cry from Kensington”

“So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to the silence. Eventually, I fell asleep contented, filled with soundlessness, but while I was awake I enjoyed the experience of darkness, thought, memory, sweet anticipations.”

Does that remind you of anything? Yup, me too: surely we’re not wrong in thinking of the first page of Swann’s Way, when the narrator says “For a long time I would go to bed early” and goes on (and on and on …) to discuss the process of falling asleep, invoking darkness, thoughts, memories. When I first read A Far Cry from Kensington back in 1988 Marcel Proust was the furthest thing from my mind but now that I’m sleeping with him, I see him everywhere.  I wouldn’t care to sit at a seminar table and defend a Proustian reading of A Far Cry… but there are interesting parallels aside from the opening and aside from Spark’s recurrent insistence on sleep.

Mrs. Hawkins' London

Her narrator, Mrs. Hawkins, is looking back on a certain period of her life — a year or so in 1954-5, when she lived in a rooming house in South Kensington. She works at several successive literary enterprises, two publishers and a literary magazine. In the course of the novel, she transforms herself by losing a great deal of weight. In the process, her life is altered because everyone interacts with her differently. She becomes, actually, younger, shedding her authority as she sheds pounds.

The tone is miles from Proustian. Spark’s bracing prose is a marvel of economy and grace. What’s more, the novel is funny. Mrs. Hawkins takes against a literary hanger-on named Hector Bartlett who wants her to promote his career. Early in the novel he asks her, “Won’t you call me Hector?” and she replies, “No, I call you Pisseur de copie” — a term that she claims originates with a French symbolist writer. They become enemies, of course, in the small world of post-war English publishing. But there are further complications involving a lady novelist, a Polish seamstress, and a psuedo-science called “radionics.” It’s all very entertaining and wry.

So, then… Proust? Spark stitches the narrative back and forth in time, bringing us up to the present, diving back into the past, lying in bed and thinking things over. And what seems most Proustian to me is her emphasis on the slippery quality of perception and judgment. From a mere name (say, “the princess of Guermantes”) Proust’s narrator invents a character, a past, an entire milieu. Mrs. Hawkins, sure of her own good sense, does likewise. She makes assumptions and fills in gaps, erroneously. As she says, late in the book, “What did I really know of all the people I had met in the offices where I had worked, day after day?” There are other common points: the emphasis on literature, the gay couple who are her last bosses. I could amuse myself by comparing Mrs. Hawkins’ attendance at a formal dinner party to any one of a number of Proustian social events. The contrast between Proust’s curlicues and Spark’s declaratives gives me great pleasure, even if this is just my little literary conceit.

And for those of you who are keeping track, this is another treat from the magical laundry-room book shelf. A first edition, no less!

Marcel Proust, “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs”/”Within a Budding Grove”

I may be slow, but I am persistent. Thus, more than eighteen months after finishing Du côté de chez Swann/Swann’s Way, I have finally read the last page of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs/Within a Budding Grove. A few months ago I met a woman at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and we got to talking about Proust. She said, “you will really like Le Côté des Guermantes, that’s where things start happening.” I protested faintly but I could not deny that A l’ombre… is somewhat lacking in discernible incident.

The first section concerns the activities of the Narrator who is now in his teens, beginning to think about his place in the world. His great obsession is Gilberte Swann, the daughter of his parents’ old friend Swann and Swann’s wife Odette. He plays with Gilberte (plays? surely too old for this?), visits the Swann household, observes with great care the luxury of the house and especially Madame Swann’s elegance. He begins to understand Madame Swann’s dubious place in society, since she was a courtesan before she married Swann. The Narrator is also finally permitted to go to the theater to see the great actress Berma perform — not what he had hoped, as it turns out. In fact as the Narrator’s world widens he begins to understand how his expectations affect his experiences.

Cabourg, France, is the model for Balbec. This hotel looks about right.

Part Two takes us to the seaside resort of Balbec, which the Narrator visits with his grandmother – not without a great deal of familiar anxiety as to his health and the logistics of getting there. Hotel life, observed with Proust’s eagle eye, is deeply fascinating, from the pretensions of the manager to the crushing grandeur of the baron de Charlus, whom we meet for the first time. I deeply appreciated the scene where his nephew the godlike Saint-Loup, the Narrator’s fast friend, introduces them and Charlus offers his two fingers to shake, without looking him in the eye. Humiliating politeness from “mon oncle Palamède!”

Finally, we reach the long section when the Narrator becomes involved with the “little band” of girls who haunt Balbec. They are not aristocratic — far from it — and not actually terribly interesting. In fact the Narrator is haunted first by the group, and decides more or less blindly which girl it is who interests him the most. His favor falls on Albertine — it was Albertine he liked best? He spends a great deal of time with the girls, lolling around on the cliff tops, playing silly girl games, neglecting his grand friend Saint-Loup… and then the summer is over. Once again, completely different from what he expected. Once again, time has escaped him.

Henry Green, “Party Going”

Oh, Henry Green! Such a trickster! Since Party Going is the third short novel included in the volume I received last month, I was not actually expecting party coverage in the style of M. Proust. Oh, no. But I was a little bit startled that the tale began with a dead pigeon. Yes, dear reader, here are the opening lines:

Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once. She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon.

Trains to the Continent leave from Victoria Station, as they did in the 1930s.

And if you think you are going to find out why Miss Fellowes gets so attached to that pigeon, let me set you straight. She does take it into the ladies’ room at the train station and wash it in the sink, observed by two retired nannies whom she knows slightly. Then she has it packaged in paper and twine and keeps it with her until …. OK. I don’t know where Miss Fellowes loses her pigeon. All is confusion.

But you see, that’s the story. All is confusion. Fog has entered a vast train station, so thick that trains are no longer departing. A group of rich and fashionable Young People assembles there for a trip to the South of France (the “party” of the title). They are all the guests of Mr. Max Adey, a young man so wealthy, so handsome, and so free of personality that he could easily turn up on the cover of a current issue of Vanity Fair. As the station becomes ever more crowded, the “party” retreats to the station hotel where they look down from their windows to “the people” below — depersonalized, of course, and somewhat menacing. Green descends from time to time into the crowd to visit with the servants who stand watch over the luggage, and to expose the network of dependence, resentment, and respect that connects these two classes.

Action? No, not really. Amabel takes a bath. Julia flirts with Max. Claire is unpleasant to her husband. They all chew over an inconsequential piece of gossip about a man known as “Embassy Richard.” Green manages to recreate the disorienting feeling of such travel glitches (think O’Hare Airport in a snowstorm) while commenting on the ever-fascinating class issues. Yes, the traditions of linear narrative fiction do fall by the wayside and yes, this does make Party Going a faintly tedious read. Yet of the three novellas in this volume, it may turn out to be the most memorable.

Ian McEwan, “Saturday”

Have I told you already how much I love the book exchange shelf in my laundry room? Sure, there’s a lot of James Patterson, but sometimes such finds! Last week I went down to do a load of darks and came back with Saturday and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit! And as it turned out, Saturday was the perfect book to read after Man with a Blue Scarf. Best of all, I was able to read Saturday in more or less one sitting, which was the ideal reading condition for a book that takes place over the course of one day.

So we’ll get Proust out of the way first, OK? When I say “takes place over the course of one day,” we do go through 24 hours with Henry Perowne, the 46-year-old English neurosurgeon who is Ian McEwan’s protagonist. But in the course of that day, Perowne’s memory travels through his past. As when we follow Proust’s narrator, we wander from the novelistic “now” (say, Perowne kissing his wife) to the remembered “then” (Perowne meting his wife). With a tug of the thread, we are brought back to the fictional present and reinserted into the course of the day. And Perowne (as with Proust’s narrator) doesn’t just remember things, he thinks about them. He ruminates, turning over his ideas about life, incidents of his day, his work, his children, his past, the nature of memory, the flow of his moods, the way they affect his perception.

And here’s where we get to Martin Gayford, for McEwan’s subject is the age-old question of where consciousness/identity/the soul resides. Perowne, as befits a neurosurgeon, is a resolute materialist. In his view, the brain produces the mind. In Man with a Blue Scarf, Lucian Freud is also seeking a kind of essence, and produces it in material form through artistic effort. McEwan makes Perowne almost completely resistant to that kind of incalculable, ungovernable impulse — almost. But he gives Perowne artistic children, a son who plays the blues and a daughter who is a just-published poet. They parse the world differently from the way he does, and despite his bafflement, he tries to follow them. And in his effort to process the novel’s denouement, Perowne resorts to story-telling.

Another strong tie to the Gayford book is the focus on the physical qualities of man: hair, skin, bone structure. A passage in Saturday about the musculature of the face might have come from Man with a Blue Scarf. McEwan, like Gayford, seems to find great reward in hard work. At the end of his long day Perowne performs surgery and reflects on why it satisfies him more than anything else in his life. “For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even all awareness of his own existence has vanished… This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger.” Lucian Freud might have said the same thing about painting a portrait.

Graham Robb, “Parisians”

Graham Robb must have had a wonderful time writing Parisians. I don’t mean to imply that it wasn’t a lot of work: this book is incredibly carefully researched. It’s subtitled “An Adventure History of Paris” and it consists of eighteen episodes (with a prologue and an epilogue) each of which focuses on one telling event in the city’s history. We get Napoleon losing his virginity; the debut of the straight play of La Vie de Bohème; Marcel Proust not taking the subway; assassination attempts on François Mitterand and Charles de Gaulle, and so on, right up to the riots in Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005. The book would have been good if Robb had simply written it straight. He has a novelist’s imagination, and though strict historians may balk at his lavish supply of speculative detail — for, after all, can we really know what the Palais-Royal smelled like in 1787? — I drank it all in.

cover of "Parisians"

But what makes The Parisians as entertaining as it is informative is Robb’s choice to assume the voices and forms he deems appropriate for each part. I have to admit to some annoyance with the screenplay format of the section about Juliette Gréco and the Existentialists, but that was more than redeemed for me by the account of May ’68 which Robb delivers in the form of an academic essay. On the new swimming pool at the University of Nanterre, he writes “On one level, it was a place where boys and girls could enact a visual exchange without implicating themselves in a contractual obligation. Swimwear exposed up to nine-tenths of the body, and packaged and commodified the remaining parts.” This chapter includes a discussion on the symbolic use, in 1968, of the famous French cobble stones, or pavés, as weapons. Since I’ve thought a great deal about this (is there not a French pastry called a pavé? Something like a scone?) I found that intensely gratifying.

The segment on the Occupation is narrated in part from the point of view of French children. The part called “Marcel in the Métro” mercifully does not attempt Proustian complexity but compares  À la Recherche ... to other artifacts of modernity “with its gleaming inscrutability, the flawless circuitry of its sentences and its bewildering modes of efficiency…” The section called “Regression” (about the Commune and colonialism, among other things) is written more or less backwards.

Other chapters are written in a straightforward manner with all the grace one could hope for.  Robb is generous, funny, and always looks for both the narrative impulse and the wider significance of each story he tells. I was enchanted by the chapter called “Files of the Sûreté” which summarizes, to the extent possible, the career of that eminent nineteenth-century criminal/policeman/detective/crook (that’s a chronological summary) Vidocq. The sources are as slippery as the subject.

Robb’s main point is that Paris, as a great city, is in constant flux. Its stories exist and vanish, as do its buildings and even its underpinnings. I can’t help wondering if this is true of all great cities, or if it isn’t an especially a Parisian characteristic?

Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way”

I really don’t know what to say about this. My Proust project has been pretty much separate from the rest of my reading. I’ve always had an idea that In Search of Lost Time was something that I’d only appreciate in late middle age, like string quartets and the operas of Wagner. (I’m not doing very well on the latter two categories, I’ll admit.) So I guess I thought it was time. I’d tried before, and gotten maybe midway through the second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. This time around I thought I’d try it in French, and that has been the magic touch. I found it unbearably slow going in English. It’s even slower in French, but I expect it to be, and there’s a great deal of pleasure in puzzling out the sentences, matching up the pronouns and antecedents, threading back half a page to pick up the subject of a verb. Add to this the fact that I’m reading at at night, before I go to sleep, and that it functions almost as well as Ambien. No wonder it’s taken me four months to get through it.

Marcel Proust

But I’m enjoying it mightily. I got hold of a 1970s three-volume Pléiade edition, with its brown leather cover and yellow ribbon markers, and thin strong paper. Very satisfying to hold. And the contents have the same quality of sensory satisfaction. There’s not much of a discernible plot. For so many pages (months, in my reading) the narrator was just trying to get to sleep — like me! There was real enchantment in settling down at night into this sea of words.

Of course I’m not very sharp at 10 p.m. Or is it that my critical faculty is suspended for this book? (Books — I do intend to read the whole thing, though it will probably take a couple of years.) Probably the most effective way to do it would be to circle back around right now and read Swann’s Way again, to see if I can get a grip on the structure. As a small-picture person, I am overwhelmed by the scope of this thing. Imagine, then, my excitement when on the penultimate page, Proust refers both backward to earlier in his tale and forward, to “instants like those when (as we will see later on) I was unable to discover the pleasures that I desired.” At least the author was in charge. That reassured me. And, yes, I did discern the parallels between the narrator’s obsession with Gilberte and Swann’s obsession with Odette. I got it that Proust is exploring the slippery quality of perception and memory. But what I look forward to every night is entering his incredibly sensual world, vivid with sights and odors and gossip and fabrics and the quality of light slanting through an old pane of glass.