987 Words: Remembrance of Things Proust

Celebrating major anniversaries of someone's birth makes sense though many of us fall short of bringing balloons and gobbling down cake. "Observing" the date someone died on (since "celebrating" sounds ghoulish) presents different issues, more as a way to commemorate someone influential in our own lives, examining a legacy that brings us enjoyment or inspiration.

The Centennial of the death of Marcel Proust, which occurs today, probably isn't going to draw big crowds in Paris streets. Where are the annual celebrations like Bloomsday recreating scenes from James Joyce's Ulysses?

Few fans today will be re-enacting Proust's narrator eating a madeleine with tea; visiting a male brothel to watch some aristocrat beaten until "blood spurts everywhere;" attending soirees hoping someone will talk to you; or desperately feigning symptoms of an illness to coerce your mother into coming up to give you that all-important bedtime kiss.

Two of my favorite authors – or rather their works influencing my own attempts to become a writer (which is, at its core, one of the things Proust's In Search of Lost Time is "about") – are Proust and Joyce. And Henry James (okay, three of my favorite authors...) and Monty Python (which probably no one expected). Four more disparate styles would be hard to imagine coexisting in one creative psyche and yet they've informed all six of the novels I've written and all the music I'm still trying to compose.

Curiously, with the exception of Monty Python (whatever you want to call it, it certainly had a "style"), they were all creating their most influential works in the first decades of the 20th Century. Henry James came into the realization of his final masterpieces including The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl between 1902 and 1904. James Joyce began the long journey of Ulysses, which takes place on a beautiful June Day in 1904, ten years later. Proust attended the premiere of Le Sacre while correcting proofs for Swann's Way.

When Joyce finally published Ulysses in February, 1922, Proust was anxiously finalizing two more of the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time while still planning additional volumes that would be inserted between The Fugitive and the concluding volume, Time Regained, which he'd already completed in 1916.

But he died on November 18th, 1922.

Not a scholar, I'm not intending to write about Proust's life (or, given the date, his death), and if you don't know what In Search of Lost Time is – or Remembrance of Things Past if you grew up, as I did, on the original English translation – you should probably check out some other sources first. It's clearly one of The Great Novels but I'd always put it off because of books entitled "How to Read Proust." I'd fall asleep after a few pages more likely because it bored me.

While I may research the life of a particular composer to better understand his music in the context of its creation, I've rarely done this with an author (except Henry James; that's another story). I scoffed at needing to read a biography of Proust if I've already read his novel: it's famously autobiographical, isn't it?

I'm not sure how many biographies of Proust are out there or if the only one I own (and never cracked open until last night), Ronald Hayman's 1990 Proust, is even the best one. I'd probably be intimidated meeting Henry James and confused by James Joyce; Proust, as a person, would probably have repelled me.

In this short essay – imagine praising Proust in 987 words when his novel of 3,275 pages (in the edition I started with) contains roughly 1,405,000 words – I need to distinguish between work and artist.

For my 32^nd birthday, an actor-friend gave me Part One of the new Random House edition of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past because, he said, "now that you've survived 30, you're ready for Proust." I'm not sure what that implied (he'd turn 30 himself weeks later) but I've had few gifts offer such long-lasting rewards. Since then, I've read the complete novel once through, Swann's Way twice by itself, before starting up again, most recently with the more current Penguin translations up to the fourth volume, Sodom & Gomorrah.

It's the fifth and sixth volumes I found the most tedious to deal with: if Swann's Way opened with 30 pages about turning over in his sleep, I swear 40 pages of The Prisoner were about him buying his mistress a hat. His paranoid obsession with Albertine, even after her death, would drive anyone crazy.

At first, when I decided to try my hand at writing a novel (not a short story), I made the mistake of imitating Proust and before filling hundreds of pages with outright, indigestible trash, I discovered that's not something you can do any more than you could imitate Beethoven starting out first composing a symphony.

That didn't mean Proust's ideas about what a novel could be couldn't, more importantly for me, inspire me to figure out what my novel could be, and maybe help me find my own voice.

For me (and many other writers and readers), the most significant adjustment came in realizing the role of memory and how it can work, the famous Madeleine Scene being just one of many instances. For Proust's narrator (conveniently named Marcel), it begins a journey back to his childhood, and from there the whole novel springs. It annoyed me, beyond this initial "Time Traveling" and occasional flash-backs, the story moved forward in a fairly straight chronological line. But still, the fluidity of memory in the opening pages set the stage.

My own novels, their Proustian parodies and puns aside (In Search of Tom Purdue?), are often defined by little nuggets of inspiration lovingly pilfered from different passages in À la recherche du temps perdu. Finishing The Salieri Effect's impact on Tom, I'm ready for the next volume.

So, Happy Death Day to you, Marcel Proust!

Marcel Proust on his deathbed (sketch by Paul-César Helleu)

– Dick Strawser

Read my second installment for the Proust Centennial, "987 Words about Proust's Remains," here...