987 Words about Proust's Remains

The grave at Paris' Père Lachaise Cemetery

There's a certain wistfulness, when an artist dies in the midst of working, to discover something left incomplete (or, worse, incompletable): imagine "What If...?," holding sketches for that 10th Symphony found in Beethoven's desk? The mind has stopped creating; the body, living. Published works live on; the possibility of works that weren't finished tantalizingly survive. Even though you may own or even have read the complete À la recherche du temps perdu, it's not that easy when you realize he hadn't really finished it – when then, voilá, Proust died.

And when he died, we were told his vast novel, the only major work he wrote, was "more or less" complete. At least, that's the "short" version one usually reads in those biographical summaries. Of its seven volumes, each one a separate novel, the last three were published posthumously, but he hadn't finished editing them.

Keep in mind, this means we have no definitive version of what Proust intended to do with this apparently never-ending novel which he'd initially planned as two or three novels, ending with Time Regained. It's not really a finite story: the hero isn't born and then dies; a goal isn't necessarily sought and ultimately reached. But there are telling details – the myriad "What Ifs?" of the imagination's potential – many of which I've found in Ronald Hayman's 1990 biography, making me wish I'd at least paged through it years before.

When World War I started and his publishers put everything on hold for the duration, Proust decided to fill things in. Otherwise, instead of sequels or pre-quels, he might have published some... well, "mid-quels." I knew, courtesy of various introductions to those volumes of the novel I'd read, how he gradually inserted four new novels. I was less interested in these details at the time, more concerned with trying to figure out what was going on. Keeping Proust's cast of thousands and reading voluminous explanatory footnotes was enough work.

While the opening, Swann's Way, first appeared in bookshops on November 11th, 1913, Hayman mentions Proust's secretary had already been typing up the manuscript for the novel's second part before he quit that December. In June, Proust was correcting new proofs but war broke out by August; and by January, the publication was officially suspended.

This second part, completed in 1914, had not yet been definitively titled – in fact, the whole novel underwent numerous title transformations – and Proust continued adding new characters like Albertine into an organically evolving plot. Knowing how he wanted it to end, what was originally the middle volume became five, one thing leading inevitably to another. Throughout the course of the war, he exasperated his publisher by adding and revising these new volumes even after the Armistice. By then constantly ill, Proust would add this disclaimer: if only he lived.

Photograph of Proust writing letters in bed (c.1913)

In February, 1922, Proust still wrote there'd be more books to come, inserting "whole volumes" between The Fugitive and Time Regained. He told his publisher, "À la recherche du temps perdu is scarcely beginning." Then, in the early spring that year, he told his housekeeper, "Last night, I wrote 'The End.' Now I can die."

Proofs for The Prisoner

Since he'd begun correcting the initial proofs of Swann's Way by 1913, Proust's usual approach to editing was not to make corrections or small cuts but to add new text and lots of it, resulting in margins filled with additional lines and scraps of paper inserted between or pasted onto the original (the famous paperolles).

In 1921, he told his current publisher the sequence following the death of Albertine was better than anything he'd ever written. But even this was being considerably revised, eventually causing lots of unresolvable confusion.

In The Fugitive, Albertine, the Narrator's mistress, escapes from his control and dies in a riding accident. The Narrator then spends the rest of the volume trying to prove she'd been having lesbian affairs. In the new version, cutting some 250 pages from the proofs, she dies along a river, his ensuing obsession considerably reduced.

By August, 1922, he'd called this new, shortened version Albertine disparue ("Albertine Missing") but his posthumous editors eventually suppressed the revision. The typescript itself "went missing," not to be discovered and published until 1987.

In October, after finishing work on The Prisoner, he resumed editing The Fugitive, before he decided to change the title to Albertine disparue, hoping to avoid any confusion with Tagore's new novel, The Fugitive. Some published editions would call Proust's sixth volume La fugitive and others, Albertine disparue, but only the title had been changed.

The cork-lined bedroom Proust rarely left

The confusion is not entirely unexpected, given Proust worked from his sickbed, rarely leaving his apartment during these last few years. By June, he continued editing even though his temperature was often around 102°. In August, he couldn't tell his typist what he wanted her to do; in September, he had several severe asthma attacks.

His eyesight deteriorated, he had periods of giddiness, flu turned into bronchitis. He tried to stand up but often "fell over." By November, bronchitis became pneumonia. But he continued to edit his novel's proofs.

One major problem with the revised Albertine disparue (not to mention several other last-minute revisions) was, there was no easy continuity with the opening of Time Regained, even as to where it should begin. Would he have inserted another volume about those years his Narrator spent in a sanatorium during and immediately after the War?

There were minor, contradictory details still needing clarification that perhaps another pair of eyes might find so he could correct them. Yet, considering how his creative process worked, could he have ever finished it...?

Looking at the piles of papers left in Proust's room, there was no way, now, there'd ever be "a definitive text." Ironically, on November 18th, Marcel Proust ran out of Time. He was 51. 

Regardless of his having written "The End," his novel still wasn't quite finished when his funeral was held on November 22nd.

– Dick Strawser

Read my 1st installment for The Proust Centennial, "987 Words: Remembrance of Things Proust," here... 

 

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...

987 Words with The Salieri Effect: On Parody

Salvador Dali as Mona Lisa (1973)

Today, we usually associate “Parody” with something funny. The Onion satirizes the news with far-fetched “take-offs” which over the years, as we've sadly discovered, have become increasingly challenging to determine which one is true? Perhaps “Saturday Night Live,” approaching an event from a different context, might point out an absurdity that could otherwise go overlooked.

To someone studying music history, a “parody” can also be the way a Renaissance composer would build on a piece of pre-existing music and use it as a foundation for his own original composition.

When someone asked Igor Stravinsky about his borrowing a bit of Bach for his “Dumbarton Oaks” or Tchaikovsky for his ballet “The Fairy's Kiss,” he said rather pithily, “All composers borrow. Great composers steal.” They could've mentioned his quoting real Russian folk tunes in Petrushka, but apparently Anonymous isn't afforded the same level of concern.

In literature, there are only so many plots to go around before someone says “you're ripping off Shakespeare” who no doubt ripped it off from some earlier source, not for lack of any imagination. But how are you ripping it off? Changing the names and calling it “recycling”? Or reinterpreting it with your own insights?

DaPonte's play written for Mozart's Cosí fan tutte wasn't based on an already-existing play typically about Roman history or Greek mythology. It was supposedly inspired by court gossip, a bit shocking in its day.

If Handel incorporated another London composer's tune into his Messiah, we think nothing of it today because we've lost any familiarity with the original and the idea of plagiarism at this distance is moot. Handel's excuse was “it's a great tune but he had no idea what to do with it,” and, apparently, Handel did.

With Stravinsky, listening to “Dumbarton Oaks” and Bach's 3rd Brandenburg side-by-side, we can hear the difference and recognize which is whose. For Stravinsky, Bach's a jumping-off point, catching a ball and running with it.

Stravinsky meets Brahms' critic

When somebody pointed out the similarity between Brahms' big chorale in his 1st Symphony's finale and Beethoven's “Ode to Joy,” as if this were something unethical, Brahms typically replied, “Any ass can see that!” Beethoven's spirit, this giant treading behind him, infused the whole symphony, consciously or not, as if paying homage to The Master.

If the opening of my Salieri Effect seems familiar, it's meant to be. Since references to Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu permeate the trilogy's first novel beyond its title, In Search of Tom Purdue, the appearance here of something straight out of the opening of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice may be surprising.

What are the implications of this reference? It's more than a mere tip-of-the-hat to Proust's famous opening line when, in my first volume, Alma Viva, the initial victim, gets off the bus for work.

But Salieri opens on a deeper parody: readers familiar with Mann's opening will imagine Aschenbach walking around Munich and running into a weird stranger, left with the impression he should visit some exotic place. Readers may make connections to my character which, as adventures unfold, might lead them to discover more insights along the way.

My character Dr. Richard Kerr (“famous among my friends”) isn't dissimilar from Mann's once-confident Aschenbach: both middle-aged men, Aschenbach's name means “Ash-Brook,” and Kerr's comes from “Ricercar,” meaning “to seek,” as in “musical detective.” Both are experiencing creative difficulties; both, primarily logical in their approach to life, are about to make sudden, irrational, life-changing decisions.

Call these references “Easter Eggs,” treats left for perceptive readers, but to anyone unfamiliar with Mann, it's just another scene. “Self-referential,” “inside jokes,” or just “me showing off,” they're another layer of perception.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Another key element of Mann's story is the conflict between Aschenbach's logical mind and his emotional response to meeting young Tadzio who becomes the writer's obsession, an internal conflict that leads to Aschenbach's death. While there may be no “Tadzio Component” in my mystery, the duality between logic and the irrational is a principal theme. Kerr prides himself on his intellectual approach (he knows a lot of facts) but, as in past novels, it's these leaps into the irrational, the “gut-feeling” Cameron points out, that always crack the case.

There is another level of reference with Kerr's stranger who, unlike Aschenbach's, has a name: Dionisio Ciapollo. In Mann's story Mario and the Magician, the evil hypnotist is named Cipolla which means, literally, “onion.” Cipolla is a study in the rise of Fascism, the story published in 1929, four years after Mussolini became Italy's dictator.

Aschenbach, being a writer, imagines his stranger's story; Kerr's hands him a card which, like him, is nearly unintelligible, then disappears. Ciapollo is both Dionysus and Apollo, wild Romantic nature and Classical clarity combined. Apollo represents the logic of structure, the focus of balance; Dionysus is ruled by the emotions and abhors staying “inside-the-box.”

The creative conflict between emotions (the Dionysian Right-Brain) and intellect (the Apollonian Left-Brain) is a key component of the entire trilogy. The Sisyphian Rhapsody will add another layer of parody involving Greek mythological characters.

There are lesser levels of parody, sometimes a simple reference of a name (which I'll get to in a later post). Two minor characters in Venice will become more prominent in the 3rd Volume, musicologists Pentheo Agavinelli and Tiresio Creontini, named after roles in Euripides' The Bacchae, at the very core of this Logical-Irrational Conflict.

The whole family at Phlaumix Court, originally introduced in The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, is a parody of TV's Downton Abbey. Names for the Ravensmoors, Lady Vexilla's ancestors, are references from Edgar Allan Poe.

Famously, Mann's Venetian novella ends with the plague, however you view the symbolism. Without giving away any spoilers, aside from having finished my novel during the Pandemic of 2020, there is no plague here.

The Salieri Effect is set in 2016; The Sisyphian Rhapsody ends in December, 2019, before the outbreak of Covid-19. And yet...?

- Dick Strawser

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You can read the previous column "Behind the Scenes in 987 Words" - the novel's Origin Story - here. The next one may be "Place-Names: The Place" and should be published sometime soon...

987 Words with "The Salieri Effect": The Origin Story

M. Proust, Cat-about-Town

Since today is the 151^st Anniversary of Marcel Proust's birth, I thought I'd go behind the scenes at The Salieri Effect – you can read the Introduction, here – to tell you where it all began, back when I first cracked open Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (or, as it's known today, In Search of Lost Time).

First of all, I'm a composer (or at least trained as one) and began writing novels to explore my own creativity. So, in 987 words, let's step back to a distant time and place.

= = = = = = =

As often happens in the creative process, one thing grows out of another, much the way leaves grow on a plant.

A composer-friend, something of a mentor for the few brief years I knew him, would jot down ideas in a notebook and try to come up with as many possible “solutions” as he could. He hadn't yet started writing the piece – he was pre-compositionally exploring its potential. Eventually, he would go through these options to select which might work the best, discarding those that didn't work at all.

But some of these he still liked and hated throwing away, so, like pot-shards, he copied them out into another notebook (back in the days before computers allowed us to do things like cut-and-paste). Perhaps, he hoped, they'll work better in the context of another, different piece. “I'm supposed to be writing a string quartet.”

Later on, he'd look over some of these discards. “I think this one will sound much better played by a clarinet.” Another one might lend itself to the flowing textures of a piano piece. Ultimately, he could have four new works from his initial idea, none of which sounded alike but all of them interconnected.

Here was a germ (perhaps budding from a motive into a melody), and from it “germinated” a whole host of opportunities. In every new configuration, you sensed the logic, the sincerity of its genesis.

As a composer, I was trained since my teens to start at the beginning and work my way to the end. Inspiration gives you your basic themes, you plop them into a structure (some standard “form”); and then, like those “paint-by-numbers” kits for talent-challenged amateurs, you fill it in with whatever instrumentation or voices you want. When my imagination could no longer come up with a decent theme or even a motive I could build from, suddenly I'm facing a Writer's Block that's telling me, “you have no talent!”

Lots of musicians have told me I was a good composer but curiously few of them wanted to perform my compositions. Giving up several times – it became too much work to overcome – I wasn't sure, if I had no talent, was it really worth the emotional turmoil? So I tried other ways to explore creativity.

During my first major “writer's block” – I was living in New York in the late-1970s – I toyed with the idea of “Writing” and of course immediately took the giant leap into “Writing a Novel.” The diving board was “Write What You Know,” and what I knew was “Composer working through a mid-life crisis Style Change.” The '60s I grew up in had warned us “Don't Trust Anyone Over 30,” and here I was now, pushing 30. I'd just quit my teaching job, disillusioned by departmental politics. Everything was new.

A friend gave me a copy of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past saying “now that you're 30, you're ready for Proust.” I'd balked at books telling me “How to Read Proust.” He said, “just dive into it” so I dragged it around, reading in the park, on the subway, and while normal people watched TV.

Naturally, this novel which I started writing not long afterward was a pale version, more a parody, of Proust, concentrating on the worst clichés imaginable about “stream-of-consciousness” rather than focusing on the roman fleuve. It seemed easy, since nothing ever happened, fueled by memory. As Proust sometimes rambled between past and present (and whatever Swann in Love was doing in there), I focused my own efforts on two simultaneous stories a century apart, set in the same house.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

The experience was dreadful, every page screaming at me “You Have No Talent!” Even though I filled numerous ring-binders with reams of notes, sketches, and drafts – research was more fun than actually writing it – I continued flogging at it over the years while pursuing two tangentially musical careers which continued to prove stubbornly unfulfilling. But through it all, I managed to learn a few things about my creativity I'd never figured out as a composer, and it was mostly about the mind and the heart: which came first?

Artists need to learn a thing called “craft,” which helps you create something – anything – even when you don't feel like working: doesn't matter if it's good; you show up at the page and work. Technique is like learning scales and arpeggios: there's nothing “musical” about them but it's exercise that keeps your fingers in shape.

My initial novel shifted back and forth between the 20th-Century's now middle-aged composer in this old house he'd inherited and his 19th-Century predecessor, an aging author dealing with the fact he'd never achieved “success,” no different than cross-cutting between scenes in a film where a secondary plot takes place either simultaneously or in another millennium. The title, regardless of the shift in focus from a “Coming-of-Age” Composer to a “Mid-Life-Crisis” Composer, had come to me easily: since the late-70s, I called it Echoes in and out of Time.

Instead of pursuing the Great American Novel, I accidentally began writing a parody of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code when the movie came out, but from a classical musical standpoint, called The Schoenberg Code. Thus I started a string of comic thrillers as applied to a Classical Music Appreciation course. (Talk about a niche audience!)

Then one night, thinking about Proust's original title, À la recherche du temps perdu, I wondered “but who's Tom Purdue?” And that quickly, my next book was born: In Search of Tom Purdue.

At this point, I was still halfway through The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, but I knew Tom needed his own novel. Who exactly was Tom Purdue? How'll he fit in with my existing characters?

And then, halfway through that, it occurred to me: what if, like Salieri, Purdue had been accused of murdering another composer?

– Dick Strawser

 Click here for the next installment of the novel; and here for the next "987 Words" post.