987 Words About Proust's Novel and How It Grew

After Proust died on November 18th, 1922, his friends came to the apartment at 44 rue Hamelin to pay their respects. There, Jean Cocteau noticed these unfinished manuscripts scattered around the room beside Proust's bed, how "that pile of paper on his left was still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers."

Proust's cork-lined bedroom at 44 rue Hamelin

Given the way Proust worked and given the recent state of his health, it wasn't going to be easy sorting through this "pile of paper" to see what remained of his supposedly finished novel.

Most readers probably think a writer sits down, starts at the beginning, and, sooner or later, inspiration willing, reaches the end. Then it's only a matter of sending it off to the waiting publisher. Weren't we lucky Proust could write "The End" to his life's work, In Search of Lost Time, months before he died?

The author's original manuscript, presumably, had been cleanly typed, thoroughly proof-read, and, complete and ready to print, sent to the publisher. Usually, a publisher's "proofs" were meant to check spellings and make necessary corrections. Instead, Proust treated them like one more step toward a final draft, writing copious marginal notes and pasting in additional paragraphs.

Proofs & Paperolles: The Prisoner, c.1921

Eventually this turned into not just new pages, but new plot threads which led to entirely new volumes to handle them; the first of these involved meeting the love of his Narrator's life, Albertine.

Proust had only met Alfred Agostinelli shortly before completing Swann's Way and their tumultuous relationship lasted barely half a year before his new secretary left and was subsequently killed in an accident in 1914. He became, with Proust's typical alchemy, the model for Albertine and the object of the Narrator's jealous obsessions for future volumes. Originally, it was Time Lost (later Swann's Way), the Guermantes Way, and Time Regained. But the "Albertine Story" became the newly inserted second volume and grew into the new fourth volume, Sodom & Gomorrah.

On Oct 13th, 1917, Proust received 5,000 pages of proofs. Correcting them would've been laborious even if his eyes had been normal, but without glasses and "without much eyesight," it became a frightful job. Still, he refused to get spectacles. Four days later, his publisher announced Proust's novel, formerly three books, will now become five.

But as Proust's ever-expanding imagination proceeded to "edit" his newest volume, within fourteen months Sodom & Gomorrah (published as Cities of the Plain by squeamish English translators), filling in details between The Guermantes Way and the now revised war-time setting for the final volume, Time Regained, was first split into two, then eventually three books.

Meanwhile, once the War finally ended, Proust saw these post-Swann volumes into print before spending months rewriting parts of Time Regained, initially written simultaneously with Swann's Way (originally entitled Time Lost) back in 1913.

However, his health, never good and often precarious, became increasingly worrisome. In early 1922, he wrote to friends about thoughts of suicide, wishing he'd had some cyanide, months before he published Sodom & Gomorrah. The expanded "spin-off" of these latest proofs became another volume, The Prisoner, announced days before his famous dinner with James Joyce.

In late-June, 1922, Proust managed to write to his editor, "the reworkings of this typescript where I am making additions everywhere and changing everything, has hardly begun," One can only imagine his editor's expression. Remember, earlier that spring he'd told his faithful housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, "Last night, I wrote 'The End.' Now I can die."

In October, catching a cold which turned into bronchitis, he completed The Prisoner but started revising the next new volume, The Fugitive, apparently not fully satisfied he'd written "The End" on his life's work.

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

Consider the chronology of these facts: Proust had written "The End" in the Spring of 1922; in late-June, he informed his editor "the reworking of this typescript... has hardly begun"; and now he indicated he had made an enormous cut of, according to Hayman, some 250 pages which amounted to almost two-thirds of The Fugitive! It should be noted the frequently quoted Wikipedia entry called The Fugitive "the most editorially vexed volume", and stated without verification the cut consisted of 150 pages: both were subsequently ignored by posthumous editions.

Proust had a new manuscript typed up, retitled Albertine disparue, having already promised his publisher he would have "more books to offer you," apparently whole new volumes [plural!] between The Fugitive and Time Regained. He also mentioned he considered the Death of Albertine and the whole process of forgetting her some of his finest writing.

While Proust didn't break his volumes down into internal chapters per se, Hayman indicated this cut began on p.648 of the proofs after "the first chapter" and ended at p.898 with "the Venice Episode." This includes memories of "a sweetly innocent Albertine" and conversations with her friend Andrée about his suspicions of Albertine's lesbian affairs; how the Duchesse de Guermantes' attitude towards Swann had changed since his death; how Gilberte, Swann's daughter, helped the Narrator "get over" Albertine; and the discovery of his old friend Robert de Saint-Loup's homosexuality.

Now, if it's true Proust regarded this part of Albertine's Story as some of his best writing, would he logically have merely discarded it to present his publisher with a shorter, more salable book? How much of it would have become fuel for one of these new volumes, not merely fragments inserted into Time Regained? Yes, in August he'd joked how “short books sell better,” but that would've been the first time in eight years he apparently cared about sparing his publisher from longer and continuously longer books!

Each time I read through Time Regained and think of this massive cut, I wonder what part of the Narrator's story was left to tell? There are large gaps of time during the War when the Narrator is absent from Paris, times he spent in a sanatorium: perhaps this volume would've been called The Invalid?

- Dick Strawser

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...

The Salieri Effect: Installment #23

With the previous installment, we have reached the end of Part II or, more importantly, passed the novel's Golden Section, marking not only the climactic turning-point of the plot but also of the novel's entire structure. When whatever happened happened in that dingy little motel room in Orient, IA, Dr. Kerr somehow found himself inexplicably (but not without numerous theories) wandering around an entirely different place. Through the powers of observation and logic and quite possibly more inductive than deductive reasoning, he assumes he's probably somewhere in that old abandoned-looking factory he'd noticed when standing out where that body'd been found. "How did he get there" was one thing. Once he figured out he was in the midst of Osiris' lab and they were once again experimenting with their killer Mobots, the important thing was "how the hell was he going to get out!"

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

– PART THREE –

CHAPTER 17

“So, it is this very sense of 'Now',” Uncle Terry pointed out, “that's one of the most elusive things for an artist to figure out – whether for a composer or novelist, even a performer. It's something more intuitive, more visceral than intellectual, something you can't learn, except with hours and hours spent working at it.”

Toni couldn't remember where this was or when it took place: recently, but her Great-Grandmother Frieda was there – hadn't she died before Toni had this conversation with Dr. Kerr in the garden that afternoon?

Uncle Terry had been telling Cameron and her in one of his part-lessons, part-conversations, about an interview he'd heard with the conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, who, he thought, always seemed to know just where to put that moment of “now-ness” into a piece of music, whether it was Mahler or Beethoven, Stravinsky or Elliott Carter.

“This knock-out passage was 'so now,' so in-the-moment in this particular rock song he'd heard on the radio when he was a teenager, he had to stop everything and concentrate on listening to it.” Kerr forgot which legendary song, or who the rock star was Tilson Thomas was telling this to (Terry was never good with pop music), “but decades later he realized his job as conductor was to convince a hundred other musicians where 'now' was – and this particular rock legend, whoever it was, smiled and laughed, 'Exactly!'”

Toni realized she'd nodded before Cameron, stretched out across from her on the grass, had frowned, not because he didn't get it but he'd realized not only hadn't he understood it, she, clearly, had. It's not that they're always competing with each other, but she was conscious of treading carefully not to hurt his feelings. She wasn't really sure she had gotten it; maybe she assumed she'd understand it next time she'd come across it, like recognizing someone when you'd see them but you couldn't remember who they were.

So, if Cameron wasn't about to ask it – he was always afraid of “stupid questions” – she would ask Dr. Kerr why it was there and not somewhere else: “how do you figure that out?” Why would a composer, she wondered, decide it belonged here and not there; and how could a performer tell the difference?

Like a professor trying not to sound professorly, Kerr went on about “how the precision with which all these component parts came together – the performers, the music, the words and harmony, our awareness of its structure, whether you the listener understand or rather comprehend them intuitively or not – depended on one thing: their complete sincerity.” He always came back to that ambiguous word, “sincerity,” which he considered the hardest thing for a student to grasp, whatever the inevitable pun about being made “without wax” had to do with it.

“If you could see how Tilson Thomas built up these phrases with his hands, how he'd pile different elements on top of another, stretch them out, increase the tension, give motion to this tension; then he'd reach a point and suddenly clap his hands together and – bang! – he'd shout 'Now!' His hands cascaded like fireworks.”

It confused Toni when Kerr critiqued something she had worked hard on, how she had grasped “the finer points of craft,” because she had no idea how exactly she'd done that: she just did. He'd go on about balance and the Golden Section (which he did a lot) but she just wrote what she felt.

“Craft,” he stressed, “must be tempered by emotion: nothing made sense if it wasn't a union of the heart and brain.” To Toni who loved mathematics, this made perfect sense; Cameron looked completely lost.

There were others in this gathering, now that she looked around, all nearby on the lawn – the great North Lawn not far from the hawthorn hedge which was in full bloom and smelled heavenly – and she was glad to see her great-great-grandmother Frieda Erden had joined them, walking with only the aid of a cane. She was an immensely old woman and had become increasingly frail over these last years since she'd been introduced to her and discovered she was the great-granddaughter of her long-lost twins, William and Gracie. There were fond memories of Uncle Terry's few visits, especially in the springtime with the four of them: she'd hold her Grandmother Frieda's hand while Dr. Kerr pushed her wheelchair, Cameron strolling beside them. It was good to see her walking on her own and maybe point her cane at Kerr to argue some detail.

“You can be as analytical as you please, Terry,” she'd say, not a bit imperious but with considerable poise and finesse, dressed in shades of violet, as she strolled toward them across the lawn, “but it all boils down to the emotional response which, if it doesn't exist, means nothing however much you analyze it. Really, isn't this 'now' you so rhapsodize about, when both the intellectual and the emotional coincide – perception or understanding – isn't this the epiphany that is the result of previously made choices fulfilling their consequences?”

“But isn't this all just another argument about the chicken and the egg?” Cameron was, as usual, confused, taking this in. Toni tried to hide a smile she was afraid he would think condescending. He always excused himself, how this was new to him, stuff he'd never thought about before, more holes in his training. “If it doesn't have any logical foundation – like a building,” he went on, “wouldn't an emotional response – 'oh, isn't that pretty...' – collapse for lack of support, being only about its surface and therefore superficial?”

“You could build something perfectly according to plan, do all the right things, and it could stand for generations,” Kerr responded, “but if the majority think it's ugly or, worse, don't even notice it...?”

“Well, you always say how there's no accounting for popularity,” and everybody laughed.

Their little picnic continued and Toni was delighted.

The sky still dark beyond her bedroom window, Toni woke up, unable to remember who'd been there or who'd said what. Something had just interrupted Vector who, as ever, stood guard behind Miss Frieda. Even though he'd retired since Granny died, he continued to look like a butler who, unless beckoned, dissolved into the background. Toni thought of him more as a grandfather in this new family of hers, so many levels of generations to consider. Never knowing any of her birth family, this was a whole new experience.

She didn't want to rub her eyes and become any more awake than she already was, especially if she could go back to sleep for even another hour – “What time is it? Almost dawn...” And would she be able to pick up the dream where she left off or would it veer into another direction?

Her parents, Burnson and LauraLynn – her second pair of adoptive parents (abandoned once, then orphaned when she was 13) – stood on the periphery near the hedge and talked to some people she didn't recognize. If she went back to sleep, would everyone in her dream be killed by an onslaught of terrorists in black masks? She had no idea why this was a recurrent nightmare. Her first set of parents were killed in a car crash shortly after she'd left for England. There'd been no terrorists involved, had there?

For all her vague talk of adventures, Granny – everyone else called her Aunt Frieda, regardless – died of natural causes (she must've been, like, a hundred years old); but, oh, how Toni missed her smile. She would always smile at her whenever she walked into Toni's room, the only room of her own she'd ever known. Everyone was so kind to her, especially Dr. Kerr – Granny promised he'd look after her musical studies – who treated her more like a niece than a student. And Cameron was like a big brother.

Toni continued to lie in bed, hoping to stay absolutely still. The rest of the house was silent but it was also mostly empty since Granny had died and Burnson was still in Venice. It was a big, echoey house with not that many people, mostly servants. Out of the silence, she heard Frieda's voice.

“Why would you do something so stupid?”

Granny, who had always been strict when it came to her piano lessons, sounded stern, and Toni looked over at her, as if asking “what was stupid?”

“There,” she said, “that,” pointing at a spot in the music, tapping it irritably with her long bony finger, three times.

It was two measures before a big cadence that modulated to the dominant. She wasn't really sure she'd done anything wrong.

“Not wrong,” Frieda said, “but it didn't make any sense,” tapping it again.

She'd been working on this sonata, Beethoven's C Major Op.2 No.3, for a few weeks and she was happy enough to get through that tricky parallel thirds figure in the right hand without fumbling. If not a wrong note or rhythm, was it the phrasing? “That's how you said I should play it, last week.”

“I said? I did no such thing!” She definitely sounded imperious and, finesse and poise aside, considerably peeved in the process. “Here... and here,” she turned back a page and tapped again, “you played it one way – good – but here, you played it differently and it makes no sense. So why did you do that?

“Music consists of patterns. You make decisions to bring these patterns to the surface. You must realize these decisions have consequences! This... and that” (tapping again), “good; but this? Flies drowning in soup! Again...”

“The thing is,” Toni reminded herself, “both Frieda and Dr. Kerr said they had no interest in telling me how I should do it – what to compose or how to interpret what I'm playing.” And for that, she realizes, though she's only 16, she should be grateful except that doesn't always make it less confusing. Once she's learned the basics – how harmony works, why “form” does what it does – it's up to her to consolidate their suggestions and questions to figure out for herself the “why”s and the “how”s. Frieda wanted her to figure out, like a painter, what the underlying anatomy did to make sense of this “musical body,” beyond just a matter of playing the right notes in the right place. It was a way of solving the riddle each piece of music uniquely proposed to find the music behind the notes.

She had realized now, now that she was getting beyond placing notes on paper, notes that followed rules implied in harmony and counterpoint, in form and the all-important process of developing them, Uncle Terry was telling her the same things Granny'd told her in her piano lessons almost as if he'd been there, too, listening. The principles were the same and while she was introduced to them through the mind of a performer, discovering what worked, she now applied them to her composing, the creative and the re-creative process.

Unlike the teachers she'd grown up with in America – she recalled Mrs. Grinder (which was supposed to rhyme with “cinder” but behind her back rhymed with “blinder”) – Frieda and Dr. Kerr, even her other tutors here, were satisfied to give her an array of information out of which she should eventually draw her own conclusions. There were “fundamental facts” that required rote learning and recitation like the times table, irregular verbs or lists of historical dates, which before was what they'd considered “education” but was really only the brickwork.

Once she'd grasped the bricks, she could figure out what to do with them, taking these facts, sorting out their implications and, “educated guesses” aside, come up with her own observations, perhaps even conclusions. Like math, she could now solve for x. Cameron, she realized one afternoon – speaking of epiphanies – was still learning the bricks.

She came up with the idea shortly after they'd arrived in Venice: she would write a series of short duets for violin and piano, modeled after Bartók's Mikrokosmos, which she and Cameron could play. She would work out certain theoretical details as a composer; Cameron, as a performer, would figure out how to play them. She planned it like they'd dissect a watch and put it back together – they'd turn them into short studies in analysis. But she wanted to do this as a surprise, without Uncle Terry's supervision.

Keeping them a surprise from Cameron might be more difficult – they were always together – at least until she'd written three or four for a trial run and figured out how to realize “a solution-in-progress.” She considered calling them Eine kleine Zergliederungsmusik (“A Little Dissection Music”), an occasional piece which had no further purpose in life.

It became easier, once Terry'd gone back to America on some new secret project, taking his ever-present side-kick Cameron with him. Unfortunately, her own return to England and Amadeus eventually got in the way. Fortunately, she could work on them in complete privacy: she had wondered what she could write next, something short and easy.

Unfortunately, she'd turned them into something more challenging than being “short and easy” because they had to be something worth analyzing. She must set some structural problem in search of a solution – but how?

There was that afternoon last fall when Frieda grumbled after Toni made some “lame excuse” about not being able to concentrate. “That's no reason, because you waste my time and you waste Beethoven's time. As a teacher, I won't have done my job until you can learn on your own once I'm no longer here. But to get there, you must pay attention, remember the questions I ask, how they connect to whatever you're working on, then reach conclusions once you've asked these same questions in the future and...”

Frieda assumed she'd gone too far, that the girl couldn't take the criticism, judging from the tears she now fought back. “I'm sorry, Toni, I didn't mean to sound so harsh, but it's true.”

“It's not that, Granny,” she said, reaching over to hug her. “It's never occurred to me you wouldn't always be here.”

And four months later, the inevitable indeed came to pass. Frieda had died and Toni felt abandoned again, lost without her. LauraLynn tried comforting her with the usual explanations – she was 96 years old, after all – but in the end, no, there was no logical explanation why she had to die, not then, not ever.

Uncle Terry told her Frieda would always be alive in her heart, with her wherever she was, whenever she needed her. “Plus I imagine you will still hear that voice every time you play.”

In fact, the first time she sat down to play after Frieda's death, when the others had gone up to bed – she'd chosen the Funeral March from Beethoven's A-flat Major Sonata which she loved – at one point, barely able to see the music for her tears, a familiar voice complained, “like flies drowning in soup!”

Toni stopped and turned around. She was alone in the room, the only light the floor lamp behind Frieda's empty chair.

“Why play it so freely?” the voice continued. “It's still a march – rhythm!”

Whenever Toni needed to sort things out about a new composition or some problem that stumped her, she'd go walk in the garden and sense Frieda, somehow, not far away.

“What are the connections?”

In the background of their picnic as Freida discussed the “now” with Uncle Terry, Toni could hear Beethoven's Op. 20 Septet.

“You have your basic set of chords available and there's a more or less set order you can place them in.” Vector came around with the teapot; Kerr held his cup out for more.

“But how do you determine what that order is?” Cameron, as usual, focused on the logical, more technical “how” of things.

“Mr. Cameron,” Vector intoned, pouring him some tea, “that order has been around since before 1700, well over three centuries' time – sufficient for Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and to a large extent even Wagner...”

“So why did Wagner” – she knew Vector could barely tolerate Wagner – “start breaking away from it, and why did Schoenberg” – whom she knew Vector tolerated even less – “feel the need to replace it completely?” Toni was one to ask more about the “why” behind something a composer wrote; the “how,” typically, was a mathematical given.

The conversation progressed quite musically with the statement of themes or ideas which often turned in further directions, depending on questions she or Cameron would ask or additional comments made by Frieda or Kerr. There were solos and some duets, a melody with its subject and response over an accompaniment, sometimes even an argumentative fugue.

Listening to these people so important to her, watching how intent Cameron was, how Dr. Kerr and Frieda explained things so simply (well, Frieda, at least...), Toni decided to turn this into a composition.

Uncle Terry was always trying to expand Toni's awareness of musical styles to acquaint her with music beyond her Belovèd Beethoven. One rainy afternoon in Provençe, he played different recordings of Verdi's quartet from Aïda, one with voices, another arranged for winds, pointing out “each character's character” was in the music, not just the words. Then he played (and talked about at great length) two 2nd String Quartets – one by Ives, the other by Elliott Carter – recreating discussions, where players impersonated individualized characters, Ives' 2nd Violinist even nicknamed “Rollo.”

Other than the hapless Rollo, you wouldn't know who they were or what they had said or even what had been discussed or argued about and maybe, in the long run, that wasn't important. But for once, she understood the “why” and asked “how did they do that? – so Kerr went back to the Verdi.

For several days, she picked through Lady Vexilla's vast collection of old opera recordings, especially Mozart's Figaro, once she figured out how to operate a phonograph (much less why), and listened intently to “characterizations.” She soon realized it was all about counterpoint with its independent horizontal lines that also created vertical harmonies, something called “voice-leading.”

But if she wanted to turn this picnic in the garden into music, how would she differentiate the characters: a string quartet with Frieda and Kerr, with Cameron and herself? But what about Vector?

She decided, no, she would not be part of the cast, not one of the performers but just a listener, sitting back, a kind of musical voyeur (was there such a word as auditeur?).

For that matter, there were others there, maybe less important to the moment: who were they? How would she characterize them?

This was something Kerr had frequently harped on, this odd idea called “voice-leading.” Granny had her run through several of Bach's old Inventions, first the 2-part ones, then a few of the 3-part ones. When she'd first learned them, Mrs. Grinder just wanted her to hit the right notes. They were very boring to play. But Frieda, not interested in “just the notes,” focused on how she'd shape each line, first individually, then playing them together. Suddenly, she found these old dry studies had become interesting – in fact, delightful.

But this dream – whether this was how her dream originally unfolded or how, thinking back, she'd “misremembered” it, she couldn't say – instead of words that Frieda and Dr. Kerr had spoken, she heard music. Instead of Beethoven's familiar Septet, this music was already morphing into something different, something maybe she had drawn out of them. Except she hadn't created it herself, had she? Each of these other people around her was creating it, one by one. Musical motives, like groups of words, passed from one to another, effortlessly spinning.

Others would join in, filling out the texture to create a much richer sound, and for the moment the discussion had become quite lively, beyond just one or two of them at the forefront. Whatever they were saying (she couldn't hear words) could become one of those “secret programs” she could hang her music on.

It didn't have to be a long work but if it was going to become a septet which seemed logical, given the Beethoven – would she quote it, maybe embed it in her main theme? – it should be at least three contrasting movements, not as many as Beethoven's had (seven movements?) or a typical Mozart serenade.

She imagined the finale started off like a scherzo, a light-hearted third movement based on a variation of that main theme but it would become grander, ending with a restatement of that main theme.

And what instruments would she use? Most of these works, whether Mozart's, Beethoven's, or Schubert's, were mixtures of strings and winds, but they didn't include a piano and she definitely would want a piano. Plus she wanted instruments that would reflect the various people in her cast, fit their personalities like the music they played. A septet could include three strings, three winds, and piano – or pairs including percussionists (like Bartók's Sonata), or maybe some brass? She remembered a French horn was also part of a traditional woodwind quintet.

She imagined herself going through these different combinations in her head, eventually deciding (for now) on pairs of strings and woodwinds as well as brass in addition to the piano (but, alas, no percussion). She wasn't sure who she could cast as percussionists in this conversation which rapidly turned into more of a round-table seminar.

This reminded her of Frieda's old joke about the difference between a French horn and an English horn (really, an “alto oboe”), how the French horn was German and the English horn was French. But the sound of the horn would be a good match for Grandmother Frieda's resonant voice (she was, after all, German). During one of their earliest conversations, Frieda told her new great-great-granddaughter it was one instrument she wished she'd learned to play. “Young ladies learned the piano. Heavens, why should any woman choose the horn?”

As a girl, she'd fallen in love with a handsome horn player at a performance of Brahms' Op.40 Trio (“the piece was much newer then”) which may have had something to do with it. Plus the Brahms Trio, regardless of her unrequited love, remained one of her few favorite pieces outside the works of Beethoven.

She argued with herself, once she patched the sound of the horn onto the line of music emanating from her grandmother, Frieda was really a pianist, quite a good one, still, at her age. And wouldn't it be more logical to cast her as the septet's pianist, since she had also been Toni's piano teacher? But she felt Uncle Terry should be played by the piano (thinking in terms of “cast”), always playing examples for her at the keyboard even though he was primarily a cellist in his day.

Vector, more on the periphery of the musical discussion, was still an all-knowing voice who offered sage advice, not just about music, and he was certainly quite knowledgeable: she heard him as a bassoon. Unfortunately that reminded her of the Grandfather in Peter and the Wolf, so perhaps the English horn would be less stereotypical.

Cameron was more of a challenge, watching him in this conversation-turned-seminar. He played the violin but not well and it didn't really suit him. The trumpet (if used judiciously) might match his personality better.

These were the four main characters in her little play, but shouldn't her parents, both important, be part of the ensemble? They weren't part of musical conversations beyond liking this or not liking that, and she still had three other instruments searching for characters: who played the violin, the cello, and, what... – maybe the flute?

And the rest of the cast? She remembered it began with her and Cameron listening to Dr. Kerr until Frieda came over and joined them, strolling across the grass. Her parents had stood nearby. Others milled about like an old-fashioned garden party with drinks and light refreshments. Was that Mozart over there, near the yews?

Ah, she realized looking more closely, not Mozart, he's too old for Mozart. “Didn't he used to be Heath Underhill,” she heard LauraLynn say, “who's starring in that local production of Amadeus Toni's in?”

He looked more like Mozart's grandfather, Toni thought. So, if that's Underhill's Mozart there, then who's that fellow by the fountain? Too portly for Haydn, she guessed it must be Rigley Fielding as Salieri. How did they get invited to a garden party when Granny's still alive? Toni only met them at last night's rehearsal.

The two actors quickly joined in the conversation but fortunately as their characters, Mozart and Salieri, not the actors portraying them. She assigned the flute to Mozart even though Mozart supposedly hated the flute (he'd hate Underhill's impersonation of him even more). Salieri, too pompous for the cello, could balance Mozart's flute as a bassoonist.

That left the violin. No one else among the guests came to mind.

“What about the Ghost of Beethoven,” Frieda suggested.

Toni agreed. “His spirit is everywhere, here. Plus Beethoven did play the violin.”

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to be continued...

©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train

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...