How would delaying her own pleasures actually help Swann? And while all the bother over her outfit may seem to turn her into a wicked witch (“I must have those red slippers!”), a monster of egotism, it is not only her husband who has noticed she’s still wearing her black shoes: Swann may be dying, but in all his dying he has spotted it too (and is still refined enough in his aesthetic appreciation not to be shocked by her somewhat daring, if involuntary, fashion statement).
Even on the edge of the void, he notices things (in ‘The End of Jealousy’, Honoré on his deathbed will notice the buzzing fly and wonder idly whether it will land on the bedsheet): it is not that the aesthetic (or the mere being-there of things) is trivialized by the proximity of death, that majestic abstract universal; it gains in intensity and perhaps value from it.
They are indeed cruel in their thoughtlessness, these foolish and self-obsessed characters; but Swann has chosen to live by the code of worldliness and he dies by it too – being as he is “polite” enough to realize that individual people come and go, but dinners in town go on for ever.
The Duchesse’s uncertain blue eyes seem to express a will to “live all you can” that communicates with something in Swann himself, and whose power he acknowledges, like the epiphany of some demanding and yet strangely intimate deity. And one day, like Swann, they will all die, even the Duc and the Duchesse de Guermantes, and perhaps their attention for detail will be tenderly remembered: “Ah, the fuss he made when his wife went out improperly dressed! What an eye for detail he had! Husbands have their uses, you know!”
True, Proust does not spare the denizens of his world from moral condemnation: sæva indignatio is never far away. In one of the texts in the Pleasures (‘A Dinner in Town’), he details the fatuous preoccupations of a group of well-heeled diners and their casual and ignorant tattle about the recent anarchist attacks, and he comments that not one of them had an income of less than a hundred thousand pounds.
Brecht once commented that Kafka, for all his mysticism, was the truest Bolshevik of them all: it would be a little simplistic to summon Proust to the barricades too, but the link between class and sensibility is precisely documented in the Search, and his embrace of the aristocracy could be perfectly murderous: he was the archetypal “smiler with the knife under the cloak” (or with a pen under the voluminous folds of his many layers of overcoats, as he tottered out from his cork-lined room to carry out fieldwork for his novel in the Ritz).
The complex syntax, those long sentences with their coiling clauses that he was already practising in the Pleasures (with varied success – many of these pieces were dashed down in a couple of spare hours and never revised) is deployed in the Search to make us slow down and take the time to notice the world and the richness of its interconnections. But this slowness is not just that of wistful elegy (the doe-eyed Marcel gazing out of all those photographs with such infinite nostalgia).
It conceals a message of extreme urgency, like the prophets at their most lapidary: “all compound things are subject to decay”, “seek out your end with diligence”, “repent!” Like the Rilke poem which presents us with an ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, it concludes “you must change your life”. Not for nothing did Proust consider calling his vast epic La Colombe poignardée, for his meditative sentences often launch a dove into the air (in his preface to the Pleasures he makes much of the need to venture forth from the maternal Ark) only to stab it to death.
The aesthetic has its decorative moment, but it is in the service of a stringent and at times alarming ethic – one in which truth seems achievable only through purgatorial detachment from life. Flaubert, the Flaubert of “l’art pour l’art”, is supposed to have returned from a routine social visit in an unusually reflective mood: “ils sont dans le vrai”, he said of the family he had just seen. (He was not usually so mellow about ordinary life.) But Proust sometimes thought art itself was a way of living in the truth.
Sometimes this produces a certain triumphalism. When in the Search the writer Bergotte dies after visiting an exhibition of Vermeer paintings, the narrator imagines that his books, opened in the windows of the bookshops as a tribute to him, are like a sign of his resurrection. The appropriation of religious imagery in such a context, and the use of sacramental language in Proust’s work as a whole (the “petite madeleine” that in Swann’s Way signals the living return of the apparently dead past – like its namesake Mary Magdalen), may give us pause: the Bergotte episode is made more poignant and personal by the fact that it is the near-transcription of Proust’s own experience, since he himself attended a Vermeer exhibition shortly before his death – there is, as it were, a delightfully modest little cough and a questioning, smiling “me too?” in this meditation on the immortality of the artist, and it is all kept in a relatively low key (the rococo rustle of those angels with their paper wings…).
The negative side of this is the way that, from the Pleasures to the very end of the Search, Proust seems at times to be adumbrating the idea that only artists (the “creative”) are saved: it’s the cork-lined room and the three-thousand page epic or nothing – thus says the Gospel of St Marcel. There is harshness as well as empathy in his attitude towards the failures and wasters he depicts, starting with Baldassare Silvande and Violante and Honoré in the Pleasures and extending to almost everyone in the Search.
Art is a strenuous deity, much less forgiving than other gods, and the service of art, he seems to be saying, is the only authentic life in a world given over to illusion and gossip and what Pascal called “divertissement”. But it is far from sure that this is really a creed that can be deduced from Proust’s work as a whole (he could be just as harsh on the “idolaters” of art as on the philistines; and while philistinism is a shame, idolatry is a sin).
The epigrams of the Pleasures and the theorizing of the Search are one thing, but the text itself indicates something quite different. Proust’s characters, whether or not they are artists, whether or not they find some truth amid the trivia, whether they are callous and footling time-servers or examples of the most solicitudinous loving-kindness (the narrator’s mother and grandmother in the Search), have what dignity they have, not because of the way they look at life but because of the way they are looked at by others (as the Pleasures repeatedly point out, we are often quite unaware of the effect we have on other people, who may understand our lives better than we do) – looked at by one other in particular, by the novelist who notices everything, and for whom, as for Kierkegaard, all things are fraught with mystery, from the Incarnation to the buzzing of a fly – or the importance of wearing the “right” shoes. His characters live because he has brought them into being: his eye (the eye of someone simply more human than most of us) has rested on them and seen them for what they are. The clarity of this gaze, which through its tenderness, amusement and indignation cares even about those who have signally failed to live in the truth, has something maternal about it.
– Andrew Brown
Pleasures and Days
Preface
Why did he ask me to present his book to curious minds? And why did I promise to take on this highly agreeable but quite unnecessary task? His book is like a young face full of rare charm and elegant grace. It is self-recommending, tells us about itself and presents itself in spite of itself.
True, it is a young book. It is young as its author is young. But it is an old book too, as old as the world. It is the spring of leaves on ancient branches, in the age-old forest. One is tempted to say that the new shoots are saddened by the long past of the woods and are wearing mourning for so many dead springs.
The grave Hesiod recited his Works and Days to the goatherds of Helicon.* It is a more melancholy task to recite Pleasures and Days to our high society gentlemen and ladies if, as the well-known English man of state claims, life would be quite tolerable if it were not for pleasures.* So our young friend’s book has weary smiles and postures of fatigue that are deprived neither or beauty nor of nobility.
Even his sadness will be found to be pleasing and full of variety, conducted as it is and sustained by a marvellous spirit of observation, and a supple, penetrating and truly subtle intelligence. This calendar of Pleasures and Days marks both the hours of nature, in its harmonious depictions of the sky, the
