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The Teller and the Tale I first read À la recherche at seventeen, in the year between school and university. In the mornings I was trying to write a novel and in the evenings I was reading my way through the great literature of the world, all borrowed from the wonderful Putney and Wandsworth public libraries. I read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Dickens and George Eliot, Yeats and Rilke – and then I read Proust. I felt at once that Proust was true in ways the others simply were not; they might be profound, tragic, funny, moving and many other things, but Proust’s book had this peculiar quality of touching on my life at every turn, of actually being about me.Why did I feel this? What was it in the book that made me feel this? At one level it was a plethora of tiny details, such as the pillow that appears in the second paragraph of the novel: ‘J’appuyais tendrement mes joues contre les belles joues de l’oreiller qui, pleines et fraîches, sont comme les joues de nôtre enfance. ’ [‘ I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and fresh as the cheeks of childhood.’ ] This is the kind of observation that tends to pass below the radar of most writers, but it catches in one short sentence the way a freshly ironed pillow-case, as one lays one’s head to rest on it, brings flooding into one’s body the sense of the protected nature of childhood, how in that blessed period we slept so well because we had no responsibilities, our lives taken care of by our loving parents. It doesn’t tell us this but conveys it with that wonderful shorthand which is the privilege of great art – ‘comme les joues de nôtre enfance’.  When I first read it I did not pause to think all this, and I did not see how it related to the theme of those opening pages and of the novel as a whole – it was just ‘felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’, as Wordsworth, who knew a thing or two himself about memory and the body, put it in Tintern Abbey. Then there were the details of social behaviour, such as we get in the third paragraph of Un amour de Swann: Les Verdurin n’invitaient pas a dîner: on avait chez eux ‘son couvert mis’. Pour la soirée, il n’y avait pas de programme. Le jeune 14
page 15
Proust and I pianiste jouait, mais seulement si ‘ça lui chantait’, car on ne forçait personne et comme disait M.Verdurin,‘Tout pour les amis, vivent les camarades!’ Si le pianiste voulait jouer la chevauchée de La Walkyrie ou le prélude de Tristan, Mme Verdurin protestait, non que cette musique lui déplût, mais au contraire parce qu’elle lui causait trop d’impression.‘Alors vous tenez à ce que j’aie ma migraine? Vous savez bien que c’est la même chose chaque fois qu’il joue ça. Je sais ce qui m’attend! Demain quand je voudrai me lever, bonsoir, plus personne!’ S’il ne jouait pas, on causait, et l’un des amis, le plus souvent leur peintre favori d’alors, ‘lâchait’, comme disait M.Verdurin,‘une grosse faribole qui faisait s’esclaffer tout le monde’, Mme Verdurin surtout, a qui – tant elle avait l’habitude de prendre au propre les expressions figurées des emotions qu’elle éprouvait – le docteur Cottard (un jeune débutant a cette époque) dut un jour remettre sa mâchoire qu’elle avait décrochée pour avoir trop ri. [The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your ‘place laid’ there.There was never any programme for the evening’s entertainment.The young pianist would play, but only if ‘the spirit moved him,’ for no one was forced to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say:‘We’re all friends here. Liberty Hall, you know!’ If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries or the Prelude to Tristan, Mme Verdurin would protest, not because the music was displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, because it made too violent an impression on her.‘Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know quite well it’s the same every time he plays that. I know what I’m in for.Tomorrow, when I want to get up – nothing doing!’ If he was not going to play they talked, and one of the friends – usually the painter who was in favour there that year – would ‘spin’, as M.Verdurin put it, ‘a damned funny yarn that made ’em all split with laughter,’ and especially Mme Verdurin, who had such an inveterate habit of taking literally the figurative descriptions of her emotions that Dr Cottard (then 15

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The Teller and the Tale

I first read À la recherche at seventeen, in the year between school and university. In the mornings I was trying to write a novel and in the evenings I was reading my way through the great literature of the world, all borrowed from the wonderful Putney and Wandsworth public libraries. I read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Dickens and George Eliot, Yeats and Rilke – and then I read Proust. I felt at once that Proust was true in ways the others simply were not; they might be profound, tragic, funny, moving and many other things, but Proust’s book had this peculiar quality of touching on my life at every turn, of actually being about me.Why did I feel this? What was it in the book that made me feel this?

At one level it was a plethora of tiny details, such as the pillow that appears in the second paragraph of the novel: ‘J’appuyais tendrement mes joues contre les belles joues de l’oreiller qui, pleines et fraîches, sont comme les joues de nôtre enfance. ’ [‘ I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and fresh as the cheeks of childhood.’ ] This is the kind of observation that tends to pass below the radar of most writers, but it catches in one short sentence the way a freshly ironed pillow-case, as one lays one’s head to rest on it, brings flooding into one’s body the sense of the protected nature of childhood, how in that blessed period we slept so well because we had no responsibilities, our lives taken care of by our loving parents. It doesn’t tell us this but conveys it with that wonderful shorthand which is the privilege of great art – ‘comme les joues de nôtre enfance’.  When I first read it I did not pause to think all this, and I did not see how it related to the theme of those opening pages and of the novel as a whole – it was just ‘felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’, as Wordsworth, who knew a thing or two himself about memory and the body, put it in Tintern Abbey.

Then there were the details of social behaviour, such as we get in the third paragraph of Un amour de Swann:

Les Verdurin n’invitaient pas a dîner: on avait chez eux ‘son couvert mis’. Pour la soirée, il n’y avait pas de programme. Le jeune

14

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