Reading Proust (Part 3)

The English Teacher comments on Within a Budding Grove (October 6, 2006)

How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?

--Stanley Kunitz, "The Layers"

I have reached that point in Within a Budding Grove when Proust is introducing to us the inimitable M. de Charlus, whom young Marcel has met in Balbec. Charlus is easily one of the most memorable characters in a work full of memorable characters. As Harold Bloom writes somewhere—he doesn't bother anymore to reference his quotes, and so I won't bother to reference his—

Proust's greatest strength, amid so many others, is his characterization: no twentieth-century novelist can match his roster of vivid personalities. Joyce has the single, overwhelming figure in Poldy, but Proust has a portrait gallery.

I don't know about greatest strength, but be that as it may be, Bloom heads his list of all-time Proustian characters with Charlus, a preeminence I won't dispute. In a passage (p. 817) that particularly struck me today, Marcel writes:

If he was so cold towards me, while making himself so agreeable to my grandmother, this did not perhaps arise from any personal antipathy, for in general, to the extent that he was kindly disposed toward women, of whose faults he spoke without, as a rule, departing from the utmost tolerance, he displayed towards men, and especially young men, a hatred so violent as to suggest that of certain misogynists for women. Of two or three "gigolos," relatives or intimate friends of Saint-Loup, who happened to mention their names, M. de Charlus remarked with an almost ferocious expression in sharp contrast to his usual coldness; "Young scum!" I gathered that the particular fault which he found in the young men of the day was their effeminacy. "They're nothing but women," he said with scorn. But what life would not have appeared effeminate beside that which he expected a man to lead, and never found energetic or virile enough? (He himself, when he walked across country, after long hours on the road would plunge his heated body into frozen streams.) He would not even concede that a man should wear a single ring.

This passage contains a giant hint of what's to come, and yet I managed to miss it completely the first time around. While I wouldn't say this to a reading group taking up Proust for the first time, I'm reminded that one cannot really begin to read Remembrance until one has already read it. How odd to read a work whose effects depend so much on a memory of having already read it—a work which itself has so much to say about the very memory we must employ to read it.

For example, as I read Remembrance for the second time, I'm keenly aware that the narrative is recounted by an older man looking back on his youth. One of the shocks of Time Regained is suddenly realizing how much age separates the narrator from his past. For long stretches of Remembrance, Marcel has been detailing the past with such vividness that we've felt fully immersed in a present more present than the one we're living outside the book. As I inch my way through Within a Budding Grove, I marvel that Proust could tell this story at all without falling into an inconsolable sorrow over lost and irretrievable time. But then this is probably a case of reading in a book what we carry to it.

As a teacher, I've spent a fair amount of time around children the last five or so years. Inevitably, I've been reminded of my own childhood over and over again. Mostly it's been interesting to me, even when an experience has triggered a deeply painful recollection of my sometimes terrifying youth. The last six weeks, however, as I've spent many of my waking hours with people twenty or more years younger than I am, I've felt something much different. As exhilarating as it was initially to spend so much time around these young people, I seem to have moved into Phase 2, in which I'm experiencing that "inconsolable sorrow over lost and irretrievable time." It makes me, irrationally, want to turn to the later poems of Stanley Kunitz, though I am not nearly to that point yet. I am a long way from saying, in my seventy-fifth year,

Maybe
it's time for me to practice
growing old.

("Passing Through")

On Sunday, I heard my mother-in-law, the poet Beth Bentley, give a reading at the Ballard library. Although most of us knew that it was her eighty-fifth birthday, she preferred we ignore it for the sake of the reading. True to herself, she wanted the focus to be on her poetry, not the passing of another year. Nonetheless, the theme of growing old was implicit in nearly every word she spoke. She read from a book-in-progress, with the tentative title Autumn Gardner. What "autumn" signifies here need not be deliberated. During the reading, Beth referred to Kunitz and his garden, and then quipped, "I don't plan to live to a 100, just to get a letter from the President."

I would venture to speculate that Autumn Gardner will be her best book, though she wouldn't appreciate me saying that. She believes her most mature work is contained in Little Fires. But my wife and I find it almost a relief that she's abandoned the high literary mode of Little Fires for the more personal poems of aging and loss. Anyone eighty-five has lost more than I can imagine, but in terms of literary skill, she has lost little, and what she has lost is more than compensated for by the same happy simplification of style that came to Kunitz in his later years. In some rare instances, a poet must practice her craft an entire lifetime before achieving a simplicity of style that marks her as the best artist she can be.

During the reading, Beth remarked that she has worked the same garden for fifty years. That is more literarily true than literally. As my wife well knows, her backyard garden was little to speak of for decades. But fifty years ago she gave up her novels—said to be in the Jamesian mode—for poems that soon found their way into The New Yorker. I don't take anything away from the lovely mini-lecture she gave us on the relationship between poetry and gardens in literary tradition and practice. (I dearly wish I had a recording of the reading.) I merely wish to make the obvious point that fifty years of working a garden is a painfully long time to look back on, layered, as the soil is, with spent effort and incalculable sacrifice.

By the way, I probably picked up from Beth, at least in part, the idea of reading Proust during bouts of insomnia—only Beth reads her Proust in French. There's still time for that, too, isn't there?