Professor David Peimer
Marcel Proust

Professor David Peimer | Marcel Proust | 08.14.21

- [Wendy] Well, welcome back, David. And thank you, Lauren. Thank you, David. Always a pleasure. We are looking forward to hearing about Marcel Proust, and welcome to everybody else. Welcome back to Lockdown. Good.

• Okay.

• [Wendy] Over to you. Yeah, thank…

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• Okay, thanks so much, Wendy, and to Lauren as always. So hi, everybody, and welcome and hope everyone’s well wherever you are, and keeping safe and good. Okay, so I’m going to be start with Marcel Proust today. And just to be honest, Trudy has been asking me to give a talk about Marcel Proust for quite a while, and I’ve refused. Until finally, “Okay, okay, I’ll do it.” And the reason is because when you start to read this guy, it gets into the very nerve cells of your mind, and it’s very hard to shake him off and, you know, put him back on the bookshelf. So that’s why I’ve resisted.

Anyway, to dive into Proust is quite a remarkable experience. And one has to look at, I think, aspect of his life, interwoven with, of course, his monumental novel, “Remembrance of Things Past”. And what I’m going to do today is interweave the two, his life and, you know, aspects of the novel because they’re really inseparable in a way. And then also, you know, his position, I think in 20th century literature, if not the last four or five centuries of the novel. And what he really represents for us today and what on earth can this guy who wrote in the early 1900s speak to us about today, 110, 115 years later?

Okay, there are two names which I mentioned upfront. The one is under Andre Aciman, who is a fascinating Egyptian born Jewish guy whose parents fled Egypt in 1965, just before Nasser came to power. And of course, two years before the 67 wall went to Italy, other parts of Europe. And then eventually, he ends up in New York where he writes. He’s a novelist, and he’s a really interesting Jewish novelist, Egyptian origins, and also teaches at university in New York, at CUNY. And he has made an almost lifetime study of Proust.

And then the other guys, the American novelist, Edmund White, who for me have the most interesting contemporary perceptions of this character Proust. Andre Aciman wrote a book called “Call Me by Your Name”, if anybody… It’s a really interesting novel and you know, really riveting, “Call Me By Your Name”. I think it says so much about identity, assimilation, the pariah parvenu, all the ideas about Jewish identity and national identity, Jewish religious, et cetera, and global, and as a writer. Okay, to start with Proust, what’s fascinating to start with this guy is that he doesn’t write about war or peace.

He doesn’t write about clashes of armies in the night. He doesn’t write about great historic events or emerging, you know, Orwellian dictatorships or you know, the war in a huge way or many other massive events to come in the early 20th century, or even some of those of the past. He’s obsessed with the upper class of France, the bourgeoisie, the strangled loves and pains of love and jealousy and pettiness and hate and dislike and manipulations and possessions and acquisition and desire. It’s all the so-called little day-to-day inner workings of our inner lives, of our mind. That’s his obsession. And this is in 1913, way before James Joyce, who wrote “Ulysses”, or any other writer on the planet had started to dive into such, on the one hand, unbearable, unbelievable, magnificent detail of the extreme detail of the workings of the mind, the ruthlessly honest workings of the mind, not just the intellect or even the emotion, the instinctive, the imaginative, the leaps of unpredictable unknown moments within our minds from thought to feeling, to sensation, to idea, the almost millions of endless possibilities in the ways that our minds truly work.

And this came up with a notion finally by critics called the Proustian moment, which is a moment of intense memory. Intensity in a moment where something visceral and sensory. And for Proust, of course, there’s the great scene of having a cup of tea with a Madeleine cake, which I’m going to come to, which has become well-known as amongst the greatest couple of paragraphs in French literature, certainly if not 20th century, and a cup of godforsaken tea. The memories triggered, which are almost involuntary memories from a non-rational space in us and how they give rise to feeling, sensations, surprising thoughts, questions. And yet, you know, we are following polite society and just having a cup of tea.

But if we are ruthlessly honest to all those little moments juggling for assertion in our minds, there’s a thought, there’s a feeling, there’s desire, there’s an attraction, there’s a repulsion, so many things happen. And that’s what this guy tries to dig right in and excavate and write about with an ironic semi-detached attitude. And it’s the irony and the absurdity and the ridiculous wit and satire that I also want to mention, you know, as we go along because you can’t read it either you go mad or you get caught up and you see the comedy. It’s almost like a Fosse like, you know, a Moliere, who I love. The Moliere, Fosses, you know, Feydeau, or some of the other French fantastic playwrights.

You know, you can feel the doors closing on the stage. The doors slamming, the Fosse, the characters, you know, bustling and hustling around their little affairs and their little desires and jealousies and manipulations and so on. So there’s that quality inside this guy’s writing. For me, it’s closer to the kind of… One of the reasons I love Vermeer and obviously the Mona Lisa and many others, just one image, one thing. And there’s so much working inside the workings of the mind and such an irony that in the early 1900s, 1913, this guy writes a seven volume, ridiculously long novel, insane. You’re going to read it, he’s got time. And yet he goes on this journey. I mean, why and how on earth can it speak to us today? Kerouac talks about him. Bob Dylan talks about this guy, you know, some of the Beatles did, many of the other poets and writers all through the century up to now. And I think Proust has made a comeback because of the way he demands that we honour and cherish the workings, the truthful real workings of our little moments all the time that happen in our minds, not just the big movements and shifts of semi unpredictable history.

So it’s the rise of individualism, which I think started with Shakespeare, individualist capitalism with the Shakespeare and monologues and soliloquies, you know, which Shakespeare is on the cusp of the end of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism, and the rise of the individual, and then the rise more and more of the inner psychology. He never read a word of Freud, and I don’t think Freud read a word of him. It doesn’t matter. It’s the zeitgeist of the times at the early 20th century. To dive in, the individual might actually matter. The individual, we talked a lot about human rights, Dennis and I. And Dennis has given wonderful lectures. The beginning of the notion of cherishing, you know, what’s so-called small of the individual, but actually pretty big, okay?

But it’s in a small little fashionable group of the people who go to the salons in Paris, it’s the upper class. We have to be really honest about this. This is not about the working class, this is not about the poor, the hungry and all of that. This is just about the inner workings of people who have the time, possibly even the luxury to engage or indulge from another perspective with all this little detail of their daily lives. There are many Prousts. There’s a period Proust, which is the Toulouse-Lautrec type paintings, you know, of the high life, the salons, and the brothels of Paris. There’s the memory and laughter of Proust, which I think Kundera, who I love his writing, the Czech writer, Milan Kundera, lives in Paris. “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, you know, for me, very influenced by Proust.

The philosophical Proust, on the thoughts about time and memory. The psychological, the ideas of human motives of love and jealousy and possession and acquisition. The idea of being in love and the reality, infatuation, obsession, all the desire, you know, hate, contempt, all the emotions which can happen in, you know, having a cup of tea or having a cup of coffee with somebody in a coffee shop. There’s, of course, Proust and his homosexuality, which for me speaks to the outsider quality, which I’m going to mention quite a bit. There’s the political Proust, the Jewish writer who was part of the leading the petitions in favour of Dreyfus. And as everybody knows Captain Dreyfus affair and how crucial that was in cracking open, you know, French society and showing how the fomenting tendrils of antisemitism and Jewish hate were all there and came out in the Dreyfus affair. And Proust wrote about this.

It’s in his novel in “Remembrance of Things Past”. And he wrote articles, he organised petitions about it. He went to the trial of Emile Zola, as you all know, he wrote the article, “J'accuse”, you know, accusing the French leadership, the elites, you know, and France of being antisemitic. It was no case against Dreyfus. Andre Gide, one of the most important French writers of the time, who didn’t publish Proust and refused and said later it was the biggest regret of his life. He said that, at the time, he doubted. And this is, I’m quoting, “I doubt that any Jewish writer of France can truly master the French tradition, and Marcel Proust is at least half Jewish. He cannot master and understand us French.” It’s Andre Gide in the early 1900s.

Then there’s… From the political Proust, there’s the charming dilettante Proust, who’s a snob, you know, who’s a performer in the salons. He entertains. He cracks jokes. He brags and shows off his literary eloquence and his literary knowledge. He’s a brag, you know, he’s a boaster. You know, he’s a pain in the neck in many ways, but he’s enchantingly intelligent, and he seduces people with his character and his mind, his wit. Then there’s the style of Proust, how to make the ordinary seemingly benign mundane things of daily life, so extraordinary in the writing, the evocation of place, characterization, the jokes, many of which he got from his mother, the observations, the incredible detail of moment to moment emotion and thought in the mind. And then it’s almost like a trance-like rhythm, which is ridiculously powerful in how it created in the writing in Proust. And all of this creates a kind of heightened intensity in the writing. And I think this is what seduces and pulls so many readers in.

That’s why I didn’t… You know, to go back to Trudy, I didn’t want to look at Proust because I know he just pulls you in right in, you know. As Andre Aciman says, it’s like an amoeba in an alien movie, you know, just pulls you in more and more, you know? And you got to try and eventually get out of this nonsense, this craziness. It’s crazy on the one hand to be so obsessed with such detail. It’s romantic, it’s idealistic, and it’s completely insane, but it’s eternally intense, delicious, and very ironic and witty. Then there’s the Proust the writer also whose literary style is not mannered, and that’s very important. He doesn’t follow the social realism of the Zolas, the many other writers, the Balzacs, and the other writers of before. He follows his imagination. He follows the inner workings of the mind, as I’ve said.

So he’s not bound by the literary styles of the fashion of his time. It’s more, if you like, his own voice that he’s found, couldn’t care about those literary rules, you know, that everybody is obsessed with. Then there’s the era and the glamour of the French salon and people going to… Sorry for my French pronunciation right now, for everything else I’m going to say. There’s the glamour of going to the salon. And then Swann, who’s one of the main characters in the book. You know, when he wants to recover from his jealousies, his petty little jealousies of love and friendships and women and men and others, what does he do? He goes to the fanciest restaurant in Paris.

You know, so there’s the era and the glamour of the upper class of Paris. It’s a little small circle that he’s writing about, the bourgeois taste of the time from dinner in The Ritz to sexual frolics and pleasures in the brothels in Paris can happen within an hour. And he moves seemingly effortlessly through the workings of the imagination in the mind, through all of this in the novel. We see him eating the crumbs of this Madeleine cake, I’m going to call it. Sorry, it’s a bad translation. You know, dipped in lime blossomed tea, and he suddenly thrusts back to his childhood in the Village of Combray. And his idea is that everything remains inside us in our past, not just as a kind of history list of facts, but as a sensory, visceral experience. And our job is to recreate, refind those moments, the smells, the sounds, the colours, the vastness, the smallness, the visceral, the senses, which re-evoke with an intensity, extra charge of intensity in life, the traumas, the happinesses, the joys, the sorrows, you know, the compassions, the wars of life.

But for him, memory is not just an association of something, of things. You know, it’s not just free association, that stream of consciousness idea of joys later. It’s often met with failure. And he writes in the book, “Will my memory ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old dead moment, which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise me up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now, I feel nothing. It has stopped as perhaps it sunk back into its darkness from which who can say whether this memory will ever rise up again. 10 times over, I must essay the task, must glean down over into the abyss. And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise we try has urged me to leave the damn thing alone, to drink my tea and to think nearly of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow, which can be brooded over quite painlessly as I sip my tea.”

It’s insanely alluring and seductive because there’s a rational detachment, and there’s a heightened charge of intensity in a cup of tea and memories. And then even darting the work to bring out the memory, to make it viscerally intense, not just, “Oh, I remembered, you know, walking one day on the beach and dismiss it as another little bizarre semi photo.” So for me, the key in Mr. Proust is this. As Proust writes in the novel, “We think we are living in the world, but we are rarely living in our minds.” Now, that for me, is the key phrase that sums up what I want to really focus on, you know, the whole of today. For him, the reality is in our minds. Of course, he’s living through the First World War. He’s living through the huge change in France from the end of the aristocracy ‘cause let’s remember he’s born in the Third Republic, the beginning of a kind of political liberalism in the Third Republic. And after the Franco-Prussian War, 1871, he’s born. And he and the beginning of the French liberalism, you know, in the Third Republic in which he emerges. So there’s a liberals… A street moving powerfully in France.

At the same time, you know, the First World War looming, coming. At the same time, unbelievable technological changes, of course, and rising massive antisemitism, social conflicts, class, all sorts of things happening. He’s not unaware of the broader sociopolitical context, and he writes about it in the seven volume book. But within that, he locates this living in the world, we are already living in our minds. He’s not saying it’s either/or, but it’s how living in our minds manages to deal with living in the big world and vice versa. And to be ruthlessly honest to that, and interestingly, Kerouac, who I spoke about a while ago, also spoke quite a bit about Proust because, on the road, he tries to get into that as well. Dylan, as I mentioned, and many, many others. So this is a key. He’s in love with things which are made in his own mind. That’s his real love in the end. He wants to possess every thought, every feeling in his mind. He even talks about when the art of cool, art of passion cools, his days to discover that the great passion of his life, his love was actually with a woman he didn’t even really like. With time, he thinks, “Well, was that love?”

I remember the passion, and I couldn’t bear to not be with her for a second and other things, but later I can’t bear to be with her, nothing to say, bored, frustrated, whatever, et cetera. So the imagination in Proust’s phrase can give us the illusion of walking in the park. And at the same moment, perhaps we’re just touring in our own little attics. Then there’s the politeness, the courtesy of manners, which he sees as ridiculous and a source of imminent, of endless fun and ridicule in satire. Again, you know, the great Fosses of French theatre capture it all, Moliere, Feydeau, and so on, who I love because this profound satire of the upper class and the ridiculous politeness and courtesies and all the little rituals created for manners. Civilization is form in France and in Europe and England and elsewhere, not necessarily substance.

For me, personally, in America, civilization is money. Civilization is form in France of his time, and I think England and elsewhere in Europe. And that’s, you know, just trying to interpret this guy. Let’s go back to “Hamlet” for a moment. There’s nothing neither right nor wrong but thinking makes it so, Horatio.“ It’s all in the mind. Shakespeare gets it. It’s all inside the mind, thinking makes it so. It’s right, it’s wrong. It’s good, it’s bad. It’s love, it’s infatuation. It’s jealousy, it’s hate. It’s pettiness, it’s envy. It’s all in the mind, Shakespeare alludes. Another example of a Proustian moment, and this is from a true story apparently. George Harrison called John Lennon one day because a very good friend of theirs had just tragically died, and he called him the next day, he said to John, "How are you?” And John is saying, “Well, really sad this guy. You know, that he died and so on. And Harrison pauses and he says, "But what was your first thought when you heard he died?” John Lennon pauses, and then George Harrison says, “Wasn’t it, 'Thank God it wasn’t me’?” That’s a Proustian moment.

That ruthless honesty to what’s really going on in the mind, even in the moment of great loss and trauma of a very dear close friend dying. The first thought can be that, and Harrison, you know, is not unaware. I think it comes out sometimes in his music. You know, some of these things. That’s a Proustian moment. A tea-soaked madeleine cake over a cup of tea. What that reminds us of? A whiff of tobacco smoke on a leather jacket, when a particular scent or smell or sight or colour reminds her so involuntary of something so powerful. That’s our identity, that’s who we are. Even in Tolstoy in “Anna Karenina”, just before Anna commits suicide, she’s about to jump into the railway tracks as the train is rushing towards her and her mind jumps to the childhood memory of a butterfly, and then she jumps. Tolstoy even is aware of these tiny moments. But Proust is the first to take all this and make those at the centrepiece of literature of a novel in writing. Okay.

It’s become known as one of the most influential novels of the 20th century. Graham Greene put it up there, Nabokov, so many of… Beckett wrote a fantastic little book about Proust, you know, and so many, so many others. Nabokov Sirin was amongst the greatest together with Kafka, you know, with Kafka and Proust and so many others in a global context, not just a French context. And that’s what’s interesting is that this guy speaks to the world in a way, not just France, but he’s writing about a tiny little group of the French upper class bourgeoisie in Paris. Never ignore the meaning in a grain of sand in that sense. Okay, I spoke about that, you know, he’s part of the Third Republic after the Franco-Prussian War, period of great change, the decline of democracy… Sorry, the decline of aristocracy, big important difference, and the rise of the middle class. And the irony is that together with that comes the rise of inner life, of the individual consciousness I mentioned.

His father was a very prominent epidemiologist who studied cholera in Europe and Asia, father wrote articles and books on medicine and hygiene. His mother, Jeanne, was from a very wealthy Jewish family, from Alsace. Father, catholic. Mother, Jewish. Mother was literate and extremely well-read, extremely good with English, obviously French and German, and helped Proust with translations of Ruskin. And for Proust, Ruskin was one of the writers he absolutely adored, and he’s raised more in the Catholic faith. But there’s the Jewishness of the mother that’s there all the time, of course. At nine, he gets asthma. And he’s very ill for a long time. He spends holidays in the Village of Illiers, forgive my pronunciation. And this village becomes the fictional town of Combray in the novel. At 11th, his education at school is disrupted again by illness.

But despite this, he excels in literature, and he starts going with his friends and his friends, older brothers and so on to the salons of the upper class of Paris. And of course, all of this feeds the novel. In spite of the bad health, in 1889, he’s called up to the French army, and he goes for a year, but he doesn’t have to do too much physically demanding stuff, that’s in part three of the novel. As a young man, most of his friends and others saw him as a real dilettante, bragged, irritating snob, and a social climber and manipulator, who aspired to be a writer but lacked the self discipline. And he had this reputation of being a kind of amateur half writer, but very charming and very intelligent and witty. Not an Oscar Wilde character, a very different kind of way, but not by chance in the homosexuality, all the other stuff, you know, what they’re up against of the social mores of their times. He had a seriously close relationship with his mama, which I’ll come to you in a moment, to appease his father who said, “Look, get a job.” ‘cause his father was a green grocer and rose to real prominence in France and Europe.

To appease his father, he got a real job in a library, 1896, but very soon he wrangled it so that he got sick leave, and he managed to somehow manipulate it to get off work for quite a few years. Never did his job, stayed in his parents’ apartment till after they both dead. His mother, who he adored loved, was obsessed, infatuated in everything you can imagine with, died in 1905 and lucky for him left him a pretty good inheritance. So of course, there’s the other side of Proust, which is the rich side. He could afford to spend all this time writing. He had a maid servant who would cook and clean and bring things to him. He could afford to live there, he could afford, you know, all this kind of dandy-ish, voyeuristic life, if you like, of the French class of his time. When he read… He spent his last three years mostly confined to his bedroom, sleeping in the day, writing at night, and dies of pneumonia in 1922 at the age of 51.

The influence of John Ruskin can’t be underestimated about the role of the artist. As for Ruskin and for Proust, the artist was to confront the appearance of nature and human nature and find the essence, be a detective for the essence of nature and human nature, and that’s the minutia of daily life. He read. He translated Ruskin into French ‘cause his English was pretty good. He read Montaigne, Flaubert, who everybody knows, “Madam Bovary”, looks similarly obsessed with his tiny detail, George Eliot, similar obsession with these tiny, you know, little emotions and little changes in movements in human life and human nature in small little places in England.

Then Dostoevsky he read, you know, huge influence on him. Another whole world of the darkest sides and equally powerful, if not more powerful, of human nature. Whole story, of course. To give you an example of the range of this guy’s mind, he writes in a letter to a friend, “So I have in progress now a study on the nobility of Paris, a Parisian novel, an essay on Flaubert, an essay on women or French women, a study on stained glass windows, churches not synagogues, a study on tombstones in certain cemeteries, a study on the novel, Spanish, French, English.” This is the range. Is he a dilettante? Is he an amateur? Is he a romantic idealist playing games with all this literary history? You know, can we take his guy seriously? You know, his mind is all over the place. Is it just a scattered fruit salad? Or is he on a quest to look for something? Ultimately, he comes to the realisation, you know, as I said before, that it’s all living in the mind. It’s not either/or, doesn’t mean amateur or dilettante.

All of these things, let’s embrace it. Embrace all the differences in our minds. Embrace the infinite variety of our minds. Embrace it, write it, accept difference, contradiction, irony, wit, humour, sarcasm, jealousy, all these things are part of who we are. Express it, not try and codify or make into polemic or simple two or three, even three-dimensional character, but focus on all the inner workings, today we’d call it, of the inner neurons and billions of cells in our brains. So the French title here, I want to just show you here, this is his original name given by his parents, Valentine Louis Georges Eugene. He get the pomposity of it, you know, the father trying to aspire to the top of the medical profession, the mother from the wealthy family, you know, they’re aspiring. You can see the child on the left, he looks almost like a Charlie Chaplin before Chaplin. That’s his years, 1871 to 1922, with two of his, you know, we’d call them today, dandy voyeuristic friends down at the bottom, little bit of the cheeky, witty, fun Proust. And then on the other side, the laconic laid back, you know, ill sickly, but very detached, ironic, you know, almost looking through you sense in the eyes.

I don’t think it’s just this two-dimensional kind of laid back dude who, you know, is stoned out of his tree in sort of semi-hippie, doing nothing. There’s something cooking behind those eyes. And on the other side is the cheeky wit, and one’s got to see the irony and the wit in this insane obsession with such detailed working of the mind. This here, this is a picture… The French original title was “In Search of lost Time”. Then first translator took a phrase from Shakespeare “Sonnet 30”, which has the phrase, “Remembrance of things passed,” and that’s where the English translation has that. The original literal French is “In Search of Time”. This is the first galley proof with Proust’s handwritten notes inside it. I don’t want to go into the detail of how this guy made it. You know, he’d cut out, and he’d rewrite and pencil and pen. And I mean, he was obsessed, you know, in how he did it, all handwritten.

So he also then engages Graham Greene as a… You know, this book, he started when he is 38 years old, seven volumes over 3,200 pages, 2,000 characters. Insane. I mean, who on earth has the time, energy, interest to write or read this? Graham Greene called him the greatest novelist at many others. In 1897, he was accused by some well-to-do friends of being homosexual, and he was, but he never publicly acknowledged it. So he went and he fought a duel with this friend. Of course, duels were the way to settle fights, insults, arguments, and they had a real duel, you know, shoot each other but both survived. So I’m just trying to give a range of this guy’s little experience in one small city and one small few villages and other things. But you know, to quote Neil Armstrong, who quotes George Eliot, “One small step for man, giant leap for literature and the novel.”

He was against extremism of all kind, religious, moral extremism leading to prejudice. And he talked about our fanaticism and intolerance would come as much from the left than it’s from the right. He talked about the insanity of the conservatives, the insanity of the left because you were talking about the extremes of both sides, which he couldn’t bear because he saw the same fanatical passion coming from the left or the right and destroying and completely being reductionist on his human consciousness. Then, of course, as I mentioned, he was part of the Dreyfus trial. Part of the Dreyfus which was a big choice because it meant that he went against his own father, who was Catholic, and he was anti-Semitic, subtly, but anti-Semitic. And he went against a lot of his Catholic friends.

Remember, he’s raised as Catholic. So all the high borne Catholics that his father’s friendly with, and he’s friendly with all go against him. He went against the Army military, elites because he takes part in supporting Dreyfus and Zola and many of the others, but he’s nowhere near as bigger name as Zola, obviously. What I’m trying to paint is a picture of an outsider trying to be the insider. He’s inside the salons. He aspires to all of that. He loves all that culture, the bourgeoisie, the upper class, but he’s also a complete outsider. He’s half-Jewish, he’s homosexual. He’s in love with his mommy, even more with his grandmother. He doesn’t move out of a family apartment until his parents are dead. You know, he’s wealthy enough that he doesn’t have to work. He can just write and do whatever else, et cetera. He’s caught up in the political shifts of the times.

All these things are happening. Such a range happening in the one mind. And that’s what I think he gives us in a way Kafka does it brilliantly equally, but of course, Kafka uses metaphor much more. In England about a decade ago, there was a survey of English writers and asked, “Who was the novelist they most admired from the 20th century?” The majority said Proust. Fascinating. And this scene of made the Madeleine cake with the herbal tea become such a Proustian moment, so famous in French literature, the sudden gusts, if you like, sudden gusts of memory. Walter Benjamin, who was Proust German translator, he wrote, “I can’t bear to read another word of this man Proust because otherwise he will become so addictive to me. I will become independent, and he will mess with my own writing.” And Benjamin, I think it’s the nail on the head. Beckett writes a piece. Virginia Woolf writes about him and many others. She admires him. She’s terrified to even think of him, she writes, because of his genius.

Genet, who I love, the playwright, the remarkable playwright of France. Genet, his first novel, “Lady of the Flowers”. After reading Proust… He’s in prison, he reads Proust. And Genet writes, “I marvel, and I want to be the Proust of the underclass of France.” Jean Cocteau, the surrealist playwright and poet, said that, “Proust was an atrocious insect. I can’t bear him. He’s a parasite on me.” Paul Claudel, Catholic playwright, a minor Catholic playwright at the time, but influential because he was Catholic, described Proust as a painted old Jewess the antisemitism from Catholicism and many others in France at the time. In New York during the '70s, there’s a popular T-shirt that goes round after the '60s, “Proust is a yenta!” I mean, he’s in popular culture in the 20th century, '70s amongst ex-hippies in New York. Proust is a popular yenta. I mean, just think of all the connections and contradictions for that to result on a whole bunch of people’s T-shirts.

Another friend of his writes, when he is older, and he’s spending all his time indoors writing, “He looked like a man who no longer lives outdoors by the day, but a hermit who hasn’t emerged from his oak tree for a long time with something pained about his face, expression of suffering that has just begun to be calmed. He looks possessed by a bitter goodness.” A bitter goodness, fascinating phrase. One of Proust’s ex-lovers, Reynaldo Hahn, composer, who writes about walking in a garden with him in Paris. And he comes across some roses, and Proust spends the next three hours just standing, looking intensely at the roses. You know, like Monet’s lilies, which he admired. And it’d seen Proust often just become obsessed with an insect, with roses, with a leaf, with the shift of the wind, you know, inside some of the leaves, a breeze, a wind, a gust, whatever. Total concentration, we would call it in the zone today, in the moment, if you like. And he talks about Proust of a sudden, unprompted awakenings of memory triggered by something illogical, unforeseen.

Others write about this hunted tottering young man of 50 who’s tottering to death. I’m trying to show the range of his character and how others perceived him in order to show how much was cooking in this guy’s mind, and that’s what we see in the novel. Of course, he didn’t believe in a God, much less a saviour. And his father once said to him, “Listen, don’t go to a certain hotel 'cause there’s too many Jewish guests there. And if our Catholic friends get to know about it, they won’t like it,” just one example of the father’s influence. In the book, there are caricatures of a Jewish family, the Blochs, 'cause the Jews were still seen as pretty exotic, I would say, together with the other side, the Oriental. So he writes about other Jews were seen as Oriental in France. 1872, the only 86,000 Jews in the Hall of France. I mean, for God’s sake, you know.

There was still obsession with Jews in the Dreyfus trial. And Proust writes in the book, “He saw a Jew come to the end of the drawing room of the salon, making his entry through the door as if he were emerging from the desert. His body crouching like a hyena, his neck thrust forward, offering profound shaloms, shalams, completely satisfies a certain taste for the Oriental in the French salon.” And then another character tells about the mother that he broke a Venetian vase. Proust writes, “He expected that his mother would scold him and so revive in his mind the memory of their quarrel, but there was no cloud upon her tenderness. She gave him a kiss, whispered in his ear, it shall be as in the temple, the symbol of an indestructible union of a nation.”

That’s his Jewish mother, of course, echoed in the book. In an essay about his mother, he referred with his typical ambiguity that she had the beautiful lines of her Jewish face completely marked with Christian sweetness, Jewish resignation and defiance turned into Esther herself. He sees his mother as a kind of Esther, you know, as you all know, becomes the wife of King Ahasuerus, if I am right, and uses a position to try and help and saved the Jews of the time. Of course, there’s a rampant antisemitism talk about symbolised by the Dreyfus affair. An interesting Herzl, Theodor Herzl, as I’m sure Trudy and many others have spoken about, is in Paris at the time. And the Dreyfus affair hugely influences him in terms of his future thoughts about Zionism, this idea of assimilation, belonging, not belonging. Hannah Arendt’s phrase of, “The Jews as Pariah or the parvenu.”

The upstart made good or the pariah, you know, the parasite on those nation, you know, and where to belong. And this intimacy with the mother is extraordinarily pretty over the top, huge. They both shared a love of music and literature and languages. And when she died, his mother’s dying phrase was a phrase from the wonderful writer, La Fontaine, “Well, if you’re not a Roman, at least act worthy of being one.” The humour, the satirical wit of the mother and the irony, which is in Proust and his mama. As I said, his father came from this very humble background. His father was a grosser. And his father came up with the idea of sanitary zones 'cause he researched cholera as an epidemiologist and how cholera could be kept out of Europe and have sort of frontier zones to prevent cholera coming back into Europe, and he travelled to Russia, Turkey, Persia. 1869, figured out the roots of previous epidemics of cholera.

The obvious links to today, I don’t want to mention, and how it entered Europe. And this led to his father’s idea of sanitation and quarantine, came from the father, a extremely prominent and well-known professor of medicine in France. He got the lesion of honour. And one of the most celebrated professors of medicine of his time, and there’s his kid, autistic, asthmatic, sickly, obsessed with dilettantish salons, the upper class, the bourgeoisie, all the little pettiness of daily life and so on. And there’s the solid father trying to solve a global problem, certainly European problem in the world. The difference is obvious, the background of the father, the background of the mother. The father had many affairs, unknown to the son of the wife. His father then tries to cure him of being effeminate and his neurosis and sends him off to prostitutes and to the brothels. Fairly standard at the time, I believe. And in the book though, he idolises his father, calls him the wise minister of state. Proust is able to see many sides, not just one angry side to daddy. Okay, he’s also born in the time, the end of the…

As I said, Franco-Prussian War, the beginning of the Third Republic, when coal and wood supplies ran out in Paris. It’s hard to heat the homes. People are starving, people are eating dogs and cats and rats, animals from a zoo. So he’s born in this time, his mother’s very ill and weak when she gives birth. Is it linked to his lack of robustness? Who knows. The brother, two years later, Robert is born very robust. He’s very close to his brother. They close all their lives. And on his deathbed, he asks Robert to make sure that he gets the Legion of Honour award. Victoria Cross of their time, I guess. Proust aspires to become a lord, a sir, whatever. You know, it aspires for the Legion of Honour in Paris, in France. His brother, Robert, is make sure that the last two volumes of the book are published.

Then the total dependence on the mother is in the opening of the book, which is all about he can’t sleep at night without the mother’s kiss. And it’s written about what pages in the book, you know, he demands that his mother kiss him good night every night. His father gets fed up, his mother is, you know, worried, just total dependency. So what does he do? But she gives in because he’s screaming and going hysterical if he doesn’t get his good night kiss. He’s demanding. He’s manipulative. He’s irritating as a kid, and he knows how to manipulate, and he knows how to get what he wants. And he presses his mother’s buttons, you know, all the time. And he’s honest about it though, in the writing. That’s really what I’m trying to get at. Okay, this is the Village of Illiers, which is… You know, it’s basically becomes the Village of Combray in the book.

And here, this is Cabourg. Forgive my pronunciation again. Where you can see, you know, where a lot of schemes take place on the beach. These are some of the women in the book that he based on the society ladies, if you like, from the salons. And there are many, many others. On the right hand side is the picture of this guy, the Baron de Charlus, who the main character is based on. One look and I think you get it all, everything I’ve been saying of Proust’s own affectations. And this is the main character which we know through such popular cliches today of France of the time. Okay, then I want to just play you here a couple of… This is Andre Aciman, the Egyptian I mentioned at the beginning, who is obsessed with Proust and has fascinating insights on him, which will come up in a second.

[Clip begins]

• And it has come to me rather circuitously, so I’m going to try to speak about the kind of mind game that Proust plays with the reader, with his characters and with himself as an author. And it came to me a couple of weeks ago when I thought about a college professor once taught Machiavelli to me. And he said, “There’s one thing you have to remember about Machiavelli. It’s all about acquisition, how to acquire power, how to acquire land, how to acquire loyalty from people, and ultimately how to keep what you’ve acquired.”

If you think about it, it’s a reductionist notion, but what it does is that it allows you to build from that reduction. And for me, the idea about Proust is very reduced. The idea is to come to a point of arrival after that is the notion of possession. Proust is about possession. And if you think about it, the opening scene… Forget memory, we’re not going to discuss memory. The opening scene is about a little boy who wants his mommy to come and say good night to him. And she’s with friends downstairs, they’re having a dinner, a particular gentleman happens to be there whom he dislikes because every time the guest is there, Mr. Swann, what happens is that little Marcel does not get his good night kiss.

Now, what the good night kiss means I want the kiss, and I want the kiss to last for a long time. I want to possess. I want to own that kiss. His mother says, “Well, good night now. Here’s the kiss.” She’s at the dinner table, and he has to walk up the stairs by himself holding the kiss on his cheek as if he wants to own it. He wants to own his mother. This is not the right good night’s sleep, good night kiss that he is aiming for so he can’t fall asleep. And he’s nervous, and he gets agitated, and eventually he hears his mother coming upstairs, she’s going to bed, and he sees her, and he’s caught. And worse yet, he’s caught by his father.

And the mother says, “The boy is agitated. What should we do?” He says, “Oh, just go and sleep with him.” That’s the end of it. So the little Marcel finally not only gets his good night kiss, he gets his whole mother. The whole package is given. He gets to own her for that one night. Problem is he’s upset now. He feels that something is wrong. He feels remorseful. He feels guilty that he’s forced his mother to do something that she’s not happy to do. And now, it’s basically getting the kiss ruins the kiss. So you have this act of what I call dispossession.

Suddenly, the very man who wanted this thing takes it away from himself. You will see this happening throughout the novel. There is no such thing as love in Proust. He calls it love, but it’s not love. It’s just a feverish desire to get someone. He wants someone, and he needs to get them. He doesn’t know what love is. I don’t think he believes in it. He doesn’t know what to do with it once he gets it, if he gets it. So all he wants is to possess the woman. And that you see in the act of Swann himself, who’s the same exact way as little Marcel.

So they find themselves in situations where they actually don’t even like the person that they allege to love. And there’s a very famous sentence at the very end of “Swann in Love” when he says, you know, to say that, “I’ve spent all these years, all this time loving a woman who wasn’t even my type,” you know?

[Clip ends]

• Okay.

• And then-

• And I want to show one other piece.

[Clip begins]

• His movement to recognise the dream which she had so long cherish and to assist position. The pronouns are all wrong, by the way, this is Scott Moncrieff, but who cares? It’s beautiful, okay? So let… Music, art, and theatre are essential in his understanding of what his mission is going to be or what the meaning of life is actually. But then you, when you think about it, what really brings meaning to his life is not just art, but the sound of his spoon that’s sort of stirring a cup. And that little tinted ablution for him is almost a call to the mission or to the vocation of his life as an artist. And maybe we can speak about one thing that I have not mentioned, the question of his style.

His style itself is a huge machine which seeks to… It’s like a huge amoeba that you see in horror movies. So basically, it’s going to engulf everything. And if it’s too big for it, well, it’s going to make itself more spacious. So long as it can engulf every single detail, every nuance, every insight, every intercepted moment of emotion, it’s going to log it all in because it doesn’t want to forget anything. It is, sorry to use the word, retention par excellence, okay? That’s all it wants to do is just to retain, retain, retain. And among the things that it remembers best as the moments that it never possessed.

• But it also wants to reflect-

• Marcel wants to remember the best of the moments it never possessed about possession, acquisition and so on.

• It’s always morphing on us. You never know what to think of.

[Clip ends]

• This guy is so interesting, Andre Aciman, “Call Me by Your Name” is his novel. And coming back to this here with a couple of last ideas about Proust, Hannah Arendt, she gets her… She talks about in one of her books that the image she gets of the Jew is from Proust. Proust writes about the character Jew, you know, the esoteric, the oriental, the parasite other, the parvenu other in European society, but the image is from Proust. And she quotes him and she says… She talks about our Judaism is reduced to a strangeness, an object of curiosity in Proust and for her. And by relinquishing Judaism primarily as a religion, Jewishness comes to be identified with closed clans and a psychology. And she quotes Proust, this is Proust, “The question is not as for "Hamlet”, to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong.“

Jews are seen for their distinctive perversity. And Hannah Arendt links it with a phrase of Israelis, and Israeli talked about what one person may see as a vice, another may see as a virtue. Of course, these are words of their times. We know what the contemporary meanings are of vice and virtue, you know, things that we admire and things we despise or human hate. This is what she called, you know, vice and virtue would be, you know, not only to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong. And then, of course, who where to belong, you know? And Arendt goes on about Proust and her own ideas, but they come from Mr. Proust. And then she writes, "It is the soul of the ancient Hebrew turned from a life at once insignificant and transcendental and so disturbing because it nonetheless resembles humanity all too closely in our poor everyday world.”

It’s Proust image of the Jew as the outsider yet again, amongst all the other roles, the political, the psychoanalytic, the psychological, the artistic, the son infatuated with the mama and everybody is the outsider, I think, is what ties them all together, but a profound sense of outsider. It is kind of exile within, you know, which many people feel, not just writers, artists, whoever. And she says, you know, that is the ultimate defining nature of the Jew. Of course, all the stuff we talk about, to assimilate or not assimilate, et cetera. And she goes on about it, Hannah Arendt. Then, I’m not going to read this one piece, but this is one phrase from the Madeleine scene of eating the cake and having the cup of tea stirring the tea, and in the tea, the memory and the leaves and the sips of the tea, and the taste of the cream and the cake and a little bit of jam inside, you know, everything What every little moment as Andre Aciman elaborates is absolutely obsessed on.

He says, I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, or mortal in the world. And it was my memory, my visceral memory that gave it back to me. So the role of memory is to remind the person to cease now to feel mediocre, accidental, and moral. Sorry, and mortal. Mediocre, accidental, and mortal in the world because memory of the strong good things in life together with the sorrows that one has overcome, the sorrows that one has faced, the hardships in life, the adversities, the triumphs, all of them come through memory for Proust. And I think that’s what enables the survivor with irony and wit and humour to survive, endure and make something of their lives. And Arendt talks about in terms of the Jew, how to the position, not any of the Jew, but it could be homosexual, it could be a Black person, could be Asian, it could be person loves yellow shirts, green shirts, short, tall, whatever.

All the aspects of otherness, outsiders, and Proust talks about the outside as necessary. Otherwise you can’t have a society. You know, society where everybody conforms and agrees. Well, you don’t need laws if everybody obeys, everybody, da da da da da. Goody two-shoes everywhere, you don’t need to. So the need in human nature divide in conquest, divide in rules the old political maxim, but it’s the need in human beings. It’s the need within our own nature, you know, to fall in love with… As Aciman talks about in the novel, to love the woman, but realise he doesn’t like her. The mother’s kiss, manipulator gets it, but then is empty because he’s won it by manipulation. Is it love that he got it? So everything has its contradiction. Everything has its complete ambiguity. But when you try to write about it in this obsessive insane detail with such attention to language and the rhythms of language, it becomes quite a seductive, alluring, almost hypnotic effect on the reader. I think. Romantic, idealistic, got to have the time, the money to do all this stuff, of course.

But it exists as a powerful monument for me to the beginning of the 20th century that the individual is gone into in such detail, such an enormous depth in contrast to the vast hugeness of the extreme events which engulf the world in the early part first off of the 20th century. And today, I think as we feel so unsettled and unsure and many things happening, you know, so many questions, you know, rushing and roaming through our minds, Proust I think offers one thing, you know, that actually we can’t think. The reality we are living in our minds is something to be really valued. And that’s where we can begin to build the strength from again. We do things out in the big world.

Of course, we do and achieved and you know, whether it’s in business or whether it’s in education or academia or family or children, whatever, but we can also together with that, never forget… And he would argue, never forget this living reality in our own mind and imagination 'cause that’s what gives us power without trying sound over religious. And finally, Harold Pinter wrote a screenplay, which was never made, but it was called the Proust screenplay. Can you see the influence?

Volker Schlondorff, the great German director, fantastic forms, you know, he made a movie in 1999 with Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich on Proust. I’ll just give you a few examples from contemporary popular culture of the enduring and in fact vastly increasing influence of this completely nutty, crazy, semi-neurotic writer. Monty Python, in one of their greatest scenes for me. You know, the scene where John Cleese goes to buy… Takes parrot back and wants to buy, you know, get another parrot and the fish and all that and fish licence talk about… Well, Proust had an haddock as a pet fish and he wants… And well, if you’re selling the author, if you’re calling the author of “Remembrance of Things Past”, I shall have to ask you to step outside young man, okay? I mean, Monty Python, bring it in. There’s another sketch of Monty Python, where the contestants have to say all seven volumes of the novel in 15 seconds or fail the contest. These are just a few examples of fun and lightheartedness, but there are so many more in popular and inherited culture for our times. And I think there’s a reason why. This guy from this place in France, you know, has loomed so large and shadows all the writers of today.

Should I take some questions, Lauren?

• [Lauren] Yes, there are some questions. Do you want to take those, David?

Q&A and Comments

• Yeah, sure with pleasure. Okay, Marcia, thanks very much to you and Henry, hope you both very well up in Canada. Sally, thanks so much. Okay. Valerie, cartoon in two parts. Yep, family sitting around. I know, I wish, but there’s so much in the Dreyfus affair. Sonya, retrieving memories through the sensors. I bought a bottle of calamine to evoke the memory of my baba. Fantastic. Okay, we all do it. I’ve got little trinkets from my father when he was in the Zambian colonial rifles at the age of 19. You know, up in Zambia, just got out of Lithuania.

How does disentangle romance from observation? Fantastic, Rodney. Whew, that’s a long discussion. Liz, two things. The introduction to… Yeah, exactly is three paragraphs. Yep, yep. And passing the seminal English translation by Scott… Yeah, exactly. Moncrieff. I still think it’s the best translation. I agree with you Liz. Hi, thanks again. Translation, I would recommend is Scott Moncrieff, that one that Liz mentioned. Proust, he never wrote about Shakespeare, but he certainly knew it inside out. I think he translated a bit, but I’ll check.

Q: Was he an atheist? A: Well, I would say that he certainly didn’t believe in a saviour, and he wasn’t religious in the conventional sense, but he inherited enormous amount of that Jewish irony, wit and outsider stuff from his mother. And the conflict, of course, with the father.

Proust, the secretary. Oh, fantastic. Thank you, I didn’t know it. Liz, referenced him not coming out of the oak tree because he was noise allergic. Yep, in a Cochrane study. I know. Thanks. There’s just too much about… I mean, this guy wrote, you know, three and a half thousand pages. It’s too much there. Possibly, he was autistic, Esther. I dunno. Hesitant to put these phrases on.

Q: Marie-France, did Proust makes such a painting of his numerous characters in social scenes? He was such a hermit. A: Well, I think he took the experiences because he delved into such detail like Monet’s lilies. You know, that he tried to, if you like, mine the gold inside their imagination and their minds of the people he met.

He had brother, Robin, as I mentioned. The guy Robert that I spoke about. Marie, did Illiers, Combray, yeah, they named it after Proust, and it’s a huge tourist attraction in France. Ron, you might enjoy “The Year of Reading Proust”. Yep, by Phyllis Rose. Yeah, Beautifully written as you say. Maritz, it was made into film. Absolutely, of Andre Aciman, it’s an excellent film, “Call Me by Your Name”. The Egyptian guy that I showed at the end. Aciman also wrote a book of essays, “Homo…” Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Proust to turned alienation into an art. Yep like Kafka and many other Jews of that generation I guess and writers, Beckett, others.

Karen Joyce, on the jacket of her… Aciman as seek to explore what time into artists he cannot grasp, yep. Aciman “Out of Egypt”, it’s also wonderful. Absolutely, superb writing. Sharshahk, thanks very much. John, Proust cousin Emmanuel received a letter while he was in the trenches. People forget that I’m a Jewish writer. Yep. Thanks, Alan. Andrew, thank you. Hannah, let’s giggle. Well, you know, I think that he looks at his society with the smirk and the smile of irony. I think that’s how really Proust did it. You know, as Gual did it, many others. So things got tougher. Monique, yep. Rhonda, thank you. Bobby, other side of memory distorts. Yep, of course.

And I think today with… You know, again this whole question of truth and untruth, you know, and how millions and millions in the world, not just America, but in England, in the world, you know, believe, you know, buying to the untruths. I mean, in Becky, you know, going so against calling AIDS, you know, a Western disease, you know, in the times. I mean, the untruths are lies, you know, that are spread everywhere and believed by so many people. The 21st century, maybe not so extraordinary, you know, if you look at history and you look at these writers and what they tell us. So the question of truth and untruth is crucial 'cause he’s trying to say what is the real truth in every moment in our minds. That’s the ultimate truth. Not only the political polemic.

Thanks, Pearl. Judy, the perfume of your mother. Yep, we all have those. Oh, me. Experience of my first college, great writing enabled me to move on. Yeah, fear of inability. Judy, great, sensory focusing. Yeah, it’s wonderful. And Judy, it’s also used in a lot of actor training exercises, you know, more safely. Sense memory, it’s called in the actor language. Rita, reliability of memories. Absolutely. And that’s why I talked in that first quote that I did about, you know, it’s a task when it’s got to find the memory and bring it back to its fullness and the truth of it. And it’s not effortless, it takes effort. And that’s different to Kundera, you know, “The Book of Laugh and Forgetting”. But Kundera’s got a whole different ironic, intentionally brilliant fantastical witchy perspective doesn’t aim at the same.

Hillary, he had a bar mitzvah, mother’s influence. Well, I think she was a pretty tough cookie for his father. Thanks, Rhonda. Okay. And Rosalyn, Kundera, yeah. They’re all influenced by Proust What can I say? You know, from Kundera to Beckett to Joyce even to a degree, although, dunno if you read him at all. But, you know, they’re all influenced to… Bob Dylan, even to, as I mentioned to, you know, just so many of them. I mean, today, the writers talk about him, which is ridiculous, but also quite remarkable.

Okay, well, thank you very much, everybody, and hope you will and, you know, enjoy the Proustian moments of heightened intensity in life day-to-day, and a cup of tea or whatever gives you happiness or a bit of moments of pleasure.

Take care.