37. The war changed 'In Search of Lost Time' immeasurably
The thirty-seventh instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero continues his reading and thinks about war.
The war changed In Search of Lost Time immeasurably, as Proust found himself having to account for this eruption in the fabric of everything he knew…
You can feel this in the writing. Prescient as ever, he wrote to a friend in 1914, describing a world in which ‘millions of men are going to be massacred in a War of the Worlds comparable to that of Wells’. At around the same time, he lost his adjutant and sometime lover Alfred Agostinelli, who was killed when the plane he was piloting (bought for him by Proust) crashed into the sea near Antibes. Deep in grief, and with publication suspended, these tumultuous years were dedicated to an expansion of the novel, which grew and grew to encompass this bitter new reality, something its author could never have conceived when he began the project in 1908.
As a consequence, Albertine (based in part on Alfred) took on a far greater prominence, which saw In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (the second volume) significantly altered and the writing of both The Captive (the fifth) and The Fugitive (the sixth), which offered the counterpoint of female homosexuality (Gomorrah) to that of male homosexuality (Sodom), which was already a central theme of the book, thus providing us with the delicious retrospective agonies of the Narrator over Albertine’s suspected infidelities with other women, which chime perfectly with the earlier jealousies of Swann with regard to Odette. Played out over this far greater length, the torturous complexities of love and desire take on an Olympian scale, achieving a psychological depth that elevates Proust’s work to the very pinnacle of literary greatness.
As I read the last volume, with the buzz of New York all around me, I found myself thinking about war as spectacle. About how, the further we are from its horrors, the more fascinating those horrors seem to us; and how we filter that compulsion toward violence into entertainment, which I suppose is some sort of sublimation of the urge to destruction that Freud delineated, first in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and later in Civilisation and its Discontents, that ‘the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man’.
Behind the hallucinatory images on our screens, the disinformation, the propaganda, the war industry grinds on, given cover by the media and lubricated by the machinations of the military industrial complex. Still, our fascination persists – and my own in particular – with the strange titillations war, or the thought of war, offers. For Freud, the battle between Eros and Thanatos, between the tendency to draw together and draw apart, is that which defines human culture. Although separate forces, they seldom operate in isolation and are often intermingled. In this way, sadism represents the interruption of the destructive instinct into the realm of the love impulse, while masochism is a combination of sexual energy and annihilation at work within the self. While human bodies bear the physical burden of this, the collective memory of war manifests its own scars. Rendered bootless by abundance, my preoccupation with war was symptomatic of a generation looking to make a connection with something far greater than itself; a desire even stronger in the generation preceding it, to which my father belonged, who had to deal with their own fathers returning from the real theatres of conflict.
This crossed my mind only because my father had apparently said as much to Alistair in a moment of drunken candour. My grandfather prized the chain of command for good reason; and so, insolence appeared to him as the greatest sin. My father’s defiance was as natural and necessarily destructive as plate tectonics, but it also concealed a deeper fear of ever being able to meet the standards set for him. This, combined with the absence of anything to sacrifice oneself for, and the cod-psychologist within us cannot but help pick out the strains of self-destruction which were to consume him.
Lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, my mind would often dwell on the image of the old air-raid shelter, which like a doll’s house of Usher, I’d come to associate with my family’s collective war trauma. In half-dreams, I entered that holy space again, this time in my imagination and with a new understanding of what it really meant. And I tried to picture my grandmother and her sister in their nightdresses, terrified – excited even – staring into one another’s eyes and thinking it might be the last time they ever did so, balanced on the edge of obliteration, listening for the sound of the approaching engines.
Elsewhere, in some distant barracks, my grandfather, wide awake and pondering how long this would all go on and what might happen to him if that lunatic Hitler couldn’t be stopped. What would I have done in either of their places? My experience of the shelter was of the strange magic of its vestigial memory, never the thing itself; and of the memory of the memory, returned to me while reading Proust. But how allied was this awareness of the numinous impressions I experienced as a child with the possibility of their return? What Freud referred to as the ‘oceanic feeling’, was for him little more than an expression of the ego’s early separation of the world into interior and exterior, and nothing to do with ‘religious’ feelings, which were much more likely to stem from infantile feelings of helplessness and of a longing for the father. ‘I could not point to any need in childhood so strong as that for a father’s protection,’ Freud says.
Years before, lying alone in different bed. Again, I recalled the influence of the slow dissolution of the barrier between the outer and inner worlds that came with the loss of consciousness; a state in which such knowledge made an even stronger claim over me, and which seemed to suggest a reality beyond the bounds of time. A place where darkness acted like a corrosive force, and was tempered only by the oblique reflections of car headlights from the road outside that moved up along the wall and across the ceiling in a kind of flowing liquid-like movement, as intangible as the impression I’m trying to articulate; as meaningful to me as I write this as it was thirty years ago, when I was just another object in the room, playing ‘no more part than an apple or pot of jam on the shelf might play, which on being summoned to a moment’s dim awareness, and having ascertained that the cupboard was dark and that the wainscot creaked, would find nothing more urgent to do than to sink back into the voluptuous insensibility of the other apples and pots of jam.’
On other days, the same feelings were evoked while attending compulsory church services with my school friends. They were drawn, not from the parables burbling from the priest’s mouth, but out of the space between the roof and the walls, from the dusty corners and musty hymnals, and set loose by the wood-creak of the pews. In this way, scriptural recitation seemed unnecessary; the sense of immanence born of the fructuous air was ample. If the parables were the ostensible vehicles for moral lessons, they were to my mind superseded by this feeling and this feeling alone, which I was sure was enough for the basis of a robust morality that might be carried forward in one’s life. I felt the sacred space of the church grow and spread out across the town, so that every broken brick wall, chipped curb-stone, and concrete breakwater, every stream, glade, and oak tree resonated with the unquestionable truth of shared origins, antecedents, and infrastructure.
This was what I remembered. This and his face, so that I could barely separate the two things in my mind. And the more I read of that final volume, the more I was drawn back into the knotted fabric of my own lost time (which is its promise), so that every atom of our little town, of Norwich, Paris, Berlin, and London, every atom of the people I’d known and loved and lost, was reconfigured as living memory; my life re-opened to the magnificent joy and terror of childhood, so that the shadow and light, the grief and bliss, the love and disgust of those days came rifling back into my brain, and the world outside – New York, in all its gargantuan glory – was suddenly something more than reality, a place that made perfect sense, and that simultaneously, made no sense at all, like a dream.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.