1. I never meant to write a story...
The first instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero confesses to heartbreak, a drinking problem, and contemplates a curious remedy to his ills.
I never meant to write a story about reading a story. It just turned out that way…
The story I never meant to write about is one of the longest ever written and getting through it takes a lot of the very thing we claim to have so little of these days: time.
But time was all I had back then. I was lost and looking for a way to escape the heartbreak and grief that had seized hold of my life. In response, I threw myself upon a book – Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu – which just so happened to be about time… and heartbreak… and grief. If you’ve read it, you’ll know what I mean. If you haven’t, then I should warn you, this book contains spoilers.
It may seem a strange way to seek salvation. But I was so helpless in those days, I’d become convinced my only hope was in getting as far away from the quotidian world as possible. The problem was how. I still had to survive. I still had bills to pay and a mouth to feed. I still had to get myself out of bed every day, go to work, and pretend that I cared about the business at hand. I still had to convince all the people who knew me that everything was all right. Giving up would have been the final ignominy.
So, I did what most of us do. I struggled on as best I could, one day at a time, helplessly bound to what passed for an acceptable life. The only thing I knew for sure was that it couldn’t go on. And that was when – out of nowhere – a rather simple, and I suppose somewhat ridiculous idea, first occurred to me. What if I could read my way out of this mess? What if I could propel myself into a fictional universe so completely that it would, like the action of water on stone over time, erode the thick carapace of sorrow that had formed around me and release my ailing spirit back into the light?
I thought long and hard about the kind of book that was capable of such a feat but kept coming up short. And then, one day – almost as if he’d been waiting there all along – a vision of Proust (round face, dark eyes, manicured moustache) popped into my head. Here was a writer whose very name symbolised the inviolability of great art, whose famously long and labyrinthine work stood like an unconquerable peak in the mountain range of world literature. What if he was the answer to my problem? To my fractured mind it seemed to make sense.
It was only much later that I discovered Proust himself had prescribed reading as a sanative measure: ‘an intervention which, though it comes from someone else, occurs deep inside us.’ In fact, reading is the one discipline, he writes in the introduction to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, capable of ‘exercising a favourable influence’ over minds ‘mired in a sort of impossibility of willing, as if in a deep rut’. For Proust, reading is a magic key capable of opening the door to those hidden dwelling places inside us, which without it, would have otherwise remained sealed up forever.
I’d been curious about Proust for a while, but his difficult reputation – and the seeming impenetrability of his oceanic novel – had intimidated me to such an extent that I’d always stayed away, confining myself to shallower waters. I certainly never saw myself reading the whole thing. Seven volumes. 4,000 pages. 1.25 million words. That seemed almost impossible. His was a story that would have to wait – an epic journey to be made on sultry summer afternoons in the imagined rose garden of my dotage: a time when the world’s commonplace claims had been effaced and only memory and midday martinis mattered.
As a younger man, I’d neither the hours nor the inclination for it; let alone the staying power. I’d plenty of other books to read; plenty of other things I wanted to get done (at least, that’s what I told myself). And so, the thought of taking up the Search remained sequestered in some forgotten corner of my brain. That was, until the moment when I found myself so full of worry and woe, so bereft and embattled, that it suddenly seemed like my only option. Having placed fiction upon a pedestal for so long, I realised I’d shied away from its summit. Perhaps the time had come to finally make the climb.
Part of my problem was that for too many years I’d been prone to a sort of forlorn hedonism, swinging back and forth between decadence and despair. This usually involved taking refuge in alcohol, reproaching myself for doing so, then repeating the process over and over again, like Sisyphus trudging up and down his hill. I told myself that if I could only stop drinking, everything else would be okay, knowing this wasn’t necessarily true. Sometimes I’d manage it, and my sobriety would last a few days, or perhaps a week or two at the most. But it never lasted long enough to make a real difference. I’d soon find myself beginning the procedure once again, stepping into the sacred surrounds of the public house, taking that first magical inhalation of stale beer and vestigial flatulence, safe at last from the slings and arrows served up by the indifferent world outside.
Like my father before me, I’d arrived at the sorry conclusion that reality wasn’t enough, and that alcohol was the answer. More than that: I was convinced that booze lent me the eyes of an artist, which was what I wanted to be more than anything else; and that alcohol alone could unleash the world’s pent-up magic, expose its secrets, and douse everything in a sublime and numinous light. With drink came the glory of abandon, the illicit thrill of stripping back the layers of the universe and tapping into a Dionysian knowledge shared only by the seers and sages of old.
In short, it put me where I wanted to be – at odds with the petty concerns and meagre ameliorations of polite society; in opposition to all those helpless data puppets cocooned amid the delusions of consumer culture, thrashing about in gyms, strung out on a mixture of celebrity-endorsed diets, senseless vanity, and secret self-loathing. They believed in so-called progress and human exceptionalism. They considered themselves almost immortal, refusing to see that breath’s sweet brevity and death’s inevitability were to be embraced, not sublimated. They had no idea what real drinking meant and no clue whatsoever as to why those of us who did know did what we did.
And in those transcendent hours of drunken oblivion, I would feel free and buoyant again, living out my fever dreams of cosmic union and personal apotheosis; at least until the following morning, when the world had turned full circle, and the grievous blackness had reasserted its dominion over my soul. In this state, all my grandiose fantasies, my claims to metaphysical wisdom, my desire for glory, my fallow rage, my sense of superiority, meant nothing. The future seemed impossible, the present intolerable, and even my own phantom past was no longer an effective refuge against the carnage of daily life. I needed another story.