2. Enter Marcel Proust...

The second instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero realises the scale of the task he's committed himself to and then dithers for an inordinately long time.

Enter Marcel Proust. Well, almost…

What actually happened was that as soon as I’d made up my mind to read him, I began to baulk at the challenge ahead. Suddenly, the whole endeavour seemed like far too much of a commitment.

I’m sure it was Derrida who said something about all decisions being madness, or he might have stolen the idea from Kierkegaard. Whoever said it was right. My decision to finally tackle Proust, I decided, was just that. More insanity. Another example of not really thinking things through.

There, beneath the shadow of the novel’s great edifice, staring up at its distant, snow-capped crest, like some bush-league Mallory, it became clear that I wasn’t up to the job. Without Sherpas, guide ropes, or oxygen; without a map, a compass, or proper provisions. Without a clue. What the hell did I think I was doing?

And so, before I’d even set off, I called time on my journey, thinking it best to wait, leave the book where it was, and give it a few more days. Days that became weeks. Weeks that blurred into one another. Months that coalesced out of nowhere, as I dithered and dallied and drank myself to distraction. The problem was that while I procrastinated, things only got worse; the fissure inside me only grew wider.

I realised that for many years – ever since my university days – the entire way I’d seen myself had been based upon a lie; upon a ridiculous intellectual posturing, born of vanity, which had been part of an absurd attempt to conceal the fact that I possessed – I hate to say it even now – a distinctly average mind.

When it comes to people like me, this uncomfortable truth is perhaps the most ordinary truth around. I’d laboured for nearly half a life under the pernicious illusion that I was different; that I was one of the exceptional few destined to make, or say, or do, something profound. That I might even have it in me to produce a work of singular significance, and thus finally confer some semblance of meaning upon my meaningless life. All of which was utter nonsense. For, beyond my tendency toward lassitude, my propensity for procrastination, and my addiction to television and other idle distractions, there was also my distinct lack of talent to consider.

In fact, I’d gradually became aware that what I’d succumbed to was that even more pernicious desire to be admired for the sake of it, to be thought of by those who knew me and those who didn’t (i.e. everyone in the world), as something special; to be, as Ruskin himself describes it in referring to the children of industrial capitalism (of which I was one), ‘conspicuous in life’. In truth, it was even worse than that. I’d spent so many wasted years milking this factitious disorder, convinced that if I simply believed it enough; that if I absorbed enough abstruse philosophy, watched enough world cinema, went to enough contemporary art shows, and read enough experimental poetry, that some of the esoteric essence of these things might seep into my thick skull. Thus, my inevitable exceptionalism had become an article of faith.

But where had this preposterous idea come from? An only child, loneliness had driven me into the arms of literature. I was fascinated by ghost stories, horror, science fiction; by the kind of books that required dice. As a teenager, my tastes developed in line with my ambitions. To fuel this fantasy, I’d taken Ruskin’s counsel and conversed at length with the kings and queens of English letters. By the age of 16, I’d read most of Shakespeare, most of Dickens, most of Hardy. I’d read Thackeray and Austen and Eliot. Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. In the years that followed I’d devoured almost everything modernity could throw at me.

But it was only when finally confronted with the actuality of reading Proust, decades later, that I finally understood what a sham all this literary showboating had been. It was only when faced with his ineffable genius that I became aware of my own dismal mediocrity – which is not to condemn all those other great writers (far from it), only the conditions under which I’d first read them; only my inability to read them properly, and to understand what reading them might mean.

Yet, somehow, without imbibing a single word, this dalliance with Proust had already taught me the lesson of my own sorry pomposity. I was a fraud; one of those poor wretches who’d absorbed enough great art to recognise it when he saw it, but with no real idea of how it was done, or of how to do it himself. And of course, ever since university, where literature had pressed its barbed hooks into me even further, I’d wanted to be a writer – the very thing, I now knew, I stood no chance whatsoever of becoming.

During this time, I did very little but go to work, where I’d sit disconsolate and distracted in front of my computer, pondering my pathetic pretensions, before returning home to skulk around my flat, lost and lonely. I’d watch television, make tea, eat biscuits, wash up, watch more television, eat more biscuits, dust surfaces that didn’t need dusting, vacuum floors that didn’t need vacuuming, and sleep when the tea and cleaning and television got too much. Eventually, I’d start in on the drink.

In this way, many more months passed, and nothing changed, except that now I had this perpetual image of Proust, with his sad almond eyes and jet-black hair, wedged in my mind, gently beckoning me toward him, like some strange and insistent lover. Somehow, despite my fears, his spirit had come to possess me entirely. Finally, if only to placate this elegant eidolon, I resolved to stick to my so-called ‘decision’ and get on with it, reassured that I’d nothing to lose but my own false arrogance.

A further confession. There was one more false start. For it was also around this time that I stumbled upon a copy of George Painter’s biography in a charity shop in Highgate, near to where I was living at the time. This charted Proust’s peculiar passage through the world, from the strange days of his infancy – blighted by illness and split between family homes in Auteuil, Illiers, and Paris – to his sporadic schooling and rather incongruous year of military service in Orléans; moving on to his adult years and entry into the fashionable salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, then finally examining his self-imposed exile in the now infamous cork-lined bedroom, where much of his great novel was composed.

Desperate to know more, I spent the next few weeks reading the two volumes of this celebrated work under the guise of justifiable preparatory research, until eventually realising that it was simply another delaying tactic on my part. I was putting off my reading of the work by reading about the man – something Proust himself would surely have frowned upon, believing, as he did, that biography offers no keys to the cyphers of great fiction.

Nevertheless, in doing so I came to see him as a kind of self-sacrificing hero; a man who milked the marrow of polite society, before isolating himself and making an experiment of his own short life to create his masterpiece; someone in whom the transformative power of art found its true expression.

What prompted this strange desire seemed to me to be the same intangible quality that drives a person to climb Everest or circumnavigate the globe, which is something like a refutation of death’s dominion, while also being a refutation of the soporific comforts of community and companionship; and yet, it’s also the opposite of both those things: a simultaneous craving for death and an absolute desire for the joy of life. If Proust was brave enough to take this step beyond convention into personal and artistic oblivion, couldn’t I take a similar, but far less dangerous one, simply by reading him?

And so, finally – I remember, it was on New Year’s Day – after just a few more weeks of dithering and delay, deeply hungover, I retrieved my second-hand copy of Swann’s Way from the shelf where it had spent so much wasted time gathering dust, sat down, turned to the first page, and read that wonderfully simple, deceptively short, opening sentence: ‘For a long time I would go to bed early.’