27. Given the frantic world we live in, I suppose many modern readers will seriously question...
The twenty-seventh instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero recalls a family picnic in the dog days of a summer long past.
Given the frantic world we live in, I suppose many modern readers will seriously question the amount of time required to read a novel of such length…
This book about time demands just that. And to do it justice, we must offer our own sacrifice of weeks and months and years; we must lose time (‘waste’ time, even), and through doing so have it reconfigured before our eyes. And not just the months or years we spend reading the novel, but all the months and years that have gone before.
In my own case, this meant being led back into the labyrinth of my prior life, the voices of acquaintances past, steadily, like a chirruping choir, rising up in my mind, their canticles interspersed with hallucinatory visions of Proustian characters, who somehow began to take physical forms inhabiting present-day London, so that I’d suddenly catch sight of Albertine skipping through St. James’s Park, Morel busking in Trafalgar Square, or Swann perusing the shop windows of Burlington Arcade.
I remember one day when I was certain that the Baron de Charlus had brushed past me on Piccadilly, appropriately enough, just moments before I stepped into The Ritz to meet a friend who’d rather randomly suggested we go for afternoon tea in the Palm Court. Once inside, my sense of occupying this other fictional world, or more properly of this other world occupying mine, only grew stronger.
Picking up one of the hotel’s heavy silver teapots offered a profound sense of connection to the Paris of Proust’s time, to the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, such that buttered scones soon became scented madeleines, our fellow patrons were transformed into dinner guests of the Verdurin circle, while the string quartet in the corner – led by M. Vinteuil himself – struck up the first notes of his sonata, all of which threw me even further into an involuntary reverie in which I found myself transported back to a lost moment from my own history, a family picnic many years before, down by the river in our little town, close to the cemetery and to my grandmother’s house.
It is unbearably hot. I’m staring up at a cloudless sky. When I close my eyes, everything is orange; when I open them again, everything is blue. The contrast is so startling, so compelling, that I repeat the process again and again. Eventually, I look over to the alder trees in the distance. They are peppered with the dark shapes of crows’ nests. I’m lying on the grass and above me, suddenly, the outline of my mother appears, holding a tuna sandwich in her hand. I take the sandwich from her and push it into my mouth. The fish has been steeped in vinegar. I can feel a pleasant stinging sensation in my nose. Turning over onto my belly, I notice more food laid out on a large blanket a few feet away: slices of Battenberg cake, Viennese whirls, pink wafers, custard creams, bourbon biscuits. There is a trifle. There is Angel Delight. There is a tartan thermos flask full of hot tea.
Beyond this, my grandfather sits in an old deckchair, the newspaper on his lap, an unlit pipe hanging from his mouth. His eyes are closed. His head droops slowly forward, then jars back sharply as the motion startles him from sleep. Every time this happens, a fly that has been resting on his nose, lifts off, performs a few circuits of his head, then lands again. The process repeats itself again and again. Further away, my father is practicing his putting on a makeshift green, a patch of parched grass on which he has excavated a small hole. With intense concentration, he strikes the ball, watches it move over the uneven ground, follows it to the hole, retrieves it, then walks back and repeats the process again and again. Finally, I turn to see my grandmother, who is sat opposite my grandfather. She is knitting in a steady and mechanical fashion, something reddish-brown and indeterminate, perhaps for my new cousin, who burbles away in his basket. Every time she reaches the end of a row, she sighs, glances up at her husband, smiles to herself, then repeats the process again and again.
A gentle wind stirs the trees. I close my eyes. Everything becomes orange once more; a burning blood-orange, and I can hear the joyous screams of my friends playing down by the river. For a moment, I think about joining them, but decide not to, because I know that very soon the Mr Whippy van will drive down the old, uncovered road where the boats are stored, stop, and announce itself with its clattering cacophony of chimes, and send all the kids hurtling towards it like fragments of metal to a powerful magnet. But I’ll have had the jump on them and be first in line, my clammy hand held aloft in anticipation of a Screwball, a Zoom, or even a Feast.
And so, I lay there for the time being, still and quiet, while in the tall trees bituminous crows bark at one another and I can feel the faint throbbing of the world and my body beat in unison with it. And I’m happy. Happy like I’ve never been happy since; happy in this in-between place, where the pain of life had been somehow obliterated. That was, until the monochrome waiter approached our table, and I was thrust back into the gimcrack reality of the hotel; suddenly alive again to the gabbling tourists taking pictures with their phones, to the dismal chamber music echoing around the dismal dining room, to the chintz and china and yet more cake to be eaten, as the waiter approached once more, pushing the desert trolley towards us with feigned solicitude.
Aware that I’d drifted off for a moment, my friend asked me what I’d been thinking about. I replied instinctively ‘my grandfather’, because out of the memory of that day all those years ago, it was the image of him nodding off in his chair, with the fly buzzing about his face, that had somehow stuck fast in my brain. He’d died some years before but was often in my thoughts. A practicing Catholic, his decision to donate his body for medical research didn’t go down too well with certain dogmatic congregants who refused to attend his funeral; but I think he felt he simply had to offer himself up for inspection, given that he’d survived three heart attacks, several strokes, and much more besides, including the time he was accidentally shot in the leg during a trip to America, to say nothing of his numerous incursions into occupied territory as a young soldier after D-Day. His was a tough and resilient body that had seemingly repelled death at every turn, at least until it couldn’t any longer.
Toward the end of his life, I remember him telling me that whenever things were getting on top of him, whenever he felt sad, or angry, or alone in this life, he’d look up at the night sky, at the distant stars, and know ‘that everything just had to be alright’. It was as simple as that, he said. God or no God. I couldn’t help but think this message was somewhat at odds with the rather austere figure I remembered from my childhood, or the draconian force that had made my father’s early life a misery. But he had softened with age, which made his death that much harder on all of us, especially his son.
While my grandfather was busy fighting the Germans, my grandmother was huddled in that same air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden that was to become my secret bolthole all those years later. These were the nights when the Luftwaffe swept in from the south and rained hellfire over our little town. I knew she was there in May 1942, when some two-hundred tons of high explosives and incendiary devices were dropped, because I asked her about it one day. This was only after I became truly conscious of the war, of my connection to it, and of what the memorial to those killed, which stood in the small square in the centre of the town, really meant. At the mere mention of that date her eyes became glassy, her voice tremulous, and I could see that she’d somehow slipped back in time and was once again caught amid the terrible noise and destruction. Yes, that was the night the bombing got very bad, was all she said.
My fascination with the war was largely down to the fact that I’d slowly become aware of the impact it was still having on subsequent generations, my own included. My father, I realised, was always in the shadow of his own; never the hero, but forever the son of one. I was at a further remove from this, and yet could feel the pull of the same unhealthy fantasy, which was the strange desire to experience the threat and terror of war without ever really having to relinquish my own relatively safe place in history. Such was the emptiness in my heart, that I’d begun to wish myself exposed to the vacillations of a far larger narrative beyond my control, but only as a temporary observer – which was nothing more than a rather ugly form of voyeuristic millenarianism; a craving for horror, but only if I could switch it off when things got too hairy.
And so, endlessly curious, I read voraciously on the subject to satisfy this need; immersing myself in books handed down from my father, who’d obviously done the same during the years before he joined up himself, when a boy’s fascination with war is arguably at its peak. Here’s Proust on the same subject, writing about his own experiences of living through the first war: ‘Night and day we think about the war, perhaps still more painfully when, like me, one is not taking part.’
It’s strange to think of my grandparents, each surviving the second war in their own way, uncertain of their respective futures and their future together, unburdened by the reality of their progeny, and their progeny’s progeny, struggling on through the horror regardless, because that’s what had to happen. It made me realise how ungrateful I’d been, brazenly dissatisfied with the comforts they fought to secure for me, wishing that I might shrivel up and die and have done with it all, and perhaps even that I’d never been born at all. Because all that war and death seemed like some grim joke without a punchline. And everything that had followed, by which I mean the world as I’d come to know it, was just the same: corrupted, immoral, barbaric.
And yet, fight they had, and fight we must; which was, in my own rather pathetic way, what I was doing by reaching out in desperation towards art. Nietzsche writes about something similar in The Birth of Tragedy: ‘Aware of the truth from a single glimpse of it, all man can see is the horror and absurdity of existence; now he understands the symbolism of Ophelia’s fate, now he understands the wisdom of Silenus, the god of the woods: it repels him. Here, in this supreme menace to the will, there approaches a redeeming, healing enchantress – art. She alone can turn these thoughts of repulsion at the horror and absurdity of existence into ideas compatible with life: these are the sublime – the taming of horror through art; and comedy – the artistic release from the repellence of the absurd.’ I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but later realised that reading Proust was a way of finding ‘ideas compatible with life’, and that I shared this mission with the Narrator who, through reworking the vagaries of his life into art, was doing much the same.
Of course, this was Proust’s intention as well. Proust who, like Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, is one of the great teachers of this difficult lesson. Because the ideas we uncover might not always make life easier, at least not materially; but they must, and should, always make it far more morally palatable. And this is the essential thing for the human being, when he or she really thinks about it; hammering free from the shackles of custom, comfort, and complacency, which is exactly what Proust asks of us in his essay ‘Contre Saint-Beauve’, when he talks of ‘shattering with all our force the ice of the habitual and the rational which instantly congeals over reality and keeps us from ever seeing it.’
Because new futures cannot be based upon the narrow realisms that frame political debate and public discourse; they cannot, for example, stand on the misguided assumptions of short-term gain, financial speculation, and the infinite growth paradigm. All that will do is throw us into catastrophe. They must instead be built on an honest reckoning with our common history; on a preparedness to confront our personal and collective psychic trauma; and on an interrogation of the shibboleths that define one’s culture, community, and religion, while always acknowledging that which exists outside the self in a spirit of shared municipal amelioration. That means an aggressive tackling of the principles of plutocracy, and the complete dismantling of the corrupt brand of corporatism that defines the reality we live in today.
And if the political side requires careful vigilance, which it most definitely does, so too does the personal; by which I mean developing a capacity for those behaviours – physical, mental, and moral – that help us tame horror and convert suffering into art, empathy, and action. Here again, Proust’s own short life offers a compelling case study, marked, as it was, by what the American theologian Reinhold Niebhur termed a kind of ‘sublime madness’, especially in its later years, where almost everything he did was in the service of his work. We know that the novel dramatises a not dissimilar shift in its protagonist, who ultimately sees beyond the superficial attractions of elite society in favour of a sacred devotion to art, which becomes a way to unlock value in the wasted years and reconnect with the numinous intuitions of his childhood.
In this space, the artistic and the ethical function as one, because great art is empathetic in that it shows us other human beings in all their infinite variety, but more crucially, because it resists and counters the totalitarian tendency, which is what can happen when we let barbarism and cruelty trump the imagination.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.
Ben Murray — the only text worth reading