29. Of course, the Travelling Companion wasn’t the only one back there...
The twenty-ninth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero recalls his much-cherished grandmother and speaks to the perpetual presence of the dead in our lives.
Of course, the Travelling Companion wasn’t the only one back there. My father was knocking about, and my grandfather and grandmother too...
In fact, my grandmother stands out, perhaps because she was one of the earliest objects of my affection; someone on whom the totality of my youthful feelings of love were projected; everything beautiful about the world wrapped up in the form of one elderly woman (she could have only been around forty-four at the time), full of a fidelity to me, a duty and devotion, that the greatest army could not undo.
In the very early years of my life, we spent untold hours together. I would sit at her feet, hypnotised by the movement of fingers and knitting needles as she made scarves, jumpers, and cardigans for the family; or I’d follow her around the house while she polished horse brasses and dusted furniture, so desperate was I to remain in her company at all times. She was the first person, other than my parents, whom I recall loving like my whole being depended on it – the kind of intimacy children are unafraid to share, but that diminishes as the years pass, when to touch that same person can become an act so difficult that one must override an inexplicable aversion, for fear of being thought cruel or distant. Which is just how I felt when stood next to her deathbed years later, a failed grandson, who’d incrementally reneged on his filial duties, afraid of both what he’d become and of what dying had made her – a withered, bird-like thing, that he struggled to look upon because it meant confronting his own unwitting betrayal and remembering the tender power of what he’d once felt.
I was reminded of this desperate moment by one of the Search’s most moving scenes. Back at the Grand Hotel in Balbec, lonely, tired, and despondent, the Narrator bends down to untie his boots and is suddenly struck by the full reality of his grandmother’s death, which up until that moment had only existed as an abstract, half-felt thing. It turns out that many years before, when in a similarly melancholy state, she’d come to his aid to help him remove them:
‘I had just perceived, in my memory, stooping over my fatigue, the tender, preoccupied, disappointed face of my grandmother, as she had been on that first evening of our arrival, the face not of that grandmother whom I had been astonished and remorseful at having so little missed, and who had nothing in common with her save her name, but of my real grandmother, of whom, for the first time since the afternoon of her stroke in the Champs-Elysées, I now recaptured the living reality in a complete and involuntary recollection.’
His relationship with her is perhaps the most genuine and heartfelt he has with any of the novel’s other characters, and this incongruous moment produces a hammer blow. She is dead and will never be there to comfort him ever again. And this dismal truth, suddenly apprehended for the first time, leaves him utterly bereft:
‘I knew that I might wait hour after hour, that she would never again be by my side. I had only just discovered this because I had only just, on feeling her for the first time alive, real, making my heart swell to breaking point, on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her forever. Lost forever; I could not understand, and I struggled to endure the anguish of this contradiction: on the one hand an existence, a tenderness, surviving in me as I had known them, that is to say created for me, a love which found in me so totally its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might have existed from the beginning of the world, would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects; and on the other hand, as soon as I had relived that bliss, as though it were present, feeling it shot through by certainty, throbbing like a recurrent pain, of an annihilation that had effaced my image of that tenderness, had destroyed that existence, retrospectively abolished our mutual predestination, made of my grandmother, at the moment when I had found her again as in a mirror, a mere stranger whom chance had allowed to spend a few years with me, as she might have done with anyone else, but to whom, before and after those years, I was and would be nothing.’
When I read this, there grew in me the awareness, always there, but up until that point unconscious, suddenly and meaningfully brought into the light, of the paradoxical survival and annihilation of the dead within us, which Proust delineates so brilliantly. For the first time, I could understand the anguish that attends this sensation, the pain and guilt that comes with the destruction of the dead, and how this might, conversely, prolong their tenure in our hearts.
Like the Narrator, I promised myself that I would no longer turn away from this suffering, but instead live within its compass, no matter what it did to my dreams, nor to my waking life. I knew that both my father and grandmother existed in me at least in part because of my neglect of them when they were alive, and that to have them there calling to me was both my punishment and my blessing.
To my mind, the presence of the dead within and around us is an entirely normal state of affairs. Those who can’t see them, or who aren’t aware of them, are either denying a difficult truth or simply bereft of the necessary imagination or intuition. The dead are quite comfortable, it seems, operating within the parameters of thought, their natural habitat, which often extends by means of projection into the so-called ‘real world’. Secretly cloistered within the psyche, rarely still or quiet, they continually murmur to us, toying with our emotions, with our state of mind, whenever the mood takes them.
Like Hamlet, we live in haunted kingdoms, where the prior intentions of the dead play out through the actions of the living; where we make our homes and professions and families in buildings built by the dead, speak in languages invented by the dead, think in patterns and prescriptions handed down to us by the dead, live by the ideas and ideologies of the dead, and conduct our affairs entirely in accordance with their dictates. While our cities – those fallen, like Sodom and Gomorrah, or those that stand for now, like Paris, Berlin, London, or New York – have always been great mausoleums, defined as much by our apprehension of absence as by our comprehension of presence. Wherever I ended up, I felt like I could sense this great seething mass of the dead, concealed from view, but distinct nevertheless, an army of restless revenants, always ready to make themselves known in our dreams, in our thoughts, or perhaps out the corner of an eye.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.