31. These recollections of were so intense that there were numerous mornings...
The thirty-first instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero considers Albertine, the ocean, and memories of Maria.
These recollections were so intense that there were numerous mornings when, for the briefest of moments, I’d forget everything that had happened, convinced she was right there next to me in bed, immersed in sleep, gently breathing…
Still half asleep myself, I’d reach out to touch her, anticipating the delicious warmth of her skin, only to feel the disappointment of a cold cotton sheet. Where had she gone? How long had I been alone? A dawning sadness that prompted me to open my eyes in the hope that the world might have changed during the night. But no, everything was just as I’d left it; the grey-green walls, the chest of drawers, the yellow-shaded lamp, the map of East Anglia, still and silent like they always were. And so, I’d look toward the liquid sunlight squeezing its way through the gap in the curtains, because if I had nothing else, I could at least usually find some sort of solace in its incomprehensible radiance.
I’m reminded of the way the light similarly broke into the interior darkness of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, a church where I’d found respite during my last visit to France. This contrast, the light breaching the dark, the dark surrounding the light, and the strange almost incomprehensible apprehension of them both, similarly recalled the walk ‘down the Dog’ all those years before, across open sunlit fields and through patches of shady coppice. I could remember the way the one informed the other, each giving weight to its opposite, how the shift between them stirred all sorts of feelings inside me, and how life itself seemed more magical at moments of transition like these.
I’d gone into this particular church because I’d recognised its name from A Harlot High and Low. This was during the difficult hours after leaving Proust in Pere Lachaise, during which I still had the smell of the Travelling Companion bouncing around my brain, having almost become convinced she was watching me from behind a gravestone. I even remember, as I walked back toward the city, thinking that this trace of her might never fade, and that I would always find her in such places, lurking among the tombs. But once inside the church, I finally found a much-needed sense of calm, a solace in the ancient stone, as in Norwich Cathedral; the light taking on a living quality, prompting thoughts of simple things, of warm memories infused with compassion rather than reproach. And there, for a moment in the cool shady interior, with the light gilding the gnomon, the magnificent possibilities of a passionate and equitable love didn’t seem so far-fetched after all.
But the salutary darkness of Saint-Sulpice had long dissipated. Waking up alone in north London after drunken nights of debate with my capricious compeers, there were many occasions when I hardly knew where, who, or what, I was… as if I’d been broken apart in the night and needed reassembling. In the essay ‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’ Proust writes: ‘whenever I woke up without knowing where I was, all – things and years and places – swirled around me in the darkness. My body, still too torpid to move hand or foot, lay guessing at its surroundings. All those which it had known from childhood onward offered themselves in turn to its groping memory, reassembling around it every place I had ever slept in, even those which for years I had not called to mind and might never have called to mind till my dying day.’
In the Search, Proust takes this theme even further: ‘And often an extra hour of sleep is a paralytic stroke after which we must recover the use of our limbs, learn to speak. Our will would not be adequate for this task. We have slept too long, we no longer exist. Our waking is barely felt, mechanically and without consciousness, as a water pipe might feel the turning off of a tap. A life more inanimate than that of a jellyfish follows, in which we could all equally well believe that we had been drawn up from the depths of the sea or released from prison, were we but capable of thinking anything at all.’
Like the Narrator, I came to see sleep as proof of the fluid and fugitive nature of consciousness, throwing up new worlds and new ways of seeing this one; both friend and enemy, on some nights obliterating every trace of pain, on others magnifying it to unbearable proportions. In mining this osmotic barrier that separates our waking life from the world of dreams, the novel expertly distils the admixture of love, lassitude, and jealousy that characterise the Narrator’s relationship with Albertine; for this hinterland is also a place of sensuality and desire. It’s perhaps no surprise that the Narrator draws a parallel between her kisses and those offered (or withheld) by his mother all those years before; tender, maternal delights without which he could never settle, and so powerful that the demand for their equivalence continues in later life.
Meanwhile, Albertine asleep is a pure creature, shed of the contradictions and common-or-garden deceptions that mark her day-to-day behaviour. In such a state, the Narrator’s stormy heart is calmed, and the cruelties the couple impose on one another are temporarily effaced by slumber:
‘Her breathing, as it became gradually deeper, was now regularly stirring her bosom and, through it, her folded hands, her pearls, displaced in a different way by the same movement, like the boats, the anchor chains that are set swaying by the movement of the tide. Then, feeling that the tide of her sleep was full, that I should not ground upon reefs of consciousness covered now by the high water of profound slumber, deliberately, I crept without a sound upon the bed, lay down by her side, clasped her waist in one arm, placed my lips upon her cheek and heart, then upon every part of her body in turn laid my free hand, which also was raised like the pearls, by Albertine’s breathing; I myself was gently rocked by its regular motion: I had embarked upon the tide of Albertine’s sleep.’
We may think we live on dry land, but that’s all wrong. This world is water and without water we’d be nothing. That same high tide which gathers up the Narrator and Albertine carries us all into uncharted territories, where, deep in the waters below, faceless creatures with bioluminescent lamps slung above cavernous jaws silently hunt their prey. We are submariners, conceived and gestated in saline solution, cast adrift like plankton, to be swept into the mouth of a leviathan, or flung against the rocky shore as the sea sees fit. It’s into this unforgiving squall that we must pitch ourselves willingly; for love, transformation, and transcendence are nothing without risk. As Herman Melville writes: ‘But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, indefinite as God – so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!’
We shouldn’t forget that Albertine is often described as a Nereid and first espied by the Narrator as a silhouette against the sea. And it’s this perplexing vision, which rises to the surface of his mind many times, that he struggles to resolve with the capricious odalisque he later takes ‘captive’ in his Parisian apartment. For even in the landlocked metropolis, the ocean is somehow always present, a recurring symbol that sends us seaward again and again.
It was something I recognised in my own history, in the river that ran by my grandmother’s house, which just a mile or so later became a wide estuary, where noisy gulls commandeered the sky and curlews plucked worms from the blue mud. It was this place that became the recurrent setting of many of my own dreams around this time, transformed into a futuristic industrial wasteland, battered by vast swells that swept across the gravel-grey waters, flooding the mouth of the river. In this spot, between the eastern and western headlands, I’d find myself cast away, propelled by riptides into the open sea, looking back shoreward, to the place where my very first amorous adventures unfolded with sweet Maria, all the while fighting for breath against the surging waves. For those were the beaches on which we first explored each other’s bodies; bladderwrack hinterlands where the sea’s ancient rhythms struck an eternal chord within us, where we found ourselves enveloped in the salts expunged by breaking waves, in those minerals essential for all animal life, saturating the night air, covering our skin and hair, passed back and forth between trembling lips, teeth, and tongues. How precious and yet precarious our exposure is: without it we risk water intoxication, too great a dose and death beckons.
As I read the line, ‘It is said that the salt liquid which is our blood is only an internal survival of the primitive marine element,’ I suddenly remembered being on the beach with Maria one day, sitting beneath the old sea wall to shelter from the wind, kissing with the kind of clumsy intensity only teenagers can muster. In the course of our embrace, a small cut on her lip had been reopened; but so vehement was our lust once unleashed, neither of us could pull away; and I remember the delicious briny taste of her blood, metallic and warm, which left me wishing it might seep into mine and coalesce, and that we might become one thing, forever entwined. Sometimes, I feel like I’d give almost anything to be able to sit with her on the shore again and taste her blood just one more time.
Thomas Wolfe famously wrote ‘you can’t go home again’, and Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back over the ruined cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. But when you think about it, where else is there to go? Boats against the current and all that. Thankfully, Proust does offer us a way back; one that’s transformed through suffering, penance, and by the power of art. Reading the Search was constantly throwing me back into sapid recreations of my past life, excavating dim memories, which were like stories I’d once read, put aside and long-forgotten, but that were now returned with a clarity and force I would never have thought possible.
It wasn’t until I’d been in London for a year or more, when the cracks were really starting to appear, that I finally pulled Swann’s Way down off the shelf. After purchasing that first volume in Norwich, whenever I saw another of those same Chatto & Windus editions, I’d buy it, until after many years, I finally had the whole set. It was like I knew I’d need it one day. Just as I knew, at long last, that I had to stop waiting for some random remedial miracle to come along to cure my despair and do something about it myself. As it turned out, this just happened to be reading the longest novel ever written; but I suppose it could have been running a marathon or jumping out of an airplane. Then again, perhaps neither of those things, because they both sound awful. If I’m honest, it was all I could think to do back then. It was right there in front of me. Yes, it was only reading a book; but it was a meaningful act. It was enough.
I’m surely repeating myself, but it’s worth saying again: I found something hypnotic in those deliciously meandering sentences of his; something that was akin to being in a trance. Like no other book I’ve read, the Search quickly became part of my psychic reality. It’s almost as if the reader is absorbed into the book and comes to find herself, as with Albertine, held captive in the Narrator’s apartment; unable to leave, like The Exterminating Angel’s hapless dinner guests, or those foolhardy enough to check in to the Hotel California. In that sense, it’s almost impossible not to become your own version of the Narrator, who is already fractured, formed of overlapping parts, to which is added the reader, who must read through him, and so find in his voice a new incarnation of her own. At the end of the Proustian corridor you’ll always find a mirror.
The book’s combination of subjective symbolism, metaphysics, comedy, and social realism might sound like a rather esoteric concoction, but these are simply the component parts of life that everyone must contend with in some way. Proust’s reckoning with the unseen world, for instance, never seems affected, overwrought or out of place. It is expressed at first within the framework of the natural intuitions of a child, the young Narrator, who understands implicitly what microscopes and telescopes tell us: that what he sees around him does not necessarily tell the whole story. It is later captured through the interventions and revelations of involuntary memory. Each of these things I recognised from my own experience; each helped frame the voices of my father and the Travelling Companion.
As my reading continued, I found myself more fully able to understand my relationship with the past, made possible because it was, like Saint-Sulpice or Norwich Cathedral, a sacred space in which the act of reading was akin to the act of prayer, built on sacrifice, labour, and expiation. The voices of Proust’s characters played off the voices inside my head, forming a kind of communal order in which I was but one participant among many: living, dead, fictive, imagined, actual. Somehow my reality had been breached; and while I realised that on one level this was all purely psychological, a fantasy, in another way I felt convinced that it was all entirely real, and that I was surrounded by spirits, sometimes benign, sometimes malevolent, who might manifest themselves at any moment, or who might step out of the book and onto the streets of London whenever the fancy took them.
Either way, what really mattered was my response to all this. Yes, I was drinking as heavily as ever, and still stuck in a dead-end job, but at least the book offered me some meaningful work, and through it the distant possibility of redemption. And so, I kept at it, happy that it had obliterated the quotidian at least in part; curious to explore the binate world in which I found myself, to be drawn back into the strange recesses of my life, and be held to account by the sometimes-incompatible demands of art and sanity.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.