36. These were the vague ideas sloshing around my head as I began the last volume...

The thirty-sixth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero follows in the footsteps of his father and heads to New York City.

These were the vague ideas sloshing around my head as I began the last volume, in the weeks and months since ‘seeing’ the Travelling Companion on the beach, after the voices had relented and I could only see a world in flames, marking the strange dawn of a new but functional despair…

And then one morning, as out of the blue as out of the blue can be, I received an email which was to precipitate the end of whatever part of my own story this all was. The message was from a man called Alistair, who said that he’d been in the army with my father all those years ago and had also been with him in New York. He’d only recently found out about his death. He attached a picture of dad looking healthy and happy, leaning on the bonnet of a large car. Beside him was a dippy looking dog, who must have been Rufus, the other protagonist of his exotic communiqués, which lay bundled together at the bottom of one of the large boxes in which I kept the pulpy detritus of my life. It seems both the dog and the car had belonged to Alistair. But my father had only ever told me about two of the three.

And this was how, a few weeks later, I found myself boarding a plane at Heathrow, with nothing but a suitcase and a copy of Time Regained in my pocket. I had no idea what I was doing but felt somehow certain that if my father had left anything of himself anywhere, then it wasn’t in our little town, or Norwich, or someplace else, but in New York, which was the secret dream that had been burning inside him all those years, and which he’d made real eventually, if only for a while. Above the clouds, in the luminous ether, I dreamt of his face.

Alistair picked me up from JFK; the only ever time anyone has ever held up one of those signs at an airport with my name on it. We drove back to the city, past the vast cemeteries that sit adjacent the highway, and which, like everything else I saw during those first few days, were an unsurprising surprise; much like their mirror, the stone, steel, and glass of Manhattan itself, which I’d seen rendered in celluloid a thousand times, but had never seen with my own eyes, and so never really seen at all. Strange but familiar. Like a model, like a film set, like the place where the end of the world surely begins.

After we arrived at Alistair’s apartment, exhilarated but discombobulated, I dropped off my things and headed out into the city, spending much of that first evening wandering the streets in mute disbelief, conscious of the disparities (but stranger still, the parities) that existed between the reality of New York and the dark sister city of my dreams. Later that night, Alistair joined me. I recall a bar, followed by another bar, then several more bars. The pair of us eagerly drinking into the early hours, talking about the past (what else?). In between drinks, I tried to explain what had happened to my father, and so did he. The next morning, neither of us could remember very much of anything. He was happy to have me stay, he said. I should come and go as I pleased. Help myself to anything. Truly, my father had meant a great deal to him. I remember eating bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon, and eggs. And listening to Lou Reed. I remember feeling painfully thankful. I felt strangely emboldened by the fact that I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Everything seemed unreal.

Over the days that followed, I began to find out something of my father’s life in Manhattan, which was really to hear the story of a rather different man from the one I thought I knew as a child, but which has come to make much more sense the older I’ve become. There I found the person who’d existed prior to having a son, and who’d rediscovered something of this youthful existence once he’d crossed the Atlantic. This was the man whose dreams had always been bigger than the circumstances into which he’d been born, who’d imagined himself, like many young men of his generation, as deserving of far more than a dutiful life in the factories or offices of provincial England, and so looked to the America of Jackson Pollock, Chuck Berry, and Jack Kerouac for inspiration. A vibrant, dynamic America in which anything was possible.

Finding himself in the land of the free, he took to the pap of life like an eager whelp who’d been too long denied his share. New York will always indulge a fantasy, and in living out a version of his, he was addressing the wrongs which he believed had been done to him as a child and young man, the banal and commonplace oppressions of authority, religion, and family, against which he’d raged all his life. It seems the person we imagine ourselves to be is as full of truth and lies as the person we really are. Switching places in the shadows, we never really know which of these avatars is showing its face to the world, and which looking inward, so that the view we have of ourselves is as confused as the view we have of the universe, and we end up living in the interstitial space between them, bereft of the unanimity that might make things bearable.

What he could tell Alistair but could never tell me were the details of the difficult relationship he’d had with his father, whose military nature and disciplinarian tendencies had eventually turned his son into a renegade. Inverting this became his own parental style, but even this approach was too pedestrian and limiting. That part of him which enjoyed playing the paternal provider had almost completely disappeared within a decade of my birth, as the parochial rock to which he’d been chained became more and more evident to him, and as his life began to increasingly look like that of his parents, constrained by suburban mediocrity. Such a future was untenable. Better to cut loose than live a lie, regardless of the consequences. That was what he had said. He simply couldn’t face becoming like his own father. He didn’t want to be that sort of father to you, Alistair explained one night. He was determined that you’d never feel the deadweight of convention as he had. That you’d never be stifled, stymied, stultified.

Of course, he’d still lived those first few years in New York drinking like a man with an unquenchable thirst, which was far closer to what I’d imagined. Alcohol offers a kind of fugitive dialectics of the self through which the pains of intrapersonal disputes might be tempered. And he’d been medicating in this way since his early teenage years. Then there was the whole Dionysian side of it, the blazing joy of oblivion, the ecstasy of dissolution. Alistair made my father’s New York sound like a consequence-free playground, and for a time that must have been true. He was still relatively young, and to live like Charles Bukowski, or Neal Cassady, or Allen Ginsberg, was the biggest ‘fuck you’ he could give to the world and to the people whose business it was to crush the spirit of sacred creatures like them, which had been most of the people he’d known, for most of his life. He was a man unbound.

I was feeling similar things myself, perked up by the welcome attack the city was making on my senses; a blast of the new which seemed to temporarily obliterate all those gloomy thoughts I’d been having about the state of the world. For a while at least, I forgot how disconsolate I’d been and began to live from one moment to the next in that bewitching citadel, which came to feel like home in a way, and with a rapidity, I would never have thought possible just a week or so prior. This must have been what he felt too, I thought to myself as I walked those same streets, day after day, bound up in a spatial, an architectural, jouissance.

At the same time, I was also now immersed in Time Regained, caught up in its stark transition from Paris at play to Paris at war – a city laid bare to German artillery and the kind of Biblical fire and brimstone once visited on Sodom and Gomorrah. Think Vienna in The Third Man and you’ll be somewhere near the strange shift in tone this part of the book conjures – the city of elegance and light transformed into one of darkness and shadows, peopled by black-market hawkers, wretched prostitutes, and lascivious soldiers looking to erase the horrors of the trenches through the pleasures of the flesh. And somewhere in their midst, beneath the prowling Zeppelins, roaming searchlights, and bursts of anti-aircraft fire, we find the aging Baron de Charlus on the hunt for masochistic titillation (or righteous punishment), his nephew Robert Saint-Loup seeking sensual satisfaction, and their friend the Narrator, still playing the voyeur to perfection.

In one scene, like a trio of stray moons, all three find themselves drawn into the orbit of a single illumined building on an otherwise darkened terrace; a male brothel, out of which the Narrator sees Saint-Loup emerge, and into which he steps to assuage his curiosity, only to find the Baron, tied in chains, being beaten for kicks by a young man who bears a passing resemblance to his former lover, the cruel violinist Morel. In war-torn Paris, one of Proust’s most memorable characters has passed beyond the purely temporal mode. For Charlus, the physical form has become nothing more than a locus for the pleasures of the sadomasochistic dynamic, while his mind flicks through the moth-eaten cue cards of past associations, aimlessly in search of a world and a time lost to it. Just a few days after his visit to the brothel, the Narrator learns that Saint-Loup has been killed on the front. In this world, bodies are tossed aside like cigarette butts, and memories (or ghosts) are all that remain.

The final party scene at the Prince de Guermantes conveys this sense of an ending with grim humour. The once elegant and fashionable guests now resemble walking corpses, their faces withered, encrusted with powders and ointments to conceal the decay that creeps across them, which the Narrator describes as:

‘A puppet show, yes, but one in which, in order to identify the puppets with the people whom one had known in the past, it was necessary to read what was written on several planes at once, planes that lay behind the visible aspect of the puppets and gave them depth and forced one, as one looked at these aged marionettes, to make a strenuous intellectual effort; one was obliged to study them at the same time with one’s eyes and with one’s memory. These were puppets bathed in the immaterial colours of the years, puppets which exteriorised Time, Time which by Habit is made invisible and to become visible seeks bodies, which wherever it finds it seizes, to display its magic lantern upon them.’

These are the living dead of the ancien régime, aristocratic France, whose world is literally being blown apart; a gradual dissolution over many centuries, sped up through revolution, imperial folly, and insurgent radicalism, fractured by Dreyfus, and finally exploded by the conflagration of total war. As it does for all of us, Time comes for these people too, while their power and capital mutate and run like mercury to find new forms in the phoenix world born of their misdeeds.

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Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.