Review: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

 Somehow the phrase ‘how Proust can change your life’ was in my head.Turns out it’s the title of an Alain de Botton book. My Alain de Botton phase was short lived and a long time ago and the French author he introduced to me was Michel de Montaigne. I’ve now read all of In Search of Lost Time (though it was the Scott Moncrieff translation, In Remembrance of Things Past) and I have to admit myself unchanged. 

Towards the end of the last volume, Proust says that he “should not ask them (the reader) to praise or to censure me, but simply tell me whether it is really like that.” He then says that his book is a tool, a lens for the reader to look inwards and if it doesn’t work it’s because “the reader has eyes for which my book is not a suitable instrument.” I guess mine are the wrong eyes because ‘it’ whether that be external or internal life doesn’t seem the same to Proust as it does to me.

That’s not to say we never converged. The immediate opening of Swann’s Way has Proust describing a sensation I have often felt but never properly shaped, that feeling of a room becoming all the rooms you have slept in as you wake up. Proust is great, in general, at describing all the woozy feelings; sleepiness, being half-asleep, falling asleep, being drunk. A great deal of the book is about the vividness of internal experience with the mediated flatness of communal and he’s really good at these moments when one slips into another.

Yet I was never as needy as the narrator. If my parents were laughing with friends downstairs when I was supposed to be falling asleep, my emotional response wasn’t a crippling panic attack at my mum not kissing me goodnight, but outrage that my parents could have fun when I wasn’t around. The narrator’s peculiar clinginess stretches into his young adult life, where going to sleep in a hotel room is some huge ordeal that can only be healed by his grandmother’s knocking on the wall to remind him that she’s there. Then it goes into his romantic life, an area where Proust certainly didn’t describe ‘it’, and I felt like I was reading something strange, alien and psychotic.

He makes the astute observation that we fall more in love with our own imagined picture of a person than the reality of them. He describes wonderfully that time as a young man when you fall in love with every woman you pass on the street, something I remember (though he calls them ‘young girls’ and gives hints that they really are young girls, not women). However the stalkerish elements of his love are not anything I’ve ever experienced. His love is one that feels nothing about following someone, breaking into their things and using people to arrange meetings.

What’s more, once he does obtain one of the objects of his affection, Albertine, he goes off her and feels that she’s little more than a pet cat. Then the only thing that incenses his ‘love’ is the jealousy that she might be sleeping with other women. This belief in the importance of jealousy must be an important one for Proust, because it was the key for Swann’s love of Odette. What is even more strange, sickening and peculiar is the way the narrator envisions Albertine as the great love of his life, it’s the core of the story and a subject repeatedly pawed over and regurgitated. At the end, when he meets Gilbertine’s daughter, who merges the Swann and Guermantes ways, it’s supposed to be an apotheosis to the story - but my only reaction was to beg him not to lock this one up.

A lot of the book deals with the narrator’s social climbing and (I suppose) acerbic takes on high society. He’s shocked that the rarefied world of the Guermantes is not the magic lantern he imagined as a child, but some pretty stupid people wasting time in pretty stupid ways. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up in an era where the doings of the rich and powerful is splashed everywhere, but it seems pretty obvious that’s what high society is - and I question why someone who is so dismissive of that world remains so attached to it. Presumably because he’s even more dismissive of the middle-class culture vultures like the Verdurins, and completely disdains the inner lives of working people like Francoise. I also wonder why high society bothers with him, he doesn’t seem to be offering anything.

Yes, the narrator has a great openness to beauty, especially architectural and natural beauty. The description of the trees and cliffs around Balbec, or the steeple at Combray are spot on depictions of those ordinary things that catch the breath sometimes. Proust is also great at writing how the writing, painting and music we hear then shape our experience of the world. It feels very real that a church in Balbec that was talked up by Swann, proved a disappointment until rephrased by Elstir. 

There are many moments and locations in the book that shine off the page. Whether that’s the village of Combray, the shining underwater hotel at Balbec, the slow-motion of the ‘little gang’ walking along the beach - and there are many more. There are also some very engaging characters. I loved his grandmother in her contrariness and love, the way her death was dealt with and the way his mother slowly became her. I like Francoise, even through his condescension. I liked Aunt Leonie, she made me laugh. I also didn’t mind St Loup, as far as posh boys go. I thought the narrator treated him terribly - does the narrator even have any actual friends? He shits on St Loup, Bloch, the little gang, the Guermantes, the Verdurins… does he actually have any affection, warmth or kindness? He’s a conceited, insufferable little shit - and he’s the author’s proxy.

Towards the end of the last volume, Proust has a 70 page explanation of what the book was trying to do, prefaced by a comment that only bad books have mission statements. In light of that, I would have to say that Proust very admirably succeeded in the things he set out to achieve, that he took on a huge project and did it well. I also have to say that I disagree with a number of those fundamentals.

That a book should focus on the physical tangible details, I agree with. I also agree that these moments can be universal and beyond time and it’s a great thing to have a book celebrating them and encouraging its readers to find them. His definition of the artistic sense as a faculty of submitting to the reality within themselves is also both interesting and important. Every painting, novel, work of art is an expression of the internal reality of it’s creator and, hopefully, universal enough to catch a reader. (I would argue that a novel is as much a craft as it is an art and that it needs to stand on it’s own legs as a chair does.. but that’s a different discussion).

I enjoyed his note that, “the working class are as bored by novels of popular life as children are by the books that are written specially for them.” It’s very much like Johnson’s comments about children’s fiction. However, I do think Proust mainly uses this as an excuse to have been writing about all the useless posh people he has. Especially because he then says that the engine that drives all self knowledge and artistic discovery is suffering. What suffering has the narrator really had? The play wasn’t as good as he hoped, the dinner party was boring and the woman he arbitrarily chose didn’t like being a prisoner. If suffering gives birth to art, then surely the working classes, who suffer far more, are the best subjects of it.

What’s more this notion that suffering is the key and that “the happy years are the lost, the wasted years” seems puerile tosh. Many great artists have suffered, it’s a precarious life. Viewed in the right way, most lives could be painted as lives as suffering, art and genius don’t really come into it. I’m not convinced that it was Van Gogh’s suffering that made him a great painter and the notion of tortured genius feels like a fallacy. 

While I wouldn’t go as far to say that I’d like to recapture the lost time I spent reading Proust’s masterwork, there were many moments, characters and descriptions I very much enjoyed, I wouldn’t say I’d rush to repeat the experience. I certainly wouldn’t say it changed my life. 

On Idleness

 On the day I write this (a couple of days before I post) I find myself reflecting on yesterday. Yesterday was a Saturday, I was not at work, I had no rehearsals (for I’m in a play) and I had no plans or particular desires. It was a lazy day and I spent it doing things that had no real purpose yet it was a day that was very satisfying and very productive.

I did some chores, doing my laundry and hoovering the house. I made a weird little playlist, inspired by some weird little playlists I made years before. I painted a silly and slightly wonky mural in the back garden of a punk seagull singing karaoke into a pink swirly lollypop. I also finally finished Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

I need to let the book digest a little before I can talk about it much, but in that final volume the narrator, Marcel, realises that the wasted years of his life haven’t been wasted but were actually the accumulation of all the experiences that he needed to start on his life’s work. I can’t say I fully vibed with Proust (and will explain all that in another post) but he does share this sense of laziness and missed opportunities with two authors I do love, Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne. 

Samuel Johnson saw himself as a great slave to idleness, frequently berating himself for his laziness and beseeching God to forgive him for the times he has been idle and praying for strength and resilience to resist its bewitching allure. He saw laziness as a swamp that would suck him into greater vices - particularly those of masturbation and sexual fantasy. He found nothing productive in laziness, as Proust did and instead saw it as an insidious sucker of resolve and confidence, always undermining the best efforts of mankind in general and himself in particular.

Yet, despite this private disgust at his own laziness, Johnson called one of his projects The Idler and speaks of it in less fearful terms. He jokes about how easy it is to feel good about achieving some small successes as so many people are too lazy to do anything and says that those same people label anything that is merely impossible. As much as he hated it in himself, he did admit that laziness is one of the less vicious sins, as a truly lazy person is too lazy to do anything really heinous.

Montaigne also talks a lot about laziness. It’s clear that as a child, he was frequently castigated for his idle temper and says how the risk was not that he would do something bad, only that he would do nothing at all. The worry of his family was not that he would be an evil person, only a useless one.

Even as an older man he admits his soul is so lazy that he doesn’t measure his “fortune by its height but by its pleasantness.” However, Montaigne, being the self-accepting person that he is, has no problem with these priorities. By the end of his essays, having struggled through the forbidding notion that philosophy is about learning to die well, then as a way to live well, understands that it’s good enough to have lived at all.

I come back to one of my favourite quotes, from the last essay;

“What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done much today.’ - ‘Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’"

How much happier Samuel Johnson would have been had he came to this conclusion. Even Proust has to justify his lazy, wasted years as grist for his mill and fodder for his book. We should all take those words of Montaigne to heart, accept that our lazy days are still days we have lived and that’s all that’s required of us in this life. And sometimes .. sometimes those lazy days are the ones where we produce the things that really last.

Like this terrible painting that could live on this wall for decades to come.

Review: Journey Back to Freedom by Catherine Johnson

I’ve had Olaudah Equiano’s An Interesting Narrative for a long time and it’s probably the book that has most often been at the top of my reading pile that has fallen back down it. This is because I’m ‘not in the mood for it’ or that it seems ‘heavy’. I’m not sure I want to face something as depressing and soul-crushingly sad as the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps it’s some buried racism in me. 

I’m working in a number of classes in my new school, classes that have a corridor with all the levelled reading books in it. These books are not only scheme books but some proper books as well and I saw that one was about Olaudah Equiano, called Journey Back to Freedom. I also saw it was by Catherine Johnson and that name tugged my memory somewhere.

Sadly, that memory was The Curious Case of the Lady Caraboo, a book I’d found cheap and exploitative, making up faux rape backstories for a character who was far more peculiar and interesting to have that fictional slop put on her. At least Olaudah Equiano was African so Johnson couldn’t artificially blacken him up in ways that act counter to the main narrative.

Alas, because I haven’t yet read his Interesting Narrative (and because it’s deep in some box, some-where) I can’t really assess this book for egregious changes in history to serve her story. From the notes at the back it seems that Johnson didn’t fully get on with Equiano. There’s the big stuff, that he worked on slave ships and as an overseer even as a free man. She also describes him as sounding smug. He wheeled and dealed his way out of chattel slavery, I think he has something to be smug about. 

However much as I was willing to rag on Johnson, Journey Back to Freedom is a decently told story to children that puts across what slavery and the slave trade actually were and the horrors of that while still connecting it with things they understand and can somewhat relate to.

It also emphasises how slavery was experienced differently in different places. Being indulged in England, working hard but as a team with free people on the ships, and the worst kind in the plantations of Jamaica. There’s a really good point that the slave owners of Jamaica went beyond the evil of owning people for the sake of free labour but actually developed a desire to hurt the slaves for no reason - even if it was counterintuitive to their productivity. I doubt there are any stories for primary-aged children that include the word ‘sadism’ but this came close.

There are exciting moments told in simple language, when a stupid captain ignores Equiano and the rest of his crew and steers his ship into rocks, or the battle at sea where a musket ball passed through his officer’s cheek. There’s also a good representation of the rough-and-tumble camaraderie of the ship.

Despite my animus against Catherine Johnson, I think this is a very good and readable account and a good introduction to Oluadah Equiano, which adds a little more nuance and detail about the slave trade. 

There is another children’s book about Equiano by Dr Robert Hume called Oluadah Equiano, The Slave with the Loud Voice but I should probably stop reading children’s versions of his story and get on with reading the real thing. 

Review: The Fraud by Zadie Smith

I've previously talked on this blog about the writings of William Harrison Ainsworth and some writings about him. He features prominently in Zadie Smith's newest novel, The Fraud. 

 I love Zadie Smith in concept, she often sets her books in places I know intimately. The school I used to work at was mentioned in her novel NW, and I met her and she was lovely. But I’ve never got on with her work, I reckon it’s because one of her biggest influences is Henry James and I’ve never got on with him either. Yet The Fraud is almost designed to appeal to me, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The Fraud is partially about the Tichbourne claimant, a man who said he was the lost heir to a large inheritance, despite being obviously (and I mean ludicrously obviously) not. This was a story that took the Victorian era by storm and it’s one of those little stories I’ve long been interested in, I love a bold con-artist and have read and written about Psalmanazar, Princess Caraboo and Martin Guerre. The claimant, Arthur Orton, was buried in St Pancras Cemetery, one of my lockdown haunts.

The story of the Tichbourne claimant is told through its impact on the Ainsworth family. This consists of fading writer, William Harrison Ainsworth, his two grown daughters, his new wife (previously his maid) their daughter and housekeeper Mrs Touchet, who is the point-of-view character. I’m a big fan of William Harrison Ainsworth and have enjoyed all of his books I have read. I also find him an interesting person and loved Shark Alley, a novel written by his modern biographer, Stephen Carver. (Who is mentioned in the acknowledgements).

Through the experience of Mr Bogle, a key witness in the Tichbourne case, the reader is taken to Jamaica in the era of slavery, a section of the book that is striking in its offhand brutality. People are mutilated, boiled alive and subject to a terrifying disease called yaws but these horrors are everyday events and more powerful for the lack of drama attributed to them. It’s also interesting how confused Bogle is when the English complain about being ‘made slaves’ when arguing over the finer details of representation.

While the title of The Fraud seems to put the Tichbourne claimant story at the centre of the book, it’s easily the weakest element. Mrs Touchet, our viewpoint character, is dragged along to the trial by William Harrison Ainsworth’s second wife but becomes deeply engaged and invested in the witness, Andrew Bogle. The absolute strangeness of the case is touched upon, the fact that Arthur Orton is nothing like the missing claimant in body or education. That he speaks no French, when the person he’s claiming to be grew up with it as a first language, that he’s missing a tattoo, that he’s of a completely different build. The book also goes into the delusional nature of his supporters, people like Ainsworth’s second wife Sarah, believe in Orton as a bizarre statement of class consciousness. She’d probably be an anti-vaxxer these days.

If anyone in the book is designated the fraud (though most of the characters are conning themselves or others about something) it’s probably William Harrison Ainsworth. He’s depicted as a man who had initial success as an author because he was so liked and likeable, with a gift for joy, but not one for writing. Touchet often talks about how she pretends to read his books, groans at the historical details in them and finds his books terribly dull. She says that he’s easy to like, his books are not. I happen to disagree. I find him to be an author who is very good at creating vivid images and set-pieces, but not so good at dialogue. He’d have been a killer silent film director. There is a sense that he and Arthur Orton have both managed to fail up, where any failure would be disastrous for Bogle or Touchet.

Mrs Touchet is a really interesting figure. Seemingly puritanical and frosty, she is also the lesbian lover of Ainsworth’s first wife, Frances and a BDSM mistress to Ainsworth himself. She’s tetchy, irritable and I loved her line about living in the countryside, “the lamb didst bore her.” She’s an abolitionist because she’s drawn into it to impress Frances but is then horrified at the real stories she hears from Bogle. In some ways she is the real fraud of the book, as the real Mrs Touchet died before most of the events in the book even happened. The character is integral to the novel but in reality was not even there.

The most mysterious character, fraud-wise, is Andrew Bogle. The courtroom and the book initially place him in the position of loyal servant, but how much of what he does is driven by survival or even hatred? He seems the most clear and transparent of the characters even as he is the least.

The three elements of this book don’t dovetail into each other but rather reflect and rub each other in strange ways. The William Harrison Ainsworth frame story seems to be particularly disconnected from the Tichbourne case and Bogle’s narrative and really only makes sense as a narrative choice in allusive or eliding ways, only really seeming to fit when thought about. In some moods this strikes me as more satisfying than if there had been clear links, and in other moods it strikes me as less. It does mean I’m happy to give some of Zadie Smith’s other novels a second go. 

A tête-à-tête between Johnson and AI

For some reason I’ve been getting lots of adverts of for AI tools, especially ones for writers. The ones on Facebook are ver funny, they have hundreds of comments but are all hidden because each one is pointing out that using AI to write something for you is not writing. Youtube has taken its own turn, deciding to advertise programmes that can write, package and release your book in under an hour. I thought I’d have a little play. 

I picked www.tinywow.com because it was free. 

First I asked it to write a short story of three paragraphs and used as a prompt ‘Samuel Johnson’s relationship with his little brother’, as that’s the theme of the novel I’m currently writing. 

Aside from the fact that this isn’t really a story, it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end, the AI made up Samuel’s previously unknown younger brother, Thomas. I did actually try and name Sam’s brother in my prompt but there was a character limit to the prompt and Nathaniel didn’t fit.

Unlike Nathaniel, Sam was really nice to Thomas, becoming his mentor and becoming a ‘testament to the power of sibling love and the joy of intellectual companionship’. It’s almost the exact opposite relationship to the one I’m writing about.

Next I asked it to write a 15,000 word essay about what Samuel Johnson would have thought about AI. Aside from the essay being a but cluttered for the short word count (with a new subheading every hundred words) the piece reads pretty well at first glance.

 It introduces Samuel Johnson as ‘an 18th-century English writer, poet, and moralist, was known for his keen intellect and wit. He is best known for his compilation of the first comprehensive English dictionary. Johnson's work often reflected his views on morality, society, and human nature.’ Interesting that some of the phrases used to describe him are exactly the same ones from the ‘story’, that must be all this particular algorithm knows of Samuel Johnson. The piece then often talks about Samuel’s beliefs in ‘honesty, integrity and compassion’ and says that his ‘philosophy centered around the idea that individuals have a moral duty to uphold principles of decency and kindness in their lives.’

The AI uses these generalities throughout to make it sound like the ‘essay’ is about something without it having to have any real content. I think it could be argued that Johnson did have a very strong belief in the moral duty to uphold principles of dignity (kindness perhaps being a little less certain). However, most writers and thinkers could be described as having those same beliefs. This is especially true of Samuel Johnson, who was a masterful repackager of standard moral teachings but not a hugely original thinker in himself. 

A more sophisticated AI might have used some more particularly Johnsonian phrases and ideas. His notion of ‘the vacuity of life’, that life is essentially an empty hole we fill with the things that are important to us, could have had some really interesting interplay with the notion of AI. Would Johnson have viewed AI as a way of filling this hole, or as something pernicious, taking away the important things that occupy us?

The ‘truest’ paragraph of the piece was the one about Johnson’s perspective on scientific progress; ‘Johnson viewed scientific progress with a mix of curiosity and caution. While he appreciated the pursuit of knowledge, he also warned against the dangers of unchecked technological advancement that could lead to moral dilemmas and societal disruptions.’ This is very true. Johnson loved science and had his own shed where he did dangerous chemical experiments. Yet, social stability was his big shibboleth, even as he tweaked the nose of the gentry, he believed in the arbitrary hierarchy because to shake it was to threaten that stability. 

Oddly, the piece becomes more casual as it goes on, with many exhortations to imagine Samuel Johnson doing various things.  ‘Picture Samuel Johnson scratching his head…Imagine Johnson scrolling through his Twitter feed…let's envision Johnson perched on a virtual soapbox…If Johnson sat down for tea with Siri, what discussions would unfold?’ I think these are probably pre-programmed methods to make an essay more engaging, yet I can’t help but wonder if they also have something to do with his imagine being used in a popular meme. (I remember once, volunteering at Doctor Johnson’s House and some students came in out of curiosity and were very excited that it was the house of ‘that meme guy’.)

The back of the ‘essay’ is also filled with rhetorical questions. Presumably, this is a way to pad the word count without having to make any conclusions or say anything definitive. It ends by bidding adieu to our imaginary tête-à-tête between Johnson and AI - becoming oddly Frenchified . Aside from anything, it shows that the AI has clearly not yet gobbled up the works of Johnson or even the Samuel Johnson Quote Page. No writer about Samuel Johnson could write a whole piece about him without one quote. 

Of course, it is impossible to know what Samuel Johnson would have made of AI, it’s quite a silly question (and so perfect for this blog). As someone who said that, “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors”, I imagine that a machine that steals from them to create contentless waffle would not appeal to him. 

The picture at the top was an image generated on the same site of 'Samuel Johnson playing ping-pong'.

Review: Sterne's Memoirs

 “Laurence Sterne springs a new surprise, read the envelope that had landed on my doormat. 

It’s not exactly a new surprise, the book came out in 1985. A leaflet in the back includes a Shandy Hall appeal, designed to help Kenneth and Julia Monkman, who were live-in, unpaid curators. The leaflet points out how Kenneth is now isn his mid-seventies and look for money to establish a paid curator, ‘not quite yet perhaps, but eventually’. Kenneth seemed to be something of an obsessive, he was eventually buried at the foot of Sterne’s grave, I hope Sterne gave him a warm welcome. His wife, Julia, planned out a famously beautiful garden which is the home to a huge amount of moths, she took over from Kenneth and then when she died, was replaced by Patrick Wildgust, who is still the curator.

Sterne’s Memoirs was the first book ‘to come out of Shandy Hall since A Sentimental Journey’. Many books have come out (or been republished) through Shandy Hall since. I’ve been a punter for a few of them, including being part of the crowdfunding for the re-publication of ‘Caine’s Jawbone’, which has since become a tik-tok viral hit. They only printed 500 copies and it’s beautifully done. A delicately marbled cover, thick paper with an introduction and commentary and then the work itself, reproduced in Sterne’s own handwriting, with his crossings out and crammings in - he was more a crammer inner than a crosser outer. 

The downside of this gorgeous presentation is the effort it takes to read his writing. There is a printed insert with the version of his memoirs presented by his daughter in her edition of his letters. The surprise mentioned on the envelope are the little differences between the edited, printed version and the manuscript. Key among them, the date of composition. Sterne started writing these before he was a celebrity and not as he was dying. 

To be honest, a lot of the differences, whether he mentioned a Herbert or Hobert, did not mean much to me, being a fond reader of Sterne but not all that knowledgeable about him and his life. I can see how someone who is as indebted in the weeds of Sterne’s life as I am in Johnson’s or Kit Smart’s, the details would be invaluable and very exciting.

As such, a few memories of Sterne were interesting in themselves to me. I was aware his father had been in the army but not quite how enmeshed into army life the Sterne’s had been in. Not only had his father been involved in battles all over the globe, but Laurence found himself all around the British isles. from Dublin to the Isle of Wight. His father’s biggest injury came, not from battle, but a duel fought. He was later shipped off to Jamaica, where he died of fever. Laurence lovingly describes his father as someone “so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no-one, so that you might have cheated him for ten times in a day if nine had not been insufficient.” - A similar sentence later used to describe Uncle Toby.

While it’s clear from Tristram Shandy that Sterne favoured his father than his mother, we find out a little more about her. Laurence’s father was her second husband, her first has also been in the army. She had many children, most of them were sickly and few survived. We learnt about the deaths of little Joram, Mary, Anne and Devischer. We also learn that Laurence became a bit of a celebrity in Ireland as a child when he fell through a mill-race, while the mill was turning. 

No mention is made of the fake memoirs of Sterne created by Richard Griffiths under the name of Tri-juncta-in-uno. Griffiths claimed to have seen some notes Sterne made about his life, maybe he saw these? Well… I’ve seen them now, and in a lovely edition. I’ll gladly read them again and probably a number of times. 

The Journey to 'Death of a Dream-Pedlar'

Death of a Dream-Pedlar had a long and tortuous journey to the place it is now - a brilliant book available to buy in ebook, paperback and hardback form.