A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust
Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
Three volumes, 1107 pages, Vintage, New York, 1982
My friend Miles Bellamy’s father, Dick Bellamy, owner of the once rather notorious Oil & Steel art gallery on the Hudson river in New York, died with the first volume of A Le Recherche du Temps Perdu open in his hands. The portrait here being that dear Dick, knowing he was taking his last breaths, remembered that the one thing he had yet to accomplish in life was… well, you get it. Unfortunately poor Dick never read did the whole thing, all 1,267,064 words, but I did. And before I die, I might attempt to do so again.
When I did finish this monumental work, I vowed that it must be the greatest book of time… and then I read Jean Santeuil (see below), yet still say yes, it’s the greatest work of all time. It’s the delicacy of feeling, the stamina of that delicacy, the persistence… days turning into years of sunlight scattered through clouds.
If asked what this novel is about, I’d answer, “The end of the aristocracy in France.” Simple. But it’s about everything not only ending, but spreading out and folding back on itself. It’s about love. It’s about mysticism.
The famous madeleine dipped in tea in the beginning opens up the space for, well, enlightenment really, and when Marcel accidently trips on uneven stones in the path to the Guermantes mansion in the end, that very path is raised into another, higher dimension and you go there too… bursting through clouds, transformed.
It’s hard to say what actually happens in this moment but one is undeniably transformed. *
James, a co-worker of mine at a used bookstore, (way back when- when there was a happy abundance of used bookstores)- came into work one day kind of glowing, radiating and outside of himself, almost floating. He said, “I just finished reading Proust,” then added, “sitting on the stone steps of a church.” I don’t remember where I was when I finished it, probably in my garden in the darkening twilight, unable to move until the end of the last page, or more likely, propped up against pillows in my bed at four in the morning or something, nothing as romantic as the steps of a church, or a chair in a room on the Hudson River in the glow of lamp, but I do remember that when I did finish it, yeah- I was in some kind of nebula, my perspective of the mundane egg (as Blake terms our world)- changed and I was stronger. Inside, there was this new strength of fragility, my own and every one else’s, even strangers, even the dead… perhaps, thinking back on it now, especially the dead…
This has stayed with me, this joy of (at the risk of being cliché)- an inner knowledge that was had, and could only be had, by reading A Le Recherche du Temps Perdu.
· Of course I am familiar with a book entitled “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, I’ve never read it and never will because the title alone is so pretentious it makes me nauseous and the fact that someone would write a book for the sole purpose of self-propaganda really makes me want to puke.
Looking for St. Loop
by Elizabeth McKague (1999)
“I thought I saw in his eyes that thirst for more sublime happiness, that un-avowed melancholy which aspires to something better than we can know here below, and which, for the romantic soul, however placed by chance or revolution,
“still prompts the celestial sight,
for which we wish to live, or dare to die.”
- (Ultima lettera di Bianca a sua madre. Forli, 1817)
- -Stendhal, “On Love”
Looking for St. Loup
I.
The gallant boy ran across the tables
like Holderlin’s comet through a mad sky.
There is no system for this.
Monsieur Melandrine came from the theater
to the Place de Clichy in work pants on a scooter.
We ate oysters and drank champagne
in the same corner where Baudelaire
sank into reverie, after a shoe shine.
The gentlemen arrive, all in black, from the Garden
and wish to enter the dark forest
yet wily nymphs hold them back.
No one believes it, although you were right
about the Minotaur- now he’s using a cane.
It’s time for change when the familiar
becomes a loneliness one can not breathe.
Leopardi said Slyia reached out to her own grave.
His red cloak flying over their heads-
He seemed to be swinging from a garland of bells!
I must find invitations to better dramas.
Philosophy, the kiss, your paint box even
that has been emptied into this night
are lost so quickly, I can’t stand, I can’t walk,
I want to limp.
I gazed over the shoulders of so many others
as he leapt past an orgy of apocalyptic monsters
made by the shadows of coats and hats on racks
behind the French double doors.
He gathered his whole life into his arms to bring,
dashing, that fearless taste of the fruit-
blind to all but Surrender, to the approach
of a movement where feeling becomes a circle of light
drifting you upwards s that your heels
are actually rising from the small,
round, marble faces, arranged for reflection
against the great window, like a sliced up moon.
II.
He wants
the word
one word
from the
beginning
to after
the end.
Some temperance
and arrangement
of the muscles
like flowers
in a vase.
Young Werther spoke of a kind of horse
that would bite open it’s own vein to relieve a fever.
Di te mi dole: Tu me manques.
A posture of Spring time in the cultured rows of sailboats.
The secret gathering is to live
as foreigners forced by the archer
to almost touch the shore.
marked obscura. The phantom swooped into the realm.
I revealed my dream.
“You mean, you actually want them t put you in the ground?”
Bones. Maybe. And daughters leaving azaleas.
My favorite part was when he drove up alone
and stepped out in front of the hotel.
How the sun carried him then, how
he lingered inside it
even as he entered the mulberry carpeted lounge.
Sultry wives, embarrassed by the heat, heaved out loud.
Bellhops hopped and stray men snatched
a second mind from the ice bucket
to place atop their usual, girdles of ennui.
She’ll torture herself with those pink hawthorns
a few hundred years from now.
Some erziehungsroman left in a box unfinished
in the closet and pithoi and stone cellar where
Thomas Aquinas once lived across the street
When once the body, the earth listened and
men walked where ever they found
an arresting feeling waiting in the distance.
It is necessary.
III.
As he watched the fawn
climb from the thicket
through unsteady branches
black with a melting frost
Play of time
the clouds bore down
another spirit upon
his wounded mind.
IV.
I’ll rent a studio where the river
becomes a dragon at the end of May.
Read Giuseppe Ungaretti at the round cafe
in the Piazza Giuseppe Poggi there is
a piece of shade shaped like an angel
from one certain elm.
If I asked you to read the palm on the hill.
You could be anybody reaching
the purple turrets in a limehaze.
I can see a missing chapter
in the prow of your hands,
mouth at the edge of a miracle.
It has been too long now not to know what to believe.
A shock went through the back of his neck.
A marching band stepped on the train.
He sat with a silent
tuba in his ear.
Another espresso in Rome.
Best one he ever had.
She walked through the Piazza della Repubblica
guitar on her back with a
pineapple and an eggplant, one in each arm.
The street musicians wondered,
“Must be some kinda California minestrone.”
She left her letters in the Hotel Vienne, 1814.
The unfinished dawn bleeding through crepe de che curtains and
the boys in stone statues across the Rue Raspail
when everything has happened in the presence of desire
and the Saints came in after kissing the trees-
She knew she could see across the expanse
but how could she scramble such love into the margins?
The sky moved closer, became charcoal and smoked.
V.
They pierced the continual sky with an auger,
threw loops up to heaven
and hung down like acrobats.
Sprung from a doubtless tube of royalty; he owned up
and saw truth as a visible object, a kind of crystal ball
in which nothing was false but the tints
of lavender in the hair and cheeks of so many Duchesses,
Princesses and Marquises’.
St. Loup laughed to cheer others.
In the hearth he burnt only the finest timber
to keep you warmer, longer.
He would soon ride again.
She escaped out under the trellises where
the quiet, gold days waiting for the post
spread out like tea with lemon.
On his own orders, later, after the pride
turned to pain (for no particular reason);
he went to the Front of the Line, crossed
the bloody battlefield in Auverres.
Endymion fought the jackals then rested his sword between her breast.
Tristan turned into Hermes when suddenly
everything on his back moved over his neck like a breeze.
It was always a trust.
In his last years he visited homosexual brothels.
His alienation pulsed. After all the gifts, still it was
like a bonfire all the way down the Champs Elysees,
it was like the dried figs at Christmas-
Perhaps there’d been too many sensations outside of himself,
he could no longer measure the end.
Perhaps it had past.
Perhaps he missed it.
You ask why it is a question of wandering?
Because somewhere the last line contains
a horizon of Nobility.
VI.
I’m in that painting; rushed through the Vatican.
Justine taught me the eye trick how when you focus
on Hell then move slowly up and above
it’s all buoyancy and heavy globes.
I found my ecstatic consciousness on the map.
What a relief. (I was getting weaker from surviving
on the nebula of the dead).
T’was not I who wrote bitterness into the third novel.
Monmartre mattresscake on bare stone and gazing
naked into the long dawn and ashes of Chesterfields.
“Comme un paysage après l’orage, attention a la mélancolie,
c’est la plus belle mélodie de l’amour
c’est aussi la plus cruel et plus difficile.
Soit prudent avec ton coeur et rendre un peu triste.”
Someday, I’m going to the
top of the hill to live
with the Capuchin sisters.
I wanted the stillness to come and last, beside some one.
It speaks when we are children as a form of protection-
to find placement amongst that which is sensual.
Each memory in its own making like a sun
surrounded by a sun, surrounded by a sun... and so on;
if you can believe such a thing.
They say it all began with the Danube,
from the Black Sea to 1001 night’s heads resting on jewels in the great net covering all.
Then Calvalcanti came in with the key and the Pieta, the Pieta and the Pieta danced
all night out back of Hamlet’s Mill. He just wanted to prove that it’s real-
that everything touches it, that it feels like Rouen blue
and haunted by crimson,
corrosive moss
that took the mouths of gargoyles.
He distinguished a solitude far beyond the waves and valleys of reason.
His precipice divided the elliptic and he finally slept when the moon left Paris,
was carried off to Asia where he studied new characters; hieroglyphs of lover’s
limbs.
No, see
MIND Body
is the first
and second half
of attention.
Then habit oppresses
soluble links to the night.
The machinery itself looks dangerous.
I wanted to tell you
how nice it would have been
when it was possible
to escape.
And now, there’s that.
That it affected you so much.
Maybe it could have been more
than these pall books to carry us,
to weave the way in.
VII.
He walked along the shore, throwing each thought that started
in his groin and moved North over his shoulders
back in to the water.
I have married many shepherds.
It was too orange- that light
in his North Beach hotel room.
Now he’s making violins for Carnagie Hall.
We’d watched the sun like we planted it,
even the noise of traffic and Ave Marias
from the laundromat below his rotting window, drowned.
Nobody talks about the Upyia Gallery anymore,
sometimes, a siren brings the needles and trumpets back into your brain.
Then the stranger appears, feeding the birds.
I couldn’t make anything new anymore, I wanted
to give it all away. Forgive me,
the East is precious, but, forgive me.
St. Loup is an archetype
the misunderstood troubadour
and the violence of another world.
Ternion in chains in the Caucasus Mountains,
no one can find you there.
the monsters come, the monsters go...
He’d never say her name in writing.
It meant house. House of peaches.
VIII.
St. Loup surrounded himself with the resistless type.
He liked to tame them. But you were the one
he appreciated. You were the dark self, the delicate solitaire.
Conversation was pure. It was only a favor. So,
he traveled to her hiding place
and learned she had died.
He told you by telegram, “I’m sorry.
She went horse riding in the planets.”
He rarely slept in the barracks.
When the Great War came he went in barefoot
and lonely, following demons for secrets
and no one to save.
He never had a photograph taken of himself.
Leave, was three days in Nueilly-
But you’d been salvaged
into the asylum.
I’m not going to be calm about this.
I believe there’s an answer.
If I could say, “Tonight, my love...”
but my voice is fainter, transient,
like a sliver of ice.
You must be brave. learn to balance
the antiquity of character with laughter.
The shetayan who is wise never returns-
you go there- in the periphery of the campfire.
Each bridge in Prague is like the bow of a violin.
For every two French people there is only one mirror.
Proust and Stendhal differ on the idea of love.
What idea?
Friends have run off to Nederland, Colorado.
Dreadlocks in Switzerland.
The Trenitalia are always right on time, to the second.
and mothers and grooms waving good-bye.
I’m concerned about the lighting (not too dark, not too cold...)
the Byzantine painter, who is eccentric, is coming.
“If you impress them too much they’ll end up thinking
you’re a survivor.”
Gray, gray, the color of storm
and that soft, yellow patch,
and the chimes, and the albatross.
The carriage waited. The shadowy lamplighter alone,
walking down the Boulevard de Batignolles in a mist.
St. Loup entertained his table until midnight.
Who are you looking at?
Let’s have another round.
His red cloak hanging on the back of his chair like Shelley’s ghosts.
The underpainting the color of brown glass
then Mediterranean light and a tiny bottle of arsenic.
Chatterton as Icarus on the bed in the attic.
You were right, about culture, how it’s all about
fathers, sons, and whores.
Monsieur Melandrine had such a fucking
intelligent looking upper lip. He abandoned
everything to position himself between feeling what is illusion and what is manifest.
I pictured his boyhood,
tangerines and linden trees, imagination at Fontainebleau.
It was the last time.
I watched an old man pour soapy water on the steps,
then sweep it away with a broom.
IX.
The sullen wind
cherry blossom snow
it is Spring.
I still have your banjo. I threw away the case.
It looked like Rimbaud’s passport.
She wrapped the souvenirs in the pretty printed paper from the confiserie
and left them in the front zipper pocket of her suitcase
when she got home, unpacking.
Forever that midnight.
He did look a bit surprised when she lay down
on the floor of pine needles in the spreading moonlight,
beyond the red stones, over the wall, out back of someone
unknown’s villa, through the dewy meadow
in an atrium of skinny trees
where Dvorak had the inspiration to compose his-
“So did you get those cool sandals...?”
“At the bazaar, in Cairo.”
Allegro ma non troppo.
St. Loup was killed in battle.
Blown up and scattered.
No one knew, but himself, then-
at that very moment,
that he really wished
for truth and freedom,
that he had plans,
that he wanted to continue
the task that
in this little globe
one can still find
some definition
of virtue.
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