Literary Summits

I’ve been e-mailing a friend who works in the creative sector. He has a million stories in his head and will be a brilliant author once he takes the time to get them down on paper.

I asked him what he would write if given a deadline. “Interesting question,” he wrote back. “I probably wouldn’t get much done [at work] if I didn’t have deadlines and the pressure of knowing I’ll have to show it in front of my coworkers — kind of keeps your eye on quality.”

Why do writers write? Because they have to? Because they have a deadline to meet?

[As I heard Clarence Page, op-ed writer for the Chicago Tribune, say at a conference this summer, “Nothing helps focus the mind like a firm deadline.”]

Maybe that’s the case for the professional writer who needs to put food on the table and a car in the garage. But for amateur writers, or the aspiring (but not yet paid) novelists and short story writers, there have to be other factors involved. I think it boils down to pleasure — or pain.

For some, writing is a release. It’s the chance to describe the world in one’s own terms, without someone else’s filter.

There’s a moment at the end of Part I of Swann’s Way where the narrator discovers the sublime pleasure of getting a thought out of his head and on to paper. He remembers an incident when he’s a boy, riding in the carriage with a doctor, and they pass by the two steeples of Martinville in the setting sun. The sight is breathtaking for the boy and he notes:

“As I observed . . . the sunlight on their surfaces, I felt that I was not reaching the full depth of my impression, that something was behind that moment.” (184, Davis translation)

The sight (and later, the silhouettes after the sun has set) “appeared to me in the form of words that gave me pleasure…” and he asks for a pencil and paper and sets out to describe the scene before it’s escaped him completely.

What he writes is not exactly fabulous prose — he compares the steeples to birds, then to girls playing in twilight, then to flowers that merge into “a single black shape, charming and resigned, [that] fade away into the night.”

But the effect that his act of writing has is what makes the incident memorable:

“[When] I had finished writing it, I was so happy, I felt it had so perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them, that, as if I myself was a hen and had just laid an egg,  I began to sing at the top of my voice.” (186)

That’s why Proust writes. He experiences the world, he finds a way to describe it, and it’s there on paper for the rest of the world to see, even if his readers don’t see the same event the same way as he did. It’s innocent enough when he’s describing landscapes, but as he moves into Part II of Swann’s Way, I can see how his take on society and the characters in it is anything but conventional.

Salman Rushdie said in an interview on YouTube that writers are dangerous because they are subject to no one — they can show the world the way they see it, and that can be a threat for those in power.

And I get the impression now that I’m into Part II that Proust is working through some painful realities, trying to process battles that were fought in salons and restaurants. He wants to show the social spider web and the difficulties of negotiating a love that isn’t socially acceptable. Writing allows him to score points, to reframe the debate, to take it out of context.

It’s also clear that he refuses to go straight to the point — and that is his point. He might have won more readers if he stopped after the first 60 pages, but he has more — much, much more — to say. Like the boy narrator who refuses to obey his parents when they tell him to go to sleep without a fuss, Proust the author is unwilling to cut to the chase and advance the action without taking the long way around.

And, for Proust, therein lies the pleasure:

“And so the Meseglise way and the Guermantes way remain for me linked to many of the little events of that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in vicissitudes, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life. . . . It is most especially as deep layers of my mental soil, as the firm ground on which I still stand, that I must think of the Meseglise way and the Guermantes way. It is because I believed in things and people they revealed to me are the only ones that I still take seriously today and that still bring me joy.” (187-188)

What brings you joy? Why do you write?

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If Proust and Jesus share anything in common, it’s that they both grew up in small towns.

In “Swann’s Way,” Proust has just turned his attention from his quirky family to the town of Combray itself. And that prompts me to ask, for no particular reason:

If Jesus wrote a novel, how would he describe his hometown?

Yesterday, in our weekly “Greek group” at work, we read the passage in Mark 6 about Jesus returning to his home town — and the incredulous townsfolk, being small-town people to the core, say to each other, “Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of . . .?” They can’t believe he’d amount to anything because they know where he’s come from, and who “his people” are.

Similarly, in “Swann’s Way,” the narrator’s aunt could have been the one speaking in the Mark passage. Madame Octave is a rare bird who is both hypochondriac and insomniac (read: the life of any party) — who never leaves the house in Combray, the small town where little Marcel and his parents visit on holidays. Even though she’s physically confined herself, that doesn’t keep her from participating in the town gossip. She watches out her window, asking her maid Francoise to find out the latest on this or that person who has just walked by, and she even passes judgment on the dogs in town…

“One knew everybody so well, in Combray, both animals and people, that if my aunt had chanced to see a dog pass by ‘whom she did not know at all,’ she would not stop thinking about it and devoting to this incomprehensible fact all her talents for induction and her hours of leisure” (59).

Ah, so that’s what people did before TV. It reminds me of the few power outages we’ve experienced in Chicago — how people actually come out of their apartments and houses and talk to each other, from porch to porch. Especially on hot nights, it creates a stir. And in those moments, I’ve thought that this kind of thing would make our neighborhood a more cohesive place — people would actually know each other better and keep track of one another.

But when I read this passage about Combray, I also realize that too much time and not enough people can create a community that’s more than tight-knit — it can be downright snug, in an uncomfortable sort of way. The kind of place where Jesus “can do no deeds of power” because expectations are preset based on his class and his family background.

It’s maybe not a coincidence that immediately after describing the exchange between Madame Octave and Francoise that the narrator switches gears to describe the town’s church in great detail, describing the mystery, the power and the wonder that the place holds for him as a small child. He seems predisposed toward some kind of mystical experience. He describes the church in terms that show that it’s already a thing of the past, a relic that has lost it’s power to impress the general public — but it still captivates the young boy.

His grandmother talks about the familiar old stones of the church building as though they were living, and comments on the steeple, “My children, make fun of me if you like, perhaps it isn’t beautiful according to the rules, but I like [the steeple’s] strange old face. I’m sure that if it could play the piano, it would not play dryly.”

This same steeple is the town’s timekeeper — literally, chiming with the hours — and it’s a piece of the time that he’s trying to reclaim in the book. And the steeple becomes his point of navigation, his guide, “the dear departed form.” He writes, “I am still seeking my path, I am turning a corner . . . but . . . I am doing so in my heart . . .”

My point, if there is one, is that at the same time that Combray seems socially constricting, the memory of Combray’s church remains a guidepost. It stands for the things that have passed on, and for the people who are no longer there.

How does the saying go? Something like, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy” (?)

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So my next literary summit is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time — more specifically, Volume 1, “Swann’s Way” translated by Lydia Davis.

Proust is no Hemingway. He uses 10 words where one might suffice; but his asides are what make it entertaining. And part of what makes his experiment interesting is that it’s all about the shrinking and expanding nature of time — how memory, sleep, stories and life itself are not linear events but a circuitous journey, like Moses wandering in the wilderness.

The difficulty in reading Proust, I think, can be expecting too much, especially now that his massive novel is considered “indispensable” and “crucial” as Peter Brooks puts it in the book jacket blurb. In my previous attempts at reading “Swann’s Way” I ended up abandoning it after 50 pages because his sentences are so rambling that his thoughts seem sloppy, jumbled and self-centered.

The publishers who rejected the initial draft of Swann’s Way seemed to agree. One of them wrote back to Proust, “I don’t see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep.” (quoted in the introduction by Lydia Davis). His penchant for taking the long way around is the typical complaint.

But Proust’s style is exacting, precise, if deliberate. He may talk around the subject — whether the subject is falling asleep, gossiping or gaining his mother’s attention — but I get the impression that he’s going somewhere with it. And he is undeniably a navel-gazer, (the patron saints of confessional bloggers?), but at least at this point he seems to come by it honestly.

Plus, I have a sympathy for the narrator because when I’m telling stories among friends or family, I’ll find myself backing up to introduce choice bits of peripheral information in hopes that the story will make more sense. Often, I take too long to get to the punchline and it flops.

I’m keeping an open mind this time around. If it takes the guy 18 pages to get to a point, maybe it’s worth waiting for. So far, having read through the opening section “Combray,” I’m enjoying his grandparents and great aunts the most. Their bickering and struggling with each other and with Swann are comical — like when he describes how his grandfather has to struggle to get his sisters-in-law to listen to him:

“he had to resort to those bodily signals used by alienists with certain lunatics suffering from distraction: striking a glass repeatedly with the blade of a knife while speaking to them sharply and looking them suddenly in the ey, violent methods which these psychiatrists often bring with them into ordinary relations with healthy people, either from professional habit or because they believe everyone is a little crazy.” (22)

By the way, I do like the translation by Davis. She keeps some of the real zingers that Proust has in the French, but she also keeps the flow of the sentence going. And the notes have been helpful (and not overkill) so far.

Grab a copy and weigh in!

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So it’s time to come clean and admit that I’ve abandoned “Tales of Genji.” Time to go back down this mountain — after 85 pages and a mere 5 chapters, I admit defeat.

It’s not as spectacular a failure as the ski-jumper who wipes out in the opening of “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” — but without a doubt, I’ve lost my way at the base of only the second of seven summits.

Sure, there has been lots going on in my life: 

• moving to a new condo in Chicago
• traveling to Germany for a study tour, and 
• staying busy at work

 . . . but those are lame excuses. Since the move, I’ve actually had MORE reading time now that my commute is longer, so I can’t really make the “no time to read” excuse.

Still, “Genji” is a book that requires an attention span of more than my present 28-minute limit, so I decided yesterday to take another book with me on the train: “Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1“

And guess what? It’s working. Maybe it’s because I’m more familiar with Marcel Proust’s general storyline (or lack thereof),  and I’ve studied it a bit in college. And his sleepy cadence fits well with my summer rhythm. We’ll see if it lasts.

So for right now I’ve put “Genji” back on the shelf and look forward to another attempt, another time.

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