Book Notes: In search of Proust, finding Ruskin, poets, poems and art – theday.com

On July 10, 1871, Marcel Proust was born, and this year we celebrate the 150th birthday of the author of In Search of Lost Time ( La Recherche Du Temps Perdu), 3,000 pages in seven volumes, four of which appeared in print before his death on Nov. 18, 1922, the remaining three between 1923 and 1927.

He continued writing and revising his monumental lifes work until the day of his death. Roger Shattuck, the Proust scholar, in his illuminating study Prousts Way a Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. describes the sheer sense of life in the novel that reawakens us to our own existence.

In its pages we find art and music, characters made immortal by his pen, a vision of life that becomes the readers own.

For a moment though, reflecting on Proust takes us back to our own library and our own community. James Merrill, when he was a student at Amherst, developed an obsession with memory and a transformative interest in Proust. In an interview with J.D. McClatchy published in the Paris Review in 1982, Merrill agreed with McClatchys assessment that Proust had been the greatest influence on his career.

And here we are, in Stonington Free Library with one of the most comprehensive collections of books by and about Proust anywhere outside of an academic library. This is entirely thanks to the gift to the library of books from the collection of J.D. (Sandy) McClatchy, who shared Merrills passion for Proust, now in the McClatchy Memorial Corner upstairs in the gallery.

The library also has in its holdings, thanks to the generosity of longtime supporter Charlie Clark, the complete In Search of Lost Time as a book on CD. Another way of discovering this 20th century masterpiece.

And dont forget that Sandys typewriter, the gift of friend and neighbor Robert Palm, is also there in the gallery, silent for over a year but waiting once again for poems to be written on it what better way to celebrate our newly opening world?

But back to James Merrill and his moving tribute, his brilliant poem For Proust. The elegiac tone, heightened by the witty homonyms and stanzaic enjambments carry the narrative forward with a touching urgency as the dying Proust leaves his bed to go out into society one more time.

In the third quatrain, the first line, with its pressing assonance, an internal rhyme and enjambment create an overwhelming sense of fracas until your palms

Are moist with fear

And then -

Back where you came from, up the strait stair, past

All understanding, bearing the whole past.

You make for one dim room without contour

And station yourself there, beyond the pale

Of cough or gardenia, erect, pale.

What has happened is becoming literature.

But of the myriad of words written about Proust, for me those by the distinguished American poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) capture the essence of Proust most perfectly in his poem Proust on Skates. In this poem, the description of him skating reflects, in the manner of an homage, a sense of Prousts creative process.

He glides with gaining confidence, inscribes

Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks,

Comes to a minute point,

Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes,

Large Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs,

Preoccupied, intent

On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script

Incised with twin steel blades and qualified

Perfectly to express,

With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped

Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed,

A glancing happiness.

It will not last, that happiness; nothing lasts;

But will reduce in time to the clear brew

Of simmering memory

Nourished by shadowy gardens, music, guests,

Childhood affections, and, of Delft, a view

Steeped in a sip of tea.

For much of his life, Hecht himself was haunted, too, by memories, though of a more horrific order. As a young soldier, he was part of the liberation of the Flossenbrg concentration camp in 1945.

The place, the suffering, the prisoners accounts, were beyond comprehension. For

years after I would wake shrieking.

He addressed the Holocaust and the horrors of war in his large body of work, work which won him many awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Award, and his appointment as National Poet Laureate. Perhaps the most painful of all Holocaust poems is his sestina The Book of Yolek. Yolek was five years old. Thanks to Anthony Hecht

Wherever you are, Yolek will be there too.

His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day.

Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,

He will walk in as youre sitting down to a meal.

Memory.

Just a reminder that you can access all these poems online at thepoetryfoundation.org, as well as finding them in the library along with letters and criticism, including the newly published letters of James Merrill and Jonathan Posts critical study of Anthony Hecht, The Thickness of Particulars, as well as his edition of Hechts letters.

But lets circle back to Proust, who exulted in life and its endless joys as he battled his own mortality. In the June Book Notes I likened the lyrics of the 17th century English poet Henry Vaughan to a carving hidden away in the organ loft of a medieval cathedral, awaiting the seeing eye of the curious traveler. I realized later that it was Proust that I was recalling and his book of essays Days of Reading where he describes his experience reading Ruskin. In a famous passage he quotes Ruskins description of a small figure, a few centimeters high, lost amidst hundreds of minuscule figures, in the portal of the Booksellers in Rouen cathedral.

On Ruskins death Proust felt he must go and find this tiny figure which, miraculously, he did. He felt that, in drawing the figure, Ruskin had conferred on it a kind of immortality. The monstrous, inoffensive little figure was to be resurrected from that death which seems more absolute than others, that disappearance into the midst of an infinite number made anonymous I was touched to rediscover it there; nothing then dies of what has once lived, the sculptors thought any more than that of Ruskin. Proust calls the figure poor little monster your poor face, that I would never have noticed but somehow he finds a sense of resurrection here in this smallest figure, framing a tiny quatrefoil, resurrected in its form, gazing at us with the same gaze that seems to fit inside no more than a millimeter of stone. The fellow is vexed and puzzled in his malice; and his hand is pressed hard on his cheek bone, and the flesh of the cheek is wrinkled under the eye by the pressure. The whole indeed looks wretchedly coarse. But considering it as a mere filling of an interstice on the outside of a cathedral gate. It proves very noble vitality in the art of the time

Proust devoted nine years to translating Ruskin, who had a profound influence on his development as a writer, especially in his conception of artist as interpreter and his belief that beauty resided in the simplest of objects [in] the most beloved sights that you see every summer evening along thousands of footpaths, the streams of water on the hillsides. Of your old, familiar countryside.

Proust understood the world through painting and music as well as literature and if you are not ready to read the novel itself there are many delightful windows on his world. Anka Muhlsteins book is one, another is Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles, a collection of all the paintings that figure in the novel, fine color reproductions appearing alongside the relevant texts. It is a feast of a book whether you are already familiar with the novel or a newcomer to its treasures.

As John Ruskin wrote in The Bible of Amiens, The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and to tell what it saw in a plain way. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one

This, as we have already seen, became Prousts credo in his writing. More than 300 years earlier, far removed from the worlds of both Ruskin and Proust, in an obscure English country parish, the poet/priest George Herbert wrote these lines in a plea for the soul to honor God by telling what it saw in a plain way.

Who says that fictions onely and false hair

Become a verse? Is there no truth in beautie?

Is all good structure in a winding stair?

May no lines passe, except they do their dutie

Not to a true, but painted chair?

Must all be vaild, while he that reades, divines,

Catching the sense at two removes?

Perhaps we can leave all three of these gifted and visionary minds on the same page and share in A glancing happiness?

Belinda de Kay is the emeritus director of Stonington Free Library.

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Book Notes: In search of Proust, finding Ruskin, poets, poems and art - theday.com