Marcel Proust was born in the wrong century. For a man who loved listening to music but who for periods of his life was reluctant to leave his bed, let alone his flat in Paris, getting himself to concerts was a chore. He tried two solutions to this problem. In 1911 he became a subscriber to Théâtrophone, a service that held a telephone receiver up at a concert and relayed it to people’s homes. Phones then, of course, had sound quality one step up from tin cans joined by a wire. It wasn’t that the reproduction was low-fi rather than hi-fi. It wasn’t even fi. What he really wanted was live music at home. And so it happened that one night in 1916 the French violinist and quartet leader, Gaston Poulet answered the doorbell at 11p.m. to find Marcel Proust on the doorstep. Proust had an unusual proposition. Would Poulet round up the rest of the quartet and come and play Cesar Franck’s String Quartet in D major that night at Proust’s flat? He had a taxi waiting. So that’s what they did. They played the piece in Proust’s candlelit bedroom while Marcel reclined on a green divan. It must have been good. When they finished at 2a.m. Proust asked them to play it again.
Proust was born about 100 years too early. Spotify would have been a godsend. But then again, if he’d lived in the era of video cameras and social media he might not have seen the point of recreating the past in written form. We don’t see the need to go In search of lost time. We carry it around with us.
The tour had been long and exhausting. Audiences were huge and everywhere ecstatic. The artist performed his usual greatest hits and was mobbed in the street outside the theatre. Profits were enormous and ticket touts had a field day. The performer found sleep impossible after the usual adrenaline rush and took to using sedatives. Who’s this, you might ask. Frank Sinatra in the 1950s? Mick Jagger in the 60s? Actually, no. This is Charles Dickens on his American Tour in 1857.
Few people read Marcel Proust. When one of the most popular current means of communication limits utterances to 140 characters it is little wonder that a work containing a 30 page description of the author trying to get to sleep appears unattractive to modern tastes. There is another problem, however. There is a general misconception of the aim of his series of novels. This is due to the unhelpful mistranslation of the title of his work – in French, “À la recherche du temps perdu”. The weakest translation was the first one – “Remembrance of things past”, later updated to the generally accepted, but little better, “In search of lost time”. The problem is that these titles encourage the popular belief that Proust’s work is nostalgic, that it is primarily about the world of memory. This is confirmed in people’s minds by the importance placed by critics on the “Madeleine” scene, in which the taste of a Madeleine cake awakens in the author’s mind a vivid, involuntary childhood memory. In my experience people see this as the point of the book and their response is “So what?” This idea – that we recall the past through the senses of taste and smell – is commonplace. Is Proust famous because he wrote several volumes to show what we all know – that when we get into a new car the smell of the interior reminds us of our first car?
my chautauqua 