It would not break my heart if nobody ever played a game again. But it would break the hearts of millions. So let us be fair: let us be appreciative of the inordinate joys which to some of us are incomprehensible.
When my elder son left Uppingham, he told me he had conducted a ceremonial incineration of all his games equipment. His sister Lindsay, so far as I can gather, made no such grandiose gesture, but simply walked away. No, we are no good at it, not myself, nor my heirs. We miss much, I know: but how would it have profited us if we had been of any use at these skills? I do seriously believe that at schools organised games should not be compulsory: though they should be available, for many derive great pleasure from them. The others, the non-games-players, should have a decent amount of exercise and fresh air, whether in the form of long walks or anything else that occurs to the imagination.
But oh, those horrible hours in the freezing cold at Clapham Common, at hockey – if I were lucky, in goal – for I might have a feeble team against me, in which case, the ball would not come my way. (I had a decent eye, and was sometimes able to poke the ball in the other direction.) ‘Bully off!’ Could anything sound more inconceivably silly? Such bogus overtones of masculinity. What conceivable good, healthwise or otherwise, could this do the reluctant?
Yet I am not altogether happy. If I could have played an adequate – and not merely a rabbity – game of tennis, it would have given me pleasure. God knows I tried. But to fail – and fail – and fail–
28. Marcel Proust
Some time in mid-war, a friend of mine whose family, living in Staines, had showed me much kindness, called upon me. He was Royston Morley, a drama producer for the B.B.C., who seemed to have read everything, and retained it all in his head. It appeared to bother him somewhat that, though a vast amount English poetry was stored there, and could be poured out at any moment, crevices of his brain would stuff themselves with the words of almost all the popular songs he had ever heard. He thought that the mind has its limitations, which seems to me quite untrue. That day, he spoke of something which was to be of great importance in my life. He spoke of Marcel Proust. Had I ever read him? I said no, and he lent me Part I of Swann’s Way.
From the beginning, I was enthralled. Having earned rather more than usual from one of my books, I bought the entire set. For a fortnight I was, as Stalky’s Beetle might have said, ‘drunk with it’. I read it in every possible spare minute, not lagging over the philosophical disquisitions, not tying myself up in Bergsonian thought, but getting the feel of the book, the flow of it: the narrative – for there is a solid one there – the marvellous characters, the fun, the tragedy, the grotesquerie, the final glory. I have read it ever since, yearly, though not at such a pace, for the rest of my life, both in English and in French.
When I was giving introductory lectures on Proust to students in America, many years after, I uttered the following heresies. One. Unless you are completely bilingual, and no faking, you must read it for the first time in English: Scott-Moncrieff’s translation is one of the most wonderful in the whole history of translation, despite some slips, some inaccuracies, some confusions that make the chronology – about which Proust didn’t seem to mind much – more muddled than it actually is. Andreas Mayor’s conclusion, a new translation of Le Temps retrouvé, is far more accurate than Stephen Hudson’s (who took over after Scott-Moncrieff’s death) but it is not as beautiful. Two. You must read it for the first time quickly, or you will become bogged down. Then, you have all the years before you in which to savour, ponder and re-read. Read it in French, if you can. But the English do incline to adopt Proust as an English writer, and his genius is not much obscured by translation, if your French simply isn’t up to the original. I have been criticised for these divagations from stern scholarship. Ou phrontis? Or, ‘I don’t care’.
For me, Remembrance of Things Past (it should be translated In Search of Lost Time), opened an entirely new world. I remember writing rather flippantly to the drama critic, the late James Agate, who had said something disparaging about Proust, that when I died, I hoped to go to Heaven and become a Guermantes. This letter he duly printed in one of his Ego books – I forget which.
Youth in Combray: the young Marcel made a wonder of it all. He could even draw a certain beauty from the picture of himself masturbating in the lavatory – the only door he was allowed to lock – with the lilacs blooming outside the window. Aunt Léonie, in her hermetic bedroom. M. Swann, who almost caused Mamma to fail in giving Marcel his goodnight kiss – but not quite: the child enforced it, and, his plea surprisingly backed by a mood of indulgence from his father, kept his mother by his bedside all night: and from that point, he subsequently dated the decline of his will.
I am not going to retrace the course of A la Recherche du temps perdu. This essay is meant for those who have read Proust.
Here I should like to tell a story. When I was staying in Cambridge (Mass.) I was invited to give a lecture at Brandeis to students of French. It was very sparsely attended, though most of the French faculty had done their stern duty and had turned up. Mine was not intended as an introductory lecture, and I realised, with a sinking heart, that the students were not really with me. However, I carried on.
About twenty minutes’ later, two elderly ladies tiptoed in, and sat in the front row. To my extreme gratification, they appeared to be hanging on my every word. Question time came. I was sure one or the other of them would speak first. I carried on to the end of the lecture, about forty-five minutes in all.
I was right. One of them did. And the question was – ‘Miss Johnson, what was that book you were talking about?’
I often wonder what Proust taught me. Nothing, I believe, in style and in surface presentation. But he did teach me how to look at, and round, characters. He taught me the trick of false presentation – no one was as he seemed – but I had already learned some of that from Dostoevsky. No, what I learned from him was to study – or try to study (I don’t wish to be presumptuous) character in the round. I no longer looked at my people as if they were paintings, two-dimensional. I tried to regard them more in the light of sculptures, with a door at either end of the gallery. According to the door at which one presented oneself, each piece of sculpture would seem different: it was the reconciling of these different aspects that was all-important.
Proust has given me more joy than any other writer – Shakespeare excepted: but then, one has the rather disturbing sense that the latter is not only the greatest writer who has ever lived, but who ever will live. The thought may be daunting to great ambition. I cannot even agree with the criticism that Proust has his longueurs (though to make a concession, I think it would be bearable if the disquisition on military strategy at Doncières were omitted). Some complain that there is far too much about Albertine. I can only say that if two more volumes about her were discovered tomorrow, I should be the first to seize upon them.
I have written and lectured about him. But judging from George Painter’s peerless biography, I doubt whether I should have liked him as a man. Those nocturnal visits, those summonings in the small hours! Those difficult, over-heated friendships. Yet he must have been an enchanting talker, making all tiredness drop away. Might we meet our great writers in Heaven? I can envisage an interminable queue for Shakespeare, and a very sizeable one for Proust. But who would mind queueing in eternity? After all, there might be nothing else to do.
About 1947, Rayner Heppenstall, poet, novelist, and features producer for the B. B.C. Third Programme, suggested to me that I might contribute an ‘Imaginary Conversation’. I liked the thought, and soon came up with an idea. It seemed to me that the characters of Proust were so ‘immersed in Time’ that they could be moved about upon Time’s chessboard, setting them down in other places, and in other years. I would let them all talk together, and they should do it in 1941, during the German occupation of Paris. I would call it The Duchess at Sunset. This was broadcast, beautifully produced by Heppenstall and magnificently acted, s
everal times; and was in general so successful that I was asked to write five other Proust programmes, using a similar technique. I should add that, to some purists, these were anathema, but I think they had forgotten what Proust said himself, that in pastiche lay a profound form of criticism. ‘Je ne saurais trop recommandé aux écrivains la vertu purgative, exorcisante, du pastiche. Quand on vient de finir un livre, non seulement on voudrait continuer à vivre avec ses personnages … mais encore notre voix intérieure qui a été disciplinée pendant toute la durée de la lecture à suivre le rhythme d’un Balzac, d’un Flaubert, voudrait continuer à parler comme eux.’
Proust: A Propos du ‘style’ de Flaubert.
The second programme, Swann in Love, was more or less straightforward: but taken back to the first meeting with Odette (in 1872, I believed) when the Guermantes were young. This raised the vexed question of chronology, into which I shall not go now: but I calculated that the Baron de Charlus must have been about twenty-nine. This had, over the years, about six repeats. The third was called Madame de Charlus and tried to recreate his marriage. I set it in the Siege of Paris and the Commune. The fourth, Albertine Regained, was something of a jeu d’esprit: it told her story from her own point of view – somewhat different from Marcel’s – and had a surprise ending. It was meant to be fun, and also to be criticism. Saint-Loup was the fifth: it attempted to follow the reasons for the strange change in his personality, and it used Bloch as a catalyst. The last was A Window at Montjouvain, a summing-up so far as was possible, of the main themes of the book and the final exhilarating triumph of Art over Time.
These programmes were, as I have said, magnificently acted: notably by the late Max Adrian, a perfect Baron de Charlus, and by Anthony Jacobs, who was both Marcel as narrator and Marcel in the action of the plays. Nearly all the music was authentic – the petite phrase was from the Saint-Saëns piano and violin sonata in D minor: the music of Odette’s Fauvre Fou and Albertini’s Le Biniou came out of the air from an unknown friend in Paris. The ‘Vinteuil Septuor’ was a most imaginative piece of pastiche composed by Michael Head.
The programmes were not originally in the order I have given, but were at last broadcast in that order, over a period of six weeks. I don’t know when any work has been so blissful to me as this one. I loved the rehearsals, the producer. I loved all my actors.
But here, a sour note – or perhaps just a sad one – must intervene. I had had tape recordings privately made of the programmes played in sequence: unhappily, only two of them really came out well. So, as I had been asked by several American colleges for the loan of recordings, I asked the B.B. C. whether I might have their tapes professionally copied by the H.M.V. Company. (I had, of course, no idea of making a commercial business out of this.)
I was met with a flat refusal – or rather, was made to understand that if consent were given, it would be only as the result of a set of conditions with which they must have been aware I could not possibly comply. They might as well have asked me to spin flax into gold, as in the fairy story.
Several years later, I enquired again (vicariously) about the B.B.C. tapes. So far as I could gather from an informant, they had all – with the possible exception of The Duchess at Sunset – been scrubbed. If this should prove to be untrue, I am prepared to make my apologies, for my relations with the B.B.C., on ‘Critics’, the television ‘Brain’s Trust’, with talks, features and drama departments, have been a source of much happiness.
But to destroy that superb acting, that music! (Neither of these, of course, to my own credit.) I can’t altogether forgive that.
Something was salvaged from the wreck. The programmes, under the title Six Proust Reconstructions, with prefaces, cast-lists, and fragments of the music, were published in England by Macmillan (1958) and later, but without the music, and under the title, which I don’t like and think pretentious, Proust Regained, by the Chicago University Press.
These books, and my one good tape ‘Window at Montjouvain’, remain. I can still hear the Baron de Charlus’s scatological tirades, rasped out in Max Adrian’s unique voice. He was the perfect Charlus. And now he is dead.
29. Depressions
For the past ten years or so, I have suffered from periodic bouts of depression. Sometimes I can put these down to spells of indifferent health: more often, they appear quite causeless. I am at my worst on waking – getting out of bed is always a torment, just as getting into it a joy – and also at my worst doldrums during the hours of the afternoon. I may be deluding myself, but I don’t think I often make this apparent to my family, though everybody knows that I am invariably far from good at breakfast. Certainly my housekeeper, who is often wounded by my taciturnity.
These bouts are seldom of long duration though sometimes they may continue for days. Once, some years ago, they did become bad enough for me to consult my doctor, who gave me some anti-depressant pills: but these merely produced a state of mindless calm, in which work became impossible. No, I have not consulted a psychiatrist, and I shan’t. I am not bad enough for that. And I have to confess that I am afraid they might do me no good. I think I might behave like George Best, the footballer, who, when forced to consult a psychiatrist and asked afterwards what the latter said, replied, ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.’
Winston Churchill spoke of having a black dog on his shoulder. Somewhere, recently, I came across a reference to a black dog on one’s foot. Shoulder or foot, it doesn’t make much difference. I know at once that it is there. (I have seen it in a dream.)
It is apparent the moment that I open my eyes and look at the cross made by the window frame. No help is coming from there. For I can hear a tune in my head, and it is going to persist, tormenting me for hours. Sometimes it is soothing, perhaps ‘Speed, Bonny Boat’, or Debussy’s ‘En Bateau’: sometimes purely ridiculous, such as ‘There was I, Waiting at the Church’. What it is is not significant: it is simply, through the bad hours, going to be impossible to dispel. I did try to explain to my doctor what this was like: I did not actually hear the music, or in any way externally hallucinate it; it was simply in my silent head.
I would try to think of all the most comforting poetry I knew: George Herbert, Manley Hopkins–
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea,
and sometimes the most bracing: Browning – ‘Waring’, or
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward.
But all to no good.
Sometimes these depressions would be filled with nagging guilts, usually almost formless; some with the irrational fear of sudden death. I don’t think that particular fear is at all usual with me at any other times. But during these fits it will be bound up, ludicrously, with rat-racing thoughts of the mess I should leave behind me. Nobody, they say, is indispensable, and in my clearest moments, I believe this. But the thoughts go on. Are all my affairs in order? Am I leaving behind me anything I should wish destroyed? Who would find me, and what shock should I cause?
I am, to all intents and purposes, insulated during these periods, from normal life. I am practically immobilised. Writing, if I can force myself to it, is often the best palliative: but not fresh air. I can find horror in the streets.
To what these states are due, I do not know: they are possibly genetic, since my mother’s temperament was, in her later years, markedly depressive. I am extremely happy with my husband, who is by nature well-balanced, serene and high-spirited, though he can be plunged into deepest gloom when something is genuinely wrong, or he fears it is. My son Philip gives me joy and an abiding interest, and my elder children have both given me my full share of interest and pleasure. My household is as well-ordered as it can be, considering Conchita’s Latin temperament: she does love a good ‘scene’, and if she gets it, feels infinitely better afterwards. But I do not, and if I sense the storm rising, ungenerously deny her thi
s therapy and rush up to my study. But she has been a wonderful support to me for twelve years, and is the friend of us all. My books are passably successful, and when things are going really well, the writing of them brings me to a state of elation.
So, with all the suffering in this tormented world, who am I to have these depressive bouts? But that is an idiotic question, and I dare say I simply put it in to make myself look less callous, and more ‘aware’. Those of us who do have to endure these things, know perfectly well that with all our mental strivings and wrenchings, we cannot help them.
During these phases, how I loathe Pippa, leaping out of bed and chirruping about. The prospect of a day’s bliss, going about moralising in song to all and sundry! A smug little girl, I think. Tears are no release to me, because I can cry very rarely. This shocks Conchita, who thought I displayed a stony heart when one of our three beloved cats, and her special favourite, died.
The worst thing, is when I think that God has no further use for me. My Calvinist side then comes uppermost. I search for all the words of comfort – ‘Who am I, that man cannot trust Me?’ – but they do not appear to apply to myself. Not then.
I am writing of this, partly as a form of catharsis, and partly because it may reassure others like me that they are not alone. The sudden sense of desolation is no rarity. I remember, in Southern Russia, walking with Charles, Philip, and Oksana, how I dropped behind: sat down on the Steppes, and wept. For God’s sake, why? I don’t know. (But it did seem a very Russian thing to do.)
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