Looking for Combray

text and photographs by J. Patrick Kelley

Illiers-Combray today does not pretend to be more than it is, a small village two hours south-west of Paris that, if the train didn't stop there, would be lost in a sea of wheat and corn. The excitement of the Proust centennial is barely detectable now, and the town is struggling to make the transition from agriculture to light industry. The buildings in the center of town are old and pleasingly foreign to the suburban American palate with a taste for the exotic, and the pace of village life is pleasant and calming after two weeks of having sensibilities bruised by the attractions and pace of Paris. But these old buildings are inscrutable and forbidding too. On many of the narrow streets the house facades look worn and anonymous, and have been built using plans and materials that are no longer in sync with the rest of the mechanized world--the cars parked up on the sidewalks.

Hard to say what I was looking for, visiting the Combray of A la Recherche. Some closeness to the artist perhaps, just like the pilgrims to Graceland or Jim Morrison's grave or Monet's garden at Giverny. You think that if you stand in the actual place, perhaps some of the artist's magic will touch you, and a small fraction of their creative insight will somehow be yours. The motivation may also be very similar to what brings us to visit a place like the cathedral at Chartres, where I'd stood just the day before and felt the power of the past in the arching twelfth-century stone and sculpture and glass. The strong sense of place, and the beauty of the art and architecture, allowed me to feel, if only briefly, that many of the things we worry about--trivial things like lost luggage or how to buy a watch battery in French, as well as more important things like death, aloneness, and existential dread--didn't matter, couldn't touch me.

As it turns out, there are actually two trips to Illiers-Combray to talk about: one that I made that day, a hot day in late June, the pilgrim's journey: camera, map, guidebook, curiosity, fatigue; and the second journey that I make now as I write and revisit, without really trying to, many of the themes in Proust's novel: memory, creativity, time, love.

In some ways both of these journeys are part of a hopeless but unavoidable trick that we frequently like to play on ourselves. Proust evokes a childhood that is so vivid and moving and familiar. We walk along the streets of Illiers-Combray to look for some of what the artist has evoked in us. We don't find it. Just as the places of our own childhood seem impossibly small and flat, lacking in some important dimension when we revisit them, so too does this town of the narrator's childhood. What we're looking for is inside us of course, and not in this strange place, which explains the inevitability of the disappointment, although not entirely why we're continually surprised by it.

For even when Proust was writing, Combray the place did not exist except as a creative reconstruction of experiences and emotions the author himself was struggling to recreate and understand. Proust only spent Easter vacations in Illiers, even though many of the Combray passages have the psychic volume turned up so high that the narrator makes it sound like he spent his entire childhood in those houses, streets, and gardens. And some of the details of the fictional Combray were taken from other places Proust lived.

My spouse and I have arrived by chance on market day, and the small town square is jammed with trucks and wagons selling produce, meat, and clothes. The guidebook says you can find a map, an Itineraire Proustienne, at the local booksellers. But it is crudely printed and only marginally helpful, with ads for what must be every business in town on the back. I want something more, and the woman who owns the shop reassures me gallantly about my fractured college French while urging that I part with 40 francs for a French-language volume called Le Parfum de Combray. The book, subtitled "a Proustian Pilgrimage," is an appreciation of the town of Illiers written in the 1940s by P.L. Archer. Archer's writing style has something of the same poetic and incantatory quality as the prose of the master himself, and the book has well-chosen quotes from A la Recherche on almost every page.

It may have been the heat; it may have been that the buildings and streets didn't reverberate with meaning as I had expected them to; but for whatever reason we headed straight for the little green park-like blotches on the map, going Swann's way, south from the center of town and then west along the Promenade de la Fontaine, to the Pré Catalan.

The Pré Catalan, a small park originally built by Proust's uncle, is landscaped in formal English style and named after a section of the Bois de Boulogne. This modest garden was transformed in A la Recherce into the somewhat larger and grander park of the Swann estate, and renamed Tansonville. I'd like to believe that it wasn't just a romantic weakness for anything green and growing that made me feel something as we entered there. Certainly it was more visibly well-tended and welcoming than the worn narrow streets of the anonymous town.

I sat in a shady place near a little bridge, and asked my friend to take my picture. As she composed the shot and worked with the camera, I posed with the book I'd just bought. A quoted phrase from A la Recherche caught my eye and I let the beautiful words sing in my mind.

Now, a year later, I really don't remember what phrase it was I read with such interest, nor can I recall exactly what it was that I felt so strongly at that moment. But as I sit and write about it, the details fill themselves in, with such force and certainty that I want to trust it: The phrase I'm reading from A la Recherche describes how Gilberte appeared to the narrator in the garden like an apparition, strange and familiar and frightening all at once. And this red-haired girl triggers something in the narrator, just as a powerful and energetic young woman triggers something in the modern mid-life male, a whole lifetime of the suppressed and unintegrated feminine, along with a terrible longing for nurturing and solace that must come from someone else, mustn't it? It certainly can't come from within.

Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when we are faced with a vision that appeals not to our eyes only but requires a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being. A little girl with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk...was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles...I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but at whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, a gaze eager to reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body.

Swann's Way

I let Proust's words take hold of me (is it now I'm hearing the words? is it then?) and the music of the language triggers in my mind another passage in French. It's the first stanza of a Baudelaire poem, only now the words are not just in my head, they're being spoken by R., my first lover. R. is leaning against me on the grass as I sit and read in the garden of the Pré Catalan, her lips so close I can feel her hot breath on my cheek as she recites, low and seductive, like an incantation:

Voici venir les temps oe vibrant sur sa tige,
Chaque fleur s'evapore ainsi qu'un ecensoir;
Les sons, et les parfums, tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse melacholique, et langoureux vertige!

[The first stanza of "Night Harmony" (Harmonie du soir) by Baudelaire:
Spring comes, flowers tremble on the stem,
Breathing scent into the air like incense smoke;
Sounds and smells swirl in the night air;
Melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo!
-tr. JPK]

Am I hallucinating? I can't be sure if it is now that I'm hearing R.'s voice, or then, or both. But there's an even greater possibility: that as I write, I'm making a sort of fiction, just as Proust wrote about and transformed his life and feelings in an attempt to understand them.

Actually, this small fiction of mine about a young woman in a garden is not totally unfamiliar. It's part of an emotional landscape that I've been exploring elsewhere, in other ways, over the past few years. And this is not the first time that R. has appeared in my writing without my necessarily asking her to--nor will it, I'm sure, be the last. So I am content to hold on to the intoxicating French poem and the heart-rending closeness I have summoned up, and keep it as the possible seed of a story for another time.

While I can't be sure where my own story will go, I am certain about Proust's art, which evoked for me a very personal version of his Gilberte. Proust wrote as part of a search for self-knowledge, but the result was to pass on an enormous gift of creativity and insight to his readers. In A la Recherche du temps perdu--literally, "in search of lost time"--the narrator's thoughts and emotions reverberate together and illuminate aspects of life that become more important to us the more that we, in this affectless and ironic post-you-name-it world, try to pretend that they're irrelevant: love, yearning, aloneness, and the possibility of comfort.

Text and photographs ©Copyright 1995 by J. Patrick Kelley. All rights reserved.

P Segal