Literary Encounters with Marcel P.
Contributed by Dana Cook

Some people collect stamps. Some people collect butterflies. Others collect beer bottle caps. Dana Cook, a Toronto freelance editor/writer and self-styled litterateur, collects Literary Encounters, which he describes as "first-person accounts of meetings (in person or print) between prominent literary figures. ("I pulled up a stool at the Key West bar and there, salt-and-pepper beard, daiquiri in hand, holding forth on bullfighting and tarpon fishing, was..."). He hopes to some day see them between covers.

Combing autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, journals and letters, as he does, Dana comes upon many references to the patron saint of this publication and has been passing them on to us. Some of his Proust sightings follow.

 

...Jacques Raverat...sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest moments days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanscent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me & make out of temper with every sentence of my own.

 

A much better day, pressing on with Mr Proust. I have now got four volumes under my belt. He is an exquisite writer but for pomposity and intricacy of style he makes Henry James and Osbert Sitwell look like Berta Ruck. What a tiresome, affected ass he must have been, but what extraordinary, meticulous perception.

 

(...)...Neal [Cassady] liked reading Proust aloud, saying 'Listen to this, now. I want you to just listen to this--this is one paragraph, mind you just one paragraph...' and he'd read the intricate prose slowly and precisely,ignoring Jack's [Kerouac's] attempts to correct his French pronunciation. (...)

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I read Proust slowly and realized I really can write like he does. [Those Beats sure did think big!] Of course he's better but I'm younger, and while less brilliant, still have a chance to learn how, with your help and patience. I'm terribly interested in life and wish you were here to share my musings and comments about living and dead things that pass so abstractly before me.

 

July 16 [1946]
(...)
Lunch with Barleto in the home of a Brazilian woman, a novelist and translator. Charming house on the side of a hill. Naturally there are a lot of people, and among them a novelist who is said to have written the Brazilian Buddenbrooks, but who manifests a curious cultural ignorance. If I am to believe B., the novelist was heard to say "English authors like Shakespeare, Byron, or David Copperfield." At the same time he's obviously well-read. Since it doesn't matter to me if he mistakes David for Charles, I find him very intelligent. At lunch the Brazilian couscous turns out to be fish cakes. When I ask to see a soccer game, the guests get very excited, and when I mention that I had a long career as a soccer player, I provoke a general delirium. Unwittingly, I've stumbled upon their principal passion. But the mistress of the house translates Proust, and everyone present is profoundly knowledgeable about French culture. Afterwards I suggest to B. that we take a walk in the city.

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"Marcel Proust's bedroom, in the house on the Boulevard Haussmann, was the first darkroom in which I witnessed almost daily, or to be exact almost nightly, for he lived by night, the development of a great work. He was still unknown, but we acquired, from out first visit, the habit of regarding him as an illustrious writer. In that stifling room, filled with benzene fumes and the dust which covered the furniture like gray fur, we watched a toiling hive in which the thousand bees of memory manufactured their honey.
* (single asterisk in text)
"I cannot remember first meeting Proust. I see him, with a beard, on the red banquettes at Larue (1912). I see him, without a beard, at Madama Alphonse Daudet's. I see him again, dead, with the beard from the beginning. I see him, with and without a beard, in that cork-lined room cluttered with medicine bottles; I see him in his sordid dressing alcove, buttoning up a lavender velvet vest over a wretched squat torso that seemed to contain nomore than machinery; I see him lying down, gloved; and I see him standing up, eating a plate of noodles."

 

"Annette Kolb, whom I did not much care for, to dinner. (...) She had high praise for a French novelist by the name of Proust, or something like that. Escorted her to the tram

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(...)The first part of Swann's Way entranced me; and I said to myself, Ah! I have kept away from Proust too long; this man reincarnates me as a Frenchman, just as Tolstoi does as a Russian, and every hour one spends with him lengthens one's life by a year. True: as long as he kept to the little provincial society of Combray. But Paris and Swann left me with a brackish taste. A marvellous picture of jealousy and even at times of love, but tedious in the way that obsessions are tedious, and beneath it one felt the sourness and boredom of French society, despite its cultivation, refinement, finesse, intelligence; that sense of perpetual unyouthfulness which makes one say to oneself as one walks along the Boulevard des Italiens: Thank heavens I am an American! If I had to live here, I would become a whiff of anarchy, yes, a hurricane, and blow it all away!

 

(...) ... Senhor Padroso's somnambulism also made me think of Marcel Proust and his remembrance of things past,. Proust, who let himself die of hunger, revolted at the thought of going on living after he had put the last full stop to his masterpiece, Proust, who, in effect, committed suicide elegantly by ceasing to feed himself ... and I wondered whether Dr. Oswaldo would end up, like the illustrious writer, with the illusion of having recaptured time past...

 

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