More Proust Sightings

One of those odd facts of life is that once you have become aware of something, the more frequently you find it in the world around you. Certainly, long before I became a Proust fanatic I would encounter references to Proust here and there, but now I find them with amazing frequency, or friends find them, sometimes in the most unexpected places, and pass them along. So I 've decided to run a regular feature for each issue, and invite all of you to send your Proust sightings for inclusion.

I've had a stack piling up for many months, and it's been interesting to see where the references are coming from. Vanity Fair, as discussed in the last issue, has mentioned Proust every single month since July of 1993, in the context of their celebrity interviews based on the Proust Questionnaire; it no doubt holds the record for mentioning him more often than any of the major circulation publications, at least in the last few years. Running a close second, I believe, is The New Yorker, in which we've found the following references.

In the issue of October 2, 1995, in Gore Vidal's wonderful piece, "How I Survived the Fifties", he writes about an author who tried so hard to be included in the literary café society of New York. "...He had mistaken it," Vidal says, "for the great, largely invisible to outsiders, world that Proust had so obsessively retrieved from lost time."

The next month, in the November 27 issue, In "Cather and the Academy" by Joan Acocella, she writes "...like other marriages of realism and Symbolism in the early twentieth century (Proust's, for example) it worked beautifully."

Only a week before the mention in the Cather article, a short piece appeared about two concerts to be given in New York on November 20 of Proust- related music. This article has been reprinted with courtesy of The New Yorker on page 11.

The venerable Smithsonian, in November of 1995, in the article "Time stands still in the harmonious world of Vermeer" by Helen Dudar, printed this: "Among those who have celebrated View of Delft was, famously, Marcel Proust, who first encountered it in the Mauritshuis in 1902 and knew he 'had seen the most beautiful picture in the world.' He loved the painting and was transfixed by one small segment of it. On the right side of the scene, just to the left of a pair of towers, sunlight floods a fragment of a building: the 'little patch of yellow wall' known even to those Proust addicts who don't know the painting..."

This View of Delft came on a postcard from my gentile correspondent Alain Siboni, a Parisian who was just in Holland for the Vermeer exhibition:

My friend Rich di Giulio found Proust on television, in a rerun episode of Northern Exposure; the series about a small town in Alaska where the residents have nothing much to do except read, and are extremely literate. But he also found, while flipping pages in a dentist's office, the most unexpected reference in a mass-market magazine, this part of a faux Enquirer page in Car and Driver, August 1995:

Here in San Francisco, there is one writer known to literally everyone: the Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. Few of us here would readily admit to a taste for either gossip or nostalgia (except for old buildings, good manners, old hang-outs or the artistic merits of bygone decades) but we all consult Caen's daily dollops, to see if any of our friends are mentioned, and call each other up in excitement when they are. He is an excellent source of local poop, and one has really "arrived" when getting his attention. I knew Proust had arrived when this item surfaced on December 14, 1995: "Christopher Reed, the London Guardian's West Coast correspondent, led off his December 6 piece on the local 'peccadilloes' (his term) with 'The mayor's wife is denying a lifelong lesbian affair while her husband is trying to recover from being photographed naked in the shower with two disc jockeys he didn't know'... Reed ends his report with a definition: 'San Francisco, n.: Proust editing an issue of Penthouse.'"

A few months ago I was talking to my friends Joe Meulich and Jane Austin about catering their wedding; while we were discussing the merits of various menus, the conversation got onto literature. "Have you read Roald Dahl's My Uncle Oswald?" Jane asked. It was funny she asked, because a few days earlier, I had been wandering the aisles of a favorite bookstore, looking for something non-Proustian to read; I had picked up My Uncle Oswald, thinking that I had never read anything by Roald Dahl, giving the back cover a cursory glance, and putting it back on the shelf. Little did I suspect what Jane was to tell me: two chapters were devoted to the fictional seduction of Marcel Proust.

I returned at once to the bookstore to pick up the remaindered My Uncle Oswald I had considered. It was sold out, but the newer edition, twice as expensive, was there, and I began inhaling it en route home, and finished it soon thereafter. This is a very silly book, but charming because it combines laciviousness and silliness in equal measures, not a bad recipe for an evening.

Also a few months ago, I saw my old friend Nancy Frank, met in my college years in Los Angeles, who has for years mingled in all my own San Francisco social circles without our finding each other until recently. Every timewe get together she brings presents; this time she said she was thinning out her library, and brought a City Lights book (so it had to be pretty good) she'd never gotten around to reading, Entering Fire by Rikki Ducornet. It came into my hands on one of thosel evenings when there was no unread book waiting at home, and so I started it that night. This tale is told by a father and son in more or less alternating chapters. The father, Lamprias de Bergerac, is an amateur botanist who roams the world in search of plants and collects exotic women; his son, Septimus, left at home with a horrid mother, becomes a Nazi. Speaking of a Party muckymuck, he says "... I saw that like the Jew Proust, the Maréchal liked to dunk his madeleines."

Alex Segal, whose wonderful portrait of Richter, and sightings in Richter liner notes appeared in the last issue, has been my main source for any information about classical music since my adolescence. As long as I've known him, he has not read a single book about any other topic, but he turned up three more Proust references in the last few months. In The Art of the Piano, by David Dubal, the author quotes the playwright Tina Howe's words about that extraordinary pianist, Glenn Gould: "He's a true ecstatic like Proust, Nijinsky, or Van Gogh." And in Fanfare, the magazine for serious music enthusiasts, November/December 1995, Peter J. Rabinowitz reviews "Evocation: Legendary Encores Played by Roland Pšntinen", in which the pianist has sought to create "an enchanting atmosphere from a bygone era. And whether or not he really achieves his Proustian goal..." And in the May/June 1995 Fanfare, in a review of the recordings of Magda Tagliaferro, "she... often talked of music and Proust to her great friend Reynaldo Hahn, who dedicated his piano concerto to her."

Recently I had a visit from an old friend of Alex's and mine from Los Angeles, Art Harris. I've known Art since my undergraduate days at UCLA, when Alex and I were majoring in advanced bohemia and Art was a grad student, hanging about a great deal in the ultra-social lounge area of the Graduate Research Library, where I worked my way through school. In spite of the fact that Art is definitely my most conservative friend, our friendship became cemented early on when I taught him how to leer. I went on to do my graduate work in underground socializing, and Art went into business, remaining a regular at my house nonetheless. As to the merits of our life paths, I can only say that he has managed to support numerous artists and craftspersons since then by commissioning or buying their work, and I have only fed them.

As our recent conversation wandered to the subject of Proust Said That, Art remembered to tell me about a small piece he'd bought recently by the Los Angeles painter Wes Christensen. Christensen, a Proust fanatic, had captured their mutual friend, LA writer Michael Laurence, at a garden table dipping madeleines into a cup of.... lime blossom tea? The piece was entitled "The Trigger."

Wes very graciously sent me a slide of the piece, and Art was happy to let me reproduce it. In his letter, Wes told me this: "The title, 'The Trigger', of course, is a reference to the famous madeleine-dunking episode... Michael and I shared an enthusiasm for this great work, a 'guilty pleasure' almost, since the mere mention of the name, Proust, conjures up in most people an immediate sneer, as they confuse the author's great subject, snobbism, with the writer instead. I tried to explain some of this to Art, but it is a lost cause to someone who has not experienced getting lost in the great Roman Fleuve himself."

John Berry, the gentleman who runs the international Sviatoslav Richter Society, sent me a clipping from The Times of London, February 15, 1996, about how the bank that bought 102 Boulevard Haussmann has recreated Proust's apartment, and made it open to the public. The bank has added a touch that wasn't there in Proust's time, the plaque commemorating his residence. This photograph captured the cork-lined dining room, where Proust did so much of his writing:

There were more sightings, but some of them so large that other articles must, entirely, be devoted to them. Some of these, to appear in PST #6, are the passion of Lucchino Visconti, and The Proust Group founded at Harvard in 1971. In the months between this issue's appearance and the next's completion, Proust will surface again and again; when he appears to you, please let me know.

P Segal