More Proust Sightings!

How many places could that Proust show up? The diversity and surprise of his appearances staggers the imagination, and this column has quite the assortment to prove it. He has turned up in the middle of the Nevada desert, on road signs, at shooting ranges, in crime reports, and perhaps mostly oddly of all, in a report of an ultra-geek computer book. He surfaces in books of all kinds, and here are just a few examples.

Last August, when Alain de Botton was in town, Proust literally appeared everywhere possible on the road between San Francisco MPSGHQ and the Berkeley bookstore where he would read. A beautiful stencil had been made, and clearly from the cover art of the very first PST, Proust's portrait by Dean Gustafson, and spray painted on street signs, garbage cans and the tall pillars that support the BART train platform from Oakland to Berkeley. No one has stepped forward to take credit for this as yet, but certain members of the MPSG are seriously suspect. Dean is not one of them.

Last Labor Day, Proust appeared out in the middle of the Nevada desert, where we had gone, as every year, for the fabulous Burning Man experience. My friends who make this project happen give me the chance to actualize my life-long fantasy of owning a café. Every year for a week, in the middle of nowhere, but in the very center of a camp of thousands, I run the café of my dreams; it never closes until the event is over. Last year I was particularly thrilled because the delightful Bob Stahl built it entirely to specification, and as elegantly as I could have hoped. For weeks before I arrived (with the hundreds of pounds of coffee et al) Bob and a volunteer crew were out there hammering away at construction. When I got there it was complete and pristine, but one of the construction workers had added a graffito to the untouched exterior: a quote from Proust. He never identified himself either, so I never could give him a kiss.

My dear friend Hannah Silver sent me a note in the mail that I decided to include here, instead of with the letters, because it was one of the weirdest sightings I could remember. "While reading the latest issue of your delightful journal," she wrote, "A Proustian memory came rocketing out of my unconscious. And I wasn't even eating a madeleine. While living in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, I heard a tale about a group of graduate students whose apartment had been robbed. The robbers took everything-- every stick of furniture, every kitchen utensil, even all the clothes. Only one thing remained-- a copy of Remembrance of Things Past-- lying on the living room floor."

A group of my gun-loving pals were out one weekend on a shooting party in a remote California location, the Celebrity Shoot-Out staged by the black-humored Bigrig Industries folks. They had created a series of targets featuring well-known faces responsible for one sort of angst or another. When the Proust target went up, my photographer friend Peter Field offered five dollars to anyone who had the nerve to tell me about it. Dennis Borawski, who can do no wrong in my estimation, jumped to the challenge. "Not only will I tell her," he said, "I'll bring her one." He did, that very night. However, he left it with the housemate who answered the doorbell, preferring not to be there if I went ballistic. Dennis guessed correctly, though; I could only laugh.

And now, on to the holier appearances, the ones in print. I found the first one myself just days after the last issue went to press, in the SF Chronicle's Sunday "pink section"; now only a few pages of it continue to be printed on pink newsprint, but it will be called the "pink section" as long as natives are alive with the memory of its former pinkness. It was in a dance review about the hot Cuban dancer who's got the dance world swooning harder than Nureyev ever did, Joan Boada. He "returns this week with the Jeune Ballet de France to perform with The San Francisco Ballet School. To call what is in store a set of student performances is akin to referring to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as a first novel-- true, but hardly the whole story."

My delightful correspondent Elaine Wilson sent an envelope full of three sightings from the New York press. The first was in an lengthy review of My Name Escapes Me, the autobiography of Alec Guinness.

"As a captain in the Royal Navy," it said, "he read Moncrieff's 12 volumes of Proust which 'would fit neatly into the pocket of a duffel coat'... Now he rereads Proust in the Kilmartin translation." The second was a tiny review of a noteworthy new book, The Love Affair As a Work of Art by Dan Hofstadter. "Studying writers from de Stael to Proust, Hofstadter shows that art often gets in the way of other obsessions..." And the third, an article about the actress Mary Louise Wilson, talks about her one-woman show, "Full Gallop" about Diana Vreeland. She is pictured on her terrace, high above the Big Apple, with one of the volumes of the Kilmartin translation in her hands, and she says "I'm reading a book now that's delicious, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. It's so witty and true. I'm going to write him a fan letter."

Alex Segal, my absolute personal authority on the subject of classical music, invariably finds at least one sighting per issue of PST in the only thing he actually reads faithfully, Fanfare Magazine. Fanfare is an excellent English publication comprised of nothing but reviews of new recordings. A review of Alfred Schnittke's first opera, "Life with an Idiot", mentions Proust, but if the plot of this ultra-post-Soviet work is not described, the mention is utterly inexplicable.

In Act 1, the main character, "I", is sentenced to life with an idiot for some crime that is never explained. He goes to the asylum to choose an idiot and takes one who seems to have a brain, but can only say "Eck"; he chooses Vova (Lenin's nickname), who comes back to live with I and Wife. Act 2, all goes well for a while, then Vova goes postal and rips up the apartment. I tries to restrain Vova and argues with his wife about it. Vova throws him to the ground and makes love to the wife. She gets pregnant, and although she wants to keep the child, she has an abortion. This infuriates Vova, who becomes lovers with I instead, and they are happy together. Wife goes mad; Vova kills her, then disappears. This is all too much for I, who loses his own marbles and turns himself into the asylum. Apparently there is a chorus in this opera, too. "When the men become lovers," James H. North writes, "it becomes a 'Chorus of Homosexuals' and eggs them on. Another form of chorus is Marcel Proust, who is occasionally on hand to look after his own interests-- he is Wife's favorite author; Vova tears up his books, and I replaces them."

When sweet, young Jason Johnston came to live at MPHQSF, he had never even heard of Proust, but it took him only days to become indoctrinated. He heard of all the sightings, of course, and found it amusing that we Proust nuts keep stumbling over MP at every turn. Less than 120 days in Proustland, Jason received a book in the mail from a friend, Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck, an exploration of the dark side of human imagination and ingenuity. Of course Roger Shattuck is well-known for his great book on Proust, and Jason quickly found Proust mentions in this book.

That same day I had a long telephone conversation with a new member of the MPSG, James Kennedy, who was telling me about a day spent recently in the renowned Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. Describing the general disarray of all the store's contents, he said he'd miraculously found one of the few books he'd sought for years: Shattuck's book on Proust. Jason and I laughed about this synchronistic mention of Shattuck and Proust, and he went off to the library. He came home with a stack of books and promptly retired to his room to read.

A few minutes later he was back in the kitchen, wild-eyed and astonished. "I found another one!" he said, and handed me Eye to Eye, Twenty Years of Art Criticism by Robert Pinchus-Witten. On the very first page was this: "Admittedly, nostalgic Proust-cultism still bridges the gap between a lost and living dandyism...."

Now, my friends, tell me that this isn't the most inexplicable sighting of all... My Webmaster friend Jeffrey Gray turned this up on the Net. At the on-line mega-bookstore, Amazon.com, in a listing for Intention-Based Diagnosis of Novice Programming Errors by Lewis Johnson, hidden away amidst a forest of computer-language mumbo-jumbo is a section of similar books by subject. In that corner of arcane script are two recognizable things, Debugging in Computer Science... and Proust.

P Segal