The Proust Wake of 1996

I woke up in San Francisco for the first time in three weeks, after the memorable Proust tour of Europe, and made my way into the kitchen at Proust SFHQ for morning coffee. It was the 18th of November, the day Proust died, and the day I was born, and six days before the Saturday on which we had scheduled the Proust Wake of 1996, to be held once again at the John Wickett Museum of Exotica.

As a professional caterer for the last 11 years, I had no qualms about throwing an enormous social event six days after returning from my travels, even if I should suffer from an unusual fit of jet-lag. I have found the perfect antidote for this travel problem,which seems to work every time. You must stay up all night, in the manner of MP, before getting on the plane; you will sleep the entire flight, being awakened only for servings of miserable airline food, which are usually worth sleeping through, and arrive at the destination ready to be awake. My expectation was to return to San Francisco and begin immediately with preparations for this annual social event at which the local Proustians would gather.

As I made coffee, one of my housemates sauntered in with the household news: another of our inmates had given notice on the first of the month because he had been offered a job in Bangkok. Nothing much had been done to find a replacement in my absence, and there was, for once, no friend waiting in the wings to move in. The search for the new member of the household is somehow largely my province, and this became the dominant concern of the week before the Wake.

We filed an application for interested parties at a local service called Roommate Referral within 48 hours, and immediately, thanks to the one per cent vacancy rate in San Francisco, became deluged with calls. I spoke to at least 20 applicants a day as I prepared for the event, while answering the dozens of calls from friends to welcome me back and hear the tales of my travels. As usual, the preparation of foods, props and other provisions for the Wake was done in Proustian hours, after midnight and until dawn.

Please be prepared for another voice to keep appearing in this description of the Proust Wake of '96. My housemate John Casten, the wonderful musician who was responsible for the Marcel Proust Support Group of San Francisco in the first place, has inserted more than one comment here, particularly in regard to the chamber music that he arranged and performed, to my utter delight.

The day of the Wake, the 23rd, was lovely, I heard, although I never had a moment to look out a window or see the light of day. My friend Miss Lisa Archer, one of my favorite co-conspirators in event planning, came early in the afternoon to assist. When I was getting together the fund-raising dinner I threw before departing for Europe, Lisa had asked me if there was anything I needed her to bring. "Well, " I said, "I could use the Eiffel Tower, if you happen to have one." "As a matter of fact," she said, "I do," and she brought an Eiffel Tower her father had made from balsa wood, the main prop for the banquet table. Of course the Tower would be recycled for the center of the buffet at the Wake, and Miss Lisa's first job on this day was to fashion a huge French flag out of red, white and blue paper napkins and a roll of scotch tape, to serve as a table covering beneath it.

The catering for this year's Wake could hardly compete with that of last year's, as described in the fifth issue of PST. Need it be said that it included a sizeable quantity of madeleines? The food this year was low priority, but there were other appeals. The first, as always, was the Wickett Museum itself, the enchanting, mind-altering accumulation of objects in which we would meet. The second was chamber music, for which my housemate John needed to find an electronic piano of sufficient quality and the third, a considerable stash of absinthe to offer my guests.

Last year, the day after the Wake, as I sat at the kitchen table in recovery, John had come home after an afternoon of playing chamber music with friends, and with a new revelation about the source of "the little phrase". He promised me that the piece he now believed to be The One would be played at the Wake this year, (John here, along with a whole "bouquet of bon-bons", my favorites were "Thine Own" by Gustav Lange and "Lotus Land" by Percy Grainger, genuine trash.) Their choices were somehow so appropriate, that when they did begin to play early in the evening, since Dr. Stevens, who played the piano splendidly, was a little out of his depth in the late-night hours, a hush fell over the part of the museum where the music could be heard, except, of course, for the guests who came over to talk with me while I was trying to listen.

"..the little phrase of the sonata is, and I have never told this to anyone, the charming but infinitely mediocre phrase of a sonata for piano and violin by Saint-Saens, a musician I don't like." -letter to Jacques Lacretelle (probably 1921)

The chamber music was the best element of the evening, aside from the company, so beautifully attired in their tuxedos and other black formal wear, and the ambiance, and I entreated John to give my thanks to Dr. Stevens for his assistance and wonderful playing. A few days later, when John remembered to do this, he was blithely practicing away during Proustian hours when he thought to make the call. Being a doctor, Dick Stevens was asleep at an early hour, preparing for a day of healing the sick, but the sound of the ringing phone brought him to immediate awareness of a possible life or death situation. Instead he got John saying thank you, and he was not amused.

Absinthe, of course, is considered illegal in every country except Portugal, England (where it is not made) and some parts of Eastern Europe. It was made illegal in France during Proust's lifetime because virtually the entire population of the country consumed "The Green Fairy" in copious quantities, beginning in the late afternoon, when the cocktail hour was called "the green hour". The popularity of this beverage hinged on the presence of a somewhat hallucinogenic ingredient, wormwood; if one drank enough of it, it was possible to get higher than a kite as well as drunk, and too many French persons seemed to find that prospect attractive, among them countless writers and artists. If you have ever wondered how Van Gogh got his astonishing world-view, now you know. The beverage comes down to us, sans wormwood, but otherwise in it's former state, as Pernod.

I'm leaving the tale of how we got the absinthe to my friend Stuart Mangrum, the wonderful writer who gives us Twisted Times,which will appear in my next issue, and the credit to his adorable wife, Michelle, who actually did most of the serious work (John here: they stayed up all night getting wasted after making it here at PHQ) . Huge thanks go to Michelle and Stuart and Tom Sheft, who gave us the orginal recipe, which he got from a friend in Burgundy whose family had been making their own at home since it was made illegal. Tom, who came to town from Portland for the event, brought a few litres of his own making and we had a considerable quantity. To be absolutely sure there was enough, a few days before the Wake I jerryrigged yet another version, a hasty combination of Pernod and Everclear in which I had soaked wormwood leaf for 24 hours, a process which turned the clear liquid in which the grayish leaves had sat a brilliant emerald green.

One thing must be made perfectly clear: in spite of the popularity of this beverage in his times, Proust was not an absinteur. He was, in fact, not much of a drinker, although, late in his life, beer became a staple of his diet. He prefered cutting to the chase and just taking drugs. In the interesting book The Maladies of Marcel Proust, by Bernard Strauss, this excellent doctor tells us that "Proust took drugs freely and often against his physician's advice." He describes in great detail the kinds of drugs Proust took, and the potential positives and negatives of each one, but never does he mention that, like the naughty of current times, he took them for their prelasurable potential; why else would he have written, as he did in The Captive, "It is easy to speak of the beauty of opium" or other such telling remarks? In fact, the hallucinogenic properties of absinthe are hardly noticeable for people who have experienced opium, heroin, LSD and other hard-core substances, and the major problem for the absinthe generation was that they had to drink annoying quantities of it to come even close. It was the alcoholism that made it such a problem, and got it banned.

The absinthe was the titillating, bad-children feature of the Wake. After years of searching, I had finally found an absinthe spoon at the great used cookware store in my own neighborhood, Cookin' on Divisadero. The charming, funny, curmudgeonly proprietor, Judy Kaminsky, has been picking them up on her shopping trips to Paris yearly; for some reason it was the only esoteric bit of culinary gadgetry I had never thought to ask of her.

Service for the absinthe was profferred on a huge silver tray, with the requisite pitcher of water, bowl of sugar cubes, and the absinthe spoon, a flat and slotted metal wedge that vaguely resembles a small cake server. The absinthe shot would be poured into a glass, the spoon balanced atop the glass, a sugar cube placed over the slots, and then water poured slowly over the sugar until it dissolved into the mixture below, which grew increasingly cloudy as the water was added. This beautiful ritual of preparation is as soporific as the drink itself. After an administration or two, the guests were in that cheery, dreamy, state in which chamber music is so ideal.

John here: we played the Saint-Saens violin and piano sonata in D minor (much credit to Dr. Richard Stevens for a) procuring the sheet music; and b) working it up to a performance level). In an earlier article (PST #3) I declared that the origin of the "little phrase" could not have been this piece (song, as we would say). I would not go so far as so to say that this is the genuine source of the "little phrase", but then again I would not say that it is not. My feeling is that M. Proust probably did not have the most discriminating taste in music (his friendship with M. Reynaldo Hahn notwithstanding); however, the sonata in question does seem seem to satisfy the minimum requirements for what was encompased in the description of what the piece was all about. There is a "cyclicalness" in the structure. There is a minimum satisfaction as to what an obsessional tune might embody (although, truth be told, the second phrase in question is not all that fine). It was fairly beautiful, thankyouverymuch, I did my best, but not much to go on...

I go back to my original thesis, which was that like the characters in the novel, the source of the "little phrase" is a pastiche; an assemblage of what the author holds dear in his memory, his fantasy of what the ideal (a totally fag situation) of the world in which he lives should be.

Honestly, I sincerely apologize for having implied in my earlier article that the Saint-Saens sonata for violin and piano number 1 in D minor is a piece of shit, but the evidence bears out the intent, if not the uncouth expression.

I must concur with John; the Saint-Saens sonata was not what I was expecting. I'd never heard it before, and now I know why: it's not one of those crowd-pleasers that is so frequently recorded, and is clearly a difficult piece to perform, but without those melodic moments that cling mercilessly to even the musically untutored brain. Nothing, in short, that you would find yourself humming the next morning in the bath. None of the pieces fell into that category, but that was irrelevant. What was magical was this music of another era in this place of another era. As I sat, tapping feet to the well-kept tempo and warm performance, I felt so much the maitresse du salon. I found myself laughing at the thought of resembling that dreadful Mme Verdurin of Remembrance, and loving every moment of it.

Michelle Mangrum made this excellent batch, and the beautful label. It's called Marcel No. 74, in recognition of the 74th anniversary of Marcel's passing.

The naughty beverage we offered to the guests at the Wake of '96 did not seem to do anything to them except keep them socializing until 4:30 in the morning. The only other thing provided for the entertainment of the guests was a stack of Proust Questionnaires for them to fill out. Much to my amazement, only two people found this exercise amusing enough to complete. One was Stuart Mangrum, who had, at the first Wake at the museum, played Proust for me in the seance described in issue #2., but he emailed his answers to the questions the next day. I had to laugh when reading, that among the virtues, he preferred all of them, but likewise all the vices, and that his favorite occupation was celebrating the completion of a creative project, a joy I adore. What most surprised me was that the other person was the young and half-bad boy Jason Sterling Girard, who, in his elegant Goth apparel and vampiric dental accoutrements, actually filled one out, naming Betty Page as his favorite heroine of history, H.R. Geiger as his favorite painter, power being the best quality in a woman, and scaring the hell out of mortals his preferred occupation.

Many things can be said about the friends who came to pay their respects to Proust, but the most significant is the enthralling qualitiy of their company. With so much to discuss, there was no time to fill out a Proust Questionnaire in the seven and a half hours of this party. Of course, even with a pile of them sitting on my desk for a year, I've never filled one out myself. One wonders if the youth of Proust's generation actually found the questionnaire an amusing parlor activity, or were simply badgered into doing it by their hostesses. Or has my generation, the first in history, one supposes, to have had so many forms to fill out, just lost curiosity for the medium?

P Segal