Jiménez, "Eternidad"

A work ("Eternity") by this Spanish poet.  You can read the original here.

Eternity, O beauty pure!
If only I could slip as bold 
Into your heart, as you unfold
Your world in mine, when your voice sings 
Clear, happy, peaceful evenings! 

In your last stasis so subdued,
If you were then to feel my soul 
Inebriate you, all of you,
As you intoxicate me whole!  

Were I but as ineffable,
As you in my most fleeting springs,
Scents, freshness, music, flutterings, 
Pure intimate spring would unpin  
Your endless unity within!  

Nachdenken über Leni G.

A famous review ("Reflections on Leni G.") of this author's novel by this German man of letters on the occasion of the novel's publication in 1971. You can read the original here.

Heinrich Böll, that loner, that Johnny-come-not-so-lately, that universally sanctioned rebel, that representative outsider of German society, and that same society's accredited prosecutor in Bonn, East Berlin, Rome, and Moscow, has accomplished the rather unique task of turning himself into a praeceptor Germaniae while still remaining a Rhenish rogue.

Authority and carelessness, of course, do not rhyme. Yet nowadays it seems that courtly preachers are only tolerable when they also prove to be court jesters. And herein lies the root of Böll's success as well as his international fame. What he has to offer the world is what it still, consciously or unconsciously, expects and desires from a German writer: morality and an acknowledgement of guilt. At the same time he denies the world what is commonly accepted as German: the thorough and the ceremonious. And what it finds in Böll is precisely what it would least suspect of the descendents of those victorious at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest: namely, charm and humor, a certain amount of roguishness that cannot be underestimated, and some touching frailties. He is a preacher with clownish features, a buffoon of priestly dignity. Yet he is no comedian. He does not fool anyone. Disproportionately more clever than all his heroes, he is just as unsure as they are, just as perplexed. He does not think of disguising or concealing his helplessness, and has nothing in common with every other German author who drags this helplessness to market as his crowning trump card. 

Paradoxically, it is in this authentic state of weakness that one finds Böll's strength. His fame cannot change the fact that we always seem to feel – and I mean this without the slightest condescension – somewhat sorry for him. Such sympathy, which should not be confused with tepid benevolence, is something he never wished to provoke; his readers nevertheless know this feeling (while it might be alien to the books of Dürrenmatt, Grass, or Uwe Johnson) and it contributes just as much to his success. There are more appreciated and more admired contemporary writers. But Böll, I believe, is loved, and perhaps we can only love when we at the same time feel sympathy. His new book will only heighten this tendency. Yet much like with the novel The Clown, where Böll could attribute the sudden increase in his readership to a hardly inhibited outbreak of sentimentality, so will the dubiousness of Group Portrait with Lady precipitate, in all likelihood, its spectacular success. Already now, a couple days after its first appearance, its publisher has printed over one hundred thousand copies. But the book does not recall The Clown as much as the earlier Böll novel, Billiards at Half-past Nine. For what begins here as the history and portrait of Leni Gruyten, a native of Cologne born in 1922, rapidly widens its lens to the group shot announced in the title. This group portrait will prove to be a swath of society including both multimillionaires and trash collectors; so too, will its time range, which concentrates primarily on the 1930s and 1940s, stretch from the fading Wilhelmine era all the way to today. In a word: a book on Germany much like Billiards at Half-past Nine, only disproportionately more opulent. Never before among Böll's works will one find such a plethora (often a confusing plethora) of motifs and milieus, of facts and figures, of topics and stages. In many chapters we often detect a pursuit for the shape of the subsequent section. And we have a narrator of incomparable observational ability, whose sensitivity and imagination know no bounds, picking from an embarrassment of riches. 

So is this a new masterpiece? Alas, this most lavish and indeed most comprehensive of Böll's novels, one distinguished by its generous aims and dimensions, at the same time strikes me as a very unambitious work. The structure is simple and has been tried and tested many times over, most recently in Christa Wolf's novel Reflections on Christa T. The first-person narrator, a shrewd and eloquent man, apparently a journalist by vocation but also an impassioned amateur detective and psychologist, pursues, in his own words, "the discovery of the truth." Böll does not select – as is customary in such novels, with Wolf's being no exception – an already deceased person whose life must be reconstructed, but, for whatever reason, Leni G., a no longer young native of Cologne who has just begun a relationship with a Turkish Gastarbeiter. She refuses, however, to share any information. What is more, many in her inner circle – her parents, her brother, a nun notable for her progressiveness, and especially the three men with whom she was involved during the war – all died long ago. Thus the obstinate truth-seeker must question witnesses and let them tell him not only about Leni, but also about all these people once close to her. In the end, most of these witnesses' statements slip into direct or indirect self-portraits; often, they also assume the dimensions of self-justification. The entire book consists of such memories and depictions (conveyed in direct speech), complemented by some inserted documents and the first-person narrator's own report. His account of his efforts, which incidentally is supposed to be comical in its meticulousness and devotion to the facts, seems in my view tedious and silly. Yet what becomes as we read on more like a collection of small literary works, was undoubtedly planned as a novel with a single central figure and a now still-recognizable fable. In the middle of all this there is Leni whom, I must say straight off, I do not like at all.     

That Böll loves simplicity and poverty as virtues in themselves, that he often mocks what we might denote as 'civilized,' that he utterly mistrusts education, are all facts long since known to his readers. And although anti-civilization affectation and anti-intellectual sentiments (examples of both of which, alas, our new novel provides in abundance) strike me as very dangerous, especially today when upon the use of terms such as "intellectual" or "man of letters" one must immediately qualify that they are not meant negatively, I have almost resigned myself to such phenomena in Böll's work (but only in Böll's work!). I cannot help but notice, however, that over time he has accorded his heroes less and less reason. The clown Hans Schnier was still permitted to say some intelligent things, which was not the legacy of the first-person narrator in "Away from the troop": he characterized himself, and not wrongly, as "artless" (tumb). Leni is also "artless," in the negative sense of the word, not that she is ever allowed to recognize this fact. At the very beginning we find: "Leni no longer understands the world; in fact, she doubts whether she has ever understood it." The novel's readers, however, are spared such doubts: it is clear that Leni comprehends absolutely nothing, that she "did not in any way, not even indirectly, have an idea of Nazism's political dimensions," or, for instance, until the end she did not know, "what a Jew or Jewess could possibly be." For a resident of the city of Cologne who by 1945 was twenty-three years old and long since part of the workforce, this ignorance does not imply a limitation as much as a stultification. Does it serve any purpose to place such a figure at the center of a novel critical of that era? Yet as little as this girl understands, just as much does she feel. Bereft of reason, but with one's heart in the right place: a combination so often preferred by German poets, if not quite by the very best of them. Moreover, Böll lauds Leni's "direct, proletarian, almost brilliant sensuality," to which the energy of her natural mystique is supposed to correspond. She wishes to be deflowered outside, in the open air, perhaps even among the heathers. That all men seem to be after this taciturn lass goes without saying. Yet "no one had wed" this "test subject" because "she was unapproachable." Why is she "unapproachable"? Is she a real girl or simply a symbol?

The fact that Böll had both in mind simultaneously can be deduced from the book's most important period. In 1943, at the cemetery landscaping job in which she works, Leni meets a young (and "oversensitive") Russian P.O.W. by the name of Boris. To spite the Nazis she plies the enemy with a cup of coffee; later she takes loving care of him, even going so far as to accrue considerable debts to be able to keep supplying him with food and cigarettes. And Boris is quite able to show his gratitude. Having an excellent command of German, he acquaints her with the poetry of Brecht and Georg Trakl; he recommends the prose of Franz Kafka; yes, it is this young Soviet, this Russian, who teaches the Catholic girl that had "lived unecclesiastically" since she was thirteen how to pray again. Here the injustice and cruelty of the world during wartime are conquered by the love shared between a German woman and a Russian man. Only when they are being bombed can they be alone. Their rendezvous takes place in the private chapel of a family crypt, because only in a crypt or some other sacrosanct space is there room for love. Admittedly, this is not only a macabre and decorative setting; it is also one whose symbolism leaves nothing more to be desired. 

Is Böll fully aware of what he has done here? Does he know that this blonde, true-hearted, simple-dimple Leni, noble, helpful, good, tender, and, as a rule, unapproachable Leni, this Leni who, if necessary, can work herself to the bone, who loves Schubert, who loves listening to sad verse, and who can sing songs such as "The young and beautiful Lilofee" – does he know that this Leni, so naïve and out-of-touch with this world and so connected to nature, corresponds with absolute precision to a fatal German feminine ideal? This ideal haunts second-rate German books, films, and ballads. So whether she treats a Soviet soldier to a cup of coffee, or hands some red wine to a handsome French lieutenant during the anti-Napoleonic German campaigns, or serves mead to a Roman legionary in the Teutoburg forest, or whether, as she does here, she gives herself over to the "starry sky evenly aglow" while lying among the heathers, or to the moon or the sun on some other meadow, it all amounts to the very same thing. No, let us not fool ourselves. This Leni G. is in no way representative or typical of the epoch depicted, nor of our century. She is timeless and eternal. Yet what is being revived here is not really the eternal feminine, but unfortunately – and this must quite clearly be said of Böll with all due respect – a seemingly eternal German kitsch. You can be sure that in German-speaking lands many tears will be cried over the tale of Leni and Boris. Yet we have one consolation: even Böll doesn't quite know what to do with Leni when she is in love and later when she is plagued by bad luck. In the second half of the book he increasingly loses track of her, which never detracts from the novel. It is precisely these small stories and sketches, these humoresques and genre pieces, these causeries and anecdotes where Leni is hardly or not at all the subject, which turn out to be the disproportionately more interesting parts of the volume.  

Should researchers (who will undoubtedly jump at the chance to study Group Portrait with Lady – the novel is supremely ripe for interpretation) come to the conclusion, however, that the composition of the whole is well thought out, even perhaps refined, then permit me to say that I don't believe a word of it. The book possesses no recognizable principle of form whatsoever. It would appear that Böll just came up with one thing after another. And off he went, unbothered, unconcerned, and without a scruple, piling up individual pieces into a whole. The merits of these pieces vary significantly: there are footling and silly episodes, then masterful works of genius written as only Böll can write. We also notice how minimal Böll's self-control was when we examine the novel's language. Hardly any attention is paid to age, profession, or level of education, or to the social and national provenance of the witnesses who become narrators; almost all of them speak the same language, a Böll-like colloquial German, which is not as bad as our mounting suspicion that the portrayal of various "informants" is being employed as an alibi for stylistic sloppiness and, worse still, for sheer prolixity. Never before has a great German author written as sloppily as Heinrich Böll has here. This applies to the final chapter as well. Here the author suddenly runs out of steam and ideas, and just like Lessing's Nathan, the novel runs along pell-mell towards an happy ending. Everything is quickly transformed into a fairy tale, recast into the wonderful, and capped with a conclusion of weary joviality. That grumpy-obstinate disposition which had become so important (already known to us from "After a business trip") should in any case not be misunderstood as a form of retraction.

Certainly many things in the novel benefit from this half-happy finale, particularly the sense of anarchy, a prick in the side of the cozy and the comfortable, while many other things are undoubtedly rendered harmless. But this cannot have escaped Böll. In all likelihood he wanted us to turn away from the consumer world and what he terms the service industry, and yet in the end not understand things too mechanically, but rather relativize our world with light irony and winking smirks. In any case, the whole only profits from this mix of doubt and mischief, of hard accusations and lush fun, of bitterness and pleasurability. Miniatures in which both of these feelings surface at once, Böll's repulsion and Böll's humor, prove that his negligence does not indicate a waning of his epic strength. Whatever objections one may have against this book, it offers no small number of plainly brilliant sidelights and impressions, close-ups, episodes, and reminiscences. In an objective, seemingly dry report by a Russian regarding the sufferings of prisoners-of-war, there is nothing new to be discovered; all the same it is chilling because Böll finds the only appropriate tone for such a subject. The description of the daily tasks in a cemetery during the war and the graveyard's habitual practices – wreathes every few days after the burial were taken, freshened up, and resold – is a sarcastic background piece that lets us know more than the weird ridiculousness of burial conventions. The tale of an old Mitläufer and speculator who prattles on wittily and with great pleasure about his alleged difficulties during the Third Reich is absolutely hilarious and renews Böll's status as an philanthropic satirist and ingenious psychologist. And the depiction of the sex scene in the bomb shelter, perhaps the apex of the whole book, expresses more about human suffering during the war than some novels in their entirety. 

I do not think that I am exaggerating when I claim that in these and other snippets Böll, like no other German writer, knows how to observe and pinpoint nuance and detail, mood and turns of phrase, sometimes with striking effect, so as to make palpable and visible what one tends somewhat solemnly to call the spirit of the times. Maybe, after all, we should be more content that we have such a great storyteller, instead of getting annoyed that he keeps churning out weak books. If I may make one Biblical reference: God comes to him in his sleep. But he, Heinrich Böll, does not choose at this time to put his talents to good use.

The Terror of Blue John Gap

The inspector entered it all in a large book and bowed me out with commendable gravity.  But I heard a burst of laughter before I had got down his garden path; no doubt he was recounting my adventure to his family.

                                                                                                                            Dr. James Hardcastle

I don't think that as a child I ever believed in unicorns.  Perhaps because their horns were clearly vestigial and served no purpose other than to distinguish them from the plainest of ponies; perhaps because young boys tend to cherish less delicate critters.  Mermaids, fairies, and other soft metaphors of femininity were likewise devoid of appeal.  Common is the child who will reject these earthbound fantasies for the beasts of beyond, for interplanetary spies and spectacles, for impossible odds and still more impossible evens.  But these gimcrack scenes have never attracted me, in no small part because I identified them long ago as shadows of our own melodramas, puppet theater for those who seek the actions but not the morals.  What did fill me with wonderment and joy, however, were the innumerable tales of what we have come to call, faute de mieux, cryptids.  And while I would now be unlikely to deem these creatures possible, some long neck, some claw's print, some unpalatable howl shattering a dark, clear night still revives a childhood fear.  Which brings us to this tale.  

Our hero will prove his mettle over the course of a few crazed months in the Derbyshire hills, but he shall pay dearly for this display of courage.  His name is Dr. James Hardcastle, "a man of a sober and scientific turn of mind, absolutely devoid of imagination, and most unlikely to invent any abnormal series of events."  Those of us who can enjoy Conan Doyle's genial phantasmagoria know that it is invariably from among such souls – the smug, the skeptic, the materialist – that his protagonists are selected.  Were incredible events to befall someone already mindful of phenomena beyond man's meager ken, we would have a corroboration, not a metamorphosis, and corroborations, as we know, do not stimulating literature make.  Thus for fairness and fairness alone we should present the man as he saw himself in advance of the happenings of the summer of 1907, which left livestock dead and local residents terrified:

How absurdly easy it is for a legend to arise in a lonely countryside!  I examined him as to the reasons for his weird belief.  It seems that from time to time sheep have been missing from the fields, carried bodily away, according to Armitage.  That they could have wandered away of their own accord and disappeared among the mountains was an explanation to which he would not listen.  On one occasion a pool of blood had been found, and some tufts of wool.  That also, I pointed out, could be explained in a perfectly natural way.  Further, the nights upon which sheep disappeared were invariably very dark, cloudy nights with no moon.  This I met with the obvious retort that those were the nights which a commonplace sheep-stealer would naturally choose for his work.  On one occasion a gap had been made in a wall, and some of the stones scattered for a considerable distance.  Human agency again, in my opinion.  Finally, Armitage clinched all his arguments by telling me that he had actually heard the Creature – indeed, that anyone could hear it who remained long enough at the Gap.  It was a distant roaring of an immense volume.  I could not but smile at this, knowing, as I do, the strange reverberations which come out of an underground water system running amid the chasms of a limestone formation.  My incredulity annoyed Armitage, so that he turned and left me with some abruptness. 

We suspect it is of no small coincidence that the panicked yokel, a staple of such stories, is called Armitage, but I digress.  What we have not mentioned is the "weird belief" itself, which I'm afraid may sound silly to modern ears so accustomed to dismissing rustic rumors.  Possessed of that typical British fortitude that immediately finds caves and lagoons fascinating, Hardcastle betakes himself into the breach – in this case literally, as he enters a canyon from where this mineral is harvested.  Something untimely will happen to his candle, as well as to the matchbox in his pocket, and James Hardcastle will spend an unforeseen period ("it may have been for an hour, it may have been for several") in moist, stony darkness.  And with the sense of sight entirely unavailable, it will be his other senses that will betray him, although betray may not quite be the right word.

Even if he will always be remembered for this magnificent creation, Conan Doyle's other works, apart from some lengthier subscriptions of mystical experiences, should not be ignored.  The world of Holmes and Watson enthralled us because their creator found a way to combine, in a most genteel partnership, the arrogance of science and the faith of the human soul.  The result was the most successful tandem in literary history; yet to have both currents converge, as they do upon the battlements of Dr. James Hardcastle, is perhaps too much for one mortal to handle.  Indeed, after the comeuppance of his cavernal visitation, Hardcastle becomes broken and emotional.  The caption to his hysteria may give away more than we should:

You can imagine that it was not long before I had shaken the dust ... from my feet and returned to the farm, cursing all unimaginative pedants who cannot conceive that there may be things in creation which have never yet chanced to come across their mole's vision.

Other pedants (please read me out of such a congregation) would consider the usually careful creator of Holmes, Watson, and a multitude of other riveting beings, and wonder at the cacophonous echo of "imagine" in this passage.  But then again, we are allegedly absorbing the tale of and by a man of science, and a shaken one at that.  A man of science who may have to choose between spreading "mad alarm over the whole countryside," and facing consignment in a house for those who spread mad alarms that turn out to be mere figments of their alarming minds.  And perhaps it may behoove us to recall that little aside about heaven, earth, dreams, and all our philosophies.   

Cold Souls

A modern and ultimately fatuous French philosopher once quipped that it was acceptable for a European to drink but not to eat alone, whereas for an American the reverse was true (our philosopher, I fear, was recolonizing the New World).  While one of the surest signs of alcoholism may be its consumption without company, an ever surer sign is the amount consumed.  That is to say, Americans tend to do things the big way, and that includes more than a slight tendency towards overindulgence.  Why so much?  Well, it does feel good, and if you're a closet hedonist, that's all you really care about, anyway.  Yet feeling good about yourself comprises more than the physical well-being that we preach and occasionally practice.  It is about understanding, especially as life moves towards its middle, that what you are doing is correct and virtuous.  Virtuous, as it were, in relation to the values to which you adhere, whatever those fortune cookie adages may be – and now I may appear more than a bit cynical, a charge I must swat like a persistent tse-tse.  Cynicism in a most pernicious form does invade, however, the life of the protagonist of this recent film.

That protagonist is Paul Giamatti, playing himself in a role reminiscent of a batch of other overly self-conscious films that tend to straddle the maniacally dull.  A full-time actor and part-time husband,  Giamatti looks like a man who has always eaten alone.  He has a grim despair about him that is only heightened by his utter indifference to his appearance and health.  "You should take care of yourself," says his wife (Emily Watson), but she knows as well as we do that such tactics are given as much attention as infomercials.  As our film begins, Giamatti is hamming his way through an adaptation of this famous play.  It has been years since I read Uncle Vanya, yet I distinctly recall being as bored with some of its machinations as the characters were with each other.  That Giamatti is ensconced in what appears to be a second-rate production of one of Chekhov's weaker works should be reason enough for depression – and here is where the film strays in a laudable direction.  The on-screen Giamatti is six years older than his namesake and it is precisely this state of affairs that he laments.  "Now I am forty-seven; even if I make it to sixty, that means thirteen more years of this."  What "this" may mean is not obvious to us or even to Giamatti.  The only detail that remains clear is the deep personal and professional dissatisfaction that gnaws on every cell of his being.  "If I could only awake one quiet morning," our nebbish moans and "find everything was alright," a barefaced admission that his ambition eloped long ago with his youth and fitness.  Lying on his couch after another disastrous rehearsal, he listens to a message from his agent on his answering machine – a device that for a well-off American assuredly indicates no desire to talk to anyone.  The message concerns an article in the New Yorker and a strange service with the almost impossible name of Soul Storage.

At this same time, a Russian woman (Dina Korzun) lands in the United States and is questioned briefly by Immigration before being let through.  She will do a few things thereafter that in all likelihood would have changed that official's mind about her entry, but let's not belabor such detail.  This same Russian and Giamatti will arrive at Soul Storage run by Dr. Flintstein (a suddenly wizened David Strathairn) and notice each other just as we, the informed audience, know they are obliged to meet again.  Flintstein has one of those faces you should never trust because even if he is not currently planning on jugglery, he has enough sins on his conscience as to be capable of just about anything.  Giamatti is counseled into believing that what plagues him is simply a grey and errant soul.  All he needs to do is cast the thing aside ("You can even store it in New Jersey to avoid sales tax," says Flintstein with some practicality).  The human soul, he is told, can be stored away like a fine wine to be opened when it or you are ready; Giamatti ponders this ecstatic state and decides that being soulless for two weeks should help him focus on being a better Vanya.  He enters a gizmo that can be likened to a CAT scan and is soon shown a clear glass jug containing the essence of his being.  "Why does it look like a chickpea?" he wonders aloud, but Flintstein has all the answers.  Giamatti considers these mysteries then leaves a new man, and we begin life in the hollow carapace of a once-troubled human form. 

Well, not quite.  According to Flintstein, full soul removal is not yet possible; it can therefore be assumed that about five percent of Giamatti's soul was not extracted.  He returns home, stares at his feet, weighs himself, and examines the equally quizzical fellow in all his mirrors.  Has he changed?  Is Soul Storage nothing more than hogwash to part with all soonness rich fools and their bank accounts?  His wife senses a change, likens his dry almost scaly chest to that of a lizard, and evinces suspicions that, like most marital doubts, are never vocalized.  Newly-found machismo hijacks his next efforts at rehearsal, and the director's reprimands indicate that Giamatti has no more rope left.  It is here than he returns to Flintstein and learns that he can also rent a "Russian soul" ("A poet," he is told), an offer he eagerly accepts.  This rental subjects him to a plethora of beatific visions: the memory of an orphanage, the soft sound of water pouring in a bath, the long anodyne stretch of a hallway beside a maternity ward, another mother gazing at a child, then a seagull – which leads us back to the author of Uncle Vanya, and I will stop my revelations here.

The second half of the film does involve, alas, the retrieval of his soul, which is exactly where the novelty falls away.  The good thing about the use of Giamatti as opposed to other vanity projects that are so painfully self-aware of being self-aware is that Paul Giamatti comprises just another name of just another actor.  He has little to show for himself that we can't already see.  His reputation neither blemishes nor enhances his fictional portrayal, and what few lines he can utter with sincerity reveal a deeply unsatisfied plainness to his thinking.  Perhaps that's why when he sees a catalogue that includes the essence of a Hollywood writer, only his laugh makes us think he is amused.

Proust

A famous and rather exquisite German novel once distinguished those who have read this French author and those who still read him (the novel wisely omitted those who think Proust is a type of champagne or peacock).  The obvious point being, one supposes, that most everyone has had some Proust in the way that most everyone has had some Shakespeare, or in the way that most everyone knows much more of the Bible than would ever be admissible in skeptical chit-chat.  The more subtle point lies in the unwaning affection that lifelong readers have for one of the greatest geniuses in any language.  In his extremes Proust has captivated many, in part because he himself had nothing that could be envied: he had no career or close friends, was refused time and again by literary society and both male and female love interests, and floated in a semi-permanent state of convalescence.  Yet he owes the intimidation he engenders to the typical insecurity regarding an unfinished book, often granted a level of cruelty akin to an unfinished meal left just outside and out of reach of a prisoner's window.  You will hear academic pundits proud of their achievement declaiming that if you have not ingested all two thousand two hundred pages, you cannot viably comment on Proust's greatness – never mind that the first five hundred or so tower above the rest of the project.  Proust is not meant to be read in the conventional sense, he is meant to become a repeated reading, a fixture on your bookshelf, an endless reference for life and its passions right next to our copies of King James and the Complete Plays and Sonnets.  With an aim that grand, therefore, we should perhaps be surprised at the insight of this slender monograph.    

The true impetus of such a study was, we learn, the conviction that despite brief success Proust was no longer being read.  Presumably the same torpor overcame the French literary world in the late 1920s that had murdered the career of the greatest of all American writers in the 1860s.  Taste was not with either man, with the only difference being that Melville bore witness to his own oblivion.  What was needed then was a pithy, precise apologia, preferably from a non-compatriot.  Beckett may have been ideal for this task because he was a Francophile, because he was in urgent need of a foil to his own notions of what comprises art, and because he was not an Englishman.  To enjoy the early Beckett, you must enjoy the awesome range of the English language; to enjoy the late Beckett, you must have a certain loathing for Romantic stickiness that can be best expressed by Goethe's phrase sollst entbehren (cited, as it were, in this trilogy).  Our very early Beckett has yet to choose between his two future selves, a pickle he would have gnawed on with particular relish.  What he has decided, however, may be rudely summarized in three points: Proust is a genius whose uniqueness stems from his emphasis of something called mémoire involontaire; Proust has no affinity for nor tendency towards morality, or any distinction of right from wrong; and, lastly, Proust's shunning of societal conventions was so exaggerated as to relegate him to a role not unlike that of a court clerk.  Beckett also casually mentions something of a weakness for the nobility but fails to suggest a reason why such a fetish plagued Proust for his entire life – yet this is the simplest question of all.  Nobility were once, and are no longer, prized for their God-given ability as well as the learning, poise, and grace their privileges bestowed upon them.  In a word, they were loved for being themselves, and they had no other destiny other than fulfilling what was already determined.  For an artist of acute sensibility there is nothing more delightful than being loved for one's essence, because that normally indicates that the artist has succeeded in making that essence translucent.  On the other hand, there is nothing worse for that same soul than being hated or dismissed for something misunderstood or distorted, especially when the misconstruer is of a vastly inferior intellect (compared to Proust, that would be nearly all of France).  Since Proust's family had money but no title he was afforded the company but not the status.  Very much like the humble clerk who is privy to all the intrigues of a trial but never allowed to comment, much less participate in its resolution.

This leaves us with two observations, one of which is as utterly correct as the other is so dreadfully wrong.  What is wrong about Beckett's assumption regarding Proust's view of morality is the woeful conclusion that someone who shuns society mindfully shuns the morals on which that society is structured.  Beckett's proof resides in a long segment on Albertine and "a couple of other Sapphists," whom he rightly terms vulgar and well beneath the gentle youth hovering in their vicinity in self-inflicted jealousy.  He then mentions Proust's proclivity for likening people to plants, and startles us with an odd passage:

He assimilates the human to the vegetal.  He is conscious of humanity as flora, never as fauna (There are no black cats and faithful hounds in Proust) .... This preoccupation accompanies very naturally his complete indifference to moral values and human justices.  Flower and plant have no conscious will.  They are shameless, exposing their genitals.  And so in a sense are Proust's men and women, whose will is blind and hard, but never self-conscious, never abolished in the pure perception of a pure subject.  They are victims of their volition, active with a grotesque predetermined activity, within the narrow limits of an impure world.  But shameless.  Homosexuality is never called a vice: it is as devoid of moral implications as the mode of fecundation of the Primula veris or the Lythrum salicoria [sic].

We know that Beckett subscribed to this philosopher's thoughts on the agony of animals; yet it is telling that a self-proclaimed non-believer would genuflect before some of the most restrictive of Catholic creeds, and even more telling that of the two plants used in his metaphor, one would be misnamed.  Beckett's categories, it seems, were always as hard and uncompromising as the bicycle handles, headboards, and other appurtenances that plagued some of his characters.  And while it seems humorous to think of the notoriously unhandy Proust studying a parterre for his literary needs, it may also be important to remember that as a mysophobe, hypochondriac, valetudinarian, and breathtakingly shy and neurotic person, he much preferred to gaze upon something that, in turn, did and could not pay him the least bit of attention.

With memory, and what our simple memories mean – here is where Proust separates himself from the rest of literature.  Re-reading Beckett's monograph I recalled quoting it in a graduate school paper; specifically, I savored the filthy shape of his comparison of habit – the most reviled term in all of Proust's pages – to "the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit."  I also recalled that the page of the edition used fifteen years ago was twenty-six (my current edition has it on nineteen), which allowed me to consider myself at twenty-six when I found life to be particularly enchanting.  I then remembered my twenty-sixth birthday in Moscow, the specific bean dish that a friend of mine ordered, the flower woman on the corner who accosted us hesitantly, and then the ice slipping beneath my feet, the pinkness of my cheeks, and the heady cologne that I still wear even though for some reason it does not remain with me as long.  That exact concatenation, what has been strived for time and again in the stream-of-consciousness narrative, is finally engirded in system in Proust.  It is the animal reflex when habit is forgotten, when we are unconscious of our surroundings, distracted, lost in thought (which implies that we are merely lost from habit) – this is when we gain truth:

No amount of voluntary manipulation can reconstitute in its integrity an impression that the will has – so to speak – buckled into incoherence.  But if, by accident, and given favourable circumstances (a relaxation of the subject's habit of thought and a reduction of the radius of his memory, a generally diminished tension of consciousness following upon a phase of extreme discouragement), if by some miracle of analogy the central impression of a past sensation recurs as an immediate stimulus which can be instinctively identified by the subject with the model of duplication (whose integral purity has been retained because it has been forgotten), then the total past sensation, not its echo nor its copy, but the sensation itself, annihilating every spatial and temporal restriction, comes in a rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of its infallible proportion.

This engulfing restores the childhood pleasures of the most saccharine of melodies, of the newness of spice and smell, of an unexpected touch, of that shimmering hint of revelation that vanishes after a few succulent moments.  Did Proust understand this phenomenon better than anyone else or was his morbid lifestyle simply better equipped to permit him such pensiveness?  Maybe that should be pondered over a very fat book.