The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [314]
By the age of 22 Proust was thus a classic case of the `boy hero who cannot grow up', imprisoned in the shadow of the `Dark Mother, abnormally stunted on both the masculine and feminine sides of his personality, and thus typically driven to projecting the search for his `other half' onto `mother-substitutes, older women of strong personality. Indeed he now took a familiar final step in this psychological progression when, under the spell of a new friendship with the flamboyantly camp Count Robert de Montesquiou, he entered the homosexual demimonde he was later to describe as `Sodom and Gomorrah, the Cities of the Plain'. He formed liaisons with young men like the musician Reynaldo Hahn and the novelist Alphonse Daudet's son Lucien, who called him `little Monsieur Proust'. It was a twilight world in which the longing for love and to be liked constantly foundered in jealousy and mistrust. Still supported financially entirely by his indulgent father, Proust gave lavish and pretentious dinner parties, or took his friends out to restaurants where he would order for them only the most expensive dishes or fruits out of season. The bemused Dr Proust would in turn give way to occasional outbursts of impatience at his son's affectations, as when a friend told Marcel `your father always tells everybody there's nothing whatever the matter with you. He says your asthma's pure hypochondria.' To the composer Debussy, Proust was `long-winded, precious and a bit of an old woman'. But still at the centre of Marcel's life was his suffocatingly close tie to his mother, with whom he spent a famous holiday in Venice, accompanied by his friend Reynaldo Hahn. Then his father died, and this was followed not long afterwards by the death of his mother. It was the most traumatic experience of Proust's life. Although, with her departure, he for the first time felt free to find his sexual partners among young men from the working-class, the moment was nearing when, in 1907, he began more and more to withdraw from society, sleeping away the hours of daylight only to spend his nights obsessively scribbling away at his life's work: the novel in seven volumes which he was not to complete until just before his death in 1922.
Seen through the eyes of its author-narrator, who only twice in a million-anda-half words gives away that his name is `Marcel, Remembrance of Times Past took the development of storytelling centred on the ego into a new dimension. The opening chapter, `Overture, is based on Proust's memories of the scenes of his own childhood, introducing his parents, his grandmother and the family servant Francoise, whose earthy, female common sense is to remain such a supportive background presence through most of the book. We then we come to an elaborated version of the `goodnight kiss' episode, when the narrator has to wait in agony all through the evening for his mother to come upstairs, because their usual goodnight rituals have been interrupted by the arrival of his parents' dinner guest, Monsieur Swann, their mysterious neighbour in the little town of Combray. When she finally comes up to his room, she reads to him, then agrees to spend the rest of the night sleeping in an adjoining bed. All this, laying the emotional foundation for what is to come, takes 18 pages to describe. The `overture' ends with the oftenquoted episode years later in his adulthood, when his mother offers him a cup of tea and a little scallop-shaped madeleine cake. He bites into it and is overcome with a strange joy, as the taste conjures up a flood of memories of his happy, longlost childhood. On this note of `once upon a time' the story proper can begin.
The central key to the immense narrative, with its huge cast of recurring characters, lies in three particular episodes, each describing a love affair. The first, in the volume entitled `Swann's Way and set at a time before the main narrative begins, describes how Charles Swann, the part-Jewish social