The Thirty-Nine Steps

Here was I, a very ordinary fellow, with no particular brains; and yet I was convinced that somehow I was needed to help this business through – that without me it would all go to blazes.  I told myself it was sheer silly conceit, that four or five of the cleverest people living, with all the might of the British Empire at their back, had the job in hand.  Yet I couldn't be convinced.  It seemed as if a voice kept speaking in my ear, telling me to be up and doing, or I would never sleep again.

                                                                                                            Richard Hannay

Nearing the end of this seminal novel it occurred to me whether I hadn't seen as a child the initial and much-altered screen adaptation – which, of course, I certainly had.  What was retained about the latter, however, had little to do with the former and a brief check into Hitchcock's rendition cleared the mist of all misconceptions.  I distinctly recall a woman being involved as well as some kind of theatrical production, all of which in the original is notably absent; in fact, apart from a couple of rustic housewives there are no women to be found at all in The Thirty-Nine Steps.  But then again, war was in the air and women cannot possibly participate with any effectiveness in the masterful schemes and dreams of great generals and their swollen ambitions – no, not in the slightest, neither then nor now, an altogether unthinkable premise.  I'm afraid I'll just have to let that one sit and turn to our story.    

Our hero is a hard-boiled bachelor by the name of Richard Hannay, thirty-seven, of Scottish provenance but fresh off the South African veld.  During the course of his adventure the veld and its laws will come in handy as a source of wisdom (especially, as it were, a tale about a mare and a lion not even related by him) for the series of difficult decisions he is obliged to make.  As the novel begins, Hannay opines that London has bored him so much in his brief sojourn that it will get one more day to make it up to him or be forever abandoned for rheboks and kudus.   On that very day he is accosted on his doormat by a frantic American neighbor called Scudder.  Scudder gains the Scotsman's attention with the barefaced claim that he "happen[s] at this moment to be dead"; that is to say, he has faked his death with a purloined corpse, a well-placed gunshot at a prognathous face and a little bit of stealth.  Now he places himself in Hannay's power because the Scotsman "looks like the kind of man who would understand."  Understand what, precisely?  Nothing less than global conspiracy, as it turns out: a Jewish cabal, a German mandate to murder the Greek premier Karolides (a leader Hannay for some reason greatly admires), and the fifteenth of June, about a month hence.  Partially out of boredom, partially in recognition of Scudder's abilities in language and disguise – both of which would lend him credibility as an intelligence officer – Hannay lets the fugitive lodge in his spare bedroom.  The two men get along well enough considering the tension, but Hannay's curiosity cannot accept Scudder's excited scribblings in a little black book which never leaves his sight.  Well, that is until Hannay comes home one night and finds Scudder belly up with a long knife through his heart.  Hannay correctly concludes that the killers will suppose Scudder took a confidant and come for him, a situation he averts by fleeing north of the border to the highlands.

Buchan's prose is peppered with Scots use ("lade," "stickle," "burn," "bent," "haugh," to name a few), and robust in the slang of the day, which simultaneously dates our tale and imbues it with a particular authenticity.  The descriptions of the moors and glens where Hannay traces a hunted path betray a learned and profound love of Scotland:

Behind me was the road climbing through a long cleft in the hills, which was the upper glen of some notable river.  In front was a flat space of maybe a mile, all pitted with bog-holes and rough with tussocks, and then beyond it the road fell steeply down another glen to a plain whose blue dimness melted into the distance.  To left and right were round-shouldered green hills as smooth as pancakes, but to the south – that is, the left hand – there was a glimpse of high heathery mountains, which I remembered from the map as the big knot of hill which I had chosen for my sanctuary.  I was on the central boss of a huge upland country, and could see everything moving for miles.  In the meadows below the road half a mile back a cottage smoked, but it was the only sign of human life.  Otherwise there was only the calling of plovers and the tinkling of little streams.

Hannay benefits repeatedly from the kindness of strangers, and comes to enjoy the chase even when faced with rather unforgiving odds.  And who then are the enemies?  A triptych of Germans now standard issue in tradecraft and cloak-and-dagger thrillers: a fat man with a lisp, his inseparable tall, dark, thin comrade, and an "old man with a young voice who could hood his eyes like a hawk."  Hannay's pursuit begins by monoplane and sedan, then emerges from all sides as if a noose were tightening around his leathery neck.  Also interspersed are Hannay's gritty observations on the tiniest and most perfunctory of actions, a talent which has few peers in English literature: "Their mouths were full of prices"; "He was a whining fellow with a churchyard face"; "Slowly that thorn let me go"; "Bed may have been his chief object, but I think there was something in the foot of a bottle"; "Plenty of people invited me to their houses, but they didn't seem much interested in me."  Ah, Mr. Hannay, if they only knew.  

Pnin

Pnin, it should be particularly stressed, was anything but the type of that good-natured German platitude of last century, der zerstreute Professor.  On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully on the alert lest his erratic surroundings  (unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of preposterous oversight.  It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin's business to set it straight.  His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.

Of all the queer trades on our earth, you will likely never hear of an absent-minded chief executive officer.  In part because that would render the fellow in question more human; but also because being a chief executive officer necessarily means being the opposite of absent-minded, which does not necessarily mean he is present-minded.  It implies, for better or worse, that he possesses that most ballyhooed of senses, the common one, often in exchange on the heavenly market for all the other senses combined.  He is practical to a fault; he knows the price of everything (invariably the first question he asks); he is a great believer in demand and supply in eternal twinning like some lonesome gulls; and he understands sympathy to be an impediment to good business.  In fact, the platitude "good business" will end up justifying every detail in his profit-hoarding existence, from the food he eats, to the clothes he wears, to the way he says "good morning" to some people and "how are you" to others, and how he's really just talking about himself.  In short, it is hard to be absent-minded when you are constantly conscious of the present and your next greenback.  A portrait in stark antithesis to the protagonist of this novel.  

The first thing we learn about Timofey Pnin, a professor recently of Europe, and before that, Imperial Russia, is that he is sitting obliviously on the wrong train.  It is an American train, a country of which Pnin has been a citizen for a decade, but America and Pnin have very little productive interaction.  We are quickly informed, per the passage beginning this review, that Pnin, a tanned, fit pentagenarian of bulging torso and a perfectly bald head, is not simply one of those college teachers who "had long ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus, in the corridors, in the library – anywhere, in brief, save in functional classroom concentrations."  Certainly, his students, transient entry-level life forms as they are, hold little interest for him (Pnin has a mild paternal instinct that is exhausted on his former wife's child, Victor).  But if Pnin is to be what he is intended to be, that is, a tragic character, he must have tragic flaws, and apathy towards his students – with one pretty exception – will not suffice.  We may begin with his English, portrayed mercilessly and accurately for those long familiar with Russian accents, and his lecture style in his acquired language, involving "his gaze glued to the text, in a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators."  There are then his eating habits, which must be good if Pnin is to maintain the ruddy-cheeked health so typical of the outdoorsman: "The Egg and We [was] a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure."  And finally, there is the small matter of Pnin's ex-wife Liza, a woman our narrator will tear to shreds even after she has already demonstrated her hatefulness towards everyone except herself.  Her marriage to Pnin will be her first of many (not to say she was faithful before or during the actual union), which might explain why poor old Timofey cannot quite get over his erstwhile spouse:

There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark.     

"Magic agony" is a triumph of sound, and Liza a paradigm for the sort of mind who needs paradigms and who, instead of equating feminism with dignity and rights, endorses frivolous freedoms, contrived scandals, and something that can be loosely termed sex appeal.  And so, if a man cannot work, eat, or love the right way, if life has so baffled him that he must resort to old habits, however destructive, how can he be expected to get on in the world?  Pnin will throw a party (no students past or present invited) towards the end of our novel that suggests he has always found methods to alleviate his loneliness, or whatever it is that truly plagues him.    

We have not spoken overmuch about our narrator, a certain Vladimir Vladimirovich, because his role is suddenly elucidated during our closing chapter.  It turns out that – well, no, let's not spoil any of the fun.  Far better to enumerate some of the instances of dazzling clarity in the realm of Pnin: "A race was run between the doctor's fat golden watch and Timofey's pulse (an easy winner)"; "He came, a figure of antique dignity, moving in his private darkness to an invisible luncheon"; "The lilacs, in sudden premature bloom, wildly beat, like shut-out maskers, at the dripping panes"; "With the confidential and arch air of one who makes his audience a precious gift of a fruity colloquialism"; "Around the natural basin, Pnin swam in state"; "Pnin and Clements, in last-minute discourse, stood on either side of the living-room doorway, like two well-fed caryatids, and drew in their abdomens to let the silent Thayer pass"; "This had corrupted Pnin, this had made of him a happy, footnote-drugged maniac who disturbs the book mites in a dull volume, a foot thick, to find in it a reference to an even duller one."  You may also notice a squirrel – correctly etymologized from the Greek as "shadow tail" – bounding at key instants in the vicinity of our scholar, as if he wanted to ask a question or three.  As if the squirrel were actually – yet again, I must refrain.  And anyway, what can you ask of a man whose only true possession is sorrow?  

The Blunderer

Walter had a vision of a little window.  It was a beautiful little square window, just out of his reach, filled with light blue sky with a suggestion of green earth below.

Adulthood, you will surely have heard, may be summarized as a series of one's choices (some apply this label to life as a whole; yet in so many instances of our childhood, choices are snatched from our tender fingers), a lovely mantra for your friendly neighborhood Freewill Society.  We are also told by some of the members of this same organization that religious faith is anathema to volition, because the existence of an omnipotent otherness suggests that our fates are already carved out in some dark and distant cave for us, sooner or maybe much later, to discover.  These same board members, whose staffing is replicated in a club almost invariably named, in cruel irony, "humanist," will then advance their theories as to why science alone promotes freewill.  Science, that same discipline that claims everything can be determined by genetics, fossils, and other unstoppable forces well beyond human direction.  Scientists have made some incredible leaps the last century and a half, but they increasingly jump without a moral compass or parachute, instead electing to manipulate whatever earthbound relics to their own evanescent theories.  The fact of the matter is, one can only exhibit freewill when there is a moral dilemma, because otherwise what we might term "volition" quickly devolves into a synonym for "convenience," or, in dire times, "survival."  Being moral means choosing what is right before the ledgers and balance sheets of ease and self-preservation are perused.  A fine way to examine the protoganist's ordeal in this novel.

That protagonist is New York attorney Walter Stackhouse, and from our first scenes with him we understand he will also become – or perhaps has always been – the title character.  Walter is married to a petite, pretty, and squirrelly real estate agent by the name of Clara, and we would do well at this point to recur to that old adage about judging a man by his wife.  It is unclear to even the casual observer why on earth Walter, physically attractive, well-off, and a respected colleague, would have settled in suburban Connecticut with Clara, who does not seem beautiful enough to justify her behavior.  Neurotic in that way unique to unrepentingly smug and selfish people, Clara is a master hand at that oldest of wifely wiles: driving a wedge between her husband and his male chums ("He had already lost five friends").  Her public and private comportment might even lead one to believe she is trying to induce a divorce (a couple of odd reactions suggest she may be having an affair with one of Walter's friends; a later scene reveals staggering emotional immaturity), which, after a few exhausting years of wedlock, Walter is now ready to give her.  And so, our story would likely have been as tedious and commonplace as a bickering couple were it not for Walter's hobby of chronicling ill-matched pairs:

The essays had been Walter's pastime for the last two years.  There were to be eleven of them, under the general title 'Unworthy Friendships.'  Only one was completed, the one on Chad and Mike, but he had finished the outlines for several others – and they were all based on observations of his own friends and acquaintances.  His thesis was that a majority of people maintained at least one friendship with someone inferior to themselves because of certain needs and deficiencies that were either mirrored or complemented by the inferior friend.  Chad and Mike, for example: both had come from well-to-do families who had spoiled them, but Chad had chosen to work, while Mike was still a playboy who had little to play on since his family had cut off his allowance.  Mike was a drunk and a ne'er-do-well, unscrupulous about taking advantage of all his friends.  By now Chad was almost the only friend left.  Chad apparently thought: 'There but for the grace of God go I,' and doled out money and put Mike up periodically.  Mike wasn't worth much to anybody as a friend.  Walter did not intend to submit his book for publication anywhere.  The essays were purely for his own pleasure, and he didn't care when or if he ever finished them all.       

I give away nothing by mentioning one of The Blunderer's more curious aspects: namely, that as compromising as this diary of sorts could have been, it is summarily discarded early on, never to resurface.  Provided, of course, one didn't understand it as a precursor to a few of Walter's future personal relationships, one of which will be with a dreadful beast, a killer by the name of Melchior Kimmel.

We meet Kimmel in our opening scene, which may remind the attentive reader of this film.  The German immigrant's actions are swift, bloodhot, and premeditated, but they are not foolproof, and anyone who encounters this mammoth bookseller whose "main source of profit" is "pornography" cannot abandon a few initial impressions.  The first is that Kimmel is extremely, almost dangerously intelligent; the second is that he is capable of incredible violence; and the third proffers an explanation for his journey hither:    

Then he stood by his bookcase, playing with his carvings, moving their parts at various angles and observing the composition.  He could see them fuzzily against the light-colored bookcase, and the effect was rather interesting.  They were cigar-shaped pieces fastened invisibly together, end to end, with wire.  Some looked like animals on four legs; others, of ten pieces or more, defied any description.  Kimmel himself had no definite name for them.  To himself, sometimes, he called them his puppies.  Each piece was differently carved with designs of his own invention, designs somewhat Persian in their motifs, their brown-stained surfaces so smoothed with fine sandpaper they felt almost soft to the touch.  Kimmel loved to run his fingertips over them.  He was still fondling them when the doorbell rang. 

It might be relevant to note that Kimmel did not "love to run his fingertips over" his wife, unless you include his wicked actions near that bus rest stop, but there are few greater wastes of time than to ratiocinate with a murderer (anyone who "loved white shirts more than almost any tangible object in the world" likely has a baleful deed or three on his conscience).  In the ensuing two months, Helen Kimmel's slaying remains unsolved but not ignored.  The man officially on the case is police detective Lawrence Corby, who will prove himself in more ways than one to be a worthy opponent.  But a certain Connecticut attorney, unhappily married and a very poor prognosticator of future events, decides to clip an article on Helen Kimmel's demise for his scrapbook.  The same scrapbook that Detective Corby will leaf through once Clara, en route to bury a mother she never loved, does not return to her Pittsburgh-bound bus. 

The Blunderer may not be one of Highsmith's very finest works (nevertheless, a new film version is afoot), but it was also one of her earliest.  Its main flaw, apart from the "Unworthy Friendships" cul-de-sac, is the inclusion at the novel's onset of far too many minor characters, suggesting perhaps that a grander scope was initially intended.  Yet the master's touches can be found on nearly every page: "He felt violently bored and annoyed suddenly, the way he had felt in the Navy a couple of times when he had had to wait too long, naked, for a doctor to come and make a routine examination"; "Not simply hatred, he knew, but a particular tangle of forces of which hatred was only one"; "Even if he fought the whole long way back in words"; "A bitter disappointment in Nathan, like a private inner hell, filled Kimmel's mind, balancing the outer hell of the room"; "His heavy body rolled with his movements, and for a few moments his brain seemed to be concentrated in his fat arms and hands"; and "for Walter simply to be near her for a few moments satisfied a deep craving, like the craving he sometimes felt to lie naked in the sun."  The "her" in this last citation is a young music teacher by the name of Ellie Briess, who may or may not be a figment of his imagination since she is so embarrassingly the opposite of dear old Clara.  Or, for that matter, of dear old Helen Kimmel.   

Pale Fire

What is posterity? Those who come after us, after our earthbound existence has ceased. Why does the true writer of genius dream only of posterity? Because he knows only the hack and the huckster compose with an eye to contemporary fame. Why do writers evoke the past? Second-raters evoke the past because they wish to associate their feeble prose with some historical event, as if death during a global war and death in a small village that has always known peace and prosperity could be distinguished by mourners; first-raters introduce the past because it is through the prism of youth's nostalgia, of our feelings of immortality, that the present and future become everlastingly tragic. What is immortality? For the non-believer, a myth; for the believer, and all great writers are by nature believers, the destiny of the human soul because literature is the history of the human soul. Why are all great writers believers? Because the writer of genius composes for his posthumous triumph; for his resurrection from some cavernal archives centuries after the hand, and arm, and body, and head that created those works have been destroyed; for the ideal reader who will finally bestow upon him the reading he has always sought, the reading that will properly reflect the parameters of his art and his genius. What is art? Art, as this author once said, is beauty and pity. Which brings us to one of the most spectacular novels ever written.     

Our hero is American poet John Shade, but he is dead. He will die twice, as well as incur one near-death experience during which time a "white fountain" will appear to his blood-blanched brain, an event which a doctor denies (odd, since doctors deny everything except death), but which will lend itself to the execution of a long and lucid 999-line poem in heroic couplets. In search of a confederate similarly grazed by the scythe, he tracks down an interviewee from a famous article who also dreamed a "white fountain"; upon their sharing some feckless tea and chatter, however, he learns she was misquoted, and that what she beheld during those two minutes of her clinical extinction was in fact a "white mountain." Shade does not desist from his reflections: his orphaning as an infant; the suicide of his only child Hazel upon an icy lake and after years of societal non-acceptance; his own weariness, wheezing bulk, and, apart from longish "sunset rambles," complete lack of concern for his physical well-being; and his deference to his wife, muse, support beam, and literary amanuensis, Sybil. Shade describes birds and butterflies with equal hand, but his verse aggregates in depth upon its posthumous edition: 

Immediately after my dear friend's death I prevailed upon his distraught widow to forelay and defeat the commercial passions and academic intrigues that were bound to come swirling around her husband's manuscript (transferred by me to a safe spot even before his body had reached the grave) by signing an agreement to the effect that he had turned over the manuscript to me; that I would have it published without delay, with my commentary, by a firm of my choice; that all profits, except the publisher's percentage, would accrue to her; and that on publication day the manuscript would be handed over to the Library of Congress for permanent preservation. I defy any serious critic to find this contract unfair. Nevertheless, it has been called (by Shade's former lawyer) "a fantastic farrago of evil," while another person (his former literary agent) has wondered with a sneer if Mrs. Shade's tremulous signature might not have been penned "in some peculiar kind of red ink." Such hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that one's attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author.

The usurper is a certain Charles Kinbote, a colleague of Shade's at Wordsworth College, and, we learn soon enough, a man bent – in, ahem, more ways than one – on drawing our collective attention to happenings far past the ken of the average resident of the "small college town" of New Wye. What events could garner such appeal for a polyglot professor of comparative literature, a European intellectual, very late of Europe (so late, in fact, that his own position and familiarity with said college town strike us as suspiciously thorough)? Nothing less, as it were, than an attempted regicide (Kinbote's alleged meaning in its native language) in a distant, beautiful "crystal land."  

The "crystal land" in question is Zembla, a name which will evoke a smile on a Frenchman's face and a smirk on a Russian's. Kinbote is impassioned by three things, in no particular order: the plight of his King, Charles the Beloved, who fled assured execution at the hands of left-wing insurgents and has since made his paths to lands unknown; literature in all its most glorious manifestations, from this poet's saturated globs (globs, in any case, of genius), to English writers of clipped, clean, and often magnificent prose (they know who they are), to the shimmering waves of the Bard himself; and the lean, sweaty energy of male youths fourteen and over, the acme of their virile charms coming during their college years. The latter two pursuits are just that, hunts of endless quarry, bountiful harvests, and daydreams of passions that quiver in a cool springtime wind. It is the first and most recondite of tales, the flight of Charles II, with the help of (literally and figuratively) various actors, through France, where he bids his farewells to his unabashedly ignored queen Disa, and onwards to some other terrestrial nook, that becomes our narrative's compass and chart. And soon enough, Kinbote's comments disenshroud these forking paths, one of which begins decidedly to resemble a cul-de-sac:

There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after the first bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind, noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually, it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain, unretouched likeness.  

Indeed, Kinbote spends an inordinate amount of his lonely, perverted time feeding his colleague details about Zembla, including an incredible secret mile-long passageway from castle to opera house. Yet the coincidences between poem and Prisoner of Zembla asides do not accumulate as much as hint at a very different knot for our flapping parade of loose ends. The biggest such oddity will be a Danish passport holder known to Kinbote as Gradus, but also as Jacques Degré, or Jack de Gray, a "sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland ... singularly featureless ... [with] café-au-lait eyes." It is this toad of a human – neither word does him sufficient injustice – who will slink across Europe, then an ocean, then America, and halt his slimy trail in New Wye. And his final deed would have been captured in the poem's final line were it not for the small matter of John Shade's no longer being able to breathe, much less bleed a pen onto a parchment square.   

Curious readers will find a wealth of secondary literature on Pale Fire, one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century, and I recommend that one read none of it; nothing will be gained by the discerning mind except some clever puns and cleverer misdirections (Kinbote's map is one of snakes, ladders, and more snakes). Anagrams and polyglot calembours are of course grand fun, and an index appended to Kinbote's commentary lubricates all the necessary engine parts for the racier among us to enjoy a few victory laps. But we are much better off gorging ourselves on the infinite delights of Nabokinbote's genius, examples of which I will not adduce if only to avoid the capital crime of preterition. Suffice it to say that our novel can and should be read numerous times, ideally over the course of a long and adventurous intellectual existence, praise that should be heaped on only the most magical of our books. But I will need to say one more thing about Charles Kinbote, or whatever his real name might be ("As the glory of Zembla merges with the glory of your verse," he tells a rather indifferent Shade and a completely unshocked reader, "I intend to divulge to you an ultimate truth, an extraordinary secret"). When Kinbote utters "Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture," we cannot but think of a Russian first name; when we consider our college town, we cannot but think of a smug homophone; and when we wonder about this "ultimate truth," we cannot but think of this tale, named after another lost kingdom. And when Kinbote sees someone lurching up the garden path, we see before us a dagger with a handle toward our hand. 

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.