You must remember this: Proust, music and the power of twee

'You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss / A sigh is just a sigh / The fundamental things apply / As time goes by'

Anyone who uses up weeks of their precious life wading through Proust's looped and never-ending reveries on the frailties of memory and the ungraspable not-quite-what-you-ever-think-it-is-ness of the human condition is probably not doing this to try to find out what Proust thought about music. Or maybe they might? (Dunno). In any case, having plunged into Jean Santeuil, Proust's 767-page trial run for In Search Of Lost Time (the hors d'oeuvre before the mighty main course), I have indeed located a few bits and pieces of Proustian wisdom on music. Sort of. Anyway, while I try to lay my hands on a reason for writing this blog in the first place, here are those Proust snippets (the morsels of Marcel):

"Poitiers took his cigarette and glass over to the piano, and began singing everything that Jean asked of him. The various accompaniments, some soft, some loud, rippled easily under his fingers: he had a charming voice and kept his cigarette in the corner of his mouth all the time he was singing, while his head moved with a sort of nervous twitch ... It was as though Jean were listening to an incomparable talker. Here was a man for whom subtleties which would have escaped anybody else, presented no difficulty whatever. He could grasp, memorise and reproduce them with extraordinary power and complete ease ...".

 -The piano playing of the young military officer Poitiers

"It was in this room that often of an evening the Marquis assembled a handful of friends to listen, silently seated in the pale-blue armchairs beneath the portraits, the tapestries and the mirrors, to four musicians playing those quartets of Beethoven, Franck, and d'Indy which were the Marquis's favourites .... Thus for the Marquis did the hours pass, in the midst of memories of hours more ancient, and the enjoyment of his pleasures set about with the pictured images of pleasures which long ceased to be enjoyed. And when he saw his guests silently seated in chairs of bygone fashion, and listening to his four musicians, it sometimes seemed to him that this was indeed the life of the past, life as it once had been, life now restored to him, though at other times these playful quirks of life seemed no more than funeral games indulged in by those whose eyes would soon never shine ..." .

 -The Marquis de Réveillon's late-night music sessions 

"If some imprudent acquantaince ventured to ask him, 'Do you really like this sort of music?' he was not only at once upon his guard, but assumed the icy expression with which he would have countered any over-effusive advances from someone who he might suspect of trying to force a way into his intimacy." 

 -The Duc de Réveillon's reflexive coolness at unwarranted signs of social intimacy 

"Bergotte was so remarkably intelligent that he had only to listen for a few moments to a pianist or a singer, in order to find at once like an old hand at Parliamentary business who need spend no time in studying a motion in order to grasp how best it may be attacked, the words that most flatter an artist in a very special way, and if not his talent at least his conceit."

 -The painter Bergotte's facility for artistic flattery 

Held together by Sellotape: a battered copy of Marcel Proust's Jean Santeuil (1896-1900)

They're just four little passages from a huge work (a pittance), but nevertheless I think they do quite a good job of conveying Proust's way with multi-layered complexity. While Santeuil is originally transfixed by the superb-seeming showmanship and effortless talent of the charistmatic Poitiers, a few pages later we discover that Poitiers' friends are less impressed. Some do indeed think him talented but others - who've "enjoyed a musical education" - "thought that his taste was abominable, his musical intelligence almost completely lacking, his mannerisms tedious". Oh dear. And so it goes on. Proust pirouettes from one position to another, and nothing can be quite as simple (or as "pure") as it first appears. The Marquis de Réveillon's late-night sessions with his own private quartet may be partly a disinterested exercise in giving a few old friends a pleasurable experience. But they're also a doomed effort to capture the lost grace of the wall tapestries; tapestries that were, in all probability, tricked-out scenes from a past that never existed in the first place. Meanwhile, the Duc de Réveillon isn't going to divulge what he really thinks about a piece of music (or at least not as a mere piece of social badinage) and Bergotte's flattery is shown to be an extreme instance of the insincerity that provides the social glue of Proust's gilded milieu. In Proust's world almost everything is shot through with self-consciousness, with self-doubt and with the artifice and ritualised performance of social manners. The pleasure in reading Proust, I reckon, is that the narrator/author is simultaneously praising and critiquing the "fashionable" world of the French aristocracy/haute bourgeoisie - admiring and reviling it - while examining his own thought processes in exquisitely minute detail as he does so. It's hardly clear-cut (there's a gauzey screen over everything in Proust's books), but toward the end of Jean Santeuil the narrator appears to be turning against the "smart" world of parties and "aimless to-ings and fro-ings, and idle chit-chat". And what is he embracing instead? "Laziness"! Or more exactly, he seems to be moving toward a way of living that's less buttoned-up (shabby suits but a freed-up mind). A life of creativity which doesn't rely on the drawing room world of "snobbery", where he would previously "fritter away in talk the moments which should have been devoted to listening". No, quite right Marcel, listening is better than talking. And what would the socially liberated Marcel Proust want to listen to? If time could twist and bend the way it seems to in his writing I like to think Proust would be a fan of all things twee (Buzzcocks/Shelley, Jilted John, Pastels, Razorcuts, Sportique, Bobby McGees), including the music of Baltimore's The Smashing Times. Yes, definitely. He'd dig a tune like Mother Nature Is Son ("The time has gone to draw a line in the sand..."). Like so much of the best music, a tune like this instantly transports you. Transports you through time and space, so to speak. What could be more Proustian than that ...?  

Proust checking out the "psychedelic twee freakbeat" of The Smashing Times