Swann's Way: Swann in Love (10th post)

Interwoven in the telling of Swann and Odette's romantic entanglement are three important factors in its development: the Verdurins' group which starts by bringing them together and ends by coming between them; Swann's consequent exile from high society; and the importance of music, in particular Vinteuil's sonata, in their relationship. In relation to the first two of those themes,
Proust's skills as a portraitist and as an observer of subtle class distinctions are illustrated in his sketches of the attendees of both the Verdurins' bourgeois and the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's upper-class salons; while, in relation to the third theme, his profound appreciation of music is demonstrated by his thoughts on the sonata which is heard in both salons.

The Verdurins' circle

Proust commences Swann in Love with a description of the “little clan” who attend the Verdurins' salon.

Immediately, with just one quote, he renders the personality of the group's leader, Mme Verdurin. Of the young pianist who was part of the group, she says: “Really, it oughtn't to be allowed, to play Wagner as well as that!” (p.259 Scott Moncrieff, p.205 Kilmartin). We suspect we recognise the type: overbearing, opinionated, pretentious and apt to make ridiculous remarks. A few more such remarks, and the initial impression is confirmed: she tells the pianist that if he plays Wagner, her emotional reaction to such great music will be so violent as to give her a headache which will last all of the next day; and she believes she had dislocated her jaw by laughing too much (p.260 SM, p.206 TK). These pretences are to be seen again in Proust's later sketch of her which begins: “Since the accident to her jaw, she had abandoned the effort involved in real hilarity, and had substituted a kind of dumb-show which signified, without endangering or even fatiguing her in any way, that she was 'laughing until she cried'.” (p.283 SM, p.223 TK). The rest of the description is worth quoting in full: “At the least witticism aimed by any of the circle against a 'bore', or against a former member of the circle who was now relegated to the limbo of 'bores'—and to the utter despair of M. Verdurin, who had always made out that he was just as easily amused as his wife, but who, since his laughter was the 'real thing', was out of breath in a moment and so was overtaken and vanquished by her device of a feigned but continuous hilarity—she would utter a shrill cry, shut tight her little bird-like eyes, which were beginning to be clouded over by a cataract, and quickly, as though she had only just time to avoid some indecent sight or to parry a mortal blow, burying her face in her hands, which completely engulfed it and prevented her from seeing anything at all, she would appear to be struggling to suppress, to eradicate, a laugh which, were she to give way to it, must inevitably leave her inanimate.” And when her husband suggests the pianist play Vinteuil's sonata, she screams: “No, no, no, not my sonata! I don’t want to be made to cry until I get a cold in the head, and neuralgia all down my face, like last time.” Proust comments: “This little scene, which was re-enacted as often as the young pianist sat down to play, never failed to delight the audience, as though each of them were witnessing it for the first time, as a proof of the seductive originality of the “Mistress” and of the acute sensitiveness of her musical ear.” (p.284 SM, p.224 TK). She is what Holden Caulfield would call the queen of the phonies, the mistress of self-admiration disguised as self-deprecation.

In that passage, Proust does give a brief physical description of his subject (“her little bird-like eyes”) but his real artistry is in depicting a character's personality. When he describes a character's physical appearance, it is usually briefly: Swann, for instance, is portrayed as having green eyes, a hooked nose, a high forehead and blond, almost red, hair. We get the impression that for Proust, such details were almost as beside the point as the number of Lady Macbeth's children was for F.R. Leavis. For him, psychology takes precedence over physicality.

Let's look at how he characterises another member of the Verdurin circle, the brilliant diagnostician but otherwise largely inept Dr Cottard: “[He] was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which you might decipher the question that he never dared to ask: 'Do you really mean that?' He was no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by, carriages, and anything that occurred with a knowing smile which absolved his subsequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved, if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of his own.” (p.275 SM, p.217 TK). He is also keen to find out the meaning of figures of speech unfamiliar to him and to subsequently use them, along with puns and plays upon words that he had learned by rote and which he inserts inappropriately into conversation. Another characteristic is that he takes everything literally. So when, for instance, Mme Verdurin disingenuously disparages her box at the theatre as being too close to the stage, he ingenuously agrees with her. Again, we feel we know this person: we have all met scientists, musicians, chess players etc whose brilliance in their field is concomitant with, and perhaps causally connected to, their social awkwardness and other behavioural oddities.

The Marquise de Saint-Euverte's party

Midway through his pursuit of Odette, Swann takes a break from the torture and returns for an evening to the society with which he is more familiar when he attends a musical soirée thrown by the Marquise de Saint-Euverte (p.145 II SM, p.351 TK).

At what might appear to us as an event in the homogenous world of the aristocracy, Proust observes lots of fine distinctions. For a start, Mme de Saint-Euverte and her salons are not viewed as being, in the social hierarchy, of the first order. True, the guests are members of the aristocracy, but mainly marquesses and vicountesses, who of course rank lower than princesses and duchesses.

But even within this world of rank, there is some flexibility in a person's standing: in front of Swann are seated two cousins, the Marquise de Cambremer and the Vicomtesse de Franquetot, and although a marquess ranks higher than a vicountess, in this case the marquess is the country cousin: “Mme de Cambremer, since she knew scarcely anyone, being all the more glad of a companion, while Mme de Franquetot, who, on the contrary, was extremely popular, thought it effective and original to show all her fine friends that she preferred to their company that of an obscure country cousin” (p.153 II SM, p.357 TK). We learn that Mme de Cambremer is Legrandin's sister, the one who lives near Balbec and whom he is desperate to avoid Marcel's family contacting (see my 5th post). The cousins spend their time at parties “wandering through the rooms, each clutching her bag and followed by her daughter, hunting for one another like people at a railway station, and could never be at rest until they had reserved, by marking them with their fans or handkerchiefs, two adjacent chairs.”

An equally unimpressive figure is cut by the Marquise de Gallardan, who is sitting near them and who suffers acutely from people she does not know failing to realise that she is part of the Guermantes family (probably because other members of that family want to have little to do with her) and who seeks to remedy this failure by loading her conversation with frequent references to her prestigious relatives (p.156 II SM, p.359 TK).

But at this moment Mme de Gallardan's cousin Oriane, the Princesse de Laumes (who we have already met earlier in the book – but later in time – as the slightly older Duchesse de Guermantes), unexpectedly arrives. Unlike the older Oriane who will appear noble and charming to Marcel at a Combray wedding, her younger version is snooty and, with a brittle wit, critical of people slightly lower than her on the social scale. In her words, we fancy we can hear her tone of world-weary scorn masquerading as repartee. She rebuffs the requests of her cousin, Mme de Gallardon, to attend one of the latter's soirées: “the Princess never liked to tell people that she would not go to their houses” and would regularly write to express her regret at being kept away from a party to which she had no intention of going (p.162 II SM, p.363 TK). She is sniffy about the residence of her husband's friends, the d'Iénas: “Can you imagine it, all their furniture is 'Empire'!” (p.168 II SM, p.368 TK). And she is dismissive when asked about Mme de Cambremer (p.166 II SM, p.367 TK), and later even jokes about her name when talking with Swann: “These Cambremers have rather a startling name. It ends just in time, but it ends badly!” Swann replies: “It begins no better.” And she answers: “Yes; that double abbreviation!” (p.172 II SM, p.371 TK). (The name “ends just in time” before “mer” becomes “merde” and “begins no better” with a second abbreviation, that of “Cambre” for “Cambronne”. Unless you are a student of French history, you will probably not know that Cambronne was Napoleon's faithful general at Waterloo who responded to the English proposal that he and his troops surrender with the single monosyllabic word that doesn't quite finish off Cambremer. That word, merde, is known in France as “le mot de Cambronne”. One imagines from this exchange that Swann and his princess would be able to finish the Times crossword in less than five minutes.)

Proust has painted a picture of a soirée full of guests who are discontented largely as a result of their relatively inferior or superior standing in society. Suffering only from his superiority, Swann is discomfited by “being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him” (p.176 II SM, p.375 TK). He turns away to listen to the concert, which has just begun with a piece familiar to him. And the music takes him back to the time at the beginning of his relationship with Odette when he was happy, when he was loved (p.177 II SM, p.375 TK), to that “mysterious world to which one never may return again once its doors are closed” (p.179 II SM, p.377 TK). This is the same door as Charles Ryder hopes to discover in Brideshead Revisited, “that low door in the wall” which he believes “opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden” of love and happiness.

Vinteuil's sonata

Little is known of Proust's musicianship: he took piano lessons in his youth and later inherited his mother's grand piano, but whether he possessed any skill on the instrument has never been established. However, we have only to read what he has to say on the subject of music to realise that he had a profound understanding and knowledge of it. Consider the following passage about the “little phrase” of Vinteuil's sonata in F# minor and ask whether or not music speaks to its author:

“Of those sorrows, of which the little phrase had spoken to him then, which he had seen it – without his being touched by them himself – carry past him, smiling, on its sinuous and rapid course, of those sorrows which were now become his own, without his having any hope of being, ever, delivered from them, it seemed to say to him, as once it had said of his happiness: “What does it all matter; it is all nothing.” And Swann then pities Vinteuil: “From the depths of what well of sorrow could he have drawn that god-like strength, that unlimited power of creation?” (p.181 II SM, p.379 TK).

We might well wonder whether a composer really conveys his sorrow to a listener by music; or is it not that the music creates its own sorrow? Nevertheless, the passage on the phrase's “wisdom” is profound:

“When it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his sufferings, Swann found a sweetness in that very wisdom which, but a little while back, had seemed to him intolerable when he thought that he could read it on the faces of indifferent strangers, who would regard his love as a digression without importance. 'Twas because the little phrase, unlike them, whatever opinion it might hold on the short duration of these states of the soul, saw in them something not, as everyone else saw, less serious than the events of everyday life, but, on the contrary, so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worthy of the trouble of expressing it. The graces of an intimate sadness, 'twas them that the phrase endeavoured to imitate, to create anew; and even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them, the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible.” (p.181 II SM, p.379 TK).

Even more remarkable is this conception:

“The field open to the musician is not a miserable keyboard of seven notes, but an immeasurable one (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which, here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by certain great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have found, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration, of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and waste and void” (p.183 II SM, p.380 TK). (Scott Moncrieff, Kilmartin and Enright have all badly translated “un clavier mesquin de sept notes” as “a miserable stave of seven notes”, which is obviously wrong as staves contain nine notes.) And when a great composer does discover a theme in that world hidden to the rest of us and reveals it to us, we the listeners carry it around with us as one of the “rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned”. Proust then says, movingly: “We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.” (p.184 II SM, p.381 TK). Thus the “little phrase” is one that had originally belonged to “an order of supernatural creatures whom we have never seen” and which Vinteuil has brought down “from that divine world to which he has access, to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours”. He had only made it visible, he had not invented it himself (p.185 II SM, p.381 TK). This latter idea is the ancient notion of the artist as conduit rather than creator.

And so the little phrase heard that evening from Swann's new perspective helps him come to terms with the fact that his hopes for happiness with Odette “would not be realised now” (p.188 II SM, p.384 TK).