English Bread And Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David

 

At almost 500 pages, Elizabeth David‘s English Bread And Yeast Cookery is quite a read. It’s also quite mis-titled, but more of that later. But it is a cookbook, so why would one want to read it from cover to cover? Surely reference is its prime function? The answer simply is that this cookbook is written by Elizabeth David and the writing is exquisite, the erudition thoroughly impressive and the advice probably faultless. This last point has to be qualified with “probably”, since it is highly unlikely that anyone except Elizabeth David herself might put every one of these recipes to any sort of practical test. Even she did not do all of them, but when she has not already tried out a recipe, she actually tells the reader in her text and admits she is speculating.

This is a text littered with items grabbed from historical cookbooks where the writer has merely copied what went before, sometimes despite its advice being demonstrably nonsensical. It is also littered with gems of verbosity from the past, where writers might offer such advice as “agitate the receptacle aggressively” rather than “beat it”. And some of the older recipes seemed to have been designed for armies, so great are the quantities and might start with and instruction such as “take a bushel of flour”.

Written in the 1970s, this text was obviously already familiar with supermarkets, but not with fast food in quantities as it currently surrounds us. This allows a contemporary reader to reflect on just how much the average diet might have changed in the last fifty years. Elizabeth David is, for example, not fond of restaurant pizza, which she seems to judge as having the same qualities as hardboard panelling. Precisely what she would have made of O’Muffins or Macbuns or similar I have no idea, but I bet I could guess.

But pizza recipes in the book on English bread? Well, this is part of the problem with the book’s title because not only does it regularly visit Scotland, Wales or Ireland, it also gets on a ferry to France, Austria, Italy or even Russia or the United States and elsewhere. It seems that the 1970s was more willing than now to admit international influences and sharing, without ever once using vacuous and meaningless terms like “fusion” or “world food”. If it’s not from the world, where on earth is it from? And as for “fusion”, this particular reviewer regards much of it as a con, leading to confusion.

The author spends much time in space explaining the details, even the intricacies of flours, grains, milling, grinding and sifting. There is a superb historical section that dips into the techniques, technology and technicalities of breadmaking. And in doing so, Elizabeth David explodes many myths which have remained mythical until today. She points out that much of brown bread on sale is coloured with molasses, not whole wheat grain, and that many recipes that specify whole grains often extract the germ and pre-cook it before adding it back to the flour. She also describes how commercial bread was in her time often aerated or pumped with extra water or even chalk to add volume, bulk and profit. Here Elizabeth David looks in immense detail at conventional yeast risen bread, flat breads, sweet breads, (not one word!), muffins, pikelets, crumpets, fermented butter cakes, griddle breads, sourdough, soda bread and many other delectable concoctions of flour, water and rising agent.

In the process, she dispels many myths, such as the oft quoted need to throw away half of a sourdough starter, advice I have read many times, many times indeed. Personally, I have in the past tried to follow such recipes, but when it came to “divide it into two and throw half away”, I was always stumped into inaction, because I never knew which half should be discarded. If it’s the case that the sourdough starter’s volume would be too big otherwise, then “make less” ought to be the instruction. Isn’t it obvious?

But then there are a lot of myths, many of them sourced in religion about bread. Man may not live by bread alone, but maybe it is all right for women. Bread of heaven, but not from my oven… There are many more, some of which made it into these pages. But with breadmaking, there is room for myth, since the process is often wholly unpredictable, so quantity, so temperature, or so procedurally sensitive that it is impossible to predict the results which will be produced even by following exactly the same recipe, a point that Elizabeth David regularly makes throughout the text.

And, of course, that is precisely why the mass-produced loaf was baked on an industrial scale, in order to try to achieve the regularity and uniformity that the modern consumer sees to crave. But no two vegetables are exactly the same shape and the shape has nothing to with the taste. Elizabeth David’s English Bread And Yeast Cookery offers the perfect cure to this disease of expected uniformity. Mix it, wait, cook it and see. Do it again, and it will probably be different. Now isn’t that a recipe for an interesting life! It is most certainly an interesting book, but don’t try to eat it all at once.

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham

 

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham is a profoundly surprising book. Written in 1930, the novel begins its story in the Edwardian age prior to the First World War. It comes, therefore, with the inevitable expectation that it will depict English society as a rather stuffy, perhaps dusty entity, full of flock wallpaper and aspidistras, tired after so many years of Victoria, but not yet woken up to the new world that the war so painfully introduced. But this is precisely where expectations could be wrong. In fact Cakes And Ale takes a rather liberated view of British society’s values, pokes fun at stiff convention and generally offers no moral judgment where other writers would surely lay on the presumption.

Cakes And Ale carries the subtitle The Skeleton In The Cupboard, without being absolutely clear whose skeleton is described, while the book certainly does not list many cupboards. One must presume that what is being referred to is the relationship between the privileged character William Ashenden and Mrs. Rosie Driffield, the wife of a novelist. Their time together begins when Ashenden is a boy, at least in his own eyes, and concludes many years later by which time both characters have reinvented themselves several times. It is a relationship that starts in platonic fascination, graduates to physical adulthood and concludes in seeming admiration at distance.

But overall, this relationship is allowed to blossom without the judgment on might expect it to receive, so skeletons remain hard to justify or identify. Equally, it could be Mrs. Driffield‘s long-standing obsession with a certain Lord George, but eventually this turns out to be sincere and long lasting. Mrs. Driffield certainly liaised with enough men to create several skeletons, but they would not have been in cupboards.

We follow William Ashenden from a self-identified childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. He too wants to become a writer and at least initially it is Mr. Driffield the novelist who interests him. At one stage, Ashenden laments the burden of having to describe his own experience in the first person. All writers, one supposes, love to inhabit that special heaven which allows convenient detachment and can put words into anyone’s mouth and feelings into anyone’s experience. Being merely oneself can be utterly restricting.

We first encounter this life while he is visiting his uncle on the south coast, in Kent to be precise, where Driffield the writer and his wife Rosie have moved in and are in the process of causing quite a local stir. General opinion is that Mrs. Driffield is rather common, a bar maid or of that ilk, and the suggestions are that she does not need classes in anatomy.

The moral indignation of the chattering classes is apparently unanimous. Mrs. Driffield puts herself about, especially in the direction of Lord George who is no lord, and the judgment is that anything in trousers is deemed of interest to her. And the indignation is not related to class, since the servants of the household where Ashenden stays are as vehement in their opinions as the boss, until they meet the sad Rosie, that is, and then their tone changes, for some reason.

Maugham has such a lower-class people drop their aitches and modify their vowels to such an extent that one wonders how they manage to say so many apostrophes. But Rosie Driffield thoroughly captivates the young lad. He becomes infatuated with her though he doesn’t realize it at first. For him, it’s merely growing up.

But the relationship changes from one of curiosity and interest to one of physicality and sex, but never does Somerset Maugham have either Ashington or Rosie regret what they are doing. Guilt seems not to be a destination in the London where they meet. They are merely human beings being human. And this is what is so surprising about the book.

Rosie eventually runs off with Lord George to the United States, where he makes a fortune and she becomes as respectable as she can possibly be first in New York and then in Yonkers, atop a significant fortune, which all goes to show something at least.

Though it is not explicitly stated, the United States is portrayed in the book as a land where moralizing attitudes and gossip have no place. Both Lord George and Rosie have moved there and have lived their lives unaffected by social judgment. Back home in England, where one expects judgment to be available by the stone, physical life continues to be denied, but not in Cakes And Ale. The fact is that Rosie has risen above criticism, but one must assume that she can only continue in that life out of Albion. Perhaps it was her skeleton after all.

 

Anglo Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

 

This particular reviewer rarely writes a negative review. If it didn’t communicate with me, there’s no need to assume that it will not communicate to you. A positive review has to concentrate on what was communicated, whereas a negative review must live in what was not felt, and that list is infinitely long, so where to start? “I liked it” or indeed “I didn’t like it” say nothing about the work in question, only about the reviewer, and this unknown person, often hiding behind an alias, should never be at the centre of the review.

So when it comes to Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson, why should I begin with “I didn’t like it”? Well at least it gets the opinion out of the way, because in the case of this particular book, it needs to be said. Anglo Saxon Attitudes felt like the longest book I have ever read. It wasn’t, but it did feel that way for most of its duration. But the reason for my opinion is complex and, I suggested earlier, has more to do with me than the work.

Details of the book’s plot are available elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the important element is the fraudulent planting of a pagan erotic sculpture into the grave of a Dark Ages Anglo-Saxon bishop that was excavated decades ago. The apparent authenticity of the find had to be catalogued, described, interpreted. For half a century this practical joke at least influenced thinking, at least amongst interested academics, on the cultural and religious origins of the race that now inhabits the country we now call England. Hence the book’s title, rooted both in the historical relics of the Anglo-Saxons, for whom “England” would have been an unknown label, and for the modern British for whom both the concept of “Anglo-Saxon” and “England” are both reconstructed myths.

Amid the need to keep alive the myth of national identity and culture, a certain person who was involved in the original discovery finds he hast to continue to perpetuate the lie. He has personal and professional reasons. He also might even believe it was true. To some extent he has built his career on the existence of the find and, equally, he built half of his life by shacking up with the girlfriend of the person who played the original practical joke on his father by planting the object in the tomb and then claiming its authenticity. Decades have come and gone. Lives have been lived. Relationships have been severed, remade and broken by death and estrangement. Gerald, who knows the truth about several things, has lived with the deception, but dismissed it as possibly false, gives given the character of the person who admitted carrying it out. Gerald now has decided it is time to come clean and tell the story.

But to whom should he tell it? And how? Reputations are at stake. Water under the bridge won’t flow back the other way. People have moved on. Or have they? Anglo Saxon Attitudes thus inhabits a society with what could be described as a rarefied atmosphere. These people are of a certain social class, attend gentlemen’s clubs, regularly drift into French, for some reason, when English is just not good enough. A single paragraph of the thoughts might refer explicitly but opaquely to five or six of the book’s characters, any of whom might have been encountered during the fifty-year span of these memories. For anyone living outside donnish society of the public school, Oxbridge or academe, these people are barely recognizable as English, as archaeological, perhaps, as something dug up from long, long ago. And yet they are the mouthpieces via which the concepts of contemporary identity and culture are lengthily examined.

A strand that figures vividly in every character’s mind, if not explicitly in the English culture being examined, is sex. The erotic nature of the apparently pagan idol in the Anglo-Saxon tomb places a large ellipsis after every mention of the word sex in the book. We have characters who are openly homosexual in a society that has laws against the practice. We encounter respectable men who put themselves around a bit, and women who express their desires via euphemism. And also some who do not. And there’s a lot more besides. Perhaps too much. Perhaps… For this reader…

Anglo Saxon Attitudes is a complex and ambitious novel. For this reviewer it falls short of all its implied goals because it concentrates too heavily on a narrow, unrepresentative section of the nation, was consistently patronizing to working class attitudes and featured characters who spent most of the time living myths. Perhaps that was the point… Perhaps… Why not read it and see what you think?

More Fool Me by Stephen Fry

 

I’ve just read More Fool Me by Stephen Fry.

I finished the book – I don’t know why.

There’s oodles of self-mockery

Couched in torrents of post-hoccery,

Where processions of media dahlings

Murmurate like cantankerous stahlings

Especially at night, often in clubs,

Where one avoids hoi polloi snubs.

In rarefied air of this sort

One can visit the bog for a snort,

Meet actors, directors, all of the kind

While imbibing until dawn’s drunkenness blind

Afore a stumbling or taxi home

Or to one’s next work randomly roam.

Always a sense of the naughty boy

But planned by a promoter’s ploy.

A complex sort, our Stephen,

Whose path in life was oft uneven

Despite a comfy start in middle classes

Before he took to lads, ignoring lasses…

But that’s now a long time past

In memoirs already so vast

This is already number three

While the author’s fifty is yet to see.

No doubt there’s many more

O’er which fans will eagerly pore

But for me, this falls below a parity

Which demands purchase for charity,

Second hand, perhaps twice lived,

Experience cleaned, already sieved

But out of synch, bereft of rhyme,

One wonders if it’s worth the time.

The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt

John Galt published his Life of Lord Byron in 1830, just six years after the poet's death in Missolonghi, in what is now modern Greece and then was part of the Ottoman Empire. Byron had been legging it around the Mediterranean for a number of years, his entourage significantly greater than a backpack. Modern reads will need to readjust their ideas of travel when they read details of the veritable caravan that accompanied the Good Lord and will then immediately understand why it was that everywhere he went he was immediately able to access elite society. In modern day terms, this is like a dot-com-owning billionaire moving into the local estate that in feudal times used to own the locality. His presence, it seemed, demanded attention. Having said that, he was always short of money.

Apart from occasional vocabulary that we no longer recognise, John Galt's work reads easily, its tenor remarkably modern, except in matters of race and religion, where a modern interpretation might just confuse. It is important to understand the assumptions of these people in order to understand their work. Yes, Wagner was anti-Semitic, but wasn't everyone else at the time? Rejecting his work on that basis would lead to an equal rejection of other people and institutions that shared the same beliefs, which would automatically include anything to do with Christianity and most writers. Two centuries ago, people did not see the world in the same light and it is through their eyes, not ours, that their work must be seen.

Paradoxically, the Lord Byron was perceived as a Liberal which, at the time, must have placed him in sympathy with at least some of the aims of the French Revolution. This is interesting, given his title, but understandable given his relative penury. He supported the Luddites in Britain, but his domestic political life in the House of Lords was not easy and he was not chosen or perhaps suited for a life in public affairs. His identification with liberal politics is exemplified in this passage from Galt, though it must be noted that at the time liberalism did not extend far into the realm of gender relationships (a cicisbeo is a lover, by the way).

“but young Italian women are not satisfied with good old men, and the venerable Count did not object to her availing herself of the privileges of her country in selecting a cicisbeo; an Italian would have made it quite agreeable: indeed, for some time he winked at our intimacy, but at length made an exception against me, as a foreigner, a heretic, an Englishman, and, what was worse than all, a Liberal.”

His liberalism did extend to the support of liberation movements, however, particularly those in Greece, where still today he is seen by some as a national hero. That is not to say that he was particularly fond of the people.

 “Do you know,” said he to the doctor, “I am nearly reconciled to St Paul; for he says there is no difference between the Jews and the Greeks, and I am exactly of the same opinion, for the character of both is equally vile.”

The significance of the above reference to Wagner's anti-Semitism now becomes clear. Perhaps we ought to reject much of Romantic poetry from the canon if we deny Wagner a place. What would be left? Answer – very little...

So what was it that Byron saw worthy of struggle and sacrifice in liberating people for whom he had little respect? The key, which becomes clearer as Galt's biography progresses, is that Byron, like other Romantics, possessed an internal motivation, a personal interpretation whose vivid emotion perhaps raised a screen that was capable of obscuring, even contradicting experience. His response to reality, it seems, is not directly born of the real, but of an idealised knowledge, perhaps pre-formed via education, birth-right and culture, that was more important, at least for the poet, than hard evidence, which could be dismissed or ignored. Galt sums up the process thus.

“that is another and a strong proof too, of what I have been endeavouring to show, that the power of the poet consisted in giving vent to his own feelings, and not, like his great brethren, or even his less, in the invention of situations or of appropriate sentiments”

The author describes how Byron was ambivalent towards the reality of Classical sites, not really showing much interest in the archaeology or the history. Perhaps, via his English public school education, he was au fait with the detail all along and so did not need to absorb direct experience. Perhaps the assumptions of his social class and culture did not admit contradiction of an already internalised ideal that was simply more important than any concrete reality.

Galt's account of Byron's life, however, seems to lack evidence of the hours that the poet devoted to writing. Given that he died in his mid-thirties, spent eight years on the road and did fifteen years in the House of Lords and several years in education, one would expect to find him at work with pen and paper much of the rest of the time. But Galt offers little evidence of this, preferring to concentrate on the travels, themselves, the people he met and the consequences of the complete breakdown in his family and marital relations. But Galt does quote extensively from the poems which, once we absorb the author's analysis that the work is rarely descriptive of anything but the poet's own emotional state, become distinct statements of personality. One feels that Lord Byron was not prone to great self-analysis or soul-searching. He had his opinions, and those were made from granite.

He did campaign for Greece's independence and he did much to achieve what the Greek people wanted at the time. But one feels that for Byron he was working towards the re-establishment of a Classical ideal, a quintessence of democracy that existed longer in school textbooks than it did in ancient Greece. Perhaps "liberal" is too strong a word for Byron... Perhaps "libertarian" would be closer to the modern equivalent. He was for individual freedom, what he saw as the natural order and more democracy, though this probably did not include either women or the lower orders.

How far we have progressed in the last two hundred years can be judged by the fact that Byron secured both personal fame and prestige of office in his own time with certain personal characteristics. He went to public school and Oxbridge, studied ancient Greek, achieved political status and public fame while being largely ignorant of the scientific advances of his day, was a libertarian and had distinct failures in both personal and familial relationships. Couldn't happen now, could it?

Time Regained by Marcel Proust

All we have is the present. Our future, if it might exist, is a mere proposition of whose eventual reality none of us can be sure, may only be imagined, until it arrives, when it becomes the present. Then, like every present, it instantly passes us by into our past, a fragile, self-interested fiction we are condemned to recreate, to reimagine via a memory capable of invention. All experience thus becomes malleable, capable of being reshaped to fit whatever mould into which we might desire to contain it. Though we might often want to deny the tangibility of the present, its reality still pains the toe that kicks the stone, whereas memory anaesthetises time remembered and allows any surgical intervention to create whatever painless past we desire.

After six volumes of re-creating the past in “A la recherche de temps perdu”, Marcel Proust entitled the last work in the series, at least in English, “Time Regained”. It is worth remembering, however, that a literal translation of Proust’s series title refers to ‘lost time’, experience possibly mislaid, or even wasted in a continuing past. But that time can indeed be regained, reimagined, recreated, and it takes a person with a mission to carry out the threat, a mission that itself becomes a new present, which can be transformative. I was no longer indifferent when I returned from Rivebelle; I felt myself enlarged by this work I bore within me (like something precious and fragile, not belonging to me, which had been confided to my care and which I wanted to hand over intact to those for whom it was destined). And to think that when, presently, I returned home, an accident would suffice to destroy my body and that my lifeless mind would have for ever lost the ideas it now contained and anxiously preserved within its shaky frame before it had time to place them in safety within the covers of a book. Now, knowing myself the bearer of such a work, an accident which might cost my life was more to be dreaded, was indeed (by the measure in which this work seemed to me indispensable and permanent) absurd, when contrasted with my wish, with my vital urge, but not less probable on that account since accidents due to material causes can take place at the very moment when an opposing will, which they unknowingly annihilate, renders them monstrous, like the ordinary accident of knocking over a water-jug placed too near the edge of a table and thus disturbing a sleeping friend one acutely desires not to waken. And, while accidents can happen, the creation of several thousand pages of recreated past cannot be achieved by accident, but only in the doing, the regular application of re-creation in whatever present remains.

And, after seven volumes of this life recreated, a reader is left to marvel at how small it was, how insignificant these important people eventually became and how small a universe they themselves imagined, let alone inhabited. To describe the procession of attitudes as petty might be ascribing greater consequence than it deserves. And, for all their airs and graces, for all their wealth, property and influence, these upper-class subjects were most at home when indulging their personal predilections in their eternal present, tastes that were sometimes as mundane as eating a snack and at other times distinctly more individual, though no more significant.

Take for example, the war memories of Mme. Verdurin. On the morning the papers headlined the sinking of the Lusitania, she clearly had her own enduring priorities. …they thought about those hecatombs of annihilated regiments, of engulfed seafarers, but an inverse operation multiplies to such a degree what concerns our welfare and divides by such a formidable figure what does not concern it, that the death of millions of unknown people hardly affects us more unpleasantly than a draught. Mme Verdurin, who suffered from headaches on account of being unable to get croissants to dip into her coffee, had obtained an order from Cottard which enabled her to have them made in the restaurant mentioned earlier. It had been almost as difficult to procure this order from the authorities as the nomination of a general. She started her first croissant again on the morning the papers announced the wreck of the Lusitania. Dipping it into her coffee, she arranged her newspaper so that it would stay open without her having to deprive her other hand of its function of dipping, and exclaimed with horror, "How awful! It's more frightful than the most terrible tragedies." But those drowning people must have seemed to her reduced a thousand-fold, for, while she indulged in these saddening reflections, she was filling her mouth and the expression on her face, induced, one supposes, by the savour of the croissant, precious remedy for her headache, was rather that of placid satisfaction.

And what about the moral rectitude (no pun intended) of these pillars of society? Always ready to cite themselves as examples of behaviour in order to enlighten the labouring, and thus less than worthy classes, sometimes these elite, privileged classes plumbed the depths of their own depravity whilst no doubt simultaneously passing moral judgment on the tastes of those below them. Aberrations are like passions which a morbid strain has overlaid, yet, in the craziest of them love can still be recognised. M. de Charlus' insistence that the chains which bound his feet and hands should be of attested strength, his demand to be tried at the bar of justice and, from what Jupien told me, for ferocious accessories there was great difficulty in obtaining even from sailors (the punishment they used to inflict having been abolished even where the discipline is strictest, on ship-board), at the base of all this there was M. de Charlus' constant dream of virility proved, if need be, by brutal acts and all the illumination the reflections of which within himself though to us invisible, he projected on judicial and feudal tortures which embellished an imagination coloured by the Middle Ages. This sentiment was in his mind each time he said to Jupien: "There won't be any alarm this evening anyhow, for I can already see myself reduced to ashes by the fire of Heaven like an inhabitant of Sodom," and he affected to be frightened of the Gothas not because he really had the smallest fear of them but to have a pretext the moment the sirens sounded of dashing into the shelter of the Metropolitain, where he hoped to get a thrill from midnight frictions associated in his mind with vague dreams of prostrations and subterranean dungeons in the Middle Ages. Finally his desire to be chained and beaten revealed, with all its ugliness, a dream as poetic as the desire of others to go to Venice or to keep dancing girls. And M. de Charlus held so much to the illusion of reality which this dream gave him that Jupien was compelled to sell the wooden bed which was in room No. 43, and replace it by one of iron which went better with the chains.

But perhaps we should not judge, merely exist in an eternal present, free from recollection, reinterpretation and, of course, from comparison. A work in which there are theories is like an object upon which the price is marked. Further, this last only expresses a value which, in literature, is diminished by logical reasoning. We reason, that is, our mind wanders, each time our courage fails to force us to pursue an intuition through all the successive stages which end in its fixation, in the expression of its own reality. The reality that must be expressed resides, I now realised, not in the appearance of the subject but in the degree of penetration of that intuition to a depth where that appearance matters little, as symbolised by the sound of the spoon upon the plate, the stiffness of the table-napkin, which were more precious for my spiritual renewal than many humanitarian, patriotic, international conversations. More style, I had heard said in those days, more literature of life. One can imagine how many of M. de Norpois' simple theories "against flute-players" had flowered again since the war. For all those who, lacking artistic sensibility, that is, submission to the reality within, may be equipped with the faculty of reasoning for ever about art, and even were they diplomatists or financiers associated with the "realities" of the present into the bargain, they will readily believe that literature is a sort of intellectual game which is destined to be eliminated more and more in the future. Some of them wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic procession. This conception was absurd. Nothing removes us further from the reality we perceive within ourselves than such a cinematographic vision.

But perhaps, in our age of the demonstrable, the provable, the reproducible, the cinematographic vision provided by a photographic memory might just be an advantage, especially when our memory or perhaps our understanding plays tricks. The library which I should thus collect would have a greater value still, for the books I read formerly at Combray, at Venice, enriched now by memory with spacious illuminations representing the church of Saint-Hilaire, the gondola moored at the foot of San Giorgio Maggiore on the Grand Canal incrusted with flashing sapphires, would have become worthy of those medallioned scrolls and historic bibles which the collector never opens in order to read the text but only to be again enchanted by the colours with which some competitor of Fouquet has embellished them and which constitute all the value of the work. Does anyone care if San Giorgio Maggiore is not actually where the author remembers it? Perhaps, we may presume, that he is merely confusing it with Santa Maria della Salute, whose whiteness and elegance ought to carry the attachment “maggiore” in proportion to the impression it makes upon a visitor’s memory. And, in an age of mass consumption and marketing, do any of us scoff at the use of “the greatest”, “the best” or “five star” when it is habitually associated with the mundane mass-produced products of Capitalism? And precisely when was the last time you heard a new pop singer described as “original”, and was such a label accurate? Clearly, there is room for fiction in the present, and, because we are all eventually flawed, what can be wrong with inaccuracy in memory? The impression was received as expressed and it is the indefinable emotion that was real, not the name of the thing that provoked it. But from the moment that works of art are judged by reasoning, nothing is stable or certain, one can prove anything one likes. Whereas the reality of genius is a benefaction, an acquisition for the world at large, the presence of which must first be identified beneath the more obvious modes of thought and style, criticism stops at this point and assesses writers by the form instead of the matter. It consecrates as a prophet a writer who, while expressing in arrogant terms his contempt for the school which preceded him, brings no new message. This constant aberration of criticism has reached a point where a writer would almost prefer to be judged by the general public (were it not that it is incapable of understanding the researches an artist has been attempting in a sphere unknown to it). And here Proust yearns for the kind of judgment that can only be gleaned from sales figures, the kind of evaluation that makes burger and beans washed down with carbon dioxide pressurised burnt sugar solution apparently the ideal food. The publicist involuntarily associates the rascals he has castigated with his own celebrity… but there is a difference between a memory tricked and a deliberate attempt to falsify, to offer cliché to apparently eager market. 

But not to judge would excise the reality of memory and with it the raison d’etre of the writer. He (for this author is a “he”) who pontificates from distance, both physical and temporal, imposes possibly invented opinion on those he cannot wait to judge. And, from the safety of temporal distance, that judgment is often driven by jealousy. Jealousy is a good recruiting sergeant who, when there is an empty space in our picture, goes and finds the girl we want in the street. She may not be pretty at first, but she soon fills the blank and becomes so when we get jealous of her. But whatever the motive for changing how we view our recollections, the act of trying to communicate them can lead to a process of clarification, albeit via avenues where we deliberately embellish them.  It is uncertain whether in the creation of a literary work the imagination and the sensibility are not interchangeable and whether the second, without disadvantage, cannot be substituted for the first just as people whose stomach is incapable of digesting entrust this function to their intestines. An innately sensitive man who has no imagination could, nevertheless write admirable novels. The suffering caused him by others and the conflict provoked by his efforts to protect himself against them, such experiences interpreted by the intelligence might provide material for a book as beautiful as if it were imagined and invented and as objective, as startling and unexpected as the author's imaginative fancy would have been, had he been happy and free from persecution. The stupidest people unconsciously express their feelings by their gestures and their remarks and thus demonstrate laws they are unaware of which the artist brings to light.

But it might even be the present that is defective. We encounter people we once knew, whom we have fixed in our memory with particular and recognisable attributes. Then years pass and we meet again. We recognise them, but at the same time they are transformed by age into something that contradicts the reality our memory has fixed. It’s a two-way process. As I went near to him, he said with a voice I well remembered: "What a joy for me after so many years!" but what a surprise for me! His voice seemed to be proceeding from a perfected phonograph for though it was that of my friend, it issued from a great greyish man whom I did not know and the voice of my old comrade seemed to have been housed in this fat old fellow by means of a mechanical trick. Yet I knew that it was he, the person who introduced us after all that time not being the kind to play pranks. He declared that I had not changed by which I grasped that he did not think he had. Then I looked at him again and except that he had got so fat, he had kept a good deal of his former personality.

Time passes, people pass away, become part of the past, a past that continues. The living can then say what they really thought all along, without ever previously having the courage to come clean, a state they probably never did, nor ever will attain. Hearing that Mme d'Arpajon was really dead, the old maid cast an alarmed glance at her mother fearing that the news of the death of one of her contemporaries might be a shock to her; she imagined in anticipation people alluding to her own mother's death by explaining that "she died as the result of a shock through the death of Mme d'Arpajon." But on the contrary, her mother's expression was that of having won a competition against formidable rivals whenever anyone of her own age passed away. Their death was her only means of being agreeably conscious of her own existence. The old maid, aware that her mother had not seemed sorry to say that Mme d'Arpajon was a recluse in those dwellings from which the aged and tired seldom emerge, noticed that she was still less upset to hear that the Marquise had entered that ultimate abode from which no one returns. This affirmation of her mother's indifference aroused the caustic wit of the old maid. And, later on, to amuse her friends, she gave a humorous imitation of the lively fashion with which her mother rubbed her hands as she said: "Goodness me, so that poor Mme d'Arpajon is dead." She thus pleased even those who did not need death to make them glad they were alive. For every death is a simplification of life for the survivors; it relieves them of being grateful and of being obliged to make visits.

And such caustic observation is not surprising, since the author of these judgments suffered permanent disability, illness, relative disadvantage in the competition of life that was conjured by these recreations from those with whom he mixed. And his revenge was to remember, to describe, perhaps to invent. Eventually he would hold the pen and write, an activity of which no-one thought him capable. Thus he created his own past in an evolving present which may become our own as we share his gift.

Memorias de mis putas tristes by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez may have invented magical realism, a writing style that stresses realism in language to the extent that images become amplified, perhaps stretched, or recoloured. The resulting hyper-reality can be seen by some readers as dream-like or exaggerated, when it merely reflects an enhanced sensitivity of awareness. The effect on the reader can be astounding, arresting, like free association with imagination nailed to the spot of the present. If such a reader is convinced, the feeling is that of being incorporated into the events, drawn in, albeit passively, into an experience that is involving and constantly surprising. There can, however, be challenges with experience that “takes you there”, rather than relates or describes in a more detached way.

In his novel, Memorias de mis putas tristes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez seems, at first glance, to have applied this stylistic technique to the book’s scenario, itself. A reader is immediately plunged into a place they might have thought they would never go and, if one is to experience this story, one has to remain in that role for the duration, which, in the case of this book, is not very long.

We meet a journalist. We experience life from his perspective, very much from within his experience. His perspective throughout is that we are sharing this life, living it alongside his old age and we suddenly seem to know him well. He is just turning ninety years old: this we know. His mind, clearly, remains acute: this, also, we know from the start. We also realise that he must still be in possession of other faculties that might have burned out in a man of his age, because he announces early on that he is about to celebrate his achievement of another decade by paying to deflower a fourteen-year-old girl. Arrangements are ongoing. The girl needs the money, at least her family does. It seems she, herself, does not expect to profit, though clearly others will. It’s a business arrangement, no more, no less. And hence, we the readers, are “being taken there”.

But, for the first time in his long life, the old man finds himself in love. At ninety, and in circumstances where the transaction was to be no more than contractual, he finds himself involved, emotionally as well as physically. He begins to imagine a permanence in this relationship, a permanence that would begin at the age of ninety.

We learn a little of the journalist’s past and his professional status. We learn more of the present social conditions of the town where he lives. But this is not a long, analytical novel. On the contrary, it is short, more of a short story, and so we find that we do not have to inhabit this persona for many pages. But the experience is revealing and not a little moving.

As to meaning? Interpretation? The reality that presents itself demands our free association remains rooted to the protagonist’s spot. We have no choice. This is not me, the reader, but magically a reader of this novel shares a vivid reality that probably would never have been imagined.

The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I doubt that F. Scott Fitzgerald intended that The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories should ever be published, let alone read as a single volume. This is a mix of autobiographical pieces and short stories. The distinction between the two, if not marked by physical division, would not be immediately obvious. The short stories deal with individuals trying to be somebody, unconsciously aspiring to some form of American Dream that usually only exists while these characters are awake and often dissolves into an alcoholic haze of non-achievement. The author, in the autobiographical pieces, lives a similar life, except that in his case the achievement is tangible.

Fitzgerald always seems to adopt the position of outsider looking in. He never really seems to be part of anything. Even his standpoint as a third person narrator seems more removed than is usual, as if he is reluctant to allow his characters to adopt their own voices. Not that, as an author, he imposes his own values or positions. It is more a case of his being somewhat difficult to pin down.

Perhaps this is because he was from out of town, if that town be this book’s version of New York, where much of the action takes place. The author reminds us several times that he is a mid-Westerner from St Paul, an identity and origin he seems to regard as both safe and homely when compared to the candle flame attraction of the metropolis he dared not approach too close.

There is, however, a general feeling of the persistent little guy prevailing, of the propertied, apparently privileged receiving eventual, and a highly moral, comeuppance. It’s a perspective he would use in The Great Gatsby, where the observation of a highlife from distance renders it desirable, whereas greater proximity reveals its flaws.

But this is not a coherent set of stories. They stand alone and were designed to do so. They are clearly best experienced individually and then similarities of theme and style will not confuse. Modern readers need to be aware of the fact that these stories were written about a century ago and contain some attitudes and language that today would be difficult to express in public, let alone publish.

The Captive – aka The Prisoner by Marcel Proust

The musings of an adolescent male, perhaps not a completely formed adult human being, if such a state is ever achieved by anyone privileged to participate in the experience of this process we call life, the very process of feeling and responding to sensory existence, events that then might be recorded as recollections of that remembered experience in sufficient detail so that, at an indeterminate future time – are not all futures indeterminate? - except for the inevitable eventual failure of non-existence - that experience can be recalled, redrafted, relived, perhaps even to the extent that it might bear even a passing resemblance to the reality it recalls, or perhaps these memories might be rendered, via mis-recollection or mis-representation or merely by reinterpretation founded in doubt, self-analysis or mere deception, to become less than accurate, a mere doffing-of-the-hat acknowledgment in greeting to a now remote truth largely ignored, or merely taken for granted, then, these musings, themselves not really of an adolescent by age, but certainly one by character, and frequenting an upper-class, privileged society, perhaps as its captive or indeed prisoner, a society whose claims to represent wide experience is itself utterly bogus, since it comprises only those with pretensions to power and status, though often these people attain neither, despite their airs and graces, their titles, their honors, their unmentioned assets or over-valued, under-used property, their taste in fashion, arts or decor notwithstanding, especially in music, which often forms the background to their heart-felt but usually vapid conversation, words which habitually talk of sex, sexuality, marriage, concubinage, loves, lovers, loved, not loved or hated, cohabitants, commercially contracted or even voluntary relationships, especially when a young woman, girl perhaps, like Albertine chooses – chooses, I say! - to inhabit to the unmarried Paris abode of he who muses in adolescent fashion, about whether she really cares for him, loves him, thinks of him, or merely uses him to further her own interest in her own sex, in Andrée for instance, causing the adolescent to wander again and anew through his own musings, to reassess his own priorities, recalling Gilberte, for instance, a focus of his attention from some time before, a past that may even be continuing, or a boy’s obsession with Odette, officially Madame Swann, who before marriage made her a living largely on her back, a posture that facilitated the advantage of a particularly propertied client who admitted her to the permanence of his own impermanent life, and who thus never really found admittance to that titled society she regularly was forced - willingly it has to be said - to frequent, then these musings of the young, adolescence-passed man might just, in an imagined world, relate to the reality all these people lived, but by its variance from that reality might appear to be more about the writer carrying out the act of recollecting than any detail attributed to those he describes, so this reality becomes a record of things past, the remembrance of things past, thus rendered almost permanent by the pen’s commitment to paper, re-drawing and re-writing that reality, at least until it might encounter a full stop.

The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan

Ostensibly, The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan is a book for children. It’s not really a novel, because the author himself conceived these pieces as separate stories to be told to his own children. Assembled in this way, however, in form they resemble many contemporary writers’ novels that portray apparently disparate and unrelated scenes featuring a main character who acts as a thread. It’s not a linear plot that is desired, but recognition that the character responds and develops as a result of what life presents and is changed by that experience. 

In his introduction to these “Peter stories”, Ian McEwan describes how he tried to forget about “our mighty tradition of children’s literature and to write a book for adults about a child in the language of the children could understand”. In so doing, and very succinctly, the author has achieved his aim and has thus created a world which is multi-layered in that there are events themselves and then there are the emotional worlds related to them.

Peter Fortune is eleven or thereabouts. Precision doesn’t matter. He has a younger sister called Kate who always seems to be able to get her own way, either by guile or by politics. Parents Thomas and Viola both work, it seems, but we never get to know them. From Peter`s point of view it is as parents that they exist and thus all possible questions about them are both answered and irrelevant.

What Peter experiences via imagination is at the core of this work, as so the review will not reveal any detail. Suffice it to say there is a cat, some toys, a burglar, a bully and even an adult in the mix. Peter address is these objects of interest directly and without analysis. He is rarely in control of his thoughts and regularly surprises himself. He addresses no great questions directly, but raises many for his co-travellers.

Cities of the Plain by Marcel Proust

 

Times change. Of that there is no doubt. Platitudes, however, remain platitudes whenever they are, like a dose of vaccine, rolled out. Their use, perhaps just once, but certainly on the second occasion, ought to inoculate and protect their user from ever again suffering their nauseating mundanity. But such immunity is rarely achieved, especially amongst those who find simple instructions, such as "don't gather", “stay at home” or “avoid clichés, at all costs” quite impossible to interpret or indeed remember.

I recall the time, not so long distanced, when even the mention of certain sexual habits might only be referred to in passing, accompanied by the bat of an eye, the nervous clearing of the throat or the deliberate and calculated inclusion of classical allusion, lest the speaker appear himself to be tainted by such professedly immoral practices. The inclusion of gender was important, here, for these unspoken, unnamed behaviours, alluded to habits that remained illegal and indictable amongst men, while the female equivalent bore a different name, lusciously classical, and, whilst not officially tolerated, it generally remained beyond the interest of the law.

But it was not only the classical, but also the biblical world that provided the means of referring to these despicable, but apparently common practices. The Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, suffered divine retribution - at least the experience is recorded as divine - because of the prevalence of these crimes against nature within their walls. In more modern times, we have passed beyond the age when the natural can be criminal, and also beyond the clichés of vilifying and ridiculing via censorious judgment or humour. For all its use of the theme, the filmed series never did include the title Carry on Sodomy, despite the near-repeated scripts’ regular use of both censure and ridicule to raise laughs from audiences who elsewhere might judge and scorn.

And so we arrive at Sodom and Gomorrah, volume four of A La Recherche De Temps Perdu, A Remembrance Of Things Past, or words to that effect. At its time of writing, an observation that significant numbers of French high society might just be able to trace their descent to these cities of the plain would have shocked. Eyebrows would have been raised, throats cleared, and private laughs would have hidden behind social condemnation, as gentlemen conversed on the way to the brothel, where the workers to be encountered did not really count, because it was clearly poverty that required them to behave thus. But times do change. Now it is not this discussion of homosexuality that might shock, but the destination of the conversants.

So now when we read of homosexual men and women, gays and lesbians, queers and dykes, we cannot suffer either the shock or the surprise of exposure to ideas we now ignore politely in public or condemn only in private. Neither can we, almost certainly, associate with the kind of society in which the revelations were being made. The lives, and more exactly the attitudes, of these people are now utterly foreign to our experience, though they may well still exist. The realization reminds us that we regularly admire images in the form of galleried art, which bear as little relation to our own lives as do the characters Marcel Proust creates, but because paintings have nothing audible to say in their own words, we fail to recognize the cultural gulf of our distance from what they depict.

Times may change, but our propensity to apply false logic persists. Marcel Proust’s observation of doctors is almost contemporary. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to outcome. “Wine in moderation, it can do no harm, it is always a tonic… Sexual enjoyment? After all it is a natural function. I allow you to use, but not to abuse it, you understand. Excess in anything is wrong.” At once, what a temptation to the patient, to renounce those two life givers, water and chastity. He also recognized that by a certain age, human beings cease to be individuals and become research projects. He had arrived at that stage of exhaustion in which a sick man’s body became a retort in which we study chemical reactions. In our own time, we codify this as aging.

But then we may, like the English public schoolboy, develop personal and internal resistance to propensities that could previously prosecute via physical activity. Various English Prime Ministers have thus profited from the Eton Wall Game in public whilst in private they probably remained on the other side of the wall. “Suppose we took a turn in the garden, Sir,” I said to Swann, while Comte Arnulphe, in a lisping voice which seem to indicate that mentally at least, his development was incomplete, replied to M. de Charlus with an artlessly obliging precision: “I, oh, golf chiefly, tennis, football, running, polo I’m really keen on.” So Minerva, being subdivided, ceased in certain deities to be goddess of wisdom, and incarnated part of herself in a purely sporting, horse loving deity, Athene Hippia. Thus we may find the limitations we impose on ourselves limiting.

At least the Old Etonian Prime Ministers would have coped admirably with the classical allusion, and probably still would. Times may change, but we only understand how they have changed when we trouble ourselves to experience remembrance of times past and engage with its characters, both larger and ultimately smaller than life.

According To Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge

On the surface, According To Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge might appear to be firmly rooted in the genre of historical fiction. Its cover portrays two gentlewomen, perhaps a mother and daughter, of the eighteenth century. Their arms are intertwined hinting at an intimacy their expressions do not convey. The elder, perhaps of the mother, stares into a distance beyond the landscape, beyond the viewer, but her imaginings are surely internal. The younger looks rather quizzically towards the mother, but there is a formality close to an assertion of independence in her demeanour. Her arm, on which her mother’s rests, is offered stiffly, tolerating her other’s presence rather than engaging with it. Surely this is to be a family affair.

We are told not to judge a book by its cover. We should also not be influenced by presumptions of genre. According To Queeney might be an historical fiction, but there is little that is purely historical about this plot. Some of the salient detail is documented elsewhere. Samuel Johnson, after labouring on his dictionary, needed silence and rest to avoid breakdown, both physical and mental. The Thrale family, who resided in Streatham, then a country retreat far from the bustle of the city, lived comfortably by virtue of profits from the family brewery. They had space and the inclination to invite. Johnsen accepted. His sojourn with the family, perhaps the most settled years of his life, is not documented, even by Boswell, though the diarist occasionally walks in and out of this novel, that charts the transformation of Johnson in the household from mere lodger to something more than a companion.

According To Queenie has nothing to do with genre fiction. It fits no mould, occupies no stereotypical niche. The events that unfold while Johnson’s relationship with the Thrales develops, especially with Mrs. Thrale, are described by Hester, a daughter of the household, who is better known to all as Queeney. The same character, via letters from decades later, also reflects upon what happened in an illuminating light. According To Queeney is thus a series of probably recalled scenes during Samuel Johnson’s stay with the Thrales, recollections that shed considerable light on the eighteenth century family, social relations and cultures of the era and contemporary concerns, as well as the specifics of Samuel Johnson’s character. We meet other notable names along the way, such as Charles Burney and his scribbling daughter Fanny, Joshua Reynolds of the peeling paint and David (Davy) Garrick who seems to ham his way through life.

Genre fiction this is not. What happens is not important here, only how it happens. Johnson develops an apparently pragmatic relationship with Mrs. Thrale, who tolerates, encourages, enjoys and rejects all at the same time. We are left with the impression that marriage may be for life, but commitment within it is taken as variable. Her overeating husband munches away. Hester, the Queenie, seems determined to compete with her mother, perhaps merely to state her own claim on individuality. Her insights along the way and afterwards are often grounded more in judgment than insight.

But what is most startling about Beryl Bainbridge’s novel, communicated via simple, transparent yet vivid prose, is the proximity the reader is brought to eighteenth century life. By the end of the book, we feel we have been there, rather than have been told about it. Exactly where we have been, let alone let alone why, is as confusing as life itself was, and remains, for its protagonists. Things happen that have no explanation. People do things for complex, often contradictory reasons. Individuals put themselves first. They overeat. They over-indulge. They get ill. They get better. They die. They pee by the roadside. They pontificate. They hurt one another. They use their stools in public. That, it seems, is life, whatever the era and whoever the celebrity. Some, like Queenie, do survive, at least for a while.

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

 

In a turn of uncharacteristic succinctness, Gioachino Rossini, himself the composer of long-winded and often empty vocal gymnastics undertaken because they were possible - or not! - rather than apposite or even aesthetic, uttered a remark, probably between courses, probably apocryphally, somewhere sandwiched between the tournedos Rossini and the baked Alaska, which wasn’t called by that name at the time because the Americans, who put the dish and the state on the map, had not yet purchased the real estate, a remark that became an oft-quoted opinion on Richard Wagner, a fellow composer, who was actually writing music at the time, rather than being a professional whipped cream spreader on the back of cigarette packets. “Wagner‘s music,” said the composer, “has its moments. It’s the hours in between that are the problem.” No doubt the other guests, also choking by now on the strozzapreti, probably guffawed their recognition of the maestro’s wit. And that was two sentences.

It is a sentiment that is often associated with the so-called task of reading A la recherche de temps perdu of Marcel Proust. He does go on, doesn’t he? Well, yes, a bit like life really, until the end. It’s where we go along the way that forms the point, a point of departure, a point of destination, a point of return and eventually no point at all. And that is the point, at least for one reader of this work.

Marcel Proust lives amongst an elite. He describes them in detail. He brushes shoulders, bellies and other parts on a regular, even daily basis, with members of “society”. It was Margaret Thatcher who claimed there was no such thing as society, only the individuals who constitute it. It is wonderful how something can be defined not to exist in terms of an agglomeration of things that unquestionably do. I digress, and so does Marcel Proust, regularly, but not because digression is an end in itself, rather because digression is all we have. Of course, when one is bored with such society one can always retire to other parts and brush bellies with one of those working women - never ladies! - who have a little time for digression. For them, it's the matter in hand that takes precedence, but usually not in the hand, itself. Times, it seems, have changed. Perhaps…

“Oh, my dear Charles," she went on, "what a bore it can be, dining out. There are evenings when one would sooner die! It is true that dying may be perhaps just as great a bore, because we don't know what it's like." A servant appeared. It was the young lover who used to have trouble with the porter, until the Duchess, in her kindness of heart, brought about an apparent peace between them. "Am I to go up this evening to inquire for M. le Marquis d'Osmond?" he asked. "Most certainly not, nothing before to-morrow morning. In fact I don't want you to remain in the house to-night. The only thing that will happen will be that his footman, who knows you, will come to you with the latest report and send you out after us. Get off, go anywhere you like, have a woman, sleep out, but I don't want to see you here before to-morrow morning." An immense joy overflowed from the footman's face. He would at last be able to spend long hours with his ladylove, whom he had practically ceased to see ever since, after a final scene with the porter, the Duchess had considerately explained to him that it would be better, to avoid further conflicts, if he did not go out at all. He floated, at the thought of having an evening free at last, in a happiness which the Duchess saw and guessed its reason

In The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust describes these creatures of society, upper crust, titled, even royal, certainly rich if we ignore the debts, propertied, (no doubt proprietarian in Piketty’s terms), conceited, racist, learned yet ignorant, self-obsessed, selfish. They even have the odd good point. I could go on. They do. But at the root, they are pretty ordinary rather than pretty.

But in the other boxes, everywhere almost, the white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes had flown for shelter against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves, one by one, from the shades of night which they patterned, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their semi-nude bodies to emerge, and rose, and stopped at the limit of their course, at the luminous, shaded surface on which their brilliant faces appeared behind the gaily breaking foam of the feather fans they unfurled and lightly waved, beneath their hyacinthine locks begemmed with pearls, which the flow of the tide seemed to have caught and drawn with it…

They dress to the nines, but for many of the species adornment makes little difference.

The Marquis de Palancy, his face bent downwards at the end of his long neck, his round bulging eye glued to the glass of his monocle, was moving with a leisurely displacement through the transparent shade and appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts past, unconscious of the press of curious gazers, behind the glass wall of an aquarium. Now and again he paused, a venerable, wheezing monument, and the audience could not have told whether he was in pain, asleep, swimming, about to spawn, or merely taking breath

This society is certainly snobbish, but it is also deeply racist. But then that was the norm of the time, wasn’t it? They were, after all, professedly Christian in an era where, in order to claim this allegiance, it may have been almost expected to be anti-Semitic. But a theme that underpins this society’s ever-competitive camaraderie deals with opposing and divisive views on the Dreyfus affair, the details of which may now be referenced with ease across a democratic internet, noted for its thorough fair-mindedness, disinterest and impartiality.

"In the first place because at heart all these people are anti-Semites," replied Swann, who, all the same, knew very well from experience that certain of them were not, but, like everyone who supports any cause with ardour, preferred, to explain the fact that other people did not share his opinion, to suppose in them a preconceived reason, a prejudice against which there was nothing to be done, rather than reasons which might permit of discussion. Besides, having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that is goaded on, he cried out against these persecutions and was returning to the spiritual fold of his fathers. "Yes, the Prince de Guermantes," I said, "it is true, I've heard that he was anti-semitic." "Oh, that fellow! I wasn't even thinking about him. He carries it to such a point that when he was in the army and had a frightful toothache he preferred to grin and bear it rather than go to the only dentist in the district, who happened to be a Jew, and later on he allowed a wing of his castle which had caught fire to be burned to the ground, because he would have had to send for extinguishers to the place next door, which belongs to the Rothschilds."

Like the contemporary and newly enacted Brexit in the United Kingdom, the Dreyfus affair began in untruths married to conceit and racism, peddled by those with ideological interest in pursuing it, perpetrated by others who found their own identity in an insane bigotry that appealed to inane prejudice, and, unlike Brexit at least thus far, was eventually revealed as utter untruth. What it did do was bring to the fore the ideological cleavages born of racism that cut through this otherwise apparently monolithic society, revealing its inhabitants’ penchant for competition rather than the cooperation their decorum tried to advertise. For all their apparent politeness, for all their overt adherence to manners, these people are vicious cynics capable of waging war to achieve their interests. And that is precisely what they would do.

And the concerns of difference are so small minded that, like Remainers and Brexiteers, these Dreyfusards and their opponents cannot conceive that anything of interest might live outside their own myopic ambit. The universe, it seems, consists of my parlour and the rest.

…at this point in the social year, when people invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dinner, making every effort to see that she was not already engaged, she declined, for the one reason of which nobody in society would ever have thought; she was just starting on a cruise among the Norwegian fjords, which were so interesting. People in society were stupefied, and, without any thought of following the Duchess's example, derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. Every invention of which no one has ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit from it. That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called 'the season.' The idea that anyone could voluntarily renounce a hundred dinners or luncheons, twice as many afternoon teas, three times as many evening parties, the most brilliant Mondays at the Opera and Tuesdays at the Français to visit the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no more explicable than the idea of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea…

But just how self-obsessed and selfish these people are is indicated by the Guermantes’ reaction to Swann’s revelation that he has just three months to live.

"I don't know why I am telling you this; I have never said a word to you before about my illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment. But whatever I do I mustn't make you late; you're dining out, remember," he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness. But that of the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death. And so, while continuing on her way towards the carriage, she let her shoulders droop, saying: "Don't worry about our dinner. It's not of any importance!" But this put the Duke in a bad humour, who exclaimed: "Come, Oriane, don't stop there chattering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme. de Saint-Euverte insists on sitting down to table at eight o'clock sharp. We must know what you propose to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles," he went on, turning to Swann, "but it's ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte's."

I mean, Darling, doesn’t the man realise that in society there is a time and place for everything? And this, surely, is neither the time nor the place to talk of dea… of such things! Get a move on! We’ll be late! Our friend’s demise will have to wait until after liqueurs, dessert at least. Bid him goodbye and come along! But then there are things that are just not done, Darling. Such as…

"You know, we can talk about that another time; I don't believe a word you've been saying, but we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon, whatever day you like" (with Mme. de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons), "you will let me know your day and time," and, lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried in a terrifying voice: "Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You've kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather," he said to the footman, "tell the lady's maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes."

I mean, black shoes with a red dress… What could she be thinking of? Well he was Jewish, after all… Perhaps she should just have kept talking… The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my internal state… I bet she talked quickly and, at the same time, said very little. Just how little Marcel Proust says in the five hundred pages that constitute The Guermantes Way might just be its point. And, in the grand run of time, we have yet to reach perhaps the crowning absurdity of the century, The Great War, the apparently heroic event of unquestioned and racist imperialism we have all recently been honouring after its centenary. Times change, perhaps also assumptions.