Everything Wears Out
Proust book six, The Fugitive
One of Marcel’s Proust’s lovers met an outrageously dramatic end. His name was Alfred Agostinelli, and Marcel loved him passionately and possessively, setting him up in his Boulevard Haussmann apartment, employing him as his secretary, and paying a friend to spy on his movements. Their relationship was tumultuous, however, and Alfred didn’t stay long before making his escape. The same winter that Swann’s Way was published, Alfred abruptly fled to Monaco. Marcel, distraught, began cashing out his stocks and borrowing money to try to woo him back. He sent desperate letters trying to secure his return, even offering cash bribes to his father. None of his efforts were successful.
Knowing that Alfred was interested in aviation, Proust — from afar, still hoping to lure him back — paid for his flying lessons. He was in the process of buying him a Rolls Royce (!) and an airplane (!!!) and had just sent him a love letter when he received a telegram: Alfred, during a flying lesson, had just crashed his plane into the Bay of Cannes and drowned.1
I didn’t know any of these biographical details when embarking upon The Fugitive, the sixth volume of In Search of Lost Time, and found their fictional parallels to be abrupt, overheated, even preposterous. When I reached the scene where Marcel receives the telegram informing him of Albertine’s sudden death in an equestrian accident, my reaction was that this was a bit of authorial laziness — since the narrator was unable to conceive of Albertine’s inner life apart from his desire to possess her, once she is no longer available to him he snuffs her outer life as well. But learning of the story of Alfred Agostinelli, I see that this was ungenerous of me. If Proust were a conventional novelist, he would have dramatized the crash. Instead, all we get is the telegram.
I read (but cannot find the source) that one Proust critic said that the fifth volume, The Prisoner (which I wrote about here) was the most skippable volume of In Search of Lost Time. I would disagree with him — I found The Prisoner darkly compelling, while The Fugitive is slighter, less beautiful, less meaty.
Still, every volume has given me deep pleasure, and this one was no exception. What spoke to me most deeply this round was the culmination of the Proustian lament: that no reality of experience can ever measure up to the demands we place on it — especially those experiences by which we define ourselves, that constitute our most cherished hopes and deepest memories.
The narrator grieves Albertine with his entire being, or at least as much of his being as he can — that gap between total surrendering to feeling, and the knowledge that the feeling will pass with time, torments him. Even in the throes of grief, he comes to several inescapable conclusions:
Even though he feels as though Albertine was unique and irreplaceable, had events in his past played out slightly differently, he would have fallen just as much in love with someone else. However much pain he feels in the aftermath of her death, the pain will fade, and he will eventually stop wishing for her return, and stop loving her entirely. Far from this being a comfort, he experiences it as another death: the death of the version of himself that loved Albertine.
For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collapses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.
And just as he had no access to Albertine’s inner being when she was alive, he has even less access to it now, and it has in fact ceased to exist — in death she will become less human to him than a character in a novel.
The idea that we shall die is more cruel than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that someone else is dead, than the idea that, when the waters of reality close after having engulfed a person’s being, they smoothly, without so much as a ripple, cover the spot from which that beling is excluded, where neither will nor knowlege exist any longer, and from which it is as difficult to return to the idea of what that person’s being had experienced as it is difficult, even while memories of their life as still fresh, to think that this person is assimilable to the insubstantial images and memories left by the characters of a novel that we have read.
The scenes that close the book are remarkable in how they fold back on the earlier volumes: in the early books of the series, experience often fails to live up to anticipation. In these later books, experience fails again — but this time it is memory that it cannot touch.
From a scene where he walks with Gilberte, his old childhood love, along the same paths in Combray he described so beautifully five books ago, in Swann’s Way:
The walks we took then were most often the same as those we had taken in earlier days when we were children: now on my way to Guermantes, how could I have avoided experiencing even more strongly than ever the feeling that I would never be capable of writing, added to the realization that my imagination and my sensitivity had weakened, when I saw how little curiosity Combray inspired in me? I was sad to see how little I relived my past years. I found the Vivonne narrow and ugly beside the tow-path. Not that I discovered any major material discrepancy with what I recalled. But, since I had been separated by my totally divergent life from the places which I now happened to rediscover, there was not between them and me that contiguity which, even before one is aware of it, gives birth to the sudden, delicious, all-enveloping irruption of memory. Doubtless because I did not understand their nature, I felt sad to think that my faculties of feeling and imagining must have diminished if I was experiencing no pleasure on these walks with Gilberte. Gilberte herself, who understood me even less well than I did myself, increased my sadness by sharing my astonishment. “However can you not be moved,” she asked, “when you take the same steep little track that you used to climb in the past?” And she herself was so changed that I no longer found her beautiful. In fact, she was no longer beautiful at all.
In Proust’s writing I always see someone who has all the instincts and sensibilities of a capital-R Romantic, who wishes that his life was shaped like a 19th-century novel, governed by love and destiny and the special knowledge given to the poetic soul. In this desire he is perhaps not unlike Emma Bovary, but unlike her, his failure to achieve the romantic ideal lies entirely in his mind and his experiences of things, not in his external circumstances (whose luxury and freedom would have undoubtedly thrilled Emma).
He is always asking: Who am I? What do I want? and finding the answers unsatisfactory. Love cannot be trusted, nor can friendship. What we imagine to be our nature is expressed through our desires, but desire has a way of mutating the second it is identified, and even our strongest feelings are temporary. Even the pleasures of nostalgia cannot be relied upon, and we can never be certain of the truth of our memories.
Some passages in The Prisoner suggest that only in art can the betrayals of human nature be escaped. In Search of Lost Time makes its own argument.
I’m getting all this info from Balsamo, G. (2017). Proust and His Banker: In Search of Time Squandered. United States: University of South Carolina Press.