Proust and James, Mindfully
I want to highlight two writers of calm attention, Marcel Proust and Henry James. I read neither in school, which probably is a good thing. They found their wandering way to my ken, and there we are.
I determined to hangout persistently with these friends. My interest stemmed not so much from wanting to follow their steps. I never presumed to write long ruminative novels. I did, however, admire the way these two writers observed people and actions. I liked their language of thought, and still do.
Proust and James offer useful models. As authors, they somehow coolly, meditatively, step back from their subjects and observe. They fortify my own sense of artist as conduit. The two writers twine in my mind. Both go to lengths to describe and understand the human motivations of their characters. They do so unaffectedly. Proust and James fashion sentences that circulate around a subject that they rarely clearly define. This undirected consideration becomes an embrace, or an acceptance. Their interest is their attention. I can relate this to Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, wherein he is chided (the poet Paul Blackburn did this in real life) about going around the subject, to which Olson replies: "I didn't know it was a subject". That was Olson's method, or attack: to surround the question. Proust and James likewise lavished thought—not some insular containment!—on their subjects. Proust and James keep poking at the thing before them, the upper class society and its denizens, but without interfering. Like, you can poke a sunning snake to see it move, but the alarm placed on the snake bears and bares your impatience. Your interference imposes a story on the snake. The subject assays the moment, or vice versa. You don't think of Proust or James in terms of plot. Plot is the most fabricated element of a novel, and often it devolves to malarkey. Novelists become captains directing their characters thru tricky waters. Often, this effectually leads to a rooting interest in their characters, especially the protagonist. The fabrication can become miserable, a lumping program of self-aggrandizement, like the worst poems of Walt Whitman. I have not been the best of friends with Proust and James, long intervals without reading them have occurred, but their importance to me has not waned.
I've read Proust's grand oeuvre twice. My mother had a rather forbidding Book of the Month Club 2-volume edition in the attic that I commandeered. I read it warily, with curiosity but no expectation of finishing. The sheer mass of Remembrance daunted me. Leaving a bookmark when I'd had enough, I read it when the urge appeared. It took literally five years for me to finish. I spent maybe three weeks on my second reading. This time, Remembrance felt like a summer thriller. I knew the neighbourhood and could appreciate the sights. With James, I think I again confiscated a book, this time one of my brother's college books. Later, I invested in numerous volumes from the Library of America and determined to read the stories and novels one after the other as they appeared in each volume. It seemed like a nice project. Plot in both Remembrance and in Henry James' stories stands largely secondary to rumination. Stuff happens in the stories of both writers, but why things happen secures our interest, not what. The poet William Carlos Williams wrote in the poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower": it is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Actions are constant, continual. We see them every day, the interactions of people and things. We rarely consider them beyond the flashing moment. To think of these actions, even just to notice them, is the greater task. Truman Capote attempted to write a modern day Remembrance. I somehow stumbled upon it, not being especially interested in his work. Victim of drugs and his own celebrity, Capote never finished the project. Portions were published in magazines, and posthumously a book appeared, made of those portions, Answered Prayers. Answered Prayers is a roman à clef about the jetset dazzlers that Capote knew. The wife of the president of CBS and the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis were models of central characters in the novel. They may be no less interesting than the people behind the characters of Odette and Madame Verdurin. Capote wrote within the milieu he knew, just as Proust did. The results differ, however. Proust seems implacable in his curiosity whereas Capote just seems gossipy.
Capote didn't seem to grasp that Proust's interest in his characters was a self-discovery. That Proust's obsessive concern for details grew from a need to see himself and the world. Capote's book--granted unfinished--drew more on tattletales and sniping.
Henry James bears an implacability similar to Proust's. He hovers around his characters with complete interest. No detail seems too small, which is certainly true with Proust, as well. I think it is their immersion in language that gets me. Language is a finding thing for them. By writing, they discover and learn. People become solid by language. Does that make any sense? The blessing of art comes when the artist disappears. The lamp brightens when the artist lets go of impact and reputation--something Capote coulld not do in Answered Prayers--letting the medium of his or her expression measure the day. I think everyone who works creatively, and I am not limiting this to artists, learns that getting out of the way of the process is the process. Technique then becomes the means of solution--art being creative problem-solving--rather than a decorative overlay. To boil this lesson down to a phrase, focus on the process, not the results. Thus Proust and Jame.