Television
Love and money
Martyn Harris
At 102 Boulevard Haussman (BBC 2, 9.05 p.m., Sunday), Marcel Proust is con- fined by illness to his cork-lined room and waited upon by the faithful Celeste (Janet McTeer in a state of tense, bony luminosi- ty). It is 1916 and German bombs rain down on Paris. On the western front the French army is winning a victory every day, but as Proust remarks, each day the victo- ries are closer to the capital.
On a rare outing the novelist, played by Alan Bates, is drawn to a young viola play- er (Paul Rhys) and persuades him to bring some colleagues to perform the Cesar Frank Quartet in D at his apartment. Proust arranges for the young man to be excused military service. He then becomes elusive, and Proust replaces him with another musician.
In George Painter's biography of Proust, the incident takes up only a few pages, and even in Alan Bennett's 75-minute screen version it looked slight enough, being filled mainly by dense silences and meaningful glances. And yet it was one of those rare television dramas which has lingered in the mind all week, slowly unpacking its chiaroscuro images and sparse, quirky dia- logue.
'I must apologise for the lift,' says Proust to the quartet. 'It dates from the period before lifts were invented.' At a restaurant he asks if he may borrow 50 francs from the maitre d'.
'Of course, m'sieur,' says the waiter, pro- ducing a note.
'No, no, you keep it,' says Proust. 'It was for you anyway.'
Bates is too meaty to play the consump- tive artist — more Gabriel Oak than Charles Swann — but he has the stillness and assurance required by a character who asuumes the world revolves around him. When Celeste's husband returns from the front on a 24-hour leave, Proust is delight- ed he will have somebody to drive him to dinner. He thinks nothing of disturbing their love-making to have Celeste plump his pillows.
'Am I in your book?' Celeste asks Proust.
'There is a servant,' he says, 'but she is not you. And I am not he . . . It is not like that. Art does not correspond to life. Art is life.'
And so Proust justifies his tiny cruelties in the name of an abstraction, just as the muddy armies off-stage commit their larger cruelties for larger abstractions. The artist may take what he needs — in this case the frisson of homosexual love — at the expense of courtesy and kindness. Eventually the lover himself is revealed as a cipher, when he is replaced by another viola player — for it is the 'useful unhappi- ness' of love which is important rather than the mere mortal who embodies it.
The terror of wealth is the absences it reveals: Proust filled his with art, as others fill theirs with religion. Viv Nicholson, con- fronted with a pools fortune, told her hus- band: 'We'll rub Dubonnet all over ourselves' (Winning Fortunes, Channel 4, 9 p.m., Sunday). Viv was the original 'Spend, spend, spend' heroine of the Sixties tabloids, who invested her fortune in tan- gerine Cadillacs and tasteless houses, and 25 years later is working on a market stall.
Another man had bought a restaurant and gone broke; a third had bought a grey- hound track and done all right. The foot- ball pools, as the Rothschild Commission pointed out, is by far the stupidest form of gambling from the point of view of return on investment, and it is correspondingly the stupidest people who win its vast for- tunes. These people needed Art or God, but what they received was the Littlewoods financial adviser, who advised, 'The rest of your life is going to be superb. You cannot go wrong at all.' A plumber who continued to work as a plumber and to take his holi- days in Blackpool asserted it had made no difference to his life and it hadn't. It had simply emptied it of meaning.
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