Letting it all hang out
Gabriele Annan
THE YEAR OF READING PROUST by Phyllis Rose Vintage, f7.99, pp. 268 Gays favour pugs. Why? A man does not look foolish walking a pug, as he would walking a Maltese or a shih tzu. The recog- nition, authoritative as a maxim by Rochefoucauld, gets Phyllis Rose cruising the net for a small dog to buy for herself, her husband and son. It leads her
to the Pug Dog Home Page. I got to read many pug owners' encomiums on their pets. I could even see their pictures. I learned when the Pug Dog Owners' Group met in Central Park. I got to know the names of pug rescue organisations all over the country, including Cromwell, Connecticut, where I could adopt pugs that had been abandoned. I read about the gathering of pug fans in which contests were held for the best dressed pug in various categories, including matching outfits for pug and owner.
The Year of Reading Proust has a lot of unexpected discoveries going for it.
Rose is an academic, but she does not compete with Alain de Botton's attempt to use Proust as an amalgam of Theophrastus, La Bruyere and Mary Killen. Rose's book is mainly about Rose, though she too adopts Proust as 'a sourcebook, the Whole Earth Catalogue of Human Emotions, the sacred text that seers consult for answers'. She misses de Botton's breakthrough point, though: that 'le temps perdu' doesn't mean `time past' — i.e. nostalgia — but 'time wasted' (it makes brilliant sense as expounded by de Botton, and he manages to fit in the madeleine just the same). At the age of 50-something, Rose starts her year with the resolution to succeed in get- ting further than halfway though Swann's Way. She has lots of other preoccupations, though, and after the first chapter Proust comes in chiefly as a starter mechanism for her own observations and reflections, which are clever, benign, funny, but might madden or embarrass anyone a bit squeamish about how much to let hang out about oneself and one's friends. Readers who love to hate American East Coast intellectuals will love it. It's just the thing for Taki fans.
There's a lot about health: symptoms, treatments, operations (including unneces- sary ones), widespread, expensive valetudi- narianism. Rose's mother is always being rushed to hospital at the point of heart fail- ure. This can be irritating, but Rose really loves her mother and draws an engaging portrait of her. There's a lot about analysts, whom Rose rather deplores except when they tell her to go home and and stop kvetching. There's a passionate chapter on cooking and 'Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough Chocolate Chip ice cream, counter- conventional, paradoxical, and true to the lived experience of our times'. There is information about St Jerome, the Beatles, Roman glass, George Painter getting Proust wrong, gardening, and cars, includ- ing the fact that post-menopausal women look wrong in a Mercedes. A lot of this is delightfully tongue in cheek.
The most Proustian episode is the party on Key West, where the de Brunhoffs (Rose is married to the son of Babar's creator) and many other writers and artists have summer houses.
Bob Stone [author of Dog Soldiers] was acting mysteriously. He had asked me to give a dinner party for his friend Sonny Mehta, the head of Knopf, and his wife Gita . . . It didn't seem strange that he wanted me to give a dinner for his friends the Mehtas, even though I'd never met them, because our house is big and on the water and I like to cook.
Bob keeps saying that the dinner 'is going to be an important evening for litera- ture'; he seems disturbed. Rose and her friend Alison decide that he's heading for a nervous breakdown. Two days before the dinner he reveals that Salman Rushdie is to be the guest of honour. Rose has to cancel her preparations, hire a caterer, and organ- ise a giant buffet.
It was true that all of Key West talked about the party afterward, but the subject for gen- eral discussion was who had paid for it. Most people knew for a fact or had it on excellent authority that Sonny Mehta had paid Even people who have asked me this indis- creet question directly and whom I had frankly told that L [de Brunhoff] and I were footing the bill were still prepared to believe that Sonny Mehta had done so.
It's not exactly like a celeb party at the Verdurins', but the misunderstanding, the perversity, the budding and lasting resent- ments are Proustian all right. Halfway through the evening, 'instead of making the brilliant conversation I thought was his duty and my due', Bob Stone enrages Rose by informing Rushdie that a friend of Rose's has spots on the lungs.
What could the great writer and martyr for art do on being informed that a woman he did not know had lung cancer except to offer, as he did, conventional words of sorrow?
A perfect Proustian joke.
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