Topical Guide 326
Mark Dorset
Proust, Marcel
As Proust probably says somewhere:
How surprising we find it that, numbered among the many attendants of Love, we do not always find Understanding, the pervasive understanding which we suppose ought to be a prominent member of the procession of Venus. We suppose, and certainly it seems to us perfectly reasonable so to suppose, that love begets, among the many offspring that we suppose it to beget, Understanding, and, so well do we convince ourselves that in so supposing we are correct, we persist in believing that we must be correct, even when we are confronted with contradicting evidence, as a blind man, who, feeling on his face a comforting warmth he takes to be the familiar effect of the sun, walks in the direction he supposes to be sunward and persists in his mistaken belief that he feels on his cheeks not the calescence of a terrestrial fire toward which he advances but the radiance of the sun, and still persists even when, at the last instant, benevolent hands prevent him from walking into a heap of flaming fagots.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 11
After extensive research, I can report, with some confidence, that Proust probably does not say this anywhere. In other words, I’m pretty sure that this is a bogus quotation, a fabrication.
However, I can also report that calescence is not a bogus word, but a real one, meaning “an increasing heat,” and that it is derived from the Latin calēscere, “to grow warm,” from calēre “to be warm.”
Also, because my research took me into Kraft’s commonplace books, I am able to offer you a passage from A. J. Liebling on Proust, a passage in which an imaginary Long Island connection plays a prominent part:
The Proust Madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton’s apple or Watt’s steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. This is capable of expression by the formula TMB, for Taste>Memory>Book. Some time ago, when I began to read a book called The Food of France, by Waverley Root, I had an inverse experience: BMT, for Book>Memory>Taste. Happily, the tastes that The Food of France re-created for me—small birds, stewed rabbit, stuffed tripe, Côte Rôtie, and Tavel—were more robust than that of the madeleine, which Larousse defines as “a light cake made with sugar, flour, lemon juice, brandy, and eggs.” (The quantity of brandy in a madeleine would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub.) In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.
See also: Books, Real and Fictional TG 99
[more to come on Monday, August 29, 2022]
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