Odette and Zipporah

[Above, Zipporah, a detail from Sandro Botticelli, Scenes from the Life of Moses (1481-82)]

M. Swann is in the habit of seeing resemblances between people whom he knows and faces in paintings, a habit that allows him to associate the lovely Odette with the words "Florentine painting," making her thus more interesting to him:

Standing next to him, allowing her hair, which she had undone, to flow down her cheeks, bending one leg somewhat in the position of a dancer so that without getting tired she could lean over the engraving, which she looked at, inclining her head, with those large eyes of hers, so tired and sullen when she was not animated, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, in a fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 230-31

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Movie recommendation: The History Boys

[Note: If you're looking for the poem "Drummer Hodge," you can find it here: "Drummer Hodge."]

The History Boys (2006)
directed by Nicholas Hytner
screenplay by Alan Bennett, from his play
109 minutes

Like Être et avoir, The History Boys is a film about teaching. But I cannot write about it without giving away too much of what happens, so this recommendation will remain cryptic. I’ll make just three observations:

1. The film has been characterized as a British Dead Poets Society. I intensely dislike DPS and see very little resemblance between it and The History Boys.

2. The History Boys has been faulted for pretension. My pretens-o-meter, re-calibrated at regular intervals, finds very little pretension in this film.

3. The scene in which Mr. Hector talks about Thomas Hardy’s poem “Drummer Hodge” is the best film scene about poetry I’ve seen.

[An aside to my ENG 3808 students, if any are reading: I wish I’d known about this film while the semester was on. The History Boys is filled with modern British poetry, more poetry than any movie I’ve seen. You’ll recognize much (perhaps all) of what’s quoted. There’s even a group recitation of Philip Larkin’s “MCMXIV”!]

[An aside to all readers: I’m trying to get “smart” quotation marks and dashes to display properly — I think they add class to the joint. If they’re not displaying properly in your browser, if you’re seeing clumps of garbled characters instead, I’d appreciate your letting me know in a comment or an e-mail. Thanks.]

Swann's little phrase

One year ago, M. Swann was deeply affected by a phrase in a sonata for violin and piano. "The little phrase," as it comes to be called, is affecting him still:

Now, like certain confirmed invalids in whom, suddenly, a country they have arrived in, a different diet, sometimes a spontaneous and mysterious organic development seem to bring on such a regression of their ailment that they begin to envisage the unhoped-for possibility of belatedly starting a completely different life, Swann found within himself, in the recollection of the phrase he had heard, in certain sonatas he asked people to play for him, to see if he would not discover it in them, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe and to which, as if the music had had a sort of sympathetic influence on the moral dryness from which he suffered, he felt in himself once again the desire and almost the strength to devote his life.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 218-19

This passage reminds me of the famous line from Rilke's "Archaïscher Torso Apollos" [Archaic Torso of Apollo]:

Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
[You must change your life.]

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"The raised finger of the dawn"

The first section of Swann's Way, "Combray," ends as it begins, with thoughts on sleep. At the close of this section, the narrator, lying in bed, has reconstructed his bedroom in the darkness, putting the pieces of furniture in their proper places. Or so he thinks:

But scarcely had the daylight -- and no longer the reflection of a last ember on the brass curtain rod which I had mistaken for it -- traced on the darkness, as though in chalk, its first white, correcting ray, than the window along with its curtains would leave the doorframe in which I had mistakenly placed it, while, to make room for it, the desk which my memory had clumsily moved there would fly off at top speed, pushing the fireplace before it and thrusting aside the wall of the passageway; a small courtyard would extend in the spot where only a moment before the dressing room had been, and the dwelling I had rebuilt in the darkness would have gone off to join the dwellings glimpsed in the maelstrom of my awakening, put to flight by the pale sign traced above the curtains by the raised finger of the dawn.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 190-191

Is Lydia Davis punning on Homer's rosy-fingered dawn? I hope so.

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Overheard

Waiting this afternoon in -- where else? -- a waiting room, while work was done on our car, I was also in Babel. A movie played on a large wall-mounted screen, with the sound coming from a speaker at the opposite end of the room. Among my fellow waiters, two or three cellphone conversations went on at all times. I slouched in a chair and shut out most of the noise by reading, but I did catch these words, from the movie:

"When they say 'hardwood floors,' what they really mean is 'hard wood floors.'"

And these words, spoken into a cellphone by someone two chairs down:

"Is she still getting beautiful, or is she fully done?"

A Google search tells me that the line about the floors is from the 1988 movie Funny Farm: "Chevy Chase finds life in the country isn't what it's cracked up to be!" The Internet, it has everything.

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Parents, weather, plaid, mourning, hums

The narrator's Aunt Léonie has died (trust me; that's not a spoiler), and the servant Françoise is grief-stricken. Today's Proust sentence has a little of everything:

That autumn, completely occupied as they were with the formalities that had to be observed, the interviews with notaries and tenants, my parents, having scarcely any time to go on excursions, which the weather frustrated in any case, fell into the habit of letting me go for walks without them along the Méséglise way, wrapped in a great plaid that protected me from the rain and that I threw over my shoulders all the more readily because I sensed that its Scottish patterning scandalized Françoise, into whose mind one could not have introduced the idea that the color of one's clothes had nothing to do with mourning, and to whom, in any case, the sorrow that we felt over the death of my aunt was not very satisfactory, because we had not offered a large funeral dinner, because we did not adopt a special tone of voice in speaking of her, because I even hummed to myself now and then.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 157

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Chariot racing in Brazil

Brazilian sugar-cane farmer Luiz Augusto Alves de Oliveira has built a hippodrome and is seeking to revive the ancient sport of chariot racing:

The Brazilian Mr. de Oliveira's career as a charioteer began about 10 years ago while he was recovering from a motorcycle accident and had nothing to do but watch the Charlton Heston Ben-Hur over and over. When he finally got back on his feet, Mr. de Oliveira set about working with field hands and friends to build and race aluminum chariots.

Neighbors such as Heloísa Consoni were apprehensive at first about the goings-on at Mr. de Oliveira's ranch. "We weren't sure if he meant to bring in lions and gladiators, too," Mrs. Consoni says. But now she is a fan. "How can you not love that speed?" she says.

The New Ben-Hurs: Chariot Racing Stages a Comeback (Wall Street Journal)

Proust and Porter

Listening to my son's final high-school chorus concert tonight (way to go, Ben!), I realized that Cole Porter's "All of You" is the most Proustian of love songs. It is about nothing less than possession. Here's Proust:

I looked at her, at first with the sort of gaze that is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but a window at which all the senses lean out, anxious and petrified, a gaze that would like to touch the body it is looking at, capture it, take it away and the soul along with it . . . .

From Swann’s Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 144

And Cole Porter:

I love the looks of you, the lure of you.
I'd love to take a tour of you.
The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you;
The east, west, north, and the south of you.
I'd love to gain complete control of you
And handle even the heart and soul of you.
So love at least a small percent of me, do,
For I love all of you.

Hearing this lyric sung by high-schoolers might seem a bit strange, but it can't compare to the experience my wife Elaine and I had some years back of hearing a chorus of elementary-school children sing "YMCA." We're city slickers, so we found that scenario both embarrassing and hilarious. But we kept our mouths shut.

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Love and hate and Proust

Gilberte Swann made her first appearance in these pages last year. Here she is again, in a sentence from Swann’s Way that captures the sort of self-division that will come to shape the narrator’s relationships with women throughout In Search of Lost Time. The narrator has just seen Gilberte for the first time:

I thought her so beautiful that I wished I could retrace my steps and shout at her with a shrug of my shoulders, “I think you’re ugly, I think you’re grotesque, I hate you!”

From Swann’s Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 145

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Another Proust sentence

I like the way this sentence shows a writer listening:

A little tap against the windowpane, as though something had struck it, followed by a copious light spill, as of grains of sand dropping from a window above, then the spill extending, becoming regular, finding a rhythm, turning fluid, resonant, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 103-104

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