The Poetry in the Art

Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust
by Clive James
Picador, 2016, 75 pages, $29.99

At first glance Gate of Lilacs might seem a self-indulgence. Fifty pages of blank verse by a sick man about a notoriously long magnum opus by another, more-lengthily, sick man may seem a bit daunting. Our “Boy from Kogarah” (aka Clive James, the polymath) and Marcel Proust (“that droopy, wheezing dweeb”, according to Clive) are an unlikely pair. For most readers, however, whether or not they are familiar with Proust’s multi-volume masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, James’s Gate of Lilacs will be a consistently interesting and often moving experience.

James claims to have learned French by reading the whole of Proust in the Livre de Poche original with the aid of a dictionary over some fifteen years. He has also read the English translations, particularly the early, and famous, Scott Moncrieff version.

As he read he also made notes in the end-papers and it is from these notes that James has composed his fifty-page poem offering us all that he wants us to know about Proust and his masterwork. James insists too that he “always thought the critical essay and the poem were closely related forms” and declares: “if I wanted to talk about the poetry of [Proust’s] thought—then the best way to do it might be to write a poem”. A fifty-page one, as it turns out.

Gate of Lilacs is divided into fifteen sections, averaging just over three pages each. It is certainly not a plot summary of Remembrance of Things Past (to use Scott Moncrieff’s title). Nor is it a biographical sketch of the Frenchman. Above all perhaps it’s a love letter, not to the aforesaid “dweeb” but to Paris, la belle époque, French culture as a whole—and, even more generally, the idea of art itself. Loose parallels might include Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and even Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

James has long been an admirer of Proust, the artist—and of his hard-won success in capturing the tenor of a whole era with its social pretensions, artistic achievements and enduring aura. According to James, Proust was both involved with, and detached from, all this. At first, a determined socialite—at the end, a recoverer of it in his famously cork-lined room. Among much else, Proust noted slyly how Parisian artists once fawned on the aristocracy and how, within his own lifetime, the aristocracy began to seek the approval of the famous writers and artists of their time.

But above all, as James makes clear, Proust was concerned with style. He realised it was not necessarily the preserve of the rich or the aristocratic. For Proust, a character with style could be forgiven almost any snobbery, shortcoming or moral failure. James also brings out the poignancy of how this belle époque flowering was destroyed by the First World War—even as Proust himself, in his cork-lined room, paid it little attention in either his life or his fiction. He died in 1922.

In his poem James roams freely among his favourite characters from the epic, discussing their historical and moral significance, while at the same time revisiting his own biography and pondering the origins of his Proustian (and Francophile) obsessions.

A good sense of the Francophilia can be found in the poem’s final section, where James confesses:

From my start

In Sydney far away, I longed for Paris.

Those tipped-in colour plates in Skira books

About Dégas, Lautrec, Manet, Seurat—

They came as proof that in the post-war world

The means to privilege might reach anyone—

Consoled me for the stroke of fate that tore

My father from my mother and left me,

For all my energy and glowing health,

A head-case hungry for a context.

This is the sort of autobiographical interpolation that only discursive blank verse will allow. In prose, it would be struck out by a teacher as “irrelevant”. In lyric poetry, it would seem prolix, but in discursive verse it is right at home. This isn’t to say, however, that Gate of Lilacs doesn’t have its lyric moments. The last few lines of the whole work are just one example:

And soon

All that I love will leave me, as I go

First into silence, then the fire, and then

The harbour water, in which there will be

At last no room to breathe, no time to think:

No time to think even of you, Marcel.

Given what is publicly known about James’s illness—and his profound sadness at being medically unable to revisit Australia (Sydney, in particular)—this is more than affecting. It’s further intensified by the fact that, only a page earlier, James has been referring to “Marcel” as “that droopy, wheezing dweeb”.

Whether Gate of Lilacs will persuade those who abandoned À la recherche du temps perdu after just two or three volumes to push on to its end is unclear. Ironically, it may be enough for them to lazily approximate the experience, via James’s heartfelt and well-burnished account of his own enjoyment of it.

Geoff Page’s latest book, Plevna: A Biography in Verse, his verse-portrait of Sir Charles Snodgrass “Plevna” Ryan (1853–1926), was published by UWA Publishing earlier this year