Proust Moment, May 6, 2003

The Excellent Taste of Grandmother

Marcel had only wanted a goodnight kiss; now, his spineless Mamma is beside his bed, reading to him from the books his grandmother had purchased for Marcel's approaching birthday. Well, let's not judge Mamma as harshly, say, as a cranky advice columnist might; it's easy in reflection to forgive loved ones for having forgiven us a little too easily, for letting paternal love triumph over common sense.

Grandmother's gift has cost her considerable time and trouble. Her original gift was some light reading by Musset, Rousseau and George Sand's Indiana. When Marcel's father strongly objects, she returns them all to the book store, but sticks with idea of something by Sand: the four "pastoral novels" The Devil's Pond, François le Champi, Little Fadette, and The Master Bell-ringers. Surely Grandmother would have preferred sitting down at a new Macintosh G4 and dialing up www.amazon.fr rather than all the back and forth to the bookseller at Jouy-le-Vicomte.

"We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it," wrote Oscar Wilde. "The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely." Certainly Marcel's grandmother would agree. She has that admirable tendency -- I admire it anyway -- of not giving gifts people want, but ones that reflect well on the giver; gifts that reflect more taste and intelligence than actual usefulness. Need new furniture? Grandmother will buy you a precious antique that will fall apart if you sit on it. This certainly puts her in good stead with anyone who would rather give a professed jazz enthusiast the adventurous noise of Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy rather than that senescent schmooze of Kenny G.

This goes, too, for Grandmother's distinction between photography and painting, between what's real and what is artisically rendered. Reality versus aesthetically arranged memories -- that's a theme we'll see time and again.

"`My dear,' she had said to Mamma, `I could not allow myself to give the child anything that was not well written.'"

"The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all, that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth. Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own. She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places. But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was art still, to introduce, as it might be, several 'thicknesses' of art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me photographs of 'Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner, which were a stage higher in the scale of art. But although the photographer had been prevented from reproducing directly the masterpieces or the beauties of nature, and had there been replaced by a great artist, he resumed his odious position when it came to reproducing the artist's interpretation. Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity, my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still further. She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved, preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of association apart from themselves, such, for example, as shew us a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day, as Morghen's print of the 'Cenacolo' of Leonardo before it was spoiled by restoration. It must be admitted that the results of this method of interpreting the art of making presents were not always happy. The idea which I formed of Venice, from a drawing by Titian which is supposed to have the lagoon in the background, was certainly far less accurate than what I have since derived from ordinary photographs. We could no longer keep count in the family (when my great-aunt tried to frame an indictment of my grandmother) of all the armchairs she had presented to married couples, young and old, which on a first attempt to sit down upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipient. But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still be discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past. And even what in such pieces supplied a material need, since it did so in a manner to which we are no longer accustomed, was as charming to her as one of those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our modern tongue. In precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects. And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time."

--"Overture," Swann's Way