'An Interzone Between Prose and Poetry'

Among Clive James’ books, perhaps the least read is Gate of Lilacs (Picador, 2016), a book of poems mostly about Marcel Proust and James’ imminent death (he would die in 2019). The poet taught himself French by reading Proust and a dictionary across many decades. Proust and his masterwork were essential to my education as well. I first read the Scott-Moncrieff translation, Remembrance of Things Past, over the summer of 1971 while managing a miniature golf course – a silly setting Proust would have appreciated. Ten years later, when I was working as a newspaper reporter, I read Terence Kilmartin’s newly revised edition of In Search of Lost Time. While reading Proust I remember thinking all the rest of literature was somehow second-rate, even Shakespeare. That left me feeling rather guilty and somehow disloyal. In his postscript James writes: 

“Proust was a very clever man, and had nothing to do with his day except observe, study and write. His powers of observation were as acute as Dante’s, Shakespeare’s or Goethe’s, but we might say the same of Lucretius, or of Homer when he registered in a set of syllables the quivering of a bowstring: when Conrad said that the writer’s aim was ‘above all, to make you see’, he forgot to say that the ability to observe is the writer’s first qualification.”

 

That’s what I remember: Proust’s powers of concentration, the way he could observe a scene and analyze it for many pages without being tedious. James takes up one of his favorite themes: the relationship of prose to poetry:

 

“Perhaps it merely blurs categories to say that the expression of a thought in prose can have a poetry of its own, but in fact poets have always been attracted to the mere sound of phrases lying loose. Tell a poet that Kepler, with his newly improved refracting telescope, observed SN 1604 in Serpentarius and you might get no reaction. But tell the same poet that Kepler studied the geometry of lunar shadows and he might make a note, because the phrase sounds good. There is an interzone between prose and poetry: a porous border where the discursive expression of a thought is rhythmic or resonant enough to take off on its own and enter the area where words and phrases, seemingly in search of one another, combine into a meaning beyond analysis.”

 

The accompanying poems are not merely discursive. James often returns to his illness and mortality. In the section titled, after Prospero, “I’ll Drown My Books,” James writes:

 

“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.”

 

If you have ever contemplated reading Proust but have been daunted by its length or reputation, let me recommend Gate of Lilacs as an excellent orexigenic – an appetite stimulant. I’m taking a dose of it myself for a third reading.