Moncrieff: 235-246; Clark: 163-170
by Dennis Abrams
“Every person we love, indeed to a certain extent every person, is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or her to be at our perpetual disposal.” Marcel’s pity for Charlus. Marcel decides to say nothing about his plans to break off his relationship with Albertine and, instead, tells her about a Fortuny gown he wants to go and purchase for her. Marcel learns that Bergotte has died. “Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them.” For years, Bergotte had “ceased to go out of doors.” Nobody knew how rich he was, or how generous he was. His generosity to young girls, in the hopes that it would stimulate his creativity, “He excused himself in his own eyes because he knew that he could never produce such good work in an atmosphere of amorous feelings. Love is too strong a word, but pleasure that is at all rooted in the flesh is helpful to literary work because it cancels all other pleasures…” “…he went on growing steadily colder, a tiny planet offering a prophetic image of the greater, when gradually heat will withdraw from the earth, then life, itself.” Bergotte’s nightmares. Insomnia. Dreams of his death. His doctors offer contradictory advice. The circumstances of his death: After a “fairly mild attack of uraemia,” and orders to rest, he went to view Vermeer’s View of Delft to see what a critic described as “…a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself.” “At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew…finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. ‘That’s how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” The celestial pair of scales: “weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter.” A touch of indigestion from potatoes. A fresh attack. “He was dead.” Dead for ever? We enter into life as though “carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life…” “They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.”
—-
Eric Karpeles, from Paintings in Proust
The death of the novelist Bergotte in the room where Vermeer’s View at Delft hung presents the single most palpable collaboration of word and image in the novel — arguably in any novel. Proust fiddled with the crafting of this scene until the last day of his life. His prose is rhapsodic, but keyed down, in awe of the painting’s elusive, haunting quietude. The luminous townscape, with its ineffable ‘little patch of yellow wall’, surprises Bergotte into thinking that maybe he should have done as Vermeer had done and layered more colours into his writing. Overwhelmed by the consummate perfection of the Dutch painter’s art shimmering before him, he diffidently holds his own life’s work in abeyance. At that moment, the picture occasions an epiphany. Merciless but emphatic, Proust extracted from his character a final self-critical judgment. ‘In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other combined the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter.’ Bergotte staggers back onto a settee and dies. It maybe asserted that the painting is what killed him. In the presence of View From Delft, so profound an expression of humanity, Proust’s unequivocal, brutal credo — life is nothing, art is all — is given full force.”
—-
From Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Way:
“Bergotte, a genuine though limited artist in his writings, has, when he dies, a glimmering sense that he has taken the wrong course, that he has been ‘imprudent.’ Looking at a little yellow patch in the Vermeer painting he had gone to see (‘That’s how I should have written’), he has a heart attack. ‘A celestial scales appeared to him which carried on side his own life and on the other the little patch of wall that was so beautifully painted. He felt that he had imprudently given up the former for the latter.’ He has been a fetishist of art, and he dies as one. He has neglected ‘his own life.’ In the curious image that follows, his books are displayed by threes in bookstore windows, ‘like angels with unfurled wings…the symbol of his resurrection.’ Resurrection by art? By books in a window? We must read carefully. Such a resurrection could take place only among the cultists of aesthetic idolatry. Proust’s tone is deeply ironic here. Bergotte had wasted his life and therefore compromised his art. It is a tainted resurrection.”
—
And finally, Richard Davenport-Hines’s Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris:
“Proust himself had been fictionalising his death until the last hours of his life. The final dictation that Proust gave to Celeste Albaret, in the early hours of 18 November, was still attempting to improve his description of the death of his character Bergotte. ‘I didn’t yet know what it’s like to die when I wrote it,’ he supposedly told her. ‘I know it more now.'”
—
Wednesday’s Reading:
Moncrieff: “I learned, as I have said, that Bergotte died that day.” through “…or is remembered with indifference.” Pages 246-259; Kindle locations 3208-14/3372-79
Clark: “I learned, as I said, that Bergotte died that day.” through “…that is forgetfulness, or indifferent memory. Pages 170-179; Kindle locations 3369-76/3527-34
Enjoy.
With the death of Bergotte, we seem to leave ‘Marcel’ for Proust himself, the insomnia & sleeping drugs, terrible dreams, illness with death inevitable and soon.
Proust gives us the interior of Bergotte’s death after the writer, struggling to visit Vermeer’s A View of Delft, collapses repeating to himself “Little patch of yellow wall with a canopy, little patch of yellow wall.” This slippage into the dying Bergotte’s last thoughts is the intimate privilege of the novelist, the most impossible knowledge of the soul passing from another.
The bookseller’s tribute to Bergotte in the the lighted bookshop windows is so very dear, exquisite, I see it as a salutation to Bergotte’s efforts, however limited, the irony is in Bergotte’s brutal judgment of the work he is leaving behind – and perhaps how ephemeral the glory of display in a bookstore window.
I found this (quoted in Patrick Alexander’s Marcel Proust Readers Guide) –
“In her memoirs, Proust’s housekeeper, Celeste Albaret, wrote that a few days after (Proust’s) death, a strange thing happened. ‘Coming out of the apartment, I suddenly noticed the windows of the bookshop nearby on rue Hamelin. It was all lit up, and behind the glass were published works of M. Proust, arranged in three’s. Once again, I was dazzled by his prescience and his certainty.” (quoting Monsieur Proust)
I was wondering about the piles of clothes and rugs, as I read that that is how Proust was decked out in the end. Fascinating that this was written as he was dying.
The observation about medicine grafting “new and incurable” chronic diseases onto nature’s shorter ones is a more elegant variant of “the cure is worse than the disease”.