twin passions

Simon has had to hear more than anyone reasonably needs to hear in a lifetime about The Beatles and Proust, two of my life’s grand passions.

[Proust: fifth Beatle?]

[Paul McCartney: second Proust?]

Quite a while ago, maybe two years, he challenged me to write about them both, to bring them together and explain what it is I enjoy so much about two apparently totally different cultural phenomena, icons who were iconoclasts. In short, why I love them both.

This is the background to my twin passions.

[‘Portrait of Madame Monet’ (c1874) by Claude Monet whose Impressionist style influenced Proust when describing the Normandy coast]

At the end of 2019, I decided that 2020 would be the year of reading Proust in French. The deal with myself was to read a minimum of ten pages a day in order to finish by the end of the year. Little did I know that Covid and lockdowns were on the way so I wasn’t the only one reading A la recherche du temps perdu. My self-appointed task suddenly looked a little too modish for my liking - I’m not a joiner - but I carried on and finished in December with a couple of days to spare. I don’t know what happened to other readers; did they just fade away midway though a long sentence or simply fall asleep every time they opened the book?

A year is a long time to spend with a single author and work, and a very long time with one as long-winded, prolix, and difficult as Proust can sometimes be. But I found that months and years later I’d still be remembering with great clarity certain parts and scenes and details. Because, despite the longueurs, it’s an amazing mix of themes, beautiful writing, very funny jokes, and wonderfully sustained figures of speech. I kept returning to the heavily annotated pages and enjoying them all over again, and even thought about putting together a collection of Proust’s Best Bits, a kind of commonplace book devoted to the colours, flowers, fabrics, trains, church belfries, the seaside, clothes, asparagus, hawthorn, alliteration and assonance, art history, and yes the effects of eating a madeleine with a tisane.

But a year is nothing compared to how long I’ve been listening to The Beatles. I was told that when I was very young, I used to kiss Paul McCartney’s face when it appeared on the television. I first became aware of them at the time of their early huge hits and they were there in the background even when I was too young to be a screaming fan at the concerts. I had some catching up to do in my teens, and the double red and blue and white albums were my main education - obviously I only went tricolore/colour-coded - until I started filling in the gaps with other LPs later on. At university I even once went to a fancy dress party as a Beatle; I had a long, thick fringe which helped, my flatmate and her boyfriend made me a cardboard guitar, I painted on a moustache, and no-one knew it was me.

The Beatles on CDs were the soundtrack to the school run for many years; after Tom and Alice went to senior school and it was just Phoebe and I in the car, we’d belt out the early songs with emphasis on the Liverpudlian vowels as a good, joyful, noisy way to start the day.

And that’s how it still is. I have a Beatles Best Bits playlist for the car, but with a more eclectic selection of tracks because I’ve grown to love much of the later, cleverer, more inventive music,

although nothing can beat Eight Days a Week for a pick-me-up with energetic clapping.

You’d think it probably isn’t possible to bring these two enormously influential phenomena together without it becoming a basic ‘compare and contrast’ school essay. Especially when you are dealing with approx. 1.3 million words printed on up to 3,000 pages versus three or four minutes music with a few lines of words, hardly any photos of Proust vs bazillions of the Beatles, two feature length films - whereas, as far as I know, Proust was never in a cinematic romp being chased by screaming girls, Paris vs Liverpool, pampered, well-connected, moneyed, society background vs not.

But I’m beginning to think it is. I can see clearly now why I am obsessed with both - not because of their differences, which are, in brief,

one gay writer, virtually unread in his lifetime

vs four heterosexual men who were, at their peak, the biggest names in the world and whose creations were adored by millions.

It’s actually the opposite, because of what they and their work have in common. Moustaches. Provincial life. Early rejection. Total lack of sportiness, despite the tennis racquet air guitar. Being reduced to common cultural denominators,

such as fridge magnets,

[what?]

and food packaging.

And the fact that in early drafts of Du côté du chez Swann, it was going to be toast and not a madeleine which led to the epiphany.

Maybe the lads from Liverpool who were usually fuelled by endless round of toast in the studio, were also dipping little sponge cakes into their tea to take them down memory lane to Strawberry Fields? (Drugs, more like, but that’s another story.)

So this is what I’ve been thinking about all week, making notes and lists. A perfect subject to muse on while knitting, driving, swimming*, and in my favourite musing place, the bath.

Challenge accepted.

Happy Sunday!

*this week we made our first-ever visits to the unheated Jesus Green Lido (opened to hardy swimmers in 1923) in Cambridge. It is 100 yards long so there is plenty of time to think about John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Marcel during each length.