It is not widely known that Marcel Proust spent the war year of 1913 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Perhaps the place seemed - somewhat peculiar to him? So far as is known, the epically expansive writer and belletrist committed to paper not a single line describing his experiences there, or its unique functional ability to recapture some past or other. The feeling I have long-harbored in some backwater of my literary memory – relating to the fact that no Proust scholar or literary historian has ever made much of his passage there in the Carolina piedmont - is one of amazement. His genteel abode in Raleigh is well-known now, and it is a simple matter to imagine gracious teas on the veranda, caressed by the fragrances of jonquils and dogwoods.
You will forgive me for interrupting? Have you ever heard Victor Sangiorgio play Stravinsky’s Tango, For Piano? When you finish your Belgian waffle and café, you may wish to go into the Music Room and proceed to delight yourself immeasurably by playing the piece - on vinyl.
One might compile a list of painterly scenes from In Search of Lost Time that have never made their way onto film, foremost the Balbec beach scamp who both rudely and stylishly hopped over an old man in repose, and the following scene from Swann’s Way, as translated in turn by Scott Moncrieff and Lydia Davis.
“Marcel” has been matured by years of his close reading of what it felt like to realize he was becoming a writer, and by the eminent victory of Capital over Labor that had quite recently taken the form of the millions and millions of persons brought to death by the Great War. It is subsequent to these events that he is writing as if he were the boy subsumed into the electric zipzap that the scene describes, his marvelous conversion into the pure energy of ardor, self, and consciousness. (Predicate: Gilberte.) 3300 pages, over two thousand named characters. Have we not been too distracted by the author’s discovery that gender identity is merely one more means to rebuild emotional constructs in new and improved form?
Proust in Raleigh will have heard the trains at night. Night trains began their run in Philadelphia, and are on their way to the darkest pit of Minus-hell. Even as a neurasthenic who rarely left Oakwood, he will have remarked the black faces ubiquitous, and the midsummer humidity he can only have called opressif. Doubtless he had carried with him his habit of trying to retire to sleep shortly after sunrise. For a long time [in his life] he had a hard time falling asleep. There are thousands of oaks in Oakwood, Raleigh: massive botanical engines doing what they will with oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and other sorts of chemistry and material ghosts. The long quiet period before dawn is the moistest hour, conducive of mental and emotional stillness, a sort of manufactory of sole-self-soul, as the undifferentiated mind plays its peaceable games with its own infinitely fecund memory-maker.
Far from Paris, he will have been able to suppose that I arrived in Raleigh in 1977, after my thirty years of lakes and hills Upstate. After Cazenovia and Skaneateles and Aurora and Cooperstown, we had not known so many houses could be made of red brick, or that the earth itself was sand and clay unbound. Peace and Person. In the late autumn, oak leaves accumulate and gather like oceanside sand dunes. Brown snowdrifts of leaves, so unlike the indiscriminate congregations of leaves in the Bois, which he cannot have failed to see. I often spent the night with my girlfriend, at her home across from the Oakwood Cemetery; a little brook formed the path of the side-winding street. I worked at Rex Hospital, then on Wade Avenue – I was doing my residency there in Pulmonology, or I was a parking lot attendant – and I had to be at work at 6 A.M. [My specialty was hemoptysis, which, crazily, ten years later I was to suffer halfway to easeful death; these rhythmic rhymes used to be known as “coincidences”; sometimes parking patrons would emerge from the hospital utterly wracked with weeping, in the first new moments of having been tortured by the devastation that they have lost their beloved spouse of forty years, or child of seven years of age, and we would charge them 35 cents an hour for the time they on our prized homeland had parked their car.] I rode my bicycle everywhere those years, and did not own a car until my third year in town. In the dripping darkness of the streetlamps, five o’clock in the morning, there was nothing so smooth as the sound of my bike tires on the pavement of the streets. Many writers have done very good jobs describing this darkling aura of gloomy otherness and charm, and it would probably be useful for you to look up some of these writings, to bathe in the wonderment of those delicious imageries. A quite-isolated yellow-bulb porch light beacons no ship or soul; these moments precede even the squirrels and the first cheepy birdies, and the aroma in which one swims as a fish in a pool, is devoid of automobile emissions, and deeply reminiscent. On an occasion or two, I would see a person walking silently on the sidewalks, and I could only presume the shadow was a colored maid or cook directing herself or himself toward some sleeping plutocrat’s kitchen; but even these other human forms (other than my own, which swooped and sailed on my Bianchi) seemed more a part of the dim scene than a reminder of the teeming mobs that would soon enough trample dear Raleigh with tens of thousands of feet of woe. The silence was curiously amplified by the awareness that a large number of nearby citizens were making no noise at all, and the hush lay on me as heavily as the dark, dark dew. It put me in mind of lush instrumentation or complex orchestration, DeBussyian or Chopinesque , though it was the silences in the nocturne that my placid heart was hearing; the gentle aubade, the serenade. If my admiring and still dreamy thoughts ventured anywhere idiomatic or unusual, it was not until I had rather enjoyed the process of the conventional observation in this setting, that the scene was mystical and magical, profoundly dear, certainly precious, and evocative of balmy reveries I may once have had waking in Clichy (Henry Miller’s Paris), riding my bicycle to Longchamps, and then dawdling on the Champs Élysées. The Raleigh pre-dawn was an essence of loneliness, cats must have been home and warm and asleep, and I was glad to be, for those few years, far from home.
Apparently, Walter Ralegh did not spell his name as did the city that was attributed to his local investment, and my Jewish girlfriend pronounced it “Rolly.” Thirty years later I can but treasure the mise en scene of Oakwood, and of and Peace and Person, where the lights of the Krispy Kreme suggested fresh coffee and murderously beautiful and dangerously delicious doughnuts, (and krullers too, though in that part of the South they are known as “madlins,” pronounced “mallenz” or [ˈmælənʒ]: etymology unknown and spurious, if such a thing is lexigraphically possible). 
The gleaming milieu shining like a lone star in the night’s obscurity also seemed to promise pastry-waitresses whose pink gossamer-rayon costumes implied breasts like those of Tess of the D’Ubervilles, or Sue in Jude the Obscure, and whose insouciance and coquetterie signified a plain, singularly Southern ravishability, the actual prospect of which, by definition, resided somewhere between likely and certain. Vance Bourjaily has a chapter in his novel Now Playing at Canterbury in which he imagines the meek Scott Fitzgerald attending one of his fiction seminars at the Writers’ Workshop. On the author’s behalf, Bourjaily experienced the oxymoronic conjunction of “excruciating cringing,” as the workshoppies flensed Fitzgerald’s short story, the chosen subject of that day’s ritual lynching. It was that sort of mortal shame I experienced on Peace and Person, feeling the warm flood of indignity and dishonor within me as I sat at the linoleumed doughnut bar with my coffee and kruller, realizing that I was unable to say even one word of non-risible seduction to the woman behind the counter, because I was – it can only have been too obvious - such a craven worm of a man. Anyway, I doubt she would have much enjoyed the itinerary I had been unable to propose, that wild and opulent six-week shipboard romance around the intriguing back alley bars of several Mediterranean ports of call.
Several days were passed, late in November 2001, in the Cleveland Clinic. The duckdrop secret word of admittance, to the most esteemed cardiological Research Hospital in the world, was hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, and the only means of exit from that Sao Paolo favela of inter-connected buildings, was a myectomy, a procedure that had before then been performed only two hundred times. That act was described by the chief surgeon (a graduate of the University of Rochester) as carving away muscle from the walls of the heart (as with a grapefruit spoon?) to permit cardiologic function to resume and life to be allowed, against forecasted expectations, to continue.
After the operation and the early stages of recovery, there is astonishment out of measure, and gratitude out of measure, and heightened appreciation, out of measure, for two particular miracles: one that survival has been assured, and two, Ohio’s sunlight on the dust motes behind the blinds has turned them into actual diamonds.
Then the subject goes home.
Just before that, a number of legally exculpatory tests are “run,” including the simple matter of a chest X-ray, which is carried out in the dim basement of the grand and palatial Cleveland Clinic, in Radiology, evidently too déclassé an activity for prominent space in a facility that routinely welcomes potentates from Oman and Robin Williams, or his like, to its four-star, adjoining hotel.
Opiate derivatives play their part; family members act queerly as if they were stoned; nurses and technicians appear and disappear like non-speaking actors in some commedia del arte farce, (O! farce it is!) and of course there is a confrontation with the food tray, which contains what must seem to be joyous gustatory delights, but turn out to be the tricksters’ outward manifestation of what are really archived, period-area Civil War biscuits. These particular distortions are but croutons in the large vague vichyssoise that is the soul’s helen kellering through such strange lands as faith, and flammable rivers, and the ceaseless and reckless vacillation between utter hopelessness and paroxysms of a grand guignol Humoresque. That is to say, pensee, or its leftovers.
My conventional, miserable personal habits of distressed familiarity seemed to have returned, as I was wheeled (I believe it was in a looping bi-plane) to Radiology. There, I realized that I was and had never really not been a desiccated sponge, as I was immersed in water and watched myself from within and from the outside burst into a blue ducky. All credit to the Clinic supervisors and policy-makers who must have been confronted with this issue and had decided for the side of right and justice, to permit the technician called WENDY to make her appearance as she would, (in fabulous contradistinction to the many dozens of desiccated sponges with whom I had been passing my time) with her black lipstick, white powdered face, and dangling piercings depending from the patches of skin just below the eyes, where later in life lesser sufferers often develop dark bags. I cannot trust myself to rightly describe the magnificent ocean sunrise she threw upon me, with her scintillating happy nature, dance-prancing around the room, and light laughter.
She asked: “Where are you from?”
I answered: “Aurora, New York.”
This town, apparently, permitted her to ask: “Do you mind if I sing?”
Mind? I don’t think I mind?
During the preparations for the procedures, and during the procedures, she replicated the sound of (it was not mere singing) Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By,” a song I had first heard in 1964 while driving through the Everglades. That audition was an early occasion of one of Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being” in which time and consciousness merge harmonically. (A person is limited to seven of these in a lifetime.) Another was hearing in an Iowa City record store in 1970, Joshua Rifkin playing Scott Joplin. Another was napping and then sleeping through the Met’s Pelleas and Melisande in 1978 in Raleigh, which is probably the only way to really understand Maeterlinck and DeBussy. Another was watching Paris and its environs pass by from the top floor of an RER car. You will have noticed that all of these epiphanic perceptions depend for their effect and focusing energy on juxtaposition, which is the bête noire I have for years been trying to eradicate from the structuralist interpretive folly of my ungrand, ununified undercooked half-theory. (Books are not life, but then, what is?) Prior to satire, juxtaposition was all men knew of comedy, and even now, in the twenty-first century, much of our work is perfecting our patience with those persons who prefer not to be dragged past 1726 (about when Swift published Gulliver’s Travels) and who actually can convince themselves that Falstaff and his heirs were doing something that was truly funny. If you must know, I walk around Ithaca in a state of almost perpetual annoyance due to the fact that here, in a college town, so many people teach and so many people believe that what some of the early Roman writers were up to was satire, which is wrong, wrong, wrong. Someday, somebody’s going to make a movie of Mrs. Dalloway that actually depicts what Virginia Stephen was thinking, with that long neck of hers and her kind-versus-pitying eyes. Relativism accounts for so little, really, don’t you think? The difference between atheism and anti-theism is important here, or at the least extremely helpful. Perhaps we can’t ask for more than that. Though demanding some final resting place, for our ashes or for our last flickering opinion, may be the single most useful expedient for determining when our homeland has been recovered. I had done what I could, by moving from city to city, and I had tried to call the attention of my fellow citizens to the trench battles of the First World War. I have worked in various mills, and trudged across the plains. I ate in Vicksburg, grits on a hot dog sausage. The belief settled upon me, finally, that I was going to ship out with both Ishmael and Herman Melville, and that in our little pica type of a lifeboat we were going to reach our homeland port, and there abide with our people. Two people, in my case: one of them was real and symbolic and has been described accurately (I have avoided the word ‘goth’ in reference to Wendy, but that may suit you better). And the other is presently finding that after the late Victorians and chasing precisions, playing Brubeck on the Steinway is her Crow’s Nest in Gloucester.
Mlle Vogdes advises me that her career as a lexicographer may result in our moving to Beijing for three to five years, where three hundred square feet of putrid air might contrast in the sharpest manner with, here, an acre of lush grass, raspberry bushes, a brook, saplings and oaks, and a pink-blossomed apple tree. If we do not move there - if that doesn’t happen - if that doesn’t eventuate - you will find me here until the end, where I started, near the lake and among the gorges and ravines of Ithaca, where nothing is out of context, and everything is in its original position.
Sentiments rise with the sun and vanish with the moon, similar to the way in which a river port moors for a night or two boats which then float away. “They All Go,” wrote Randall Jarrell. But I am presently bound to the deepest sort of impression that the only two geographies in which I have ever felt naturally-born, are the lakes and hills of upstate New York, and the Mississippi Delta. Port Gibson was declared “the town too beautiful to burn” in the Civil War, but that might equally have applied to Greenville. (One day I must drive from Cayuga Lake to Cayuga, Mississippi – this would be straight through – in Mississippi via the Natchez Trace.) The Civil War made one million persons dead out of the thirty million who then lived in the United States (Ten million in today’s dollars.) The moneyed people in the North deceived and suborned those fellaheen with no hope to engage militantly with the fellaheen with no hope in the South on behalf of the Confederacy’s moneyed people. The latter fellows supplanted their having been reduced to beasts of burden and wage slaves before the war with the entirely factitious Homeric and Tennysonian ideals of the glory of perpetuating slavery by reason of melanin.
According to some sources, Shakespeare rusticated-within-disguise and spent several months in Virginia, where he wrote a play (extant) that he willed to have produced on the 400th anniversary of his death date, (which is to say, 2016). It is little-known that Henry James spent the summer of 1912 in Vermont, reading Proust in manuscript, and a long kept secret was the fact that Matisse passed most of 1952 at the eminently vulgar Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, which he pronounced the most pleasant place on earth. Dvorak summered in Spillville, Iowa. You may wish to look this up, too. Greenville, Mississippi is also known for its unraveling of statistical probability by salubriously hearthing an unusually large number of authors, among them Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, and Tennessee Williams (though the latter spent more time at the Cutrer Mansion in Clarksdale, also a soul’s balm village). Greenville, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Clarksdale; (Bourbon, Rosedale, Anguilla, Le Tourneau, Roxie, Redwood, Satartia, Nitta Yuma, Panther Burn, Hushpuckena, Alligator, Dubbs, and Bobo). This trip I will take in a convertible Saab, dark green.
Twenty years after souls had been freed from Auschwitz, which is to say, twenty years after souls had turn to melting and sparkling radium-fire in Nagasaki, some of us had retreated from battle engagement, and, except for a few skirmishes in the outlands, encamped mid the dusty lawns and copses of the Genesee Valley – a place in which, incidentally, despite my four years of residence, I never learned the cardinal compass points or ever felt topographically at home. The year before we had daily gathered round the chuckwagon in a place called Mary Jemison (a white girl raised among the native people, not so uncommon an occasion, as it turns out) and the next year for rations we stumbled over the lawns toward Letchworth, named for the nearby river gape. We did not bear weapons or memory; a peacetime army declines to attend muster. There was much mystification, and it seemed that nothing was not seen as through an opaque veil. Near Geneseo, there was a small park near a wandering stream, where we gathered in period costumes for afternoon charivaris and stupidly, recklessly, and pointlessly rode bareback the wild horses of our innocent and incipient wills. A monument there remembered the ignoble passings of Boyd and Parker, scouts of General Washington’s murderous and genocidal Sullivan Expedition. We used to picnic there (Alice B. Toklas Brownies, LSD, vodka-spiked lemonade, and cheeseburgers), by the tree around which by their intestines were those soldiers tied, run in circles, and finally fileted.
Someone had stolen her umbrella one rainy day, and afterwards she left at the coat rack scene of that purloining a note of the most sophisticated kind of sarcasm, well before that literary form had been by forty years corrupted with writhing pain and literal tears. I had not known that one might use English to fling the very wryest imprecations into the darkness of undifferentiated malfeasance, and the feat amazed me. After two martinis I place myself before my computer’s keyboard and swing lassos, fling javelins, sail down ocean swells at thirty knots. When I do this, or when I sit for hours reading or writing, I have in mind the girl who left a note intended to provoke the emotional disruption of the umbrella thief. She was the same person, I later learned, I had been secretly espying every day, and by whom I was fatally intrigued. She would come and go on the gentle hillside of the Genesee Valley, and by her I confected (as one will) a transubstantiation involving meat wrappings and wispy daydreams. She occasionally wore flowered, colored-print stockings. I think they depicted orchids or magnolias, but now I see them as Charleston dogwoods, hothouse bougainvillaea, tropical dahlias, tormenting daffodils, calla lilies, red red peonies, pornographic oleander, jazz gardenias, fen hibiscus, titillating hyacinths, amatory fuchsia, and sweaty hydrangea. Or maybe lotus flowers. Eventually she and I married and lived in Ithaca, but that didn’t work out well. There, in the hills by the lake, the only topography of which I was aware, was the cold and mean moonscape that her dazzling luminosity had made of my heart.
