On the Road with Proust -- Umberto Tosi

 " ... The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die."  -- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way 

 From Stepanie Heuet's 2019 graphic novel adaptation

It's been twenty five years since I last dove into Proust. I was living in San Francisco. The Millennium was still a couple of years off. I had my first cell phone, a nifty flip device. Looking back, I see that I was living  in two worlds - at least. I stretched myself between a demanding Silicon Valley start-up job and being an over-age, doting, divorced dad to a precocious, late-in-life eight-year old. 

It was no more harried a lifestyle than that of many single parents, mostly moms, but that didn't make it any easier. I had zero time for much of anything reflective, enlightening or recreational, much less Proust.

Marcel Proust blind-sided me then. This time it was more on purpose, evoked, purposefully enough by one of his famous little madeleine's dipped in lime blossom tea. (We'll get to that in just a bit.) 

The logistics of my life that other time twenty-five years ago were daunting. I commuted fifty miles each way between my foggy, Ocean Beach, city apartment and my office at Mightywords, a start-up in Sunnyvale, California devoted to developing the Internet's first accessible, self- publishing service for writers and businesses worldwide. It was on the bleeding edges of new and old technologies -- Internet commerce and publishing - when Amazon was known mainly as an online bookseller. I found my editorial-tech job fascinating, stimulating and exhausting. I worked doubles-shifts all week. On weekends I'd pick up my nine-year-old kid at her mom's in Modesto, a Central Valley, ex-urb one hundred miles east of San Francisco. 

The hours-long commutes were a bear. But books on tape not only saved my sanity, but made the time magical. I stocked my car - and fed my brain - with audiobooks on cassette tapes traded at The Green Apple, a popular used book emporium on Clement Street in San Francisco - still a book-lovers hangout. Month-after-month, I devoured a mix contemporary novels, histories, and literary classics on the road - the latter consisting of classics I revisited, or I had never gotten around to reading. I thought of it pass-time then. 

In retrospect, those audiobooks transformed those years of mind-numbing commutes into consciousness-expanding adventures of the imagination. I learned a lot about writing in the process - how the best breathes, has a voice manifest when read aloud. Nothing like talented actors to bring prose to life. Through them I got to know new writers and understand old ones better.  

The best were addictive. There was a brilliant enactment of James Joyce's Ulysses produced by the BBC, for example. Other gems included the readings and re-enactments from English and American literature, Jane Austen, Dickens, Twain, Toni Morrison and beyond; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dostoyevsky,  Gunter Grass, and on and on, too numerous to name. Often I would sit in my car  long after arriving at a destination in order to hear a chapter's conclusion.

One day, I ran into Marcel Proust in the classics aisle of the Green Apple. I had only read smatterings of his monumental ouvre, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) with some difficulty at times, but appropriate awe. And there, in audio-cassette, a shop-worn set of all seven sections of the great work, in English translation. 

 Madeleines de Commercy

I didn't know if I could get through it, How wrong I was. Proust's sprawling, vivid panoply of life, and vividly portrayed, fascinating, often venal, narcissistic, hypocritical and arrogant - in other words all too human - characters came to life in my car and my imagination. And the writing, oh Lord, the the divinely conscious weave of this prose captivated me. Its grace moves the spirit and can bring tears, like passages of Mozart or poetry. 

My bifurcated life crumbled to dust when the millennium tech crash sent my fledgling company's venture-capitial backers running for cover. No more endless daily commutes, at least. And goodbye to my personal highway literature salons. 

They're effect on me seemed ephemeral. They went where memories go - which was what Proust's masterpiece was about. I went back to freelance writing on my home computer for a living, back to reading paper books as God intended. It would be a decade before digital books took hold, along with the indie publishing market enabled by bigger ventures than ours developing and offering the kind of tech solutions we had been pioneering. It's a familiar high tech capitalist.

The psychological aspects of my literary deep-dives are another story. Those meander through my psyche like streams above and below ground and emerge into  the darndest places, evoking inconvenient questions like who-am-I and what-should-I-be-writing. 

Who can resist the undertow of Proust's wondrous insights, his haunting revelations of unconscious memories triggered by a humble pastry dipped in lime-blossom tea? Let Proust himself explain it:

 Zoë Tosi

"...No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?... 

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. ..." - from Swann's Way.

No surprise these passages got me jonesing for a taste myself. I knew that this concoction would not transport me into Proust's consciousness, nor was it likely to conjure person remembrances. That would take other triggers -- and 'shrooms perhaps. But the tea and madelaines might put me in reach of something undefined. Put simply, I  was curious. Like any fan, I wanted to fantasize myself into the story.

Petite madeleines happen to have been one of my youngest daughter Zoë's favorite treats since babyhood. She was a strikingly singular child who grew up to earn a doctorate in artificial intelligence, become a researcher and stand-out gourmet cook and baker among other pursuits. Perhaps Proust's cookies are indeed magical.

I had the spongy, shell-shaped, sweet egg madeleines on hand from a local French pastry shop, but try as did all over the city, I could not find the "lime-blossom-infused tea." I found lemon tea, and all kinds of herbal and spice teas, but no lime blossom tea. This was a few years before the explosion of global online shopping that we enjoy (and/or wrestle with) today. 

All things come to those who wait. Eureka! A couple of weeks ago, I came across a pretty tin of loose, lime blossom tea while shopping on line. Serendipity or what? I flashed on my San Francisco days in proper Proustian fashion and immediately ordered some plump imported madelaines. Both treats arrived promptly at my door. I put the kettle on promptly and asked my inamorata, the artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris to join me for Proustian tea during which told her the whole story above and more. 

The pungent tea and and delicate cakes didn't trip us out, but proved a lovely experience filled with a lively discussion about the nature of memory, creativity and the unconscious. Just where do dreams and memories - the experiential kind, not so much the mental cue cards -- reside. What activates them and how do they feed our stories and other artistic creations? 

Taking tea and madeleines felt like a Holy Communion with the Great Author that visited Proust and all of us who write to some degree. Literature is filled with evocative food and drink - from Isak Denesin's Babette's Feast, to the Dickens' Christmas repast in Great Expectations, and of course, A Christmas Carol from Austen to Gatsby, Like Water for Chocolate boils over with meaningful feasting. 

Sipping Proust's tea got me thinking of food in my own stories - of a marathon wedding feast in my period novel, Ophelia Rising, family trouble at a Thanksgiving dinner in my short story, From Cradle to Gravy, for example. As an amateur chef  myself, I've always felt self-indulgent writing elaborate food scenes into my stories. No more.

What experiences evoke flashbacks for you? I made a list my most suggestive triggers - not that one can normally control these things. My Proust List includes certain foods, also things, sights and other sensations  - for me the aroma of newly mown country hay, of cool Sierra Nevada pines and the salty iodine smell of the ocean at the cape and later, Santa Monica beach. 

I visited my cousin Madelaine and her husband Phillip in Massachusetts a few years ago. She and I - five year apart - were close as children back amid our then big Italian family in Boston. She showed me around her house, which was new to me. There, in a basement rec-room, was the old, upright player piano of my maternal grandmother - fully restored and shiny. I was so happy she had ended up with it - a family treasure. 

As a boy, I loved to pump the piano's foot pedals and watched its magical keys play roles of opera arias, Italian songs, jazz numbers, rolls made by songwriters and performers themselves like George Gershwin and Sergei Racmaninoff. 

Now at my cousin's house decades later I  sat the the old piano, opened the lid and gently fingered its black and white keys. The sensation tripped me down what I recognize now as a Proustian rabbit hole. I was a child again in Boston, running about my grandmother's home among the score of us at  one of her Sunday feasts  -- redolent with mouthwatering pastas, soups, main courses, wines, fruits, cheeses and desserts all made from scratch by our Nonna Rosa while I watched all that morning and and even allowed to help. 

More than church, this was our worship. The clan would gather -- aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, a few friends - generations far from old Italy and everyday cares.  My late mother and Zio Aldo, both richly voiced opera singers, would sing songs and arias, accompanied on that piano, and by my grandfather on his shiny, gourd mandolin, a cousin on guitar, as others joined in acting out and fracturing everything to raucous laughter.

They're all gone, like Proust now except for we few cousins next. More tea? 

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Umberto Tosi's novels include his highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mysteries The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead. the forthcoming Death and the Droid, plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus his epic historical novel Ophelia Rising.  His nonfiction books include High Treason (Ballentine/Putnam), and Sports Psyching.  His short stories have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is contributing editor. His stories, essays and articles have been published widely in print and online since the 1970s.

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Enjoy Umberto Tosi's Hollywood noir detective thrillers: The Phantom Eye  and Oddly Dead.

 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Dog of the North, The Portable Veblen and managing editor of Chicago Quarterly Review.