Self-promoting Proust would have been a social media star
The novel, its enthusiastic critic raved, was a “little masterpiece… almost too luminous for the eye”. The subject of this prescient review – Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu – was indeed a masterpiece. The critic, however, was not entirely objective: it was Proust himself, busily multitasking.
There is a twee name for the unendearing habit of puffing your own books: it is known as sock puppetry, and in this, as in so much else, Proust was vastly ahead of his time. A century after Le Figaro published his essay in hyperbolic autocriticism, the literary world continues to gasp and stretch its eyes at the wickedness of well-known authors who publish pseudonymous reviews on Amazon, praising their own work and, in the nastiest cases, belittling their rivals’.
A few years ago a group of authors, including Lee Child, Joanne Harris and Ian Rankin, published an open letter deploring sock puppetry. Quite right, of course. But even as Proust’s lamentable lack of professional integrity is exposed, it is hard not to reflect how much that most graceful and assiduous of selfpromoters would have loved social media – and tempting to imagine an alternative reality, in which the pink tip of Albertine’s kitten nose became as famous as Cara Delevingne’s eyebrow.
A recent Radio 4 programme on the hidden history of corridors offered intriguing insights into those liminal spaces beloved by politicians, civil servants and itinerant adulterers. If corridors provide a natural setting for covert grown-up transactions, the imaginative lives of children flourish in the obscure places left over when buildings are designed. From Maria Merryweather’s tiny tower room in The Little White Horse, to Harry Potter’s spider-haunted cupboard under the stairs, and the underground “froth” of stone cavities below Jordan College, Oxford, home of Philip Pullman’s heroine, Lyra Belacqua (whose further adventures are published later this month) – the more cramped and unpromising the space, it seems, the richer the fantasy life to which it offers a portal.
C S Lewis notoriously banished Susan Pevensie from Narnia once she became interested in “nylons and lipstick”, but the magic doesn’t necessarily fade.
I still remember the sinister charm of retreating, aged seven, with my book to the cupboard under the stairs, convinced that no one would ever find me there.
Term starts in Oxford this week, and the 20-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai, has tweeted to her 932,000-odd Twitter followers for advice on what to pack when she goes up to read PPE at Lady Margaret Hall. The responses ranged from gloomy (cough medicine, mace spray) to idealistic: an open mind, a warm heart and empathy.
Two thoughts surface from my undergraduate days: the first is the terrible damp chill of Oxford. It is easier to keep a warm heart if the rest of you is warm too. So, woolly jumpers. And avoid bicycles. I know it is quite a trek from the centre of town to LMH (further still to my old college, St Hugh’s), but I loved those long walks up the Banbury Road. Of all the things I learned at Oxford, it is the habit of walking and thinking that has proved most enriching.