authors under the influence

[Paul Mackin]

On Oct 21, 2006, at 7:44 PM, robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

>
>  -------------- Original message ----------------------
> From: Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net
>
> "My speculation would be that, though the attraction of drugs and  
> even more so booze as an aid to the creative process is  
> considerable, an ambitious novelist is only going to turn to really  
> HEAVY use as a last resort. Proust needed dangerous substances just  
> to keep going physically and mentally. He knew he was poisoning  
> himself and shortening his life. It was a calculated trade off. .  
> Incidentally he thought of himself as a pretty competent  
> toxicologist."
>
> That pretty much applies to Glenn Gould as well. Throw in Gould's  
> self-imposed social isolation and it looks like were talking about  
> soul brothers.
>
> "To make the point here's a connection to  Pynchon. If a general of  
> the British Empire were to be sexually defiled by a little Dutch  
> girl in the early 1920's Pynchon would never have been able to eat  
> lunch in New York again.,"
>
> Sorry, you've lost me there. I suppose I might be a little dim as  
> of this moment, but could you please provide me a little more context?
>
>


OK.  As Mike Bailey guessed, I was half seriously suggesting that   
the phantasmagoric encounter between General Pudding and Katje might  
be a fairly decent example of what would likely have been seen in an  
earlier age (Proust's) as dangerous to the social fabric in the way  
it undermined both male and ruling class authority.

In that society extra-marital relations between men and women of the  
same class was an affront to male authority only if the women  
happened to have a  husband. However the crossing of class lines  
could add a  further complication, though not necessarily. A rich man  
could take a shop girl  for his mistress and no one would bat  an  
eye.  But when  Lady Chaterly has an affair with the gamekeeper there  
is both class leveling and the undermining of male authority, namely  
her husband's. When homosexuality was involved (and homosexuality in  
all its aspects was a central Proust theme) the concern was  
compounded. The sex was  evil in itself. And it seemed also that when  
classes crossed in same-sex relationships the likelihood of leveling  
was much greater than with opposite-sex relationships.  Proust's  
novel contains some fairly extreme examples of this latter.

Anyway the whole point of bringing all of this up was Proust's heavy  
use of life-threatening  substances in  order to maintain both  
physical and mental survival. To put it  simply he worried constantly  
and disablingly about being found out.  Though part of  him was  
social critic who wanted to explore and expose to the full the  true  
nature 19th century society (that's the long  19th again),  another  
part was that of a  social snob who cared a great deal  about what  
the right people thought of him. He was in a double bind. He wanted  
to write honestly about what he knew. Trouble was, how could a man  
write  so authoritatively and convincingly about these things unless  
he himself were part of them,  which of course he was.