Books of the Ages

On the Granta blog this week, Ollie Brock hears from his grandmother, Helen McLaren, through books. The photo shows a scene from Paradise, the farm in Rhodesia where she grew up.

Books of the Ages

A few Christmases ago, my uncle and aunt and their family completely outdid us for presents. Along with a bottle of home-brewed gin, we each found ourselves unwrapping a copy of my late grandmother’s memoir. Formerly a single typescript (it spawned just one or two photocopies) which had taken a relaxed amble between several attics over the course of a few decades, it had since been packed off to an online self-publisher by my cousin, and come back a bound book between elegant covers. I’d barely stopped to imagine my grandmother’s early existence before then – but there she was, age 10, staring out at me from a black-and-white photo in which she is dwarfed by immense tree trunks that shoot up out of the frame.

Helen McLaren as a child

The book describes her childhood in rural Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the daughter of a doctor who used to take long journeys through the bush on a motorbike to visit his patients. She grew up with the natural world in her bones. The book’s world is a place of baboons, peach orchards, and the occasional locust swarm (when the last of these came, everyone in the house turned out to bang on pans and drive them away. Any that didn’t escape were victoriously roasted for lunch). They kept a chameleon in the house, which used to scale the curtains in search of prey. At one point she describes her first wide-eyed visit to a town.

She had died five years previously, and I’ve always had that wish, very common in the circumstances: to be allowed just one more conversation. And as if by a magical stroke, I suddenly felt as though I’d been granted it.

When I read Proust for my French degree, I admit I occasionally had recourse to an English translation – an old copy that had belonged to my grandmother. She’d spent a lot of time outdoors, and was a tough sort of woman; the kind that doesn’t believe in illness. The opposite, if you like, of the French novelist who broke new ground in both prose style and hypochondria. Proust died before he could even revise the last volume of his giant novel, and it shows: in several places he accidentally reuses a simile, applied to different characters; or else places a worldly remark twice in the text with variant phrasings. It’s as though you’re watching him work – but my grandmother wasn’t going to let him get away with it. In at least two of these instances I’d look up the translation to check I hadn’t read wrong, and find a thick pencil line in the margin, with the note, ‘You’ve used this BEFORE!’ I can almost hear her fingertip thump the page, and the resounding subtext: ‘Got you, you miserable bed-bound bastard!’

What I’m Reading

Not Proust: once when you’re twenty and once when you’re seventy seems about right, and I’m still in the awkward gap between the two. The nice thing about that gap, though, is that you can while away the time indulging in Marcelophilia. Granta’s sister publisher Portobello Books brought out Proust’s Overcoat last year: the intriguing story of Jacques Guérin, the man with arguably the worst case of the disease. (It’s fair to say that the author, Italian investigative journalist Lorenza Foschini, shows some symptoms too.) The central quest of his paraphernalia-collecting was the acquisition of the eponymous coat – as close as you can come to touching the man.

Alain de Botton wouldn’t be pleased. In his How Proust Can Change Your Life, he warns sternly against the idea that we can get closer to the writer by touching his possessions or visiting the house that inspired Swann’s Way – we would be better to internalize the philosophies of the book, and use them to be happier than Proust was. (De Botton is so concerned about this danger that he dedicates a whole chapter to it.)

Anyone looking for a digestible biography, meanwhile, could do a lot worse than read Edmund White’s Marcel Proust – it manages to be sensitive and intelligent while also being concise. (Following in their master’s footsteps, not many biographers have managed this.) And on the weightier side, Gilles Delueuze’s Proust and Signs is a quite astonishing work of literary exegesis – proof of the worth of literary criticism for anyone suffering a crisis of faith.

On self-publishing and how it has changed the world of photography, see this piece by Sean O’Hagan.

Also on the Granta blog: Andrew O’Hagan on his selection for the most recent Best Young British Novelists List, and Javier Montes on the Spanish-Language clan’s visit to London...

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