PROUST and Perry – Recalling The Memory of Things Past -Pinter/PROUST

Yesterday, I posted excerpts of an essay written by theater critic Stanley Kauffmann about The Proust Screenplay by Harold Pinter here. Kauffmann implied that he was surprised that Pinter’s Screenplay did not open in the same way as did the novel. He wrote:

 

I give one major example of deliberate omission and one of imaginative recomposition. When I knew that Pinter’s screenplay was en route to me, I speculated that it would begin on that night in early January 1909 when the thirty-eight-year-old Proust dipped the rusk in the tea and the taste and scent took him back to boyhood and the madeleines. Not at all. In the whole screenplay there is no madeleine. Pinter made his own means.

Proust’s opening scene is probably the most familiar part of the novel, even for those who have never read the work. Proust begins to remember things past when he smells and tastes the crumbs of a madeleine cake  (We would call it a cookie,) dipped in tea, which brings him back to a time in his youth  30 years earlier when he shared such a treat with his aunt. The “Proustian Madeleine” is now an iconic image called up in all sorts of contexts, even the act of playing an old video game. As it turns out, food science proves that no madeleine would crumble as Proust described. (NPR). 

Here you can read the passage that started the whole thing.

Science seems to dispute that taste and smell are strong triggers of memory, but experience tells me something different. Long forgotten smells have brought memories back to me so keen that I thought I was standing in another place in another time. [ETA – I cannot find the cite about science again and a few of you have asked for it. Please see the my replies to comments by Micra and Verbosa. I decided not to take the error out altogether, but I retract the statement.]

One such sense memory for me is the smell of  Old Spice, the  men’s after shave or cologne that might have been the only choice for many years. I grew up in a family where I was the only child, since my brothers were quite a bit older than I – so in a family with three  men.  I was usually given some money to buy presents when the occasion arose, Christmas or Father’s Day, birthdays, and my go-to gift was some configuration of an Old Spice gift set. All three of them wore it. I remember so well walking into one of the bathrooms after someone had finished his toilette and smelling the sharp fragrance, usually diffused by the steam of the shower – an even sharper whiff when I got a hug or a kiss as someone was leaving for the day or for a date.

So years – decades- later, when I went into my brother’s bathroom, and saw among the more current fragrances, the porcelaine-like bottle of Old Spice, I couldn’t resist putting my nose to it – and instantly I was leaning my face up from the sofa ready to accept a kiss on the cheek. When I mentioned my find to my brother, he said he never wore it, but he liked to have it. “Why?” “Because it reminds me of things.”