Marcel Proust and the windy heck

Peter Rose

Soon after learning of the appalling Air France disaster over the Atlantic Ocean, I was seated on an Airbus, with even less leg-room than usual and no manuscript to edit, which was most unusual. Looking through the window, I saw one of ABR’s senior contributors strapped to the wing and quite supine. She had placed herself there voluntarily for the windy heck of it – rather like J.M.W. Turner and Chateaubriand, each of whom purportedly had himself lashed to the mast of a ship during a storm, for the full Romantic frisson. My contributor (who shall remain nameless, though I’m not sure why) waved to me and mouthed an invitation to join her on the wing. But I cried off, citing another book I had to write before we arrived in ... wherever it was.

Strange then – or not so strange at all – that this should follow a decision made just yesterday in our office to include an oneiric question in a new feature called ‘Open Page’, which will have its début in our July–August issue. Each month we will invite a prominent author to answer a few questions about his or her work, method, literary politics and predilections.

One of the questions is, ‘Are you a vivid dreamer?’

Our aim in presenting ‘Open Page’ is to find out more about the writers whom Australians most like to read. Here, we have drawn almost inevitably on the famous Proust Questionnaire, so called only because Marcel Proust was the most famous person to complete it – twice in fact, when he was aged thirteen and twenty. Nevertheless, all but one of the questions are our own. We won’t enquire about our monthly subject’s favourite bird (Proust: the capricious swallow) or favourite occupation (‘loving’) or most marked characteristic (‘a craving to be loved, or, to be more precise, to be caressed and spoiled rather than to be admired’). We will leave that to Vanity Fair, in which the Proust Questionnaire continues to appear more than a century after its creation.

And who will our first subject be? And why does she write? And would she do so if she had her time all over again? And if she dreams at all, is she an aviatrix?

Stay tuned for the July–August issue.