Vacation Reading With Marcel Proust
I took a mini-vacation last week, and for once I chose not to do battle with the big bluefish off Cape May or to stride manfully into each of the Atlantic City casinos in turn, clad in my finest white dinner jacket and breaking their baccarat banks one by one. No, this time I stayed at my mother’s place in Cape May Court House, NJ, and read Proust. Well, not only Proust, I also finished re-reading one crime thriller (Firebreak, by Richard Stark) and read another one for the first time (The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette). There was also some Regis and Kelly in there, and a little of The View, even some Rachael Ray, but all that is another and perhaps more profound article.
My goal for this holiday not-in-the-sun was to get back into Proust.
Proust is my desert island book. I’m cheating, really, because when we say Proust we mean his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), and this “book” comprises seven books, and in the current Modern Library edition, six volumes. So it’s one book and a lot of books at the same time. Just as our lives are one life and a lot of lives at the same time.
In Anne Tyler’s excellent The Accidental Tourist, her hero, Macon, is a man who doesn’t really like to travel but he makes his living writing books for people who have to travel for their jobs. So Macon’s guidebooks are all about making the agony of travel a little less agonizing for working stiffs who may not have the inclination or the time to see the sights or soak up foreign culture but who just want to do the traveling and do their business and then go home with as little hassle as possible. (And this was before 9/11!)
One of Macon’s personal methods for getting through the tedium of air travel is always to bring along an enormous novel called Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. When I read The Accidental Tourist I had never heard of Miss MacIntosh, but I looked it up and it actually exists; it’s by Marguerite Young, it’s almost 1200 pages of poetic prose, and it Is Not An Easy Read.
If you find a copy of Miss MacIntosh and leaf through it a bit you can see its utility for Macon. I imagine he might get through ten or so pages of this dense prose in a trans-Atlantic flight. Then on the flight back he might plow through seven or eight more; then he can put the book away until his next long flight. It will be there, waiting for him, this world of Miss MacIntosh, a world that will never end because he’ll most likely never finish the book. And there’s something very calming about visiting a world which, unlike our own, will never end. Macon may be in a steel contraption hurtling dubiously over an ocean between one chaotic and annoying airline terminal and another, but in the world of Miss MacIntosh he is separate, and safe.
Proust is my Miss MacIntosh, my refuge, my other world, except I read it when I’m not traveling.
I’ve been reading In Search of Lost Time off and on for years, and am now somewhere in the fifth volume of the Modern Library edition. I take months off at a time, but it’s always fun to dive back in. If it’s been a particularly long gap, I have to back up a bit, just to re-orient myself, figure out what is or sometimes is not going on.
Now Proust is the opposite of a page turner. He’s a page-returner. I read a sentence, or a paragraph, then read it again. Then I stare off into space. Then I read the passage again. The thing about Proust is you can’t just read him and let yourself be carried along the way most good writers will carry you along. You have to carry yourself along. Proust doesn’t make it easy for you to keep up with him, but then he never makes it any harder than it has to be in order for him to get his ideas across. if Proust needs a sentence to run for a whole page (with two or three parenthetical asides), then that sentence will run for a page, even if it is part of a paragraph that runs for three or four pages. Is this easy? Hell no. Is it rewarding? Infinitely.
Some people like to climb Mount Everest. I’m sure this is slightly difficult, but apparently the maniacs who climb Mount Everest get something out of it. So it is with the maniacs who enjoy reading In Search of Lost Time.
But I don’t want to give the impression that the book is inherently deadly or forbidding. Proust’s voice is a good-humored, good-natured voice, a wise voice. If David Foster Wallace, another author infamous for his verbosity, is (to me!) like a smart guy who sits next to you on the plane to Europe who at first seems really witty and brilliant but after an hour or two you just wish he would put a lid on it for a while and let you read your Richard Stark thriller, Proust is the guy who might shyly start to talk to you, asking questions about yourself and your family and job, what books and movies and music you like, and then he’ll start talking about anything at all and he’s so brilliant that you don’t want him to stop talking, even though he’ll keep saying, “Oh, but I should shut up, I’m boring you, you talk for a bit!â€Â
There is a plot to In Search of Lost Time, but you’re barely aware of it while reading the book, just as we’re barely aware of the plots of our own lives. The book is a story of a man’s life, a gentle, social, intellectual, art-loving man who suffers from rather precarious health and who fortunately doesn’t have to work for a living. But his life and his heart is full, with books and music and art, with family and friendships and conversation, and with love affairs, each one somehow more gloriously tortuous than the one before. The man writes about all of this, not just bringing it to life the way all good novelists do but somehow taking an event or an idea and taking you deeper into it, and then deeper still, so that when you pause at the end of a passage you don’t rush headlong into the next but sit there, as I said, staring off into space. It’s like at a museum — a painting stops you. You don’t want to go on. You want to live with this painting for a while. Or a piece of music, an aria, a guitar or sax solo — you listen, and then you think, okay, I’m going to listen to that again.
The only way to appreciate Proust’s famous long rolling passages is just to start reading the book, but he does sprinkle the work with innumerable small gems, so I’ll pull out some random, short samplings (these are all from the current Modern Library translation):
“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.â€Â
“Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.â€Â
“The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else.â€Â
“Her friend had extraordinarily bright eyes, like a glimpse through an open door in a dark house, of a room into which the sun is shining with a greenish reflection from the glittering sea.â€Â
“…a certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we successively love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, apt, that is to say, to gratify our senses and wring our hearts.â€Â
“The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once.â€Â
“There is nothing like desire for preventing the things that one says from bearing any resemblance from what one has in one’s mind.â€Â
“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.â€Â
I suppose someday I’ll finish In Search of Lost Time, if I live long enough. But I won’t be sad when I read, and re-read that last sentence. You see, I’m working on my French, and my goal is that by the time I’m done with the Modern Library translation my French will be good enough to start in on the original. And that should last me at least until I’m ninety.
(This has been a special Newcritics exclusive for Quinn/Martin Productions; check out my joint for some cheap laughs.)
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Proust was undoubtedly nervous, too. I know he suffered from migraines. He wrote in bed. His bed-room was lined in cork. He once banished a friend from ever visiting him again, because he hated the guy's cologne. Not only did he write his six-volume masterpiece, but belle lettres galore. So he wrote to the friend complaining months after their last visit that he had removed everything that had been in his room that day, all the furniture even, but the stink remained.
What do you think? Was the cologne lavender-scented? Perhaps with a lime top note. That, Proust never said.
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Manny, here's the deal. Just give Proust a shot when you really have the time and inclination, because it does take some real effort, especially the very beginning of the book, which has just about no action for fifty or so pages while the narrator talks about not being able to go to sleep when he was a little kid. If you can make it past that overture you just may be on your way. Also, I'd suggest trying the new Modern Library edition which is based on, but a revision of, the old Montcrieff translation that you have.
Or, what the hell, just read War & Peace or The Brothers Karamazov instead!
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Most "important" books I've tackled on my own, long after college. I suppose I could tackle this too.
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PS. Manny and I still show up with the same avatar, even though he's using a separate computer. MyBlogLog says it can't be helped unless he start his own blog from another abode, which is unlikely.
Readers take note: Although we're very close, we're VERY different. newcritics pinpoints the many areas where we disagree most. Apparently it doesn't bother Manny.
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Kevin, I was somewhat disappointed by "How Proust Can Change Your Life" -- it just seemed a little facile to me, although in aid of a good cause I suppose, i.e. getting people to read Proust. I'd say just go ahead and give the big book a shot and see what happens.
And Kathleen, you're so right, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are much easier to read than Proust. In fact I kind of miss the Russians, and as I mentioned to Bob Stein down below I've had "Anna Karenina" sitting on my shelf just waiting for me actually to pick it up and read it for some time now.
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Everyone needs a crutch. There are various helps -- Terence Kilmartin I think compiled a character, place, and motif index, and there are various other summaries. As to movies, I found the version of Swann in Love with Jeremy Irons repellant, and the more recent (and star-studded) Time Regained charming although incomprehensible to anyone who has not read the books. My favorite pony is Harold Pinter's unproduced "The Proust Screenplay" (which did have a stage performance in London a few years back). It manages to pick out a few main themes and follow them all the way through in a comprehensible although non-linear narrative structure.
A warning about the Penguin translation: you can buy all the volumes in Canada. Because of the vagaries of US copyright law, the last volume can't be published in the USA for many years to come.
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I console myself with the thought that when "Recherche" first came out it was in installments stretching from, what, 1913 to 1927, and so the people who first read it took an even longer time to do so than I will (maybe).
Any other slow readers out there?
I'm still pushing for the Modern Library translation -- all questions of toning down Moncrieff's purple-osity aside, it works from the latest revised French text, which was not available to Scott Moncrieff, and again, I find its English to be impeccable if very English. And, yes, in the last volume Kilmartin provides a valuable appendix of names, themes, characters and places -- very good for a clod like me who might take six months off because all of a sudden he must read all of Thomas Wolfe or something.
I'm with you on the movie of "Swann in Love". How could a movie with such a director (Schlondorff), such a cast (Irons, Delon, etc.), Sven Nykvist behind the camera, written by Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière -- how could this movie turn out so boring?
"Time Regained" (Raul Ruiz) to me was much better; it might be a decent intro to someone interested in tackling the book, just for its beauty and for Malkovich's Charlus, but with the proviso you mentioned, that they won't know what the hell is going on.
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My approach has been to read 1 volume of Lost Time, then to read 1 of something else. I started sometime in the spring and I expect to finish by next spring, maybe before the end of this year. It's working for me.
I've been picking up the volumes as they turn up at local used book stores, using Amazon when I get to a volume I couldn't find that way. Mostly it's been Moncrieff, in some cases as revised by Kilmartin and Enright, some not. I just found the 4th volume used, in the new Penguin translation; if I'd realized it at the time I probably would've held out for Moncrieff et al., but what the heck, a little variety will probably be interesting in its own way. The 2 volumes of the Modern Library edition that I've read have been good, so I can second Dan's recommendation.
[The NY Review of Books reviewer (Andre Aciman) was lukewarm at best on the Penguin translation of Swann's Way (Lydia Davis), and he just hated their translation of Budding Grove (James Grieve), but I haven't seen reviews of the later volumes. I'm comforted by J. Burruss's comment above that "it still sounds like Proust".]
I have found that Proust's reputation for being a difficult read is a little overstated. Lost Time is certainly very long, which is a sort of difficulty in its own right, but it's not hard the way that I've found Joyce or, say, Pynchon to be hard. (Some is harder than others, with both those guys.) You don't get the long conversations without explicit indications of the speaker as in Joyce, and you don't get plunged into the middle of conversations with very little indication of the context as with Pymchon (at least in Mason & Dixon). You don't get unpunctuated stream of consciousness. What you do get are some rather long sentences featuring lots of descriptive clauses, which often feature multiply-embedded descriptive clauses of their own. Sometimes it's a bit of a puzzle, for a given such description, what exactly it's meant to describe, but it usually becomes clear by the end of the sentence. There's a certain amount of carrying a clause along in your head while you're trying to figure out who exactly it modifies, which admittedly can be some work; but that's about it for difficulty. I find that you get used to it; however, Dan's method of reading intermittently and in small chunks surely would make it harder to get accustomed to this sort of thing.
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I think it's especially apt that you treat Proust as vacation reading; the book strikes me as having a very vacation-y feel to it, specifically a beach-vacation feel, the kind of vacation where you get up in the morning, you go for a swim, you have a little lunch, you read a little, go for another swim, maybe watch a little baseball, read a little more.... No hurry, take your time. I read a decent sized chunk of Budding Grove during just such a vacation this summer and, especially given that it mostly takes place at Balbec, the mood of the book seemed well suited to the mood of the vacation.
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Now that I think about it again, I strongly recommend picking up the sixth and final volume of the Modern Library edition, which contains the final book -- "Time Regained" -- because of the great "Guide to Proust" in the back of the volume. You've probably already noticed Proust's lovable way of blithely bringing out from the wings a character he hasn't even mentioned in quite some time; with the guide you can quickly look up the character and get a brief identification along with a listing of all his previous appearances. For instance, in the book I'm reading now, "The Captive", M. Brichot suddenly strolls up on p.260, when he hasn't been seen since near the end of the previous book, "Sodom and Gomorrah". I love the way Proust does this, but the "Guide" is great for those times when you just draw a blank or want a quick refresher.
One of my correspondents (initials BG) told me that she just started the first volume and after reading the first ten pages fell into a deep nap. I think that Proust himself would have heartily approved. What better way to bring on some rich dreams than by drifting off with "In Search of Lost Time"?
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My post ate your comment? Now I'm really mixed up. By all means please send it in again if it somehow got eaten. I love comments. In the meantime I've read a few more sentences from "The Captive". Like this one, which is so Marcel:
"Unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable as regards everything that concerns the life of a certain person, so that a lie -- that most harmless of things, in the midst of which we live so unconcernedly, whether the lie be told by ourselves or by others -- coming from that person, causes that little heart, which we ought to be able to have surgically removed, intolerable spasms."
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I can't recall all of my comment... but do know that you are now expected to make
madeleines for this year's holiday bake-off.
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Here's some good recipes:
http://frenchfood.about.com/library/weekly/aa02...
I can make the tea though. I confess to being a horrible tea snob. Every day I make a pot of loose Irish breakfast tea that I buy by the pound at Old City Coffee at the Reading Terminal here in Philadelphia.
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I am reading the Modern Library Paperback Edition. For a few years, the series has been coming out at least here in Canada with complementary covers that fit together on the bookshelfâ€â€when I own them all and have placed them in order, their spines will create a picture. While appealing to the collector in me, this has also caused me endless hours of dithering and consternation because I read Swann’s Way in the Vintage Classic edition and it doesn’t match the subsequent volumes I have purchased. What to do? What to do? If I were to buy Volume I of the matching set (or so I have been thinking), how could I live with it there on the shelf, knowing it was not the actual book with which I had spent so many hours reading it mainly in my bed, as Proust had written it in his? And what would I do with the other Volume I, the one I had read? How could I put it on the shelf beside its stand in? Would I need to complete that set as well in order to sleep soundly? But now, thankfully, Dan Leo has given me an elegant solution to my dilemmaâ€â€I’ll simply read Swann’s Way again after reading all the others, and thereby legitimize the ownership of both versions of the book. (However, I guess I’d better buy the rest of the set I’m reading now, before another design comes out.)
With Volume IV, I am suddenly finding Proust readable in a way he hadn’t been for me before. I haven’t been able to decide whether he just dropped a very readable section right into the middle of his novel, or whether I’m acquiring an “ear†for Proust’s writing style, as I have in the past after immersing myself in other writersâ€â€Shakespeare, for example, or Russell Hoban’s dialect in Riddley Walker, or Jose Saramago, whose lack of punctuational signposts especially regarding dialogue can be mightily confusing. (Compared to any of these, to my mind reading Tolstoy is like falling off a log, at least once you’ve figured out that everyone has at least three names). I imagine the latter explanation is closest to the truth – as Mike Molloy has said so wonderfully well, with time, I have grown more used to carrying Proust’s clauses along in my head.
With Volume IV, too, I have for the first time been noting with great pleasure – as Dan does – Proust’s wonderful ability to be concise (and the irony of that). I’ve even recently marked a few of his bon mots with a pencil (something I do not normally like to do with books, but I couldn’t help myself). They include this astonishing bit of character description: “His short-sightedness, since it caused him to see everything very small, gave him the appearance of seeing great distances so that â€â€rare poetry in a statuesque Greek God remote, mysterious stars seemed to be engraved upon his pupils,†and this observation, which may be as appropriate to embarking on Swann’s Way as it is to so many other circumstances in life, “For it is a fact that in the most genuine exhaustion there is, especially in highly-strung people, an element that depends on attention and is preserved only by an act of memory. We feel suddenly weary as soon as we are afraid of feeling weary, and, to throw off our fatigue, it suffices us to forget about it.â€Â
It gave me an odd feeling to make those pencil marks, however, knowing that it was unlikely that anyone else, or even me again, would ever get far enough into my copy of the novel to see them. It was a bit like firing a couple of sentences off into space in a time capsule, only in reverse; there was no connective tissue, and not even the taste of a madeleine, to draw them back again.
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