READING PROUST

(In Search of Lost Time, with special attention to the translations from Penguin/Viking)

This is, as I had expected, a difficult but rewarding read. I don't agree with everything Prof. Landy says, notably his dismissal of the notion that Gilberte and especially Albertine are female names bestowed upon essentially male characters. (The argument goes like this: Albertine can't be a guy because her assumed lesbian activities don't make any sense. I don't at all agree with that. If the love of Marcel's life were actually Albert, and if Albert were bisexual, then the threat to Marcel's happiness would come from the entire universe of women, as I argue elsewhere.) Similarly, the dismissal of the madeleine imagery--and all that worrying about whether the novel's narrator is actually writing the book we are reading!--strike me as too tortured by half. But I'm still working my way through!

I greatly enjoyed reading Edmund de Waal's affectionate memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. The first third is replete with Proustiana, because one of his ancestors, and the man who collected the netsuke icons that are the core of the book, was a model for Charles Swann. Proust of course knew Charles Ephrussi, so he appears from time to time in the text. But even more fun is finding the correspondences between the two Charleses. Swann is a brilliant amateur of Vermeer; Ephrussi, of Dürer. "He has languages," de Waal writes, "he has money and he has time. So now he sets off wandering. Like a well-brought-up young man, Charles goes south. He goes to Italy." He is writing about Ephrussi, as it happens, but he could equally well be speaking of the fictional Swann.

How this project began

I started reading Swann's Way a couple times before a pal challenged me to read the whole of the novel with him. Every Wednesday on his way to the law office where he was a low-level attorney, he'd stop by my room (it had a kitchen but wasn't really an apartment). We'd drink coffee, smoke(!), and talk about Proust. Egging each other on in this fashion, we both finished the novel before the year was out.

Ten years later, I read the novel again—and aloud—to my wife over the course of two winters. (One of the French deconstructionists, arguing that one can't just study a novel by itself, because it's a collaborative venture between the author and the reader, cinched his case by pointing out: "After all, who has read every word of À la recherche du temps perdu?" It pleased me hugely to be able to say, if only silently, "I did!")

That was the handsome, two-volume Random House edition of the novel, entitled Remembrance of Things Past, the first six books rendered into English by Charles Scott Moncrieff and the seventh by Frederick Blossom. (Scott Moncrieff died before finishing his task, which is probably the reason Penguin decided to employ seven different translators for its 21st century Proust.) When Kilmartin's reworking came out in the 1990s, I acquired that, too, but only read pieces of it—notably book seven, The Past Recaptured, greatly improved over the rather lame Blossom translation. Otherwise, however, Remembrance of Things Past was still hobbled by the post-Victorian prose of Scott Moncrieff.

Then came the new Penguin editions, the first four volumes of which have now been published in the U.S. by Viking. After reading a rave review of vol. 2—In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower—I realized that I would have to read it. On second thought, I decided to start from the beginning with the new Swann's Way. It was a good decision. Lydia Davis did a wonderful job with the first volume, and by the time I'd lulled Little Marcel to sleep (on page 43 in this edition), I knew that I was once again in for the long haul. So I set out to acquire a complete set of hardcover books—not so easy, as matters turned out! I read them in sequence, and I have reported on them here.

The novel according to Penguin

• Swann's Way (In Britain: The Way by Swann's) (tr. Lydia Davis)
• In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (tr. James Grieve)
• The Guermantes Way (tr. Mark Treharne)
• Sodom and Gomorrah (tr. John Sturrock)
• The Prisoner (tr. Carol Clark)
• The Fugitive (tr. Peter Collier)
• Finding Time Again (tr. Ian Patterson)

And for extra credit :)

• A first cut at comparing the two "Lost Times"
• Dueling madeleines (Lydia Davis v. C.K. Scott Moncrieff)
• Why doesn't Viking publish the rest of them?
• "A Short View of Proust" (Edmund Wilson, 1928)
• Marcel goes to the movies
• In search of Proust: biographies and commentary
• In search of Proust: the comix!
• Private Proust at Coligny Caserne
• The love of his life: all about Albertine
• What would Marcel make of the Kindle? (digital editions)

But why bother?

The French sometimes boast that they have a Shakespeare for every generation, or at least for every century, while we Anglophones are stuck with Will's originals. Well, now we can say the same about Proust!

Beyond that, I've seen it argued that literary French has changed little over the past hundred years, while English most certainly has, under the battering of such writers as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. (Whatever you say about Charles Scott Moncrieff, he probably never read Ulysses and he certainly was unfamiliar with the noisy young journalist who stormed into Paris in 1921.) However that may be, it's nice to have a freshened version of Proust's prose, and one that arguably is closer to the original than the one rendered by Scott Moncrieff in the 1920s.

(Proust, Joyce, and Hemingway! It's pleasant to think that my three favorite writers once breathed the same air in Paris. Indeed, Joyce and Proust once met at a party ... and had little or nothing to say to one another.)