Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (Within a Budding Grove)

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In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

The two-minute 'Shadow'

Marcel makes quick work of Gilberte Swann. As with Swann before him, the more desperately he loves the girl, the less interest she displays in return. So he decides to put his love on ice, while maintaining his friendship with her parents.

Then, two years later, it's off to Balbec. (By my calculus, Marcel is now sixteen, and still astonishing dependent on his mother and grandmother.) He spends a seemingly endless summer at a grand hotel on the Normandy coast, watching strange places and people become familiar to him. He becomes an improbably close friend of the Guermantes aristocrat, Robert de Saint-Loup, and of the painter Elstir (whom we met as a foolish young man belonging to Madame Verdurin's "little clan" in Swann's Way). He also meets the Baron de Charlus, who deigns to make a move on him, an overture which only mystifies Marcel.

More important than any of these is his acquaintance with the "little band" of girls whom he describes as adolescent, and who sometimes behave that way, but who surely are older. Indeed, two of them seem to be sitting for the bac or high-school leaving exam, which Proust passed — in economics and mathematics — just as he turned eighteen. (There is also the matter of the book's title: some argue that "en fleur" is a reference to the menarche, which in 1900 was about fourteen for European and North American girls. Indeed, according to his grand-niece and biographer, that's why Scott Moncrieff felt he had to bowdlerize Proust's title for the book.)

Marcel focuses his adoration, first on one, then on another of these young women, but it is obvious to everyone except him that Albertine Simonet will be the love of his life.

Evolving characters, revisiting the past

One of Proust's great themes (and talents!) is showing character and how it changes over time. In the second volume of his masterwork, he deals with friendship, including the curious sort of friendship that is carnal love. How do we bridge the gap between the stranger and the dear person he or she will become, as friend or lover? First up: Gilberte Swann, whom Marcel first adores and then, after considerable pain, trains himself to ignore. Then there's Robert de Saint-Loup, so marvelous that the modern reader wants to kick him in the pants. And of course there is Albertine, the obsession toward which Marcel has been working all this time.

He is equally adept with the pretentious and social-climbing Bloch, whom we met in Swann's Way as a "precious youth," greatly admired by the narrator. That admiration has now been qualified. Just as the homosexual Proust is often harsh in his treatment of "inverts," so does he, the son of a Jewish mother, verge on anti-semitism in his ridicule of Bloch's family, especially the uncle, Nissim Bernard. (Bloch's first name is Albert, though I confess I had to look it up. Nor does he have much in the way of physical characteristics. He's a year or two older than Marcel, though they were schoolmates at one time.)

As the title suggests, memory is a major theme of In Search of Lost Time. The author's understanding of memory is clearly stated in this second volume, in the words of James Grieve for the Penguin Proust:

[T]he greater part of our memory lies outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve ... the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away.... It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no longer care about.

This is what Roger Shattuck calls Proust's "binocular vision." Forgetting is as important as remembering! The crumb of madeleine dipped in herbal tea does not return us to the past: rather, and despite what Proust seems to be saying above, we bring the separation with us. It is this double vision that makes the experience so poignant.

The new translations

Proust was close to death when he saw the English translation of the first volume of his seven-part masterpiece, À la recherché du temps perdu. He fired off a letter (in English!) to the translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Calling it “Swann’s Way,” the author complained, was a bit misleading. As for “Remembrance of Things Past,” as Scott Moncrieff had titled the novel as a whole, that was wildly mistaken!

Not at all chastened, Scott Moncrieff went on to bowdlerize the title of volume two, so that À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs appeared as “Within a Budding Grove.” Apparently “in flower,” in the Britain of 1924, was too honest a reference to female puberty. Similarly, he would soften Sodome et Gomorrhe, with its too-obvious reference to homosexuality, so that it became “Cities of the Plain.”

These howlers apart, Scott Moncrieff’s translation was justly celebrated as a masterpiece in its own right. All subsequent translators have drawn upon his gifted prose, though the titles, happily, have become truer to the French.

For the Penguin/Viking In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, James Grieve swings a bit wilder than Lydia Davis did for Swann's Way. Where Scott Moncrieff translated petite bande (of girls) with "little band," Grieve uses "little gang." As an Australian, he is perhaps unaware of how "gang" sounds to an American ear. (Grieve earlier translated Swann's Way in an edition published by Australian National University. A sample from that book appears in Dueling Madelines, elsewhere on this website.)

Then there is the astonishing conversation between Bloch and Marcel, referring back to an occasion when Marcel was walking in the Bois-de-Boulogne with Gilberte and her mother. Along comes Bloch, who takes his hat off to Odette without eliciting any recognition from her; afterward, she mystifies Marcel by referring to Bloch by an altogether different name. Now, at Balbec, Bloch is anxious to discover her name, but Marcel is so puzzled that he doesn't oblige. Bloch then rattles on to claim an sexual romp with Madame Swann. This is how it appears in the original:

"En tous cas, tous mes compliments, me dit-il, tu n'as pas dû t'embêter avec elle. Je l'avais rencontrée quelques jours auparavant dans le train de Ceinture. Elle voulut bien dénouer la sienne en faveur de ton serviteur...."

In Within a Budding Grove, Scott Moncrieff translated this quotation in words superficially close to the original, though baffling to a 21st century American, who has never ridden a Zone (circumferential) railroad, nor heard "zone" used as a synonym for a woman's girdle:

"Whoever she is," he went on, "hearty congratulations; you can't have been bored with her. I picked her up a few days before that on the Zone railway, where, speaking of zones, she was so kind as to undo hers for the benefit of your humble servant...."

For the Modern Library edition, Kilmartin and Enright follow this language almost exactly, but Mr Grieve translates much more freely:

"Well, anyway," he said, "you deserve to be congratulated—she must have given you a nice time. I had just met her a few days before, you see, riding on the suburban line. She had no objection to yours truly, and so a nice ride was had by one and all...."

For the Yale University Press edition of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, William Carter had the happy inspiration of using the American term "Beltway" for le train de Ceinture, which fits so nicely with the idea of Odette's taking off her "belt" — if Bloch is telling the truth and she did indeed take if off! (In Proust's time, the circumferential Chemin de Fer de Petite Ceinture or "little belt railroad" connected all the train stations of Paris. It has since been abandoned.)

Much the same is true of one of my favorite passages of Proust's, which I have underlined in all my editions of the novel:

"It is one of the systems of hygiene among which we are at liberty to choose our own, a system that is perhaps not to be recommended too strongly, but it gives us a certain tranquility with which to spend what remains of life, and also — since it enables us to regret nothing, by assuring us that we have attained the best, and that the best did not amount to much — with which to resign ourselves to death."

Isn't that lovely? It's from Carter's Shadow (page 573) but just about the same as in the three-volume Random House edition of Remembrance of Things Past that I acquired in the 1980s. I read it aloud to a Harvard freshman whom my daughter fetched home for Thanksgiving dinner, with some other strays who lived in distant countries or had no home to go to. Edward confessed that Harvard was a disappointment; he had grown up in the ghetto, and he'd expected to enter an entirely new life in Cambridge, only to find that his classmates were all over-bright, upward-striving youngsters just like himself. I don't know if Proust was any consolation, but Edward had indeed attained the best. If he'd matriculated instead at CCNY, he might have spent the rest of his life wishing he'd aimed higher.

In my judgment, Grieve falls far short in his version:

"[T]herein lies one of the modes of mental hygiene available to us, which, though it may not be the most recommendable, can certainly afford us a measure of equanimity for getting through life and — since it enables us to have no regrets, by assuring us that we have had the best of things, and that the best of things was not up to much — of resigning us to death."

Recommendable? Equanimity? I don't think so!

Which translation to buy?

Altogether, I cast my vote for the Yale University Press edition of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Like James Grieve, William Carter often goes back to the original to improve Scott Moncrieff's sometimes musty language. To prepare for this reading, I downloaded the public-domain e-books, both in English and in French, so I could compare the language to that of Scott Moncrieff and, where it had changed, to the Proustian original. Really, there's scarcely a sentence that Mr. Carter hasn’t changed, always for the better and often getting closer to Proust’s

For example: when Marcel first enters the grand seaside hotel at Balbec, where he’ll meet those young girls in flower, he is awed by the majesty of the elevator boy. He tries to placate him with chatter, but “il ne me répondit pas.” Scott Moncrieff rendered this as “he vouchsafed no answer,” phrasing which appears unchanged in today's Modern Library edition. Mr. Carter is more straightforward: “he did not answer me.” Just so!

To his credit, James Grieve also gets this right. But I cannot forgive him "the little gang" or his butchering of my favorite passage.

Buy the Yale/Carter edition at at Amazon's US store -- or at other Amazon stores around the world.

Warning: don't rely on Amazon links or reader reviews, because the store doesn't distinguish between the Modern Library, Penguin, Yale, and 1920 public domain translations!

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