Swann’s Way
The gateway to a full-on Proust habit. About varieties of love: eros (carnal), agape (unconditional/motherly), societal (admiration), divine (mystical/aesthetic). That last one isn’t old-fashioned denominational GOD LOVE, but more like a recognition of the wonder of existence/beauty, often tinged with a wistfulness, or melancholy, since the instance of divine love is experienced without warning or reason and then only remembered/recaptured with decreasing intensity thereafter. Importantly, this sort of divine love requires one to have an innate capacity to experience moments of incapacitating/life-elevating beauty. The narrator has it, Swann does too, others also suggest an experience of rapture. (Others not so much — I’m looking at you, Odette). Everyone knows the famous madeleine, but the other similar motifs/vehicles of ecstatic beauty come to the reader in passages just as good/memorable/beautiful about pink hawthorns and a phrase in a sonata. Not the stuff of visceral plot-driven fiction, alas. No plot. It’s also about the experience of TIME, of course, and the book’s length and approach exercise the reader’s memory and reinforce a sense that time in the novel has really passed, in part because it’s been days since you’d read a passage or image referred to later on. Sometimes felt suffused with chrysanthemum dust. Best when discussing solo apprehension of the divine. Slowest when about carnal superficial love and attendant tilt-a-whirl adolescent worries (like what little I’ve read of Balzac, Stendhal), and related highly calibrated societal sensitivities. Words I’d use to describe the prose and approach would include mixolydian, serpentine, rapturous, velveteen. At times like a psychedelic Stendhal, sort of. Good call by the translators to name the first volume Swann’s Way instead of Meseglise Way, the true name of the path but not nearly as catchy a title! 4.5 stars rounded up for canonical status and the sense that it must be re-read to really appreciate once the whole thing’s been completed. It’s clear now that I’m 250 pages into the second volume that the prose in the first volume is softer, sort of prissier, redolent of youth in the country, more innocent than it is at least later on when it offers plenty of writer-related talk and brothels. A good time of year to read this stuff — something about it matches the light in September (ie, it’s “radiant” or “luminous”), although that might also have to do with the beautifully formatted Modern Library paperbacks. Or D. J. Enright’s work on Terence Kilmartin’s revision of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s original translation.
Within A Budding Grove
Now just past his adolescent years, our nameless little narrator friend spends time at the Balbec beach and basks in the ambit of some fine young lasses after chatting with a kindly ambassador and a famous (albeit brutishly dressed and mannered!) writer he admires. The bits with Bergotte, the great writer, were fun — I love great writers as imagined by great writers (the only others I can think of are Arnheim in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1, and Archimiboldi/Hans Reiter in 2666). I’m having trouble recapturing all that’s covered in this one, particularly early on, since I somehow started it about six weeks ago. Good to see Swann and Odette years later, comparatively settled down, to feel like I’d experienced their most passionate episodes and now know them well, can see the world through their eyes and appreciate changes in character. Little narrator dude alludes to time spent in a brothel, just chatting of course, and in general seems a lot less wispily enthralled by pink hawthorns. Once he travels to the beach, he recognizes young yearning ladies but has a low estimation of his ill self and sort of holds his tail between his legs and talks not of sharing in their yearning but appreciating young ladies for how interesting they might be, something which at first seemed indicative of the author/narrator’s sexuality but also nicely setup a change of tune (from bashful whistle to let’s get it on) after hundreds of pages. Narrator hangs with some male folks his age, particularly Saint-Loup, who really stands out at first, erect as a silver bishop on the swirly shifting societal chess board, a kind kindred aristocratic kid for Marcel to marvel at and befriend. For the most part, over 730 pages, all that really happens (ie, in terms of a concentrated burst of action) is he tries to mack on a hot little lady who’s asked him to come sit by her bedside after pressing on his hand, giving him meaningful looks, and speaking “the language of affection” with him, and so when he leans in to kiss her . . . I won’t give it away since it’s a relatively pleasurable payoff on page 701. This long second installment seems a little more solid as narrator comes into his own, essentially sides with writing over an ambassadorial career, and then develops his eye for beauty in art, nature, and pale little dark-haired ladies wired to please, all near the sea with its sets of waves as liquidy and luminously lapidary as the prose, as always. A cathedral is associated with rocky cliffs along the sea while talking to a cool painter guy who sees everything’s intricacy and serves as role model and ambassador to the girls. Something continually of interest is the lack of Christian religious significance/influence and the suggestion that a sort of mystical artistic perception (all elements of life imbued with beauty) transforms the world into a cathedral. The end’s very much about the first stirrings of adolescent eros, whose innocence is underscored by the hysterical tilt-a-whirl romance between Swann and Odette in the “Swann in Love” section of Swann’s Way. This one ends with the recognition of his reserve of passion within, sort of how the first one ended with recognition of his reserve of divine love/artistic perception. It’s not so much a “five star” book in itself — some stretches really dragged and others soared — but the overall project (its themes, characters, settings, execution, insight, and particularly its language of course) is without a doubt at least seven stars. Monumental without being monstrous at all.
The Guermantes Way
Five stars for the project, four stars for the bulk of this installment, although it leaps beyond stars every once in a while, which keeps me reading/rating it five stars. It’s tough to pull off hundreds of pages of shallow conversations in super-rich salons of bygone Paris, but MP does it. Scenes of conversations among sometimes insufficiently characterized artistocratic characters is exactly the sort of stereotype old-timey canonical novels come up against when derided by those who’ve never read them. Questions readers tend to ask are: 1) what the heck are they talking about and 2) who the heck’s talking anyway? Within those scenes are nuggets, morsels, scrumptious bon mots for the attentive reader to savor, but I often found myself fighting upstream through these long passages to get to the good stuff for me in Proust: Marcel rehashing things solo, self-analyzing, taking off on essayistic benders. Like in The Magic Mountain, another major modernist touchstone, where Hans gets caught in a blizzard and the novel hits an eighteen-star peak, in this one, at the beginning of section two, more than midway through, I think, the self-contained ~30 pages about Marcel’s granny are about as good as it gets in lit. The sort of thing that’s so good, so affecting, so smoothly rendered, so poignant, as they say, that the light of proceedings streaming fore and aft is refracted through its prism (I hope you’re picturing the cover of “The Dark Side of Moon”) — like these ~30 pages of serious meaningfulness focus and color the narrator’s grayscale social ambitions, emotional longings, and disillusionment with it all.
Sodom and Gomorrah
Let’s say three stars for interminable party scenes and seven stars for solo Marcel going on about grandma and dreams and seeing an airplane for the first time (maybe my favorite page/paragraph so far — the end of 581 and most of 582). Oh place names reduced to their historical tribal derivation and places reduced to fancy homes where one is always welcome. That’s sort of like the opposite of the madeline-induced association — instead of something small mysteriously opening up rich far-reaching memories, experience transforms the wide-open endless mysteries of a girl on the beach, the name of a town along a train route, and the lofty aristocratic salons of Paris to something lesser/known if not quite quotidian. Oh Marcel, you lover of mystery, you mystic (pink hawthorns, Vinteuil’s little phrase, Elstir’s radiant sea cliffs), always flipping/flopping between incantations of adoration and indifference (whatever it takes to win the girl). Mostly didn’t like how narrator condescends to his characters but toward the end I saw the point that he’d been disillusioned by, first, Parisian aristocratic circles and then Balbec’s fancy/pretentious untitled folks. Spoiler: everyone’s an invert. Loved the opening essay on inverts. (I love the word invert.) Albertine waltzing with a female friend in a mutally arousing way, with tah-tahs touching — shocking! I don’t have too much to say about how Marcel handles inversion. I suppose it’s outdated but also, as a reader, I couldn’t help being like dude the reason you’re flipping and flopping about marrying Albertine and worried about her lady lovin’ is that you, the author, clearly want to press your chest to the chest of someone named Albert. Didn’t quite buy narrator’s freakout about Albertine toward the end — seemed histrionic/forced — but loved the cliffhanger. In general, glad this one’s over and glad I made it through. The prose pulls you through even if the characters don’t seem as loved by the author as much as the artists Bergotte and Elstir, or revered friends like Saint-Loup. M. de Charlus (extraordinarily well characterized after hundreds of pages devoted to the book’s most variable prickly invert supreme) and Morel (at this point, not much more than a cutout quarry of a handsome virtuoso violinist) are not the most charming folks. Nevertheless, dog-eared dozens of pages, especially toward the end, of Proust-y excellence. Flowing insight wins the day and makes the dual whirlpools of not always so scintillating chitchat worthwhile. Five stars for In Search of Lost Time so far — four stars for this volume.
The Captive and the Fugitive
The longest book I’ve ever read, longer than those with many more pages. I don’t mean the complete Search — I’m referring to this volume, a mere 936 pages that took me forever. If I’m honest with this impression, I should admit that I find Proust sort of stupefying most of the time. I can only read 15 pages at a time without dosing off or reaching for my phone. But every once in a while there’s an image or insight that makes it all worthwhile. I mean, the book is regularly studded with the best of things I look for in books, my copy is regularly dogeared, but this installment is dense and nutso. For the most part, Marcel is with Albertine but doesn’t want to be with her (“The Captive”), but once she’s gone (“The Fugitive”) he’s obsessed with her again, madly in love, until he learns of her sudden spoiler alert. Most of the musing seems to be about whether Albertine is getting it on with women. The finest section, up there with the description of the grandmother’s death, describes Albertine asleep. It’s not riveting but it’s surely real good and maybe even the best ever. Other bits take off, especially about music and Venice but they’re not as clear as the bit about Albertine sleeping. When Proust’s prose clarifies an image, be it a little phrase in a concerto, pink hawthorns, an airplane rising into the sky, or his lover asleep, he’s the best. For me, when he brings the aristocracy on stage, he doesn’t totally falter at all but I fall asleep. Memorable bits in this include asking Andree if he can watch as she gets it on with another woman — or at least gently caresses a woman’s arm. Also, the revelation about M. de Charlus and Odette, and about St. Loup at the end. In general, like in Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black,” this depicts (more in summary than in scene) the tilt-a-whirl game-playing dynamics of the ending of an intense relationship. The gist is: say or do exactly the opposite of what you really want to say or do — insincere concealment is essential to successful manipulation of a lover. As a non-reader, I hate that shit so much, but on the page, it’s less frustrating/childish, although Marcel is starting to seem more and more to me like a manipulative obsessive sociopath. I mean, he can’t seem to look at a young lady without wondering if she’s a lesbian. In the end, it seems like he wrote 900+ pages of this volume so he could embed this bit of straightforward editorializing: “Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one’s pleasure with a man or woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it” (p 934). The violinist signs his letters to male lovers “Bobette” — similarly I don’t think I’ve ever really totally believed that Albertine (who at one points wants her “pot broken,” a euphemism for buggery) is not actually an Albert — Gilberte is a thinly veiled Gilbert and Andree is really an Andre. Also, Marcel at one point says he’ll get the commoner Albertine a yacht and a Rolls Royce — the class stuff maybe makes me less a full-on lover of this? The prose is fantastic at times, the insight impeccable, but everything’s so high-falutin and a bit unbelievable, especially the society stuff. It’s hard to summarize since I’ve already forgotten so much, which seems like part of the point of Mr. Proust’s massive project — over time Marcel forgets Albertine; I’ve forgotten the first pages by the time I’ve reached the end. One more volume to go in the fall, before I read it all again 10 years from now. Also, the bare thigh on the cover of this one has maybe been photoshopped to the point of seeming unhealthily thin?
Time Regained
To say I’ve read the complete seven-volume novel now is truth and lie since it’ll take a few more trips down the pair of “ways” and “transversals” before I can really call this “read.” Maybe my favorite volume for the fifty-page stretch where M. explicitly addresses the work to come. Some of the best writing about writing I’ve read. Otherwise, threads are tied up — plus there’s literal tying up (bondage), pedophilia (only a mention), WWI in Paris, zeppelins and airplane fighters at night (the prose takes off during the wartime sections). Toward the end everything is degraded by age, war, perversion — entropy uber alles. The shortest and most accessible volume — I’d maybe even suggest that intrepid readers might want to try reading this first before Swann’s Way? Every fifth page dogeared. Proust, by this volume, has perfected his epigrammatic skills, for sure. Now at the end I have a better grasp on everyone in the world of Paris, Combray, Balbec and I’ll appreciate it more next time through — a volume a year every year forever. In this one, there was some satisfaction that M’s stated intentions regarding solitude and society, and the moments of perception that make life worth living, jibed with my impressions of the novel — it worked for me exactly as M. states he hoped it would. I experienced what had been experienced as the language sharpened as M. emphasized an impression’s importance — the maybe-too-famous madeleine, the pink hawthorns in bloom, the little phrase in the sonata, the aeroplane climbing the sky, his grandmother’s death, Albertine asleep, slipping on uneven paving stones, sitting in a library room conceiving this cathedral dress of an Arabian Nights-like masterpiece — ie, all these memorable solo ecstatic moments of sensory intensity rendered in riveting and superclear language, compared to long scenes in society of always perceptive yet oft-soporific calibrations of character. Loved that the church at Combray was ruined during the war; the image of old Odette; Charlus ultimately a depraved exaggeration of what he’d been; the tragic dissolution of Saint-Loup and the flat-bottom of his daughter’s nose, same as her mother and grandmother’s; M. the narrator dissolving into Marcel the author. As with most of these volumes, there were stretches were I was like will I really give this four stars? But then Proustian expository overdrive would kick in and save the day. Again, this was really just an introduction to a text I’m sure I’ll return to throughout life thanks to its wisdom and insight, its structure and exemplary language, its world and its riches.
*
And if you’ve scrolled this far down the page you might be interested in this:
Proust: The Search by Benjamin Taylor
Loved this short bio focused on Proust’s transition from social-climbing gadabout dilettante to the next Stendhal thanks to the conception, execution, and reception of In Search of Lost Time, his “telescope fixed upon time.”
The prose is dignified, flowing, accessible, not quite aping Proust but in a similar direction, with a similar spirit. It’s also not at all fawning or overcelebratory or sensationalist — a few times it calls out Marcel for being foolish to suggest that he’d pay for printings of his books, for example, and there’s a bit about Marcel’s penchant for autoerotic manual manipulation while two starved caged rats are released to eviscerate one another. The author gapes aghast along with the reader. A percentage of the text is dedicated to inversion, mostly in terms of source material for his great inverts, but most of it focuses on the budding and flowering of The Search, for example Marcel’s pivotal translations of John Ruskin (downloaded the complete Ruskin ebook for $2 as a result):
“Art divinizes, according to Ruskin, according to Proust. Of course the great difference between them was, as Tadie says, that the ‘Bible lay at the heart of Ruskin’s aesthetics; it was his religious fervor that had guided his religious feelings; Proust would retain the divine without the religion.’ Judaism and Christianity, the enemy creeds of Marcel’s maternal and paternal ancestors, had beautifully canceled out in him. He was what he would remain: a congregation of one.”
Of course it’s also compelling to learn about the provenance of the little phrase in the sonata, or that the source model for Albertine was actually an Alfred, or that the primary model for Charlus is the same as Des Esseintes in Huysman’s Against Nature (Au Rebours).
Also confirms that Swann’s Way and Time Regained were composed simultaneously — one day I intend to read The Search backwards, or at least start with TR and then SW before reading the others. Will most likely read the Tadie bio at one point but not right away. For now, this more than sufficed as an introduction to Proust’s life. Also worth it for descriptions of his late-life appearance as a sort of Jewish Howard Hughes, emaciated, his paper-thin skin blue, his eyes in profile almost Asian, and the bit about his bathetic late-life encounter with James Joyce, not to mention elucidation of the social repercussions/semi-hysterical antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair.
A beautiful hardback that’s aptly weightier than it should be in a book so slight, with deckled edges, and a sweet Philip Roth blurb on the back.
*
To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).