Prepping for Proust

The modest Proust collection of my library minus a scattered book or two.  Notice the spines on the boxed set in the middle form a gentleman's detachable, stiff collar that was in style at the time Proust's novel was written. 

Aiming nebulously, my primary New Year’s Resolution is to reread Marcel Proust’s long novel, In Search of Lost Time.  I last read it back when I started this blog so my previous experiences with the novel can be found in an earlier post.  After many years attempting it, when I finally managed to start and actually finish Proust the first time I became fascinated with the author in my usual obsessive way.  I collected several biographies of Proust, various philosophical and critical studies of his novel, guidebooks, along with Proust’s earlier unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil, all of his short stories, and a few other related books.  I came to know the man and his work very well.

It’s been nine years since I last read the novel.  It’s high time I experience its atmospheric longevity and intricate intimacy again.  This will be my third reading.  In anticipation of that, I have spent much time recently thumbing through my modest Proust collection.  

Two thick and richly detailed biographies on Proust along with Philosophy as Fiction and a partial shot of the 1931 Random House edition of the novel, the first English translation.

Marcel Proust: A Life was written in 1996 but translated into English in 2000.  Jean-Yves Tadie’s biography is a wonderful blend of detailed personal facts about Proust and the evolution of the novel.  My favorite section of this entertaining 800-page bio is Tadie’s account of aspects of the novel Proust was actively working as he neared death.  He was desperately trying to complete sections of three different volumes but, in particular, he was preoccupied with fleshing out The Fugitive, the shortest, and most unfinished, part of the novel.  He died before he could give it the attention he had given to almost all of the rest of the novel.  

By coincidence, William C. Carter’s Marcel Proust: A Life was published the same year Tadie’s bio was translated.  Carter gives more details about Proust’s private life, his prowess for art and literary criticism, his perversions, his intimate tragedies, among other aspects of this sophisticated man.  Of course, much of the (also) 800-page bio is about the author giving birth to the novel.  But, whereas Tadie wades into Proust’s specific struggles with his sprawling narrative, Carter focuses more on Proust the person, once a bit of a gay playboy, the man who ultimately lived a hermit’s life, the wealthy class big tipper, who lived in a cork-lined bedroom to muffle-out street noise while he slept all day and wrote all night and struggled with his deteriorating health.

Of a philosophical nature, Samuel Becket wrote a widely acclaimed 96-page analysis of Proust’s work in 1931.  To me it is actually easier to read the long novel than for me to comprehend Beckett’s thick, heady critique.  How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) is an entertaining, entry-level read about Proust and the Proustian ideas contained in the novel that meanders into a sort of self-help manual.  Nostalgia was written in 1956 and suffers for it.  It nevertheless offers some great insights into the novel from psychological perspective.  Philosophy as Fiction (2004) dates more currently and is subtitled “Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust”, indicating its philosophical approach.  All of these books assist the reader in understanding the multiple levels of Proust’s novel, many philosophical themes are explored, Proust was a cerebral man.

Two excellent guidebooks have helped me see the book at a higher level and to keep up with the dozens of primary characters throughout the course of the novel.  David Ellison’s A Reader’s Guide to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (2010) is an excellent summation and analysis of the work’s many interlocking narratives with particular attention to words and phrases in French that are difficult to translate into English.  Patrick Alexander’s Marcel Proust’s Search For Lost Time: A Reader’s Guide (2007) is similar but adds a section on the dozens of main characters featured throughout the novel, which can come in handy from time to time, especially if the reader is new to the work.  I once corresponded quite a bit with Patrick via email when we were both members of a yahoo discussion group on Proust.  He is an interesting and highly approachable person.

Meanwhile, Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (2000) by Roger Shattuck takes a different route, comparing Proust to other writers on similar topics and dealing more with the novel’s themes as opposed to a chronology of the narrative.  It is illuminating in its revelation that the novel, fully narrated throughout by the “protagonist,” is actually a narration on different levels.  There is the “I” of the narrator as an older man reflecting back over the whole story, but there are also other levels of “I’s”, of different ages, often multiple levels simultaneously, throughout the course of the story.  This is rather obvious after Shattuck points it out, but I didn’t really notice that during my first reading of the book.

Three other books reveal details of Proust’s life and interests.  Proust in Love (2006) is another book by William C. Carter.  Here, Carter takes his biographical talents and reveals intimate details about Proust’s many sexual liaisons with particular attention paid to his failed relationships.  It is an interesting read and helps articulate why Proust was such a sensual writer – he was a highly sensual man until depression and illness took him.  Paintings in Proust (2008) is a marvelous treasure of an art book.  Splendidly published it covers over 400 paintings mentioned throughout the course In Search of Lost Time.  An amazing work.  More modest but just as interesting is Monsieur Proust’s Library (2012).  Proust was an avid reader and this book looks at his book collection and how he incorporates reading and literature into his novel, just as he does paintings and other artworks. 

Then, at last, we come to Proust’s writings themselves.  I read The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust shortly after I finished the novel for the second time.  They are all written in a widely-used style during the 1890’s, reflecting influences of high romanticism and ancient Greek society.  It is tough to read any of them.  They are so trite and overly poetic.  Though they were published in journals of the day, they reflect an author learning his craft, far from perfecting it.

A more massive failure was 730-page unfinished novel Jean Santeuil.  I have only read a few hundred pages of it, with particular interest paid to the small sections of the work that Proust went on to tweak and polish and craft into In Search of Lost Time.  In itself, the unfinished novel is well-written, though it lacks very much punch in the story itself which is one reason Proust abandoned it.

I have three different editions of the novel itself.  One is a nice two-volume boxed set published by Random House in 1934.  This is the novel in its original English translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff.  I have not read much of this edition.  I bought it purely for show.  The novel’s title in that edition is Remembrance of Things Past which is also the translated title in a 1981 extra-thick paperback edition.  Here Terrence Kilmartin has placed into English a 1954 French re-translation.  The Fugitive is entitled Sweet Cheat Gone in the older version, for example.  Sodom and Gomorrah is harmlessly entitled Cities of the Plain. This is the first edition of the novel that I eventually read.

I first read the novel as translated Remembrance of Things Past.  To the left are Proust's Way and Jean Santeuil.  To the right are How Proust Can Change Your Life, Samuel Beckett's essay "Proust", Nostalgia, and the most modern translation of the second volume, In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.  Above are books on art as presented in the novel and Proust's personal library.

I say “eventually” because, like most people who start the novel, I failed to begin with.  Not once but several times.  I picked up a copy of volume one of the 1981 version for two dollars ages ago at a used book sale.  I figured at the time that I would at least read the first part and best-known section of the novel, Swann’s Way, at some point in my life.  Until 2006 every attempt ended in indifference 50-pages or so in.  Then, one day, it was suddenly engaging to me.  I then purchased the second and third volumes of that translation, underlining profusely and making a few notes in the margins.  In some cases I marked pages with small sticky notes.

For my second attempt to read the novel, I upgraded a more recent, and still most-established, English translation from 1992 handsomely published by The Modern Library Classics in 2003.  This revised translation by D. J. Enright is the first English rendering to more accurately employ the title In Search of Lost Time.  You can obtain a feel for the immersive length of this highly affecting (once you get into it) and aesthetic novel by the number of pages in each of its six volumes.

Swann’s Way comes in at 606 pages not counting the additional ten pages of notes and synopsis at the end of the Enright edition.  Within a Budding Grove, my personal favorite part of the novel in my first two readings, is 730 pages.  The Guermantes Way is the longest section of the novel at 819 pages.  Sodom and Gomorrah, another favorite section for me, is 724 pages.  Since The Fugitive (370 pages) is the shortest and less fleshed-out part of the novel, Enright combined it with The Captive (559 pages) forming a single, thick volume.  Lastly, Time Regained is 532 pages before you get to its note and synopsis followed by a very lengthy “A Guide to Proust” in which Enright orients the reader to all the characters, persons, places and themes of the novel.  

The reader can tell Proust was racing to finish the last three volumes before his death by the fact that they are the only sections under 600 pages in length.  Rarely did Proust remove things form the novel.  Like a painter, he simply kept adding more layers, expanding the narrative each time.  Had he lived another year or two the novel would in all likelihood have been a couple hundred pages longer.

Altogether Enright’s more recent translation of In Search of Lost Time weighs in at a total of 4,340 pages for the narrative.  With spanning the lifetime of the narrator from childhood to old age, at a time when electricity, the automobile, the telephone, and airplanes came into being, with hundreds of characters, places, works of art, dozens of philosophical inquires about memory and individual moments of human experience, there is nothing like this novel is all of world literature.  The novel forces the reader to accept its slow pace, elongated diversions, and subtle tension punctuated by the most unexpected sensual and emotional experiences.  These experiences make the effort well worth undertaking.  Proust’s narrative construct and prose is brilliant and, often times, as heart-rending as it is thought-provoking. 

Counting the contained guidebook, references notes, and synopsis my Enright translation is a handsomely packaged boxed set with over 4,000 pages to it.

Beyond these three translations, I own an even newer translation of the second section of the novel.  James Grieve offers In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower as an even more precise rendering of Proust’s title in French – an erotic title rather than the more innocuous Within a Budding Grove, reflecting the underlying sexual tensions present in this volume but also throughout the novel as a whole.  I have not completely read this version.  Rather, I have sought out my favorite sections from other translations and read those.  For the most part, I find this edition less poetic and more pragmatic.  The novel is not as lyrical to me in this translation and I do not intend on doing more with this book than have it for show as my fourth translation, the most recent one, of my favorite part of the novel.

I have a few other scattered books on Proust but the most noteworthy of these are a comic-strip genre version of Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove by Stephane Heuet.  These are fun visual reads, condensing about 1,000 pages of the novel down to only a few words in a historically accurate, comic-book style presentation of just a few hundred pages.  While this take on Proust is overly simplistic by necessity, it does touch the primary plot points and shows the reader that there really is an interesting story here once you understand how to approach Proust’s sustained cerebral style of writing.

Throughout December I am reacquainting myself with all things Proust.  In Search of Lost Time is an extraordinary literary achievement and reading experience.  When I was finally able to finish it back in 2006 I pronounced it “the novel of the second half of my life.”  I still feel that way.  So, it is way past time that I explored it again.  I’m looking forward to knocking out this New Year’s resolution in 2019.  Most likely I will take the slow road and read it along with other stuff.  I expect it will take me most of the year to finish at that pace.  I’m in no hurry though.  Something like this needs to savored and I’m sure I will see new things this time around that I didn’t notice previously.  This novel is not really about an adventure but the act of reading it can be.