A month of not reading Proust

I love Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu¹). It’s a monumental work, which I’m not going to attempt to summarise here, set in late 19th & early 20th century France, largely within the milieu of the Parisian upper classes, dealing primarily with time and memory but also adolescence, jealousy, snobbery, anti-semitism, homosexuality and so much else besides. The seven volumes (usually published as six in English) are a world entire within which, by way of Proust’s characteristically long, looping sentences, you become immersed.

I’ve read it (in translation) three times all the way through. The first two times I read the D.J. Enright revision of Terence Kilmartin’s revision of C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1920s translation (“what?” I hear you cry: see this page for more background), as published by Vintage. Most recently I read the Penguin Modern Classics translation (in which each volume has a separate translator, most notably Lydia Davis’s first volume Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way /The Way by Swann’s)). And recently I discovered that Oxford World Classics are publishing “their own Proust”, with the 3rd volume Le Côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way) due out next month.

When I bought the Penguin volumes, I got rid of the Vintage ones. And now all reviews that I read suggest the Oxford Proust is even better than the Penguin. Does that mean – barely sixteen months after buying the Penguin Le Temps retrouvé (Finding Time Again) – I have to buy Proust all over again?

There are some books that I will happily buy multiple copies of: I have a battered 90s Penguin 20th Century Classics edition of Joyce’s Ulysses that got me through my final year of University, and also the lovely oversized hardback Cambridge Centenary edition. I also have 2 copies of my favourite book – Clive Barker’s Weaveworld – because my late 80s paperback copy, signed by Clive when he did a book signing in Dundee while promoting Everville, has been read so often that it’s at risk of falling to pieces, so I bought a hardback edition to use as my reading copy from now on. And there are always nice old editions of books by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King I’m happy to buy even though I already own them in other versions. But the Oxford Proust will be seven volumes: that’s about £80. And my bookcases don’t really have room for two full versions of In Search of Lost Time. But…I know I’ll probably cave in. The Oxford Prousts look very smart, with Monet covers (much better than the quirky photographs on the current Penguin edition), and although a new translation doesn’t necessarily mean a better one, and while my French is good enough to read an article about cycling in l’Equipe, and isn’t up to tackling Proust so I can’t compare the translations as translations, there were elements of the Penguin edition I struggled with, and which I don’t recall struggling with (though it has its own issues) in the Scott Moncrieff/Vintage edition.

So in order to stave this off for as long as possible, I’ve read all around Proust recently. Firstly, there was the huge, comprehensive 1996 biography by Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadie; then there was Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays by Proust himself (okay, so technically I haven’t avoided Proust per se, just the Search), the title essay of which was his initial attempt at the work which would ultimately become the Search but which he then scrapped. I re-read the two volumes that have so far been published of Stephane Heuet’s graphic novel adaptation (okay, so technically I haven’t avoided the Search per se, just a prose-only edition). Then there was Joshua Landy’s Marcel Proust – A Very Short Introduction. I also read a volume of drama by Corneille, Molière and Racine (whose Phaedra plays a prominent role in the first half of the Search, and which I thoroughly enjoyed), and – bit of a tangent – 2022 Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux’s The Years, which has been likened to a contemporary version of the Search (I was impressed by it, but there are other of her books that I prefer). Also the second volume of Lydia Davis’s Essays, where she discusses in fascinating depth the process of translation in general, and of Swann in particular. Then the memoir of Proust’s housekeeper Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, and finally (maybe) the Selected Letters of Madame de Sévigné, the favourite book of the Search‘s Narrator’s beloved grandmother. Oh yes, and I re-watched the 1999 film adaptation of Le Temps retrouvé. And…found a map of “Proust’s Paris”, which shows locations from both the life and the fiction

What next? There are plenty of other books either about Proust himself (though as far as straight biography goes, I can’t imagine anything beating the Tadie); books about reading or collecting Proust (A Year of Reading Proust, Proust’s Overcoat, etc.); or books which attempt to aid the understanding of it (such as Lost Time or the sumptuous Paintings in Proust, both by Eric Karpeles). The closest you can get to reading the Search without actually reading it is The Seventy-Five Folios: the long-lost final, aborted attempt at the Search before Proust started it from scratch again in 1909, but I bought that only last year and it seems a bit soon to re-read; or else to re-read the other proto-Search, Jean Santeuil, which Proust began in 1896 and abandoned four years later. It contains some gorgeous writing and memorable scenes but – odd complaint to make about Proust, given that the Search is nobody’s idea of a page-turning thriller – has no sense of forward motion at all and feels very episodic.

But there’s a word for all of this, isn’t there? It’s one that Joshua Landy, in his Very Short Introduction, doesn’t hesitate to use, and that’s “idolatry”, which my Concise Oxford Dictionary defines as either the “worship of idols” or (more pertinently) “great adulation”. Of course it has a more pejorative definition, related to worshipping a lesser (or man-made) thing in place of a greater. And that brings me to a particularly enjoyable and wise example of the second category of books above: Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997). In this, (and I paraphrase) the philosopher says that it’s pointless a Joyce enthusiast going to Dublin, or a fan of Monet making a pilgrimage to his garden at Giverny, or the lover of van Gogh’s work visiting Arles, or one of Proust visiting the village of Illiers-Combray², in a fictionalised version of which the wonderful opening parts of the Search are set. There is nothing intrinsic to these places that makes them any more special than anywhere else; we won’t find what we’re looking for (unless it’s a museum and giftshop, in which case, fine); nor will it bring us necessarily any closer to a comprehension of the art. The task we must set ourselves, says de Botton, is not to view the artist’s world through our eyes, but to view our world through their eyes. As Proust himself said, “thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists.” It isn’t the place, it’s the way of looking at the world that matters. Or in my case, there’s no substitute for just plunging in and reading the damn thing again.

And that’s very true, and I agree with it entirely, but I still bought myself a packet of madeleines.

Notes

¹ Previously (and incorrectly) translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past

² The young Proust spent time with his family in Illiers, which he fictionalised as “Combray”. To celebrate the centenary of his birth in 1971, Illiers renamed (or perhaps we should say rebranded) itself as Illiers-Combray.