Andrew and I have now completed the Modern Library edition of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust’s monumental work. Early in 2023, we turned the final page of “Time Regained,” and closed the sixth volume of the 1981/1991 edition, wrapping up at page 2616. This translation, by D.J. Enright (1992) builds on C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1931 translation and Terence Kilmartin’s 1981 version.
Andrew and I began our adventure about three years ago. Over the years, I had previously read the book three other times, and there had been some earlier exposure for me, in my French literature class at the University of Virginia.
Back then the university was still fairly small (I think only about 6,000 students, all told), and it was still a men’s school (except for the School of Nursing and a few women graduate students in the School of Education). I clearly remember our teacher, M. Alfred Proulx (probably at that point in my life the handsomest man I had ever seen), giving reading assignments to all us young men. With each assignment, he would note that it would not be necessary to read these-or-those pages, giving us the page numbers for the assignment. Naturally those pages not assigned were exactly the pages we 19- and 20-year old students read first. We had quickly figured out why we were not supposed to look at them.
Andrew had heard me talk about the book often, so one night, back in the winter of 2020-2021, he mentioned how much he had noticed that I obviously liked the book, and he wanted to read it, too. And he wanted to read it aloud to me, beginning a delightful adventure in which he read, I listened, and we had many interruptions to talk about what we were hearing (and, I suppose, learning from one another as we talked).
Of course there were interruptions as we got caught up in other subjects from time to time, and we once even got so deep into the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the history of the Weimar Republic that we had to leave Proust a while to read Joseph Roth’s brilliant Radetzky March. And I spent much of my solitary reading time trying to figure out why the awful failure of the Weimar Republic had to happen.
But we were never away from Proust for long, and I even supplemented my enjoyment of the work by joining a book club which for about a year had been discussing (unbeknownst to me until I heard about it) Proust and this magnificent book. For various reasons, I could not attend all the club’s meetings, but the ones I attended were stimulating and, it seemed to me, very enlightening. And, because the club was coming to the end of its discussions of Proust, I spent some time thinking about what I had read and I waited until now to write this.
All in all, the Proust “adventure” has been a splendid reading experience and especially exceptional for me, since I had Andrew doing the reading.
As for my own reactions (aside from what I’ve just written), I’m able to identify several personal “take-aways” that I’ll not forget:
- Culture (music, art, literature) of La Belle Époque, and Paris in particular. The period of time covered by Proust’s story has been fascinating me for most of my life. Or, as Adam Gopnik put it in “Peripheral Proust” in The New Yorker (May 10, 2021): “Along with everything else he did that was more academically respectable, he offered a picture of a particular beautiful place and period in the world’s history.”
- The book’s influence on me, both personally and as a writer. Or—to put it another way—I somehow took up and thought about the notion that Proust seemed to be pushing forward the idea that everything remains inside ourselves, including what we observed (and learned) in the past. That is, unless we specifically (and consciously) reject it. It’s all there, for each of us to deal with as we can.
- And continuing that effect on us as writers. Christine Smallwood, in “Time Unregained” in The New York Review of Books (February 8, 2024) captures this response for us very well: “Marcel for the readers of the novel, may be a spoiled, petulant, rich young man who does things like summon a dairymaid to his room under the false pretense of delivering a letter that hasn’t been written; he may ruminate on the need for a constant stream of new girlfriends to spark his interest and insist that his current girlfriend not attend parties where she might run into her lesbian friends; but he is still, or will one day be, the author of In Search of Lost Time. His actions and thoughts are, if not the actions and thoughts of a great artist, at least part of the story of the formation of a great artist, the back story of great art. We read knowing that plot is preamble (my emphasis), that all this time will be regained, that he will put aside his partygoing and take to his bed—the place he most liked to work.
- The first (or nearly first) overt reference to homosexuality as common in life.Notably, Proust used a new word—inversion—to identify this phenomenon. In his essay (amongst several other characterizations), Gopnik makes one reference to Proust as the “Perverse” Proust, quoting the eminent scholar Antoine Compagnon who himself pointed out that Proust “was among the first French authors to write openly about homosexuality.”
- On this subject, Gopnik continues: “The anthropology of ‘sexual inversion’ dominates the later volumes … Proust’s view of gayness would, by contemporary standards, be considered homophobic: he treats gay men, whom he calls ‘men-women,’ as suffering from a deforming syndrome. … The idea of the man-woman is not a derogation of homosexuality but an explanation of its normalcy: people, being people, contain opposites in themselves. Against the old Platonic idea that humans are longing for their missing half, the ‘Perverse’ Proust’s point is that they possess it already. Homosexuality is neither a deliciously archaic transgression, as it was for Wilde’s circle in London, nor a damnable perversion. It just is.”
- At the same time, for me, Proust provides a different look at turn-of-the-century society and how it was different in France than in America (or anywhere else, for that matter). Gopnik makes a point of our need to understand—as Proust did with the Dreyfus Affair—the fact that Proust “recognized the injustice and found it intolerable. … the word ‘intellectual,’ in our current sense, was invented then, for the Dreyfusards, and that was what he became. He began to think of himself as a republican intellectual, a citizen with a pen and a conscience, as much as the aesthete he had been.”
Several other specific pleasures (from what could be a very long list) I had fun with:
- The sly reference to Charles Ephrussi (a great favorite among historical people I’ve come to admire) and the allusion to Renoir’s The Luncheon of the Boating Party.
- The almost overwhelming attention to fashion, not just in clothing but in all the different subjects with which people in society concerned themselves.
- The shallowness (emptiness, in fact) of some of the wealthiest people who had obviously learned how to fill up their time (and some who had not), allowing us more modern readers to feel a little sorry for them.
- And there’s plenty more, but after several years of living with (and gaining much from) Proust’s great work, that’s enough.
So here is what Proust leaves us with, in the last two paragraphs of the book:
“In this vast dimension which I had not known myself to possess, the date on which I had heard the noise of the garden bell at Combray—that far-distant noise which nevertheless was within me—was a point from which I might start to make measurements. And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it. A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.
“I understood now why it was that the Duc de Guermantes, who to my surprise, when I had seen him sitting on a chair, had seemed to me so little aged although he had so many more years beneath him than I had, had presently, when he rose to his feet and tried to stand firm upon them, swayed backwards and forwards upon legs as tottery as those of some old archbishop with nothing solid about his person but his metal crucifix, to whose support there rushes a mob of sturdy young seminarists, and had advanced with difficulty, trembling like a lead, upon the almost unmanageable summit of his eighty-three years, as though men spend their lives perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall. And I was terrified by the thought that the stilts beneath my own feet might already have reached that height; it seemed to me that quite soon now I might be too weak to hold upon a past which already went down so far. So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves–in Time.”
An Afterthought for Today’s Reader
From the Musée d’Orsay, Paris:
“This imposing group portrait commissioned from Tissot at the end of the Second Empire invites us to access the intimacy of the Circle of the Rue Royale, a male club founded in 1852. Each one of the twelve models paid 1000 Francs for the painting to be made, and the final owner was to be determined via a special draw.
“Baron Hottinger, seated to the right of the sofa, was eventually named the winner. The painting remained in his family until it was acquired by the Musée d’Orsay. Among the most remarkable personalities of the group is the Marquis de Galliffet, who would later be a ferocious opponent to the Paris Commune in 1871, standing to the right of the painting and leaning on an armchair where Prince Edmond-Melchior de Polignac is sitting. Standing to the far right of the painting is Charles Haas, who years later would become one of Marcel Proust’s sources of inspiration for the character of Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.
“Son of a fashion seller and a milliner, Tissot always gave particular attention to clothes in his painting. The Circle of the Rue Royale offered every opportunity to express this interest and demonstrate an extreme accuracy that vied with that of photography. Costumes and accessories rendered with many details testify to the taste of the aristocracy in the 1860s whilst showing the social status of these men captured in prestigious surroundings.
“The scene takes place on one of the balconies of the Hôtel de Coislin that still overlooks the Place de la Concorde. The carriage and passers-by one can see through the balustrade convey the animation of the square, whilst above the trees one can distinguish the roofs of the Palais de l’Industrie built for the 1855 World Fair and now no longer there.
“Not unusual for Tissot, the painter seems to have played with different registers, mingling several artistic references. Still loyal to Ingres’s teaching, close to those who were to become the Impressionists, he broke free from French tradition by staging this group portrait outside, in the style of British conversation pieces. A major example of Tissot’s modernity, emblematic of the intellectual and mundane atmosphere of the time, this piece contributed to the young painter’s recognition as he was emerging as one of the most talented portrait painters of his generation.”
A useful (and rewarding) wrap-up for this reading “adventure” might be to connect with thoughts from philosopher Catherine Malabou about this painting. Especially note the conclusion about the divisions in society in Proust’s day between the aristocracy and the other classes of people. Malabou makes an interesting link to today’s divisions in society, possibly different in other countries but thanks to what’s happening in many places—even in the United States with our censorship of reading materials for children, attacks on faculty in higher education, etc.—Malabou intimates that what Proust was describing is happening again.
Catherine Malabour’s 2019 commentary (7.47 minutes), is at YouTube, with her final comments at about 6.47, but I’m also happy to share what she said here:
“It is also a moment when Proust analyzes the fact that what we call cosmopolitanism or international society or what we would now call globalization can at an moment turn into an extremely hermetic rationalist movement and this issue still very much resonates nowadays. Just when we think everything is open, it could suddenly close. This happens to Swann. When antisemitism starts in France, he loses all kinds of social status. His funeral almost takes place behind closed doors. Nobody is worried about his health, etc. He is quickly forgotten.”
So does our joy in reading or re-reading Proust’s masterpiece leave us thinking? Joyfully? Hopefully? Or worried? What a good job he did! Now it’s up to each of us.