In my mid-twenties, I read Proust. I set aside a year to do it. In my early twenties, I had made a list of everything I thought I should read to become well read. For some reason I couldn't face War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov, but Proust felt alluring.
Looking back, I remember moments, impressions and feelings, not so many details. Luminous, fleeting flows. I remember being bored by sections of it, but in a way that felt strangely productive, as though the book was stretching some neglected faculty of attention. By the end, I felt my reading imagination had become more elastic. Proust had probably altered something in how I read.
Most of all, I remember the ending hitting me like a revelation and feeling very emotionally moved by it. It felt less like the conclusion of a novel than the disclosure of a way of seeing life.
Afterwards I read a short biography of him. What stayed with me was the image of his final years. Shut away in his room, racing to finish the work before he died. A novel about memory and time and therefore, in some sense, about everything.
I'll try to reread it one day. Perhaps just the first volume and the last. I'm not sure I have enough of the thing he was writing about to read all of it again - time.
I often think about Proust in his cork-lined room when the sun is shining outside, and I am sitting indoors reading with a nagging sense of guilt because I should be out there exercising and "doing something useful"
the real beauty of Proust for me is when it all coalesces, somehow, somehow, in the final volume. one of the few long books that deserves its total length. indeed i always wish it was longer...
Yes! Sometimes people suggest you can just read the first volume, or just the Swann-Odette bit. I am willing to admit that the middle part where he has Albertine locked up is a tiny bit of a slog. But it is so worth it to get to the end. The paving stone! (IYKYK). You can't have the full experience without reading it all. It's also one of the most rewarding re-reads of all time, and you can't re-read without completing it the first time.
I was lucky enough to read the whole of La recherche in French in a throwaway elective class during grad school. Changed everything about how I read books, understood life, etc. Sure, he’s an undertaking, but also gossipy and fun. I humbly submit there should be more ambassadors of the William Friedkin variety. Picture two film icons in the crepuscular twilight of a medieval chateau, one a glamorous movie star, the other the director of The Exorcist, The French Connection, and Cruising. As Friedkin tells it:
“In the evenings, after dinner, Jeanne [Moreau] would read Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel, “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” (“In Search of Lost Time”). She would begin reading to me in French, then translate it into English. Gradually, I became caught up in the novel’s language, its complex structure and the intertwined lives of the many characters. After two years, Jeanne and I realized we were culturally displaced in each other’s worlds. Our marriage ended, but not my love for Proust.”
Thank you for your illuminating insights. To sink into your long essay is a pleasure. I'm still pondering, with the ever-hovering question: how to write. Is there is a slight error, or my misunderstanding, in that Captain Ahab failed in his adventure, as the whale destroyed his boat as well as most of his crew, and he was entangled in his harpoon line, dragged underwater and drowned. The whale was never caught.
Borges was more than likely aware of Mocha Dick (the name taken from Mocha Island, off Chile) who was eventually caught and killed, and partly inspired Melville's own white whale:
Fine essay, Henry, thank you. Proust is one of those authors who offer a slow but near-permanent enchantment for readers patient enough to submit to its cadence and flow and eddies and resurfacings.
Therein lies the beauty of the long book (in Proust’s case, many books) as well as the hesitation to commit one’s mind so fully to what will be a total invasion and occupation. 😂
Another enchanter and fine poet of trains is Vladimir Nabokov (great chapter in Speak, Memory); and the process you cite of patiently reading Proust in French mirrors my own slow study and translation of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which made for a magical summer when I was 22 and dreamed in Spanish — but like your own interrupted project — got called off by a return to work and school and the fall.
Even if I don’t get back to it, it was a fine ride and still remember and am nourished by it decades later. All the best, Ted Cleary
Reading Proust in French is definitely one of my bucket list projects. (I have read the recent Penguin translations by Davis and others, as well as the Kilmartin ones (revised from Moncrieff's) for the first two volumes). Two reactions that I remember having that I thought might be amusing to share are admittedly rather low-brow (compared to the other erudite comments to this piece I have read):
(1) I'm sure I'm just projecting my 21st century expectations/standards, but I found it very difficult to have a concrete mental image of the narrator in his younger years--he is undergoing some kind of sexual awakening with his encounters with Gilberte and Albertine and her cohorts, so I am picturing someone in his early adolescence, yet because he is such a mama's boy (grandmother's boy?) he comes across more like a six- or seven-year-old at the same time. The introspective tone of the mature narrator probably adds unwittingly to the cognitive dissonance.
(2) I feel that Proust is in a way a bit disingenuous in creating this narrator character that is so similar to him in all these respects (based on what I know of Proust's life), EXCEPT that he is unwilling to make the character gay (or an "invert" in his parlance, as translated). Which is obviously a valid authorial choice, but Proust clearly wants to explore the dynamics of relationships in the gay world--the interesting complications that arise when your romantic interest could also be your rival, etc., so to accomplish this he has to create this somewhat unrealistic scenario (to me at least--maybe it's my own limitations) where he gets to party with all these bisexual young women, at least several of whom are supposedly romantically interested in this hypochondriacal mama's boy. Again, maybe I'm just projecting my own 21st century expectations, but there are times when I was figuratively rolling my eyes quite a bit.
As a general rule I don't recommend studying illustrations whilst still reading a book, as I like to form my own impressions, but it was the remarkable graphic novel version of Swann's Way by Stephane Heuet that opened up the young Narrator to me.
I opened this essay thoughtlessly this morning, just because I too am reading this volume, with no thought to how long it was, and I've been reading it all day in between pushing kids on swings, and now I've finally finished as the kids head off to bed. I kept thinking I really should just stop and return to it another day, but it kept sweeping me along. Anyway, I'm glad I did! I feel quite outclassed by the you and your well-read commenters (good thing I read The Ambassadors last year or else I really would have been at sea), but I appreciate you sharing these thoughts and impressions with us hoi polloi.
Splendid essay. I wrote my dissertation on James and romanticism, a large focus on the the genre of the romance, albeit in the post-major phase non-fiction prose. Oddly enough, I happen to be reading Proust for the first time now (justing having begun volume four). I know of no extended work of criticism that compares the two. A book must be written. Skip the quest book. The seed of one is here... It can be called "Baroque Monsters."
Nice constellation of passages from HJ and MP to Dante, Ruskin, Larkin, etc. etc. The Dantesque descent in James that haunts me the most is the opening chapter of Wings. I think possibly the best chapter of a major phase novel, though the weakest of the three novels. The pre-major phase novels are also not as bad as you make them out to be. Europeans and Washington Square. Nothing there... But Maisie? The Princess? Portrait is also a masterpiece. Madame Mearle at the piano? The entrance of Osmond? Isabel's vigil in, what chapter? 43? Another descent into the underworld.
can there really be no major work comparing them…!? I find that extraordinary
yes you are right about Maisie, but a lot of the rest doesn’t do much for me, thoughI was enjoying Princess recently. Portrait just doesn’t work for me at all.
There are multiple book-length studies of James and Balzac, Flaubert, French novel (pre MP), but nothing, from what I know, of MP and HJ together beyond passing references of comparison. Many studies that contain chapters on them, Leo Bersani, Eve Sedgewick, etc., but no, what I would call, examination of their imaginative universes, which are, no doubt as you describe so well, purely phenomenological (at least in late James, maybe why you don't enjoy the early as much). One would think that Rene Girard could have had room for writing on James! The most Proustian image in James, to my mind, comes in the GB when we see Adam (I think) leading Charlotte away, back to American City, with a silk rope around her neck!
Dissertation will be a book at some point. Tentative title "The Man of Imagination: A Reading of Late James." Need a better subtitle. Sigh.
Agree SO MUCH about the silk rope and have been intending to reread TGB for a while now...
"Our young woman so yielded, at moments, to what was insidious in these foredoomed ingenuities of her pity, that for minutes together, sometimes, the weight of a new duty seemed to rest upon her—the duty of speaking before separation should constitute its chasm, of pleading for some benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object of price of the emigre, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and negotiable some day in the market of misery."
A marvellous essay, Henry! Thank you so much. I must admit I found Proust TOO heavy going when I read it (in French) in my twenties. Too slow, too circular -as Borges would say-, too "French". Contrary to Jai, below, I sailed through the Karamazovs and War and Peace without any tediousness and embraced Crime and Punishment and The Idiot with avidity. However, I agree that the final volume really fits into the formulaic pattern of Conclusion... Suddenly, or rather Gradually, everything comes together somehow and every minute we have laboriously spent "assimilating" Proust is justified and our lives somehow enriched.
It has taken me a couple of hours to read this essay as it needs to be read, including the delightful detour into "Reading and Time", which made me realise that reading Proust in my approaching old age is, in its own quiet way, the most radical thing I have ever done.
I have not read Proust, nor the comments above (at least as yet). I want to thank you for the summations in this worthwhile essay.
The introduction of at least half a dozen authors, a sense of what reading can be, and for me at least the part that stood out most - the nature and need for quests.
Thank you for sharing this all - it was unexpected and delightful.
I hope your brilliant essay moves me to read Proust again, now in English. I have wanted to do it for so long now. I have the two volumes of In Search of Lost Time in C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation on my shelves, and I have read Proust in Russian centuries ago, when none of us readers even suspected that he exchanged his own gay story of life in this beautifully written prose, I loved. Then, here, I read Marcel Proust's biography by George D. Painter, which is excellent, but in somebody else's biography, forgot the name, I read an awful description of Proust's so-called real gay parties.... So, do not read anything about Proust's life if you want to enjoy the perfect style of literary prose. I hope I reread Proust again now. Thank you for your essay. (Unfortunately, my French is too poor to enjoy the writer in French.)
On Goodreads we spent 2013 as the Year of Reading Proust so I read all the Scott Moncrieff translations then. I finished reading the Lydia Davis translation of Swann's Way last year. I think my favorite book among these volumes is Within a Budding Grove, though there is a sort of exhilaration that comes with the emotional ending of Time Regained. I felt as though the Albertine books seemed different from the rest, as though they were not quite as complete in the form we received them.
‘I realized I was ready to write, and everything I had to say for the morning was already known to me, darkly, like the feeling that I was ready to lay an egg, or like I knew whatever it is that a seed knows.’ Wonderful.
Anyway, I am now going to begin a long-anticipated journey. I have Swann’s Way here (the Moncrieff), and it is time. Thank you for such an irresistible invitation.
In my mid-twenties, I read Proust. I set aside a year to do it. In my early twenties, I had made a list of everything I thought I should read to become well read. For some reason I couldn't face War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov, but Proust felt alluring.
Looking back, I remember moments, impressions and feelings, not so many details. Luminous, fleeting flows. I remember being bored by sections of it, but in a way that felt strangely productive, as though the book was stretching some neglected faculty of attention. By the end, I felt my reading imagination had become more elastic. Proust had probably altered something in how I read.
Most of all, I remember the ending hitting me like a revelation and feeling very emotionally moved by it. It felt less like the conclusion of a novel than the disclosure of a way of seeing life.
Afterwards I read a short biography of him. What stayed with me was the image of his final years. Shut away in his room, racing to finish the work before he died. A novel about memory and time and therefore, in some sense, about everything.
I'll try to reread it one day. Perhaps just the first volume and the last. I'm not sure I have enough of the thing he was writing about to read all of it again - time.
this is excellent
I often think about Proust in his cork-lined room when the sun is shining outside, and I am sitting indoors reading with a nagging sense of guilt because I should be out there exercising and "doing something useful"
the real beauty of Proust for me is when it all coalesces, somehow, somehow, in the final volume. one of the few long books that deserves its total length. indeed i always wish it was longer...
Nabeel wrote about that recently. I have all the books here and I'm going to get to the end this summer. More posts to come...
Yes! Sometimes people suggest you can just read the first volume, or just the Swann-Odette bit. I am willing to admit that the middle part where he has Albertine locked up is a tiny bit of a slog. But it is so worth it to get to the end. The paving stone! (IYKYK). You can't have the full experience without reading it all. It's also one of the most rewarding re-reads of all time, and you can't re-read without completing it the first time.
the ‘fancy dress’ party!
Never to be forgotten! Especially at my age, ha.
Proust is uniquely positioned as a synthesizer who:
Takes the English empiricist trust in sensation as his method.
Takes the German philosophical seriousness about time and consciousness as his problem.
Takes the Russian emotional and psychological depth as his register
and produces something that functions like religious consolation entirely through secular aesthetic means.
No other writer sits quite at that intersection. That might be the most precise account of what makes the Recherche singular.
I was lucky enough to read the whole of La recherche in French in a throwaway elective class during grad school. Changed everything about how I read books, understood life, etc. Sure, he’s an undertaking, but also gossipy and fun. I humbly submit there should be more ambassadors of the William Friedkin variety. Picture two film icons in the crepuscular twilight of a medieval chateau, one a glamorous movie star, the other the director of The Exorcist, The French Connection, and Cruising. As Friedkin tells it:
“In the evenings, after dinner, Jeanne [Moreau] would read Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel, “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” (“In Search of Lost Time”). She would begin reading to me in French, then translate it into English. Gradually, I became caught up in the novel’s language, its complex structure and the intertwined lives of the many characters. After two years, Jeanne and I realized we were culturally displaced in each other’s worlds. Our marriage ended, but not my love for Proust.”
SO MUCH GOSSIPY FUN. If I had my notes I would write about all the things that made me laugh in volume one.
Totally. He can be very funny, especially in the early books that are more about the social scene.
Thank you for your illuminating insights. To sink into your long essay is a pleasure. I'm still pondering, with the ever-hovering question: how to write. Is there is a slight error, or my misunderstanding, in that Captain Ahab failed in his adventure, as the whale destroyed his boat as well as most of his crew, and he was entangled in his harpoon line, dragged underwater and drowned. The whale was never caught.
yes, I must check the original Borges reference...
Borges was more than likely aware of Mocha Dick (the name taken from Mocha Island, off Chile) who was eventually caught and killed, and partly inspired Melville's own white whale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mocha_Dick
Fine essay, Henry, thank you. Proust is one of those authors who offer a slow but near-permanent enchantment for readers patient enough to submit to its cadence and flow and eddies and resurfacings.
Therein lies the beauty of the long book (in Proust’s case, many books) as well as the hesitation to commit one’s mind so fully to what will be a total invasion and occupation. 😂
Another enchanter and fine poet of trains is Vladimir Nabokov (great chapter in Speak, Memory); and the process you cite of patiently reading Proust in French mirrors my own slow study and translation of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which made for a magical summer when I was 22 and dreamed in Spanish — but like your own interrupted project — got called off by a return to work and school and the fall.
Even if I don’t get back to it, it was a fine ride and still remember and am nourished by it decades later. All the best, Ted Cleary
Sounds like an ideal summer...
Reading Proust in French is definitely one of my bucket list projects. (I have read the recent Penguin translations by Davis and others, as well as the Kilmartin ones (revised from Moncrieff's) for the first two volumes). Two reactions that I remember having that I thought might be amusing to share are admittedly rather low-brow (compared to the other erudite comments to this piece I have read):
(1) I'm sure I'm just projecting my 21st century expectations/standards, but I found it very difficult to have a concrete mental image of the narrator in his younger years--he is undergoing some kind of sexual awakening with his encounters with Gilberte and Albertine and her cohorts, so I am picturing someone in his early adolescence, yet because he is such a mama's boy (grandmother's boy?) he comes across more like a six- or seven-year-old at the same time. The introspective tone of the mature narrator probably adds unwittingly to the cognitive dissonance.
(2) I feel that Proust is in a way a bit disingenuous in creating this narrator character that is so similar to him in all these respects (based on what I know of Proust's life), EXCEPT that he is unwilling to make the character gay (or an "invert" in his parlance, as translated). Which is obviously a valid authorial choice, but Proust clearly wants to explore the dynamics of relationships in the gay world--the interesting complications that arise when your romantic interest could also be your rival, etc., so to accomplish this he has to create this somewhat unrealistic scenario (to me at least--maybe it's my own limitations) where he gets to party with all these bisexual young women, at least several of whom are supposedly romantically interested in this hypochondriacal mama's boy. Again, maybe I'm just projecting my own 21st century expectations, but there are times when I was figuratively rolling my eyes quite a bit.
As a general rule I don't recommend studying illustrations whilst still reading a book, as I like to form my own impressions, but it was the remarkable graphic novel version of Swann's Way by Stephane Heuet that opened up the young Narrator to me.
I opened this essay thoughtlessly this morning, just because I too am reading this volume, with no thought to how long it was, and I've been reading it all day in between pushing kids on swings, and now I've finally finished as the kids head off to bed. I kept thinking I really should just stop and return to it another day, but it kept sweeping me along. Anyway, I'm glad I did! I feel quite outclassed by the you and your well-read commenters (good thing I read The Ambassadors last year or else I really would have been at sea), but I appreciate you sharing these thoughts and impressions with us hoi polloi.
I love this comment, thank you :)
Splendid essay. I wrote my dissertation on James and romanticism, a large focus on the the genre of the romance, albeit in the post-major phase non-fiction prose. Oddly enough, I happen to be reading Proust for the first time now (justing having begun volume four). I know of no extended work of criticism that compares the two. A book must be written. Skip the quest book. The seed of one is here... It can be called "Baroque Monsters."
Nice constellation of passages from HJ and MP to Dante, Ruskin, Larkin, etc. etc. The Dantesque descent in James that haunts me the most is the opening chapter of Wings. I think possibly the best chapter of a major phase novel, though the weakest of the three novels. The pre-major phase novels are also not as bad as you make them out to be. Europeans and Washington Square. Nothing there... But Maisie? The Princess? Portrait is also a masterpiece. Madame Mearle at the piano? The entrance of Osmond? Isabel's vigil in, what chapter? 43? Another descent into the underworld.
can there really be no major work comparing them…!? I find that extraordinary
yes you are right about Maisie, but a lot of the rest doesn’t do much for me, thoughI was enjoying Princess recently. Portrait just doesn’t work for me at all.
your dissertation sounds fun!
There are multiple book-length studies of James and Balzac, Flaubert, French novel (pre MP), but nothing, from what I know, of MP and HJ together beyond passing references of comparison. Many studies that contain chapters on them, Leo Bersani, Eve Sedgewick, etc., but no, what I would call, examination of their imaginative universes, which are, no doubt as you describe so well, purely phenomenological (at least in late James, maybe why you don't enjoy the early as much). One would think that Rene Girard could have had room for writing on James! The most Proustian image in James, to my mind, comes in the GB when we see Adam (I think) leading Charlotte away, back to American City, with a silk rope around her neck!
Dissertation will be a book at some point. Tentative title "The Man of Imagination: A Reading of Late James." Need a better subtitle. Sigh.
Agree SO MUCH about the silk rope and have been intending to reread TGB for a while now...
"Our young woman so yielded, at moments, to what was insidious in these foredoomed ingenuities of her pity, that for minutes together, sometimes, the weight of a new duty seemed to rest upon her—the duty of speaking before separation should constitute its chasm, of pleading for some benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object of price of the emigre, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and negotiable some day in the market of misery."
A marvellous essay, Henry! Thank you so much. I must admit I found Proust TOO heavy going when I read it (in French) in my twenties. Too slow, too circular -as Borges would say-, too "French". Contrary to Jai, below, I sailed through the Karamazovs and War and Peace without any tediousness and embraced Crime and Punishment and The Idiot with avidity. However, I agree that the final volume really fits into the formulaic pattern of Conclusion... Suddenly, or rather Gradually, everything comes together somehow and every minute we have laboriously spent "assimilating" Proust is justified and our lives somehow enriched.
by the way, his surname is "Scott Moncrieff", in the scottish tradition of non-hyphenated surnames
oh damn, thank you
It has taken me a couple of hours to read this essay as it needs to be read, including the delightful detour into "Reading and Time", which made me realise that reading Proust in my approaching old age is, in its own quiet way, the most radical thing I have ever done.
Two hours, and not a moment of them wasted.
I have not read Proust, nor the comments above (at least as yet). I want to thank you for the summations in this worthwhile essay.
The introduction of at least half a dozen authors, a sense of what reading can be, and for me at least the part that stood out most - the nature and need for quests.
Thank you for sharing this all - it was unexpected and delightful.
I'm so glad!
I hope your brilliant essay moves me to read Proust again, now in English. I have wanted to do it for so long now. I have the two volumes of In Search of Lost Time in C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation on my shelves, and I have read Proust in Russian centuries ago, when none of us readers even suspected that he exchanged his own gay story of life in this beautifully written prose, I loved. Then, here, I read Marcel Proust's biography by George D. Painter, which is excellent, but in somebody else's biography, forgot the name, I read an awful description of Proust's so-called real gay parties.... So, do not read anything about Proust's life if you want to enjoy the perfect style of literary prose. I hope I reread Proust again now. Thank you for your essay. (Unfortunately, my French is too poor to enjoy the writer in French.)
Do read Proust again even if only some !
On Goodreads we spent 2013 as the Year of Reading Proust so I read all the Scott Moncrieff translations then. I finished reading the Lydia Davis translation of Swann's Way last year. I think my favorite book among these volumes is Within a Budding Grove, though there is a sort of exhilaration that comes with the emotional ending of Time Regained. I felt as though the Albertine books seemed different from the rest, as though they were not quite as complete in the form we received them.
I wish I had been aware of that at the time!
‘I realized I was ready to write, and everything I had to say for the morning was already known to me, darkly, like the feeling that I was ready to lay an egg, or like I knew whatever it is that a seed knows.’ Wonderful.
Anyway, I am now going to begin a long-anticipated journey. I have Swann’s Way here (the Moncrieff), and it is time. Thank you for such an irresistible invitation.
Excellent! Do report back!