Last year, on the week before Christmas, I began the third volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way. On June 10th, I noted that I had finally passed the halfway mark in that volume, “a rate that suggests that I should finish this volume just around Thanksgiving.” Sure enough.
Eleven months reading a novel, especially one that is really just one-sixth of a much larger project – and the end of The Guermantes Way especially gives one a feel for just how deeply these volumes are not-quite-arbitrary slices from a larger pie – is a significant commitment of time. While it will be awhile before I begin on the fourth volume – I’m telling myself to give it a year, at least – the urge is strong to “just keep reading.”
As indeed many faster readers would do. My friend, Pam Rosenthal, began reading Swann’s Way, the first of these books, just about the same time I did a few years back, although, rather in typical Pam fashion, she created a Proust reading group to give the process more of a social cast. The last time I checked, she had not only completed the whole darn thing, but the group (or possibly a different one) was now halfway through reading it a second time.
But I’m not a fast reader & Proust of all writers is a not a “fast read.” If ever there were a novelist whose work was like watching clouds form & shift & reshape themselves across a nearly windless sky, Marcel’s the guy. I always have problems with writers whose prose I am forced to read in translation, since so much of what I read for is precisely that which gets left behind in that process, but even in the Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation as revised by J.D. Enright – which sounds as much like a committee as one can imagine – Proust’s prose makes one linger. It has been rare for me to read a sentence in this book only once – rather, one lingers and goes back over it, savoring phrases, noting its turns & hesitations, not unlike Faulkner, tho never with quite the Gothic Swamp Thing feel that the Mississippi author gives to some of his prose, especially when writing of the Snopes. There is a new translation in the works – Lydia Davis has already done Swann’s Way & I believe some of the others may already been in print – but from my perspective it makes no sense to read a translation that is not entirely the work of a single translator, even tho I enjoy Davis’ own prose a lot.
Proust, tho, does for me something that I think all great art should be able to do – he alters my sense & perception of time. Specifically, he expands it and slows it down. This is something I never really understood until I saw Jean Eustache’s 1973 film, The Mother and the Whore. In it, the two-timing protagonist, Jean-Pierre Léaud, a perennial grad student who is stuck in the failure of 1968 to transform the world, finds himself trapped between two women, a politically naïve nurse & a far too-savvy-for-him entrepreneur (the one ’68 radical in the film who has had the ability to move on, but who clings to Léaud as tho he were the promise of an uncompromised life). Late in the film, Léaud finds himself in a crisis with the entrepreneur at a exactly the instant the nurse needs him most. As he flees the confrontation & heads to the nurse, the abandoned woman sits atop the mattress on the floor of her impeccably unadorned flat, puts a 78 of Edith Piaf on the record player and puts her head in her hands & then doesn’t move for the entire length of the song. It’s a stunning scene precisely because it suddenly brings cinematic time into real time, something that almost never happens (consider just how badly Spielberg handles his homage to this same moment with the Piaf song in Saving Private Ryan). It’s a great test for any art that occurs in time – you can find it in Visions of Cody, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld &, I would argue, in any poem of substance as well (hence the greatness of “A” 22-23, and of The Pisan Cantos). Proust does this better than any novelist I’ve read. That he can do it in a way that comes through translation is amazing. He makes it feel so very simple. Perhaps it is, but only he seems ever to have figured out that secret.
