evelyn_b

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For, with a girl as pretty as Albertine, was it possible that Mlle Vinteuil, having the desires she had, had not asked her to gratify them? And the proof that Albertine had not been shocked by the request, but had consented, was that they had not quarrelled, that indeed their intimacy had steadily increased.

Sodom and Gomorrah ends with Little M. once again convinced (after a brief reprieve after she "reassured" him by flirting with Saint-Loup) that Albertine is having lesbian affairs every second his back is turned. The reasoning behind this conviction is shaky at best, and his conclusion is no better: since every moment in which Albertine is out of his sight is a Schrodinger's orgy, the only possible thing for him to do is marry Albertine and follow her around every hour of every day. In this way, he reasons, he would save Albertine from "vice" and himself from jealousy. This does not strike me as the most obvious solution, or the best, even if we granted the premise, but "how to deal with jealousy in a healthy and reasonable way" is not one of the multitudes contained by In Search of Lost Time.

The next volume is called The Captive. With this we're jumping the tracks to an earlier, less well-regarded translation. This is because it was the only one available at the library, but I'm also now curious to read it. I learned, a couple of weeks ago, that Lost Time used to be on the high school reading curriculum in California (and possibly elsewhere in the US) in the 1960s. This surprised me because I would not have expected something with this much gay content to be considered school-appropriate fifty years ago, but 1) maybe high school students were expected to be more mature in 1960, 2) maybe it was too long and confusing for angry parents to skim effectively, and 3) possibly the earlier translation was less explicit, though it's hard to imagine how that was accomplished without making huge chunks of the book incomprehensible. So I guess we'll find out!

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"I should be delighted to play to you," the dowager Mme did Cambremer said to me. "But you know I only play things that no longer appeal to your generation. I was brought up in the worship of Chopin," she said in a lowered tone, for she was afraid of her daughter-in-law, and knew that to the latter, who considered that Chopin was not music, to talk of playing him well or badly was meaningless [. . .] Because she considered herself "advanced," because (in matters of art only) "one could never be far enough to the Left," she maintained not merely that music progressed, but that it progressed along a single straight line, and that Debussy was in a sense a super-Wagner, slightly more advanced again than Wagner [. . .] People said that an age of speed required rapidity in art, precisely as they might have said that the next war could not last longer than a fortnight, or that the coming of railways would kill the little places beloved of the coaches, which the motor-car was none the less to restore to favour. Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For those who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring. In any case, the day was to come when, for a time, Debussy would be pronounced as flimsy as Massenet, and the agitations of Melisande degraded to the level of Manon's. For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life. But that time was still to come.

Since we last met Little M., the grief of his grandmother's death has struck him belatedly - this is not that, this is just another party; that is a challenge to excerpt because (as usual for Proust, but even more so) it's very long and all connected, like a gigantic nervous system. M.'s guilt dreams about his grandmother hit me unexpectedly hard; there was nothing in the past 1500+ pages to prepare me for it, but at the same time everything was preparing for it. For over a thousand pages, I thought Proust was a safe author to read at work who would not cause me to sob uncontrollably behind the cash register, and I was wrong. That just goes to show you. . . something.

But life's not a short story; it doesn't stop just because you've taken a dramatically satisfying plunge into the icy waters of late-acting guilt, and all the guilt in the world won't stop Little M. from going to parties. Why should it? Life is a lot of things at once. Sometimes when you go to parties you will run into people who want to complain about how "our" attention span keeps getting shorter and will soon shrink to nothing, which is why there's no market for doorstopper fantasy series. Do worries about the collective attention span increase with big jumps in communication technology and transportation speed, or are they a constant? There's probably a study about this somewhere.

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“Have you noticed how often a writer’s letters are superior to the rest of his work? What’s the name of that author who wrote Salaambo?”

I should have liked not to reply in order not to prolong the conversation, but I felt it would be disobliging to the Prince d’Agrigente, who had pretended to know perfectly well who Salaambo was by and out of pure politeness to be leaving it to me to say, but who was now in a painful quandary.

“Flaubert,” I ended up by saying, but the vigorous signs of assent that came from the Prince’s head smothered the sound of my reply, so that my interlocutress was not exactly sure whether I had said Paul Bert or Fulbert, names which she did not find entirely satisfactory.

“In any case,” she went on, “how intriguing his correspondence is, and how superior to his books! It explains him, in fact, because one sees from everything he says about the difficulty he has in writing a book that he wasn’t a real writer, a gifted man.”

Guermantes is so good, you guys, even if Proust may not be one hundred percent fair to his hosts all the time. I’ve finished it, but I still have a vague but hopeful ambition to say a few things about structure and whatnot next week, before I start Sodom and Gomorrah in earnest.

In The Guermantes Way, Little M. goes to a couple of parties, and in the meantime, in a comparatively brief section that cuts straight down through the middle of the book like one of Bloody Stupid Johnson's moats, his grandmother has a stroke and eventually dies. More on this later, I think?

It’s interesting to me that we seem to see so little of Little M. (still and almost certainly forever unnamed in the text) actually interacting with people – so much of his narrative energy goes toward either describing them or speculating about them or describing their effect on him, or describing the effect on him of inanimate objects and plants, or of weather, or of the rooms in which he fails to sleep. When we do see him with others, he can be surprisingly unlikable. But I don’t even know if “unlikable” is the right word – his internal monologue about Albertine can be patronizing and calculating, for example, but it also gives such a convincing impression of being someone’s secret machinery of thought, despite being obviously part of a widely-available printed book that I am reading, that I can’t actually be mad. I always enjoy the uncomfortable illusion of mind-reading.

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I felt myself isolated, not only from the great, freezing night which extended far around us and in which we heard from time to time the whistle of a train which only rendered more keen the pleasure of being where we were, or the chime of an hour which, happily, was still a long way short of that at which these young men would have to buckle on their sabres and go, but also from all my external obsessions, almost from the memory of Mme. de Guermantes, by the hospitality of Saint-Loup, to which that of his friends, reinforcing it, gave, so to speak, a greater solidity; by the warmth also of this little dining-room, by the savour of the well-chosen dishes that were set before us. They gave as much pleasure to my imagination as to my appetite; sometimes the little piece of still life from which they had been taken, the rugged holy water stoup of the oyster in which lingered a few drops of brackish water, or the knotted stem, the yellow leaves of a bunch of grapes still enveloped them, inedible, poetic and remote as a landscape, and producing, at different points in the course of the meal, the impressions of rest in the shade of a vine and of an excursion out to sea; on other evenings it was the cook alone who threw into relief these original properties of our food, which he presented in its natural setting, like a work of art; and a fish cooked in wine was brought in on a long earthenware dish, on which, as it stood out in relief on a bed of bluish herbs, unbreakable now but still contorted from having been dropped alive into boiling water, surrounded by a circle of satellite creatures in their shells, crabs, shrimps and mussels, it had the appearance of being part of a ceramic design by Bernard Palissy.

"I am jealous, furious," Saint-Loup attacked me, half smiling, half in earnest, alluding to the interminable conversations aside which I had been having with his friend. "Is it because you find him more intelligent than me; do you like him better than me? Well, I suppose he's everything now, and no one else is to have a look in!" Men who are enormously in love with a woman, who live in the society of woman-lovers, allow themselves pleasantries on which others, who would see less innocence in them, would never venture.

If you say so!

I won't have much to say about it probably, but thanks to Project Gutenberg I'm still creeping along in Guermantes despite not having it with me.

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Now, every morning, long before the hour at which she left her house, I went by a devious route to post myself at the corner of the street along which she generally came, and, when the moment of her arrival seemed imminent, I strolled back with an air of being absorbed in something else, looking the other way, and raised my eyes to her face as I drew level with her, but as though I had not in the least expected to see her. Indeed, for the first few mornings, so as to be sure of not missing her, I waited in front of the house. And every time the carriage gate opened (letting out one after another so many people who were not the one for whom I was waiting) its grinding rattle prolonged itself in my heart in a series of oscillations which took a long time to subside. [. . .]

On coming home from the Opera, I had added for the following morning, to those whom for some days past I had been hoping to meet again, the image of Mme de Guermantes, tall, with her high-piled crown of silky golden hair, with the tenderness promised by the smile which she had directed at me from her cousin's box. I would follow the route which Francoise had told me that the Duchess generally took, and I would try at the same time, in the hope of meeting two girls whom I had seen a few days earlier, not to miss the the coming out of a class or a catechism. But meanwhile, from time to time, the scintillating smile of Mme de Guermantes, and the warm feeling it had engendered, came back to me. And without exactly knowing what I was doing, I tried to find a place for them (as a woman studies the effect a certain kind of jewelled buttons that have just been given her might have on a dress) beside the romantic ideas which I had long held and which Albertine's coldness, Gisele's premature departure, and before them my deliberate and too long sustained separation from Gilberte had set free (the idea for instance of being loved by a woman, of having a life in common with her); then it was the image of one or other of the two girls seen in the street that I coupled with those ideas, to which immediately afterwards I tried to adapt my memory of the Duchess.

Little M. is at it again in The Guermantes Way, watching girls go by with half-imagined futures whirling around him like currents of air and water. ( Cut for some meandering )

”. . .And what about your work? Have you settled down to it yet? No? You are an odd fellow! If I had your talent I'm sure I should be writing morning, noon and night. It amuses you more to do nothing. What a pity it is that it's the second-raters like me who are always ready to work, while the ones who could, don't want to!”

- some highly useful observations from Saint-Loup.

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Moreover, I forgot almost immediately these last weeks of our stay. What I saw almost invariably in my minds eye when I thought of Balbec were the hours which, every morning during the fine weather, since I was due to go out in the afternoon with Albertine and her friends, my grandmother, following the doctor's orders, insisted on my spending lying down with the room darkened [. . .] I went back to bed; obliged to taste without moving, in imagination only, and all at once, the pleasures of games, bathing, walks which the morning prompted, joy made my heart beat thunderingly like a machine set going at full speed but fixed to the ground, which can spend its energy only by turning over on itself.

I didn't forget about In Search of Lost Time! I finished Within a Budding Grove on Monday.

Recently, I had the chance to talk to two different people about Lost Time -- one who said, "UGH, Proust, I couldn't stick with it, I had to give up after the twentieth time it was just a lot of bourgie French people walking back and forth," (approximately Page 8 of vol. 1) and one who claimed it was the best thing ever, not the best novel in French or the best fruit of the invention of language, but the best thing, full stop. My own feelings are somewhere in between.

Within a Budding Grove was not quite the rapture that Swann's Way was, maybe because some of the novelty has worn off the sentence structure, maybe because Little M. is a little older – here there is less hyper-sensory free-association and more posturing by glib young intellectuals and musing about the essential nature of girls and other categories of people – maybe just because I've been more distracted. I still have high hopes for The Guermantes Way, which Best Thing Ever Guy reluctantly (but not really reluctantly) ranked as his favorite volume of the six.

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The reason I now gave in my letters to Gilberte for refusing to see her was an allusion to some mysterious misunderstanding, wholly fictitious, which was supposed to have arisen between her and myself, and as to which I had hoped at first that Gilberte would demand an explanation [. . .] Gilberte never having questioned or sought to learn about this misunderstanding, it became for me a real entity, to which I referred anew in every letter. And there is in these baseless situations, in the affectation of coldness, a sort of fascination which tempts one to persevere in them. By dint of writing, "Now that our hearts are sundered," so that Gilberte might answer, "But they're not. Do let's talk it over," I had gradually come to believe that they were. By constantly repeating, "Life may have changed for us, but it will never destroy the feeling that we had for one another," in the hope of at last hearing the answer: "But there has been no change, the feeling is stronger now than it ever was," I was living with the idea that life had indeed changed, that we should keep the memory of the feeling which no longer existed, as certain neurotics, from having at first pretended to be ill, end by becoming chronic invalids.

- Within a Budding Grove, "Madame Swann at Home," p. 286

Little M. has been a little more than usually insufferable this week, but can I hold that against him? Not really. It was too long ago, and anyway, I've been worse. Teenagers aren't all terrible at relationships, but as you will learn if you read In Search of Lost Time, some of us were.

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"Suddenly the sky was rent in two; between the Punch-and-Judy and the horses, against the opening horizon, I had just seen, like a miraculous sign, Mademoiselle's blue feather. And now Gilberte was running at full speed towards me, sparkling and rosy beneath a cap trimmed with fur, animated by the cold, her lateness, and the desire for a game; shortly before she reached me, she slid along the ice and, either to keep her balance, or because it appeared to her graceful, or else pretending that she was on skates, it was with outstretched arms that she smilingly advanced, as though to embrace me."
- Swann's Way, "Place Names - The Name," p. 566

Swann's Way is over and I miss it already, but in a way, it isn't going anywhere, ( for a couple of reasons: )

Overall: absolutely delightful, and impressively close to perfect for a book with 600 pages and not much plot. If you don't like following sensitive children around while they develop a bunch of misconceptions and attachments, you could even read "Swann in Love" as a self-contained novel, though I can't at all guarantee you won't want to push poor Swann out of a moving carriage. I haven't cringed and laughed so hard since Persuasion.

Now I have to order Volume 2, or else get it from the library -- unfortunately the local chain bookstore has an entire shelf of Jodi Picoult, but no Proust at all. I was planning to take Swann's Way to the used bookstore when I was finished, but I love it so much that I don't think I can.

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( A joy for ever! )

All of a sudden (250 pages in) there's a brand new chapter, and a new POV character, who is not as vivid and adorable as Little Marcel, but whose problems are entertaining nonetheless (they are not really problems). M. Swann is pursuing Odette, which necessitates making friends with the clingy Verdurins and their "circle." If Proust decides to spend the next hundred pages just describing their exhaustingly repetitive daily "casual evenings," I'll be perfectly content.

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I have one major resolution for 2016, and that is to read In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Why haven't I read it already? I started a couple of times, back in the Nineties, but always stalled out. Now I'm about a hundred pages into Swann's Way and it's completely intoxicating, in the now-established tradition of books I put off reading for years because of intimidating cultural osmosis.

So far I love this book a lot. The narrator was a child once, but is no longer a child (we don't know yet what he's been doing in the meantime) but his childhood is always beside and in front of him -- at least for now, until he forgets again. I don't even know his name yet -- Marcel, maybe? -- he's just "the boy." Swann's Way is full of the garbled and poetic misunderstandings of childhood, like the narrator's early love of theatre:

"At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and so inaccurate was the picture I had formed in my mind's eye of the pleasures to be enjoyed there that I almost believed that each of the spectators looked,as through a stereoscope, at a scene that existed for himself alone, though similar to the thousand other scenes presented to the rest of the audience individually."

This leads to a discussion of the pleasures of categorization, how the narrator and his friends used to rank actors and the thrill he got when a new acquaintance challenged his ranking, and then to a story about the narrator's uncle that is melancholy and funny and suddenly terribly sad and unjust. This is a book of memories, made so far entirely of memories, and it captures the feeling of remembering beautifully, with its viney sentences that are like daydreams. It's been extremely difficult to stick to the daily page limit I set for myself -- an attempt to keep myself from getting overwhelmed that I might have to abandon. It carries you away quietly and very far, like time itself will if you don't find some way to stick a pin in it.

So I don't have much to say yet and I don't know if I will have much to say, except: this book is great and I'm sorry I've put off reading it for so long. Maybe at some point I'll feel bogged down by all the digression, but right now it's the opposite of a bog.