If you don’t love his magnificent novel, it’s perhaps because no one advised you not to begin reading on page one. Nor is it necessary to read to the end, meaning all 3,000 pages. In fact, the first of the seven novels that make up A la Recherche du temps perdu/Remembrance of Things Past is sufficient for many readers. That’s the best part, the most accessible, and the least like those “French novels” that English speakers often cast aside, muttering that an evening of Peking Opera would be less taxing.
The first novel of the seven is Du Côté de chez Swann, usually translated as Swann’s Way. It is named for Charles Swann, one of the main characters in the novel, although the first person narrator — unnamed except much later — is really the lead, the star of the long narrative. That’s because the world of the novel is seen through his eyes, from his point of view: Paris, the provincial town of Combray, the holiday resort on the coast of Normandy, even Venice. But more than locations, the narrator writes about several hundred characters, some of whom are as famous in literature as those in Dickens, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or indeed the immortals of Greek mythology and the Bible. Many are obvious homosexuals, although closeted. And a number of the characters who, at first, are raging heterosexuals later change direction.
Even more drastic than these changes in sexual orientation are the revolutionary shifts in society. One example: Madame Verdurin, a philistine and a vulgarian with low tastes in Swann’s Way, at novel’s end is the Duchesse de Guermantes — meaning she has climbed to the very top of snobbish Parisian society.
When I suggested above not to start at the beginning, I meant: skip the Overture, as it is called in some, but not all, English translations. The very first line in French is “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure,” meaning “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” From there, the narrator tells perhaps more than necessary about his sleep habits. This opening section goes on for some thirty to fifty pages, depending on the translation. (You’ll probably want to double back to it after you’ve come to the end of Swann’s Way.)
You should start reading at the section titled “Combray,” which is the name Proust gave to the town of Illiers, where members of his family lived and where he spent much of his childhood. Located about sixty miles southwest of Paris, the town was renamed “Illiers-Combray” in 1971, on the hundredth anniversary of Proust’s birth.
If you begin here, you might imagine that you’re reading an English novel of the nineteenth century — Jane Austen, perhaps, or George Eliot, even Dickens. That’s because Proust read these and many others and his novel shows their influence. This section begins, “Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no more than a church epitomising the town…My grandfather’s cousin — my great-aunt — with whom we used to stay, was the mother of that Aunt Léonie who, since her husband’s death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray, then her house, then her bedroom, and finally her bed…”
Diagnosis: agoraphobia and extreme hypochondria. In other hands than Proust’s, Aunt Léonie might have been a sadly depressing character. Instead, he makes her one of the great eccentrics in literature — and he couldn’t have done so if he hadn’t read Dickens. I’ve known many like her.
Aunt Léonie no longer “came down,” as she put it, meaning that meals were brought to her bedside and an endless line of visitors “came up” to visit. Her rules were strict: everyone must ask after her health (she spent years and years on her deathbed), and all must sympathize with her pitiable condition, but woe to the person who made her sound too sick, too far gone. They were permanently banished. Nor must visitors neglect local gossip. She was avid to know which neighbors attended Mass, who was absent, and whether So-and-So arrived at the church before the Elevation of the Host.
I’ll stop here before I’m accused of supplying an eighth volume to the novel. One final comment: Remembrance of Things Past is a highly unstable text because Proust died before he could make the hundreds of changes and corrections that he had in mind. He worked desperately on page proofs and manuscripts almost literally until the hour of his death, on November 18, 1922.
The first English translation, by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, published in 1928, is in many ways the best. You’ll do well to avoid those recent translations that operate under the clunky title In Search of Lost Time. Yes, that’s literally what it means in French, but in English we speak of remembering the past. Even pedants and fools don’t “search the memory for lost time.”
The worst translation is a recent one by Lydia Davis, a literal-minded translator whose work reads exactly the way it shouldn’t: like a translation. If you’ve dipped into her own fiction, you’ll realize how desperately wrong she was for Proust.
The following article and photos courtesy of frequent Mandate contributor Charles Harmon Cagle.