When I haven’t the energy to read Proust, I read something else. In that respect, I’m no different from anyone else. But the other day my daughter commented on how strange it was that I was sitting on the couch reading one book while another lay at my side — after reading one for a few minutes, I would switch to the other, and after a while back again to the first. This went on for some time. I suspect this reading habit isn’t unusual either.

I can’t explain the thinking that forces the switch, nor even my choice of which books to read simultaneously. When my daughter made her comment, I was tag-reading Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half. Perhaps it was the yellow covers (but only Sloan’s book glows in the dark). Perhaps it was because I’d just picked up both at one of my local Little Free Libraries (there are 4 within a 5-minute walk of my apartment). Each book is an easy and enjoyable read, but I found Brosh’s work much more profound, despite her purposefully childish drawings. Brosh’s memoir began as a blog (still available here); for the book she created some new episodes but also included her immensely famous stories about her 18-month bout with depression. Rightfully hailed as one of the best depictions of this terrible ailment, Brosh’s book ought to be required reading for everyone.

Mr. Penumbra‘s appearance was fortuitous, for I had just added it to my list of books to find and read. I was disappointed by the ending, but not the way that Kat, the Googler, is. (I’m trying not to include any spoilers here). It just seemed like a shaggy dog tale — a lot of build-up to a nearly anticlimactic ending. But I’m still keeping the book (the cover glows in the dark!). And I wouldn’t mind finding a bookstore like Mr. Penumbra’s, and if a group like the Unbroken Spine offered me membership, I’d grab it. A love of books and reading and puzzles is clear throughout this weird little mystery.

Another pairing: a compendium of P. G. Wodehouse golf tales with an obscure history of a village in Provence, again both picked up at my Little Free Library. Peattie’s Immortal Village tells of the city of Vence, from pre-historic times to the late-1920s. Botanist and author of a range of books, Peattie fell in love with Vence when he lived there for a few years. Before leaving the little city, he was inspired to write this book, which was then privately printed in France. In 1945, in response to the ravages of WWII, he brought out this American edition, with Paul Landacre’s gorgeous woodblock illustrations. He hoped it would teach readers, as they considered the aftermath of war, that

it is not insignificant to learn that this little Provençal town, once situated on a dangerous frontier, was destroyed again and again by barbarians and torn by internecine quarrel, and yet it was rebuilt. It is worth while to remember that nothing material is indestructible, but the spirit in man is.

Peattie’s writing reveals a 1920s racial sensibility, and the mishmash of kings, queens, nobility, invaders and townspeople in the Middle Ages is a challenge to keep track of. Yet there can be no confusion about Peattie’s appreciation for the people and environment in this “forgotten corner of Provence”.

About Wodehouse, I will say only that I never expected to laugh so often while reading a book of stories whose connecting thread was a love for the game of golf, about which I agree with whoever quipped “a good walk spoiled”.

Gustave Moreau, Jupiter and Semele

Within a Budding Grove, pp. 528-533.

I still have the 5-year-old notes for these pages, but to ease the task of getting back into reading Proust himself (rather than just my old blog posts and some books about his novel) I’ve backtracked. Re-entry completed.

I’m sure that somewhere there’s an annotated edition of Proust’s RTP, no doubt with more annotations than text. (Shattuck refers to a recent French edition of 7500 pages, which includes all Proust’s drafts and rejected materials, as well as critical essays, etc. etc. Shattuck rightly posits that if it wasn’t good enough for Proust to include in the published version, then we probably don’t need to know about it.)

I’m having fun, however, creating my own annotations. Moreau’s art work (left) is a case in point. Only a detour through the Wikiverse allowed me to fully appreciate how a fleeting reference to this painting works. Still at Balbec, Marcel sees his grandmother’s friend, Mme de Villeparisis, showing concern for Marcel’s father, in a way that “shewed her this one man so large among all the rest quite small, like that Jupiter to whom Gustave Moreau gave, when he portrayed him by the side of a weak mortal, a superhuman stature.” Behind this reference to Roman mythology lie jealousy, betrayal, murder. But what’s more interesting to me is that Moreau’s painting dates from AFTER Marcel’s visit to Balbec (Marcel Sprinker* places the Balbec visit as sometime between 1894 and 1896-7), thus reminding me of the importance of differentiating between the young Marcel and the older Narrator. Each tells a portion of RTP, but the line between them is so smooth as to be almost invisible.

The quote about Moreau, for instance, comes at the end of the paragraph below. Can you pinpoint where Marcel’s voice changes to the Narrator’s?

I asked myself by what strange accident, in the impartial glass through which Mme. de Villeparisis considered, from a safe distance, the bustling, tiny, purposeless agitation of the crowd of people whom she knew, there had come to be inserted at the spot through which she observed my father a fragment of prodigious magnifying power which made her see in such high relief and in the fullest detail everything that there was attractive about him, the contingencies that were obliging him to return home, his difficulties with the customs, his admiration for El Greco, and, altering the scale of her vision, shewed her this one man so large among all the rest quite small, like that Jupiter to whom Gustave Moreau gave, when he portrayed him by the side of a weak mortal, a superhuman stature.

That sentence appears to begin with Marcel’s POV (“I asked myself”); he’s astonished that such a great lady should be aware of his father. Yet almost immediately the language takes on the detailed complexity of the Narrator’s long-after-the-fact memory. The Jupiter reference finally confirms that a shift has occurred (how could Marcel have known about a painting not yet or only recently completed, and therefore not exhibited?).

Why is noting these shifts important, especially when Proust disguises them so well? It has to do with what I reported in an earlier post — the many selves. The much older Narrator is clearly not the same person as Marcel. It also has to do with the entire point of the novel, which I’ll write about when I get to the end of it myself (sometime in December of this year, if all goes well).

A final note about Proust’s titles: Moncrieff translated À la recherche du temps perdu as “A Remembrance of Things Past” (from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30), but not everyone has been happy with that. In fact, I think most experts dislike it immensely. A preferred version is the more literal “In Search of Time Lost”, although I don’t like how this drops the rhythm of”recherche”, as well as its implied meaning of “searching again”. Montcrieff at least holds on to that subtle prefix, re-.

For the second volume’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, which ought to be “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”, Montcrieff gave us “Within a Budding Grove”. Was Proust’s appreciation of young girls flowering into puberty too creepy for Montcrieff? What to do? I’m taking the easy route by sticking to the version I have, Montcrieff’s original (1924), with all its flaws. It’ll do.

*Michael Sprinker, History and Ideology in Proust (1998), p. 96.

The final reblogging from 5 years ago. 

Within a Budding Grove, 514-528

Queen Ranavalo III of Madagascar

One of the perks of reading Proust is finding out about obscure personages. Although his main characters are his own creations (albeit based on real people), he sprinkles his stories with references to historical figures, references that seem arbitrary — perhaps the author’s version of “Tell Sparta people”.

Queen Ranavalona is one — an obscure ruler of Madascar when the French colonized the island; they eventually deposed her in 1897. She was exiled to Algeria but spent part of each year in Paris.

Her name comes up as Marcel talks about his and his grandmother’s position at the hotel in Balbeque. Recall, from another post, that the hotel’s guests are rather snobbish and eager to comment on everyone else’s status and behavior. Marcel is dissatisfied with his position at the bottom of the heap and misses the notice of people like M and Mme Swann. And then,

… mere chance put into our hands, my grandmother’s and mine, the means of giving ourselves an immediate distinction in the eyes of all the other occupants of the hotel. On that first afternoon, at the moment when the old lady came downstairs from her room, producing, thanks to the footman who preceded her, the maid who came running after her with a book and a rug that had been left behind, a marked effect upon all who beheld her and arousing in each of them a curiosity from which it was evident that none was so little immune as M. de Stermaria, the manager leaned across to my grandmother and, from pure kindness of heart (as one might point out the Shah, or Queen Ranavalo to an obscure onlooker who could obviously have no sort of connexion with so mighty a potentate, but might be interested, all the same, to know that he had been standing within a few feet of one) whispered in her ear, “The Marquise de Villeparisis!” while at the same moment the old lady, catching sight of my grandmother, could not repress a start of pleased surprise. (p. 519)

Of course Marcel’s grandmother and the Marquise know each other, but for complicated reasons they pretend not to, and Marcel must continue to squirm at the low end of the esteem scale. His chance to gain notice must pass, and he seethes with frustration. Oh, the ignominy!

The Narrator gives it all a spin so funny, I actually laughed out loud. Marcel is so self-conscious, as he walks among these people, that he can’t stop thinking about them not thinking about him:

Alas for my peace of mind, I had none of the detachment that all these people shewed. To many of them I gave constant thought; I should have liked not to pass unobserved by a man with a receding brow and eyes that dodged between the blinkers of his prejudices and his education … (p. 517)

Marcel can’t bear that he doesn’t stand out in this crowd of blinkered people with their low brows and low educations, and he is pleased when his grandmother and the Marquise finally deign to recognize and speak to each other. You can almost hear Marcel’s sigh of pleasure. Now people will look at him and think, “He must be somebody!”

I hope that most people, upon reaching adulthood, are relieved to discover that they can pass through the world for the most part unnoticed. How perceptive of Proust to make the young Marcel so self-conscious that he’s actually uncomfortable if people aren’t looking at him (with admiration and envy, of course) — as if his very existence depended on their noting his actions and wondering, “Who could that intelligent, sophisticated, handsome, well-dressed young man be?”

As Maurice Chevalier sings in Gigi, “I’m so glad that I’m not young anymore.”

Back in 2010-11, while working my way through 500+ pages of tiny print (I’ve just counted — 48 lines per page), I complained a bit about the lack of illustrations in some other books. I’m amused now that I never had that thought regarding Proust, and even now I can’t imagine how it might be illustrated without interrupting the experience of reading.

At any rate, my complaints paid off with a useful tip from a reader, as you’ll find out. This post was originally titled, “Why aren’t there more illustrations?”

Charles Ephrussi, by Jean Patricot, 1905, courtesy Wikipedia

When I first moved to NYC, in the mid-1970s, a neighbor pulled out a recently published edition of The American Heritage Dictionary and asked me what its one drawback was. I’ve always loved how the editors had designed that dictionary, and I could see nothing wrong with it: etymologies, definitions, usage guidance, breakdown of shades of meaning among synonyms (example: break, crack, fracture, rupture, burst, split, splinter, shatter, shiver, smash, and crush, all carefully delineated in a brief paragraph). So much information in one book. It seemed perfect to me.

My friend’s complaint? Not enough pictures. The margins of a page could hold as many of four photos or diagrams, but many have only one and too many have none at all.

I can’t look at a dictionary now without thinking of my erstwhile neighbor, and a non-fiction book with a stingy few illustrations makes me wonder why more weren’t included.

Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is one such book. I’m loving it, although as the netsuke de Waal is following move to Vienna we have to leave Charles Swann/Ephrussi in Paris, and I was so enjoying all those overlaps.

Towards the end of the chapter on Charles, de Waal describes Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party and says that the top-hatted man at the rear, with his back to us, is his great uncle Charles Ephrussi! Well, Edmund? Why didn’t you include a reproduction? Why must I go through my art books hoping that one would have included it? (I was lucky and found one.)

Titian, Woman with a Mirror

Yes, yes, I know. Illustrations add to the expense of a book and better images than most books can produce are just a few clicks away on the web. If I could be more satisfied with each author’s descriptions of these pictures, I’d be a happier reader all around. But my mind wants to “see”, and so I pause in my reading to look something up.

Now, as I read Proust, I’ll be able to see Charles Ephrussi (and imagine Louise Cahen D’Anvers, for I’ve been unable to find any online drawing or painting of her; the closest available is Titian’s Woman with a Mirror).

L Cahen d’Anvers, by Bonnat, Courtesy Chapitre.com

BTW: the Getty Museum blog has a post about de Waal’s memoir.

And then, thanks to a follower, I was able to find a portrait of Louise Cahen d’Anvers, one possible model for Mme Swann. Oh, Odette, you look so very sweet here. Is this the image Marcel (and the Narrator) carried of you for so long? Does this innocent profile mask a colorful and notorious history?

Renoir, Little Irene

But wait. There’s much more information these days on the internet (it’s impossible to keep up). Louise and her husband Louis commissioned Renoir to paint a portrait of their daughter, Irène. Evidently, her parents were so unhappy with the painting that they hung it in the servants’ quarters and paid only 1500 francs. Renoir called the family “stingy”. If you’re curious, you can learn more about Louise and Irene here. I’m satisfied that this portrait reveals Gilberte, its background of shrubbery dappled with light looking like the gardens where Marcel first met Mme Swann’s daughter.

One last detour on my journey through past Proust posts, to a novel whose title reveals its relevance.

Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (2003), Kate Taylor, 457 pp.

This novel, set in three time periods, is about women and how they cope with frustrated love, parenting, artistic creation, and, most importantly, anti-semitism — echoing Proust’s themes, but from the viewpoint of, say, Gilberte or Marcel’s mother.

Alfred Dreyfus

Marie Prevost, the main character, is a Canadian translator reading through Madame Proust’s journals and suffering from unrequited love — the object of her desire is Max, son of Sarah, daughter of parents killed at Auschwitz (and also distantly related to Mme Proust). Through Marie, we learn about Mme Proust, who worries about the bohemian life of her odd son, Marcel, at a time when all of France is arguing the case of Dreyfus. It is also through Marie that we learn about Sarah, sent from Paris to foster parents in Canada, saving her from the death camps but causing an anomie no one seems able to break through.

The parallels in the three stories are ingenious (causing comparison to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours), some you might guess right away and others only as they carefully unfold in the plot.

Marcel Proust, seated

Taylor jolts us back and forth between three time periods. We see late 19th- and early 20th century Paris through Mme Proust’s journals (Taylor’s own creation, and so well done I can’t believe they don’t sit somewhere in a French archive). Anyone at all familiar with Marcel’s great work will note the clues to its genesis.  For instance, at one point, as the 19th century is drawing to a close, Mme Proust writes in her journal:

Marcel was pointing out that when you are a child waiting for father to come home and lunch to be served, time seems to drag on forever, but when you are an adult, and want to write a letter, and see a friend, and buy new gloves all in the same afternoon, it rushes by, and there is never enough of it. “How does the year or the century make any difference to how we perceive the time to pass?”

In the Jewish neighborhoods of mid-20th-century Toronto, reeling from WWII and the horrors of the concentration camps, are where we find Sarah, unable to connect to anyone, for decades suffering the shock of the separation from her parents. The modern setting gives us Marie’s life in Toronto and her journey to Paris, where she has to confront her own disappointments.

It’s as though Taylor is allowing us to put together a jigsaw puzzle, handing us just a few pieces at a time. At first, none of the pieces fit, but eventually patterns emerge, and at the end we have a detailed picture of lives that feed into each other. Some might argue that the links are too neat, too coincidental — but this is the author’s prerogative. Life often is coincidental, dependent on the daily accidents of crossed paths and shared desires.

Père Lachaise

This novel is a beautiful homage to Proust’s epic, to love and memory, to desire and loss. It begins and ends at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, a must-see for any fan of literature visiting Paris. (In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain calls it “the honored resting-place of some of [France’s] greatest and best children.”) You’ll want to go there after reading this book. If you do, take a few pebbles to place on the graves you visit.

I’m nearing the end of these posts from the past (I think). However many remain, though, I’m determined to end this week with real-time reading and blogging.

Within a Budding Grove, pp. 504-514

Saint Blandina, courtesy SaintsSPQN.com

The only thing to report about these 10 pages is that Marcel has arrived at Balbec Plage, had a physical collapse, been rescued by his indulgent grandmother (“… be sure you knock on the wall if you want anything in the night”), and recovered enough to mingle with other guests at the hotel and comment on their behavior.

For example:

… the barrister and his friends could not exhaust their flow of sarcasm on the subject of a wealthy old lady of title, because she never moved anywhere without taking her whole household with her. Whenever the wives of the solicitor and the magistrate saw her in the dining-room at mealtimes they put up their glasses and gave her an insolent scrutiny, as minute and distrustful as if she had been some dish with a pretentious name but a suspicious appearance which, after the negative result of a systematic study, must be sent away with a lofty wave of the hand and a grimace of disgust.

On a related topic, I find it impossible to read one book at a time. No, I’m not like a two-fisted eater, with a book in each hand as my eyes alternate between the two. But I have a couple of books next to my couch, that I read in the afternoon or evening, and three more by my bed, that I read at night or when I wake up. When I get bored with one, I switch to another.

Bored with a book? As Spongebob would say, “Those words! I didn’t know you could use them together in one sentence!”

But, yes, bored. Every book has its slow moments, and Proust’s has what seems like more than its fair share. All this is to say that, although it may look as though I’m devoted to Marcel and carefully focused on the 10 to 20 pages I can read each week, it would be misrepresenting the truth. I’m actually a very fickle reader. If Proust were the only thing I was reading these days, I’d have finished the two volumes/seven novels long ago.

Busy, busy, busy.

Early 2011, my alternate reading consisted of Diana Wynne Jones, Cornelia Funke, Salman Rushdie, Sara Zarr, and I don’t even remember what else. These days, it’s a set of obscure books, which I’ll be happy to introduce you to, but not today.

Another promise to myself this year is to write some short fiction, so I’m trying an experiment: one short story per month (most are going up on Wattpad). Let’s see how long I can keep this up.

In 2013, my sister sent me this card (download and enlarge for a better view); it inspired the following.

Flatiron’s Walk

The snow was deep when Flatiron set out for Invermere. He’d been tempted to stay in, a bowl of hot porridge in his lap as he toasted his feet on the hearth. The wind had picked up overnight, and its claws were searching in every crack for a way into his cottage. He knew that if he went outside his walls, it would tear through his layers of cloak, clothing and undergarments to freeze his skin.

Yet he needed to check his mail. A certain package ought to be waiting for him in the cubby, third from the left and five rows down, behind Mrs. Foresight’s thin lips and fearsome bulk at the corner shop in the village that lay, under banks of snow, just over the Hill. Through the thick window in his front door, he could make out the blurred image of a tree’s massive branches waving at him as he pulled his snowshoes from their rack.

While wrapping his scarf around his neck, Flatiron hummed a summery tune. He recalled how the hottest day of the previous August had scorched his bare head while he’d weeded the snapdragons. As usual, the memory didn’t warm him.

“Cheer-io!” he called out, though anyone else would wonder who he was cheer-io-ing. Flatiron lived alone.

The door banging shut sounded like “good riddance!”
“Yes, I know. You’re tired of me.” Flatiron heard the bolt shoot across on the inside. “At least I’m doing something productive!” he shouted through the thick door before turning up the path to open his gate. He paused a moment. The tree that had waved at him stood still, even in the wind. Its dark branches, silhouetted against the sky, looked like cracks in river ice.

Then, with a creak, the gate swung to behind him, shoving him into the world.
           Behind him, a window curtain tweaked, but Flatiron pretended not to notice. “You’ll be lucky if I’m back before supper. It ain’t no picnic, walking to Invermere in all this. A good horse and sleigh would be worth its season’s feed, but no.” His voice rose two octaves. “‘Can’t afford it, too rich for us, we aren’t the aristocracy.’ Pah! Anybody’d think we were chimney sweeps.”

The deep whiteness soaked up his words so that not even the parliament of owls, hunkered down in the copse on his left, heard him. Flakes of snow, in a windy fluster, eddied around him.

He muttered as he shuffled along, his snowshoes leaving a slurred track. “There’s never an ‘enjoy your walk’ or ‘my regards to Mrs. Foresight.’” He leaned into the wind, and his words whipped past his ears, only to get caught in the few remaining strands of hair that trailed from his woolen cap. He tucked them under his collar, where they melted into soft whispers that warmed his neck.

Invermere lay to the southwest, and the sun would have been in his eyes if not for the thin clouds moving in from the sea. The muted light exaggerated the bleak landscape. Bare branches in the copse scratched against the low sky. They stretched towards Flatiron as he shuffled past, and he fought off an urge to swat at them. The sky seemed to sink lower and lower, as if to enfold him in a damp blanket.

He shivered.

Off to his right, Bearded Tor sheared steeply upward. Sharp pinnacles cleaved the sky, shredding the clouds that hung about the peaks. “Like me, old man, you’re losing your hair,” Flatiron commented.

A herd of black-nosed sheep clustered against the other side of a stone wall. They baa-ed and thrust their heads into the air. Steam gathered into a darkening cloud over them.

“You’ll start your own blizzard, if you don’t watch out,” he warned them.

For a moment the sheep held their breaths, puzzling out a response, and the cloud dispersed in the wind. But, coming up with nothing, the animals exhaled, blowing up another cloud of steam.

Flatiron shook his head and trudged on. He felt a chill claw of wind scrape down his back, leaving a wake of shivers. “Not far now. Just one foot in front of the other, and trek’ll soon be over.” The shivers spread to his shoulders, ran down his arms, and curled his fingers into his palms.

A thud startled him. He turned in time to see a second lump of snow slip from a branch in the copse, landing with a solid plop. Where the snow had been now sat a raven, a silhouette of coal against the gray sky. Aiming a squawk at Flatiron, the bird flapped its wings before settling back on the branch. As if by signal, another raven joined it, and then three more.

“Going to Inver, is he?” remarked one of them. “Feeling the cold, too, my word,” came from another. The others piped in. “Shivery weather, ain’t it?” “Don’t let that cloud knock off your hat!” “Watch us. We’re off.” With a noisy rush of wings, the five took flight towards the village. A black feather, streaked with grey and smaller than his thumb, landed on Flatiron’s sleeve. In the sky, the birds shrank to black dots and then dropped out of sight behind the Hill.

“An unkindness of ravens,” Flatiron recited. “A muster of storks. A siege of herons. A cast of hawks. A deceit of lapwings.” He pocketed the feather, his eyes on the rise just ahead. For eighty-two years, he had hiked to the top of the Hill, surveyed the village on the other side, and then decided whether to turn back or keep going. He stopped there now.

Smoke rose from chimneys, anchoring Invermere to the lowering clouds. Ravens swarmed like schools of fish. A red cloth, not yet rigid, flapped on a line. On the Hill’s crest, the wind, scented with animal dung and frozen hay, struggled against him, but Flatiron pushed forward. After a few steps, the wind gave up, and the village rose to engulf him. He gulped one final icy breath before sinking among the houses, where sooty smoke had streaked the walls. Down here, the air tasted of burning peat.

In the shop, where he leaned his snowshoes in a corner, his breath steamed in front of him. He waited quietly while Mrs. Foresight helped a young mother, whose tyke clung to her skirt while staring at Flatiron’s knees. He examined them himself and noted a tiny hole starting in the left knee of his britches. A scar from the morning’s efforts with the firewood.

Mrs. Foresight stared at Flatiron’s chin. “Best to come early and be tucked back in at home ‘fore lunch, cold day like this, innit?”

Flatiron nodded, opened his mouth to speak, but too slowly. The woman had already started up again.

“Your package ain’t come yet, but I expect it next week, just like I told you last time already. Tuesday, after floods clear.” She ducked her head to glance sideways out a window. “Looks bad now, but melt’ll start in two days.” She glanced back at his chin. “You’ll be wanting some bread crumbs. And an onion.”

Whatever for? wondered Flatiron. Yet he paid for the items. Wrapped in yellowed paper and tucked into his deep pocket, they banged against his leg as he left Invermere.

With the wind at his back, the climb out of Invermere was easier, and all his layers warmed him. Densely falling flakes hid Bearded Tor; behind the wall, the sheep wriggled out of snow banks and then huddled more closely together. In the copse, a host of sparrows flitted among the branches, threatening the sleepy owls. A single crow stood sentry on a limb overhanging Flatiron’s path.

From his pocket, he dug out the onion … the packet of crumbs … the feather–which had stretched to the length of his forearm and turned completely grey. Whose feather now? A stork? An ostrich?

Under the sentry’s branch, he proffered the feather. The crow gripped it with a claw and flew off, hoarsely calling, “About time. They’ve been waiting for ages!”

Flatiron scattered the crumbs over the copse and watched the sparrows dip up the meal, bowing and scraping in an avian gavotte. The owls rearranged their feathers.

He stood so long that he began to feel the wind creeping under his cap and scarf and cloak. Snow had buried his snowshoes, and he had to shake them off before starting the last stage of his walk.

The gate stood open, creaking impatiently.

“Yes, yes, you’re quite right. This is no weather to be standing around in.” He gently shut the gate, making sure the latch was tight against the wind. Even before opening his door, he could smell dinner.

While Flatiron’s woolen layers steamed near the hearth, he drank the mug of black coffee that had been made ready for him. Stew bubbled in a heavy pot suspended over the fire.

“The feather. You planned that, didn’t you?” he said. He took another sip. “Am I too late to add the onion?”

Warning: I get a bit philosophical here.

Within a Budding Grove, pp. 488-504

Grand Hotel, Cabourg

Marcel has gone off to Balbec-Plage, in Normandy. After, of course, much anguish about leaving his mother. I suppose it’s all meant to be very touching, but I couldn’t help thinking, “Get on with it, already!” as he moped and worried about how he’d survive in a strange town, with only his grandmother to tend him. (And, of course, the ever-loyal Françoise, who accidentally heads off on the wrong train and arrives much later in Balbec.)

Duguay-Trouin, St. Malo

He does write something worth thinking about at the beginning of this section (“Place-Names: The Place”):

… the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves…. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather within ourselves, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the creature that we were, range ourselves face to face with past events as that creature had to face them, suffer afresh because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. (pp. 488-489)

Nativity, Great Hours of Anne of Brittany

So, there are at least two Marcels, the “Marcel” who loved Gilberte, and the “Marcel” who doesn’t. How many different selves can there be? According to Marcel, we aren’t one self that gathers layers around it, like the grit in an oyster that becomes a pearl — instead we’re each a cast of thousands, each cast member taking its turn as star, created by a new emotion, only to be pushed off-stage by the next star.

Maybe. The backstage area must get crowded, as a person gets older. Imagine the noise and confusion! “Five minutes, 1981 broken-hearted-over-Joe self! Five minutes.” And the 1981 self pushes forward, to cameo in a brief moment of regret about that idiot Joe. Oops! Did my 1981 self try to upstage me there? “Back!” I say, “Back!”

Final great quote: “a casino, over which a flag would be snapping in the freshening breeze, like a hollow cough” (p. 503) — doesn’t bode well for the casino, does it?

I have to wonder now whether Proust’s multi-selves are one version of the multiverse — all those infinities are within us rather than in a set of parallel worlds. Walt Whitman: “I contain multitudes.”

Tomorrow: a break from WTWP for some of my own fiction.

First week of January, 2011, must have been quiet, for I made wonderful progress in Proust, reading whom is like watching a glacier. Things move too slowly to notice changes over short periods of time (or just a few pages) — you need great distances, huge chunks of text, to see anything happening.

Botticelli’s Magnificat

Within a Budding Grove, pp. 416-487

If Ralph Vaughn Williams had composed with words, he might have written the last few pages of “Madame Swann at Home”. Such lyrical beauty, with all those flowers and colors, as Mme. Swann walks along a Parisian avenue on a sunny May afternoon, surrounded by a crowd of men. Marcel practically drools over her.

It’s a fitting end to this episode, 150 pages of Marcel agonizing over Gilberte Swann, who, his readers can immediately see, barely tolerates him. He doesn’t hide the painful scenes.

Mme Swann’s samovar was “metallic red”

Finally, Marcel gets the message (Gilberte lets her boredom show), and he goes all noble. He stays away from her, hoping that this will make her realize how much she loves him, but also reasoning that the longer he stays away from her, the less he’ll love her. It’s a very complicated sort of logic: He knows she doesn’t love him, yet can’t help hoping that perhaps she does. He stays away, to cure his obsession, but also in hopes that the separation will end in a happy reconciliation.

There are hints of future loves with others, specifically to Albertine. But he hints that his affair with Albertine will be just as unhappy as his current one with Gilberte. You can’t help feeling that Marcel tends to love in all the wrong places. Also, his fascination with Mme. Swann is a bit suspect, but I have to let that go; he’s so honestly confessional that, if he’d been infatuated with her, he’d have written about it.

Luini’s Adoration of the Magi

Some great quotes in these pages:

… there is nothing that so much alters the material qualities of the voice as the presence of thought behind what one is saying. (p. 419) [I can’t resist a nod to the current presidential campaigns.]

It is what I should have said then and there to Bergotte, for one does not invent all one’s speeches, especially when one is acting merely as a card in the social pack. (p. 435)

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind that are listening…. The truth which one puts into one’s words does not make a direct path for itself, is not supported by irresistible evidence. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in the words themselves. (p. 465)

Guelder-rose

During those periods in which our bitterness of spirit, though steadily diminishing, still persists, a distinction must be drawn between the bitterness which comes to us from our constantly thinking of the person herself and that which is revived by certain memories, some cutting speech, some word in a letter that we have had from her. (p. 476)

And this, from a Marcel in the depths of despair about Gilberte:

We construct our house of life to suit another person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, a prisoner within the walls which were intended only for her.

Victoria carriage

I wipe away the tears, just as Marcel presents that paean to Mme. Swann, in her spring attire, shaded by a parasol the color of Parma violets. She has left the victoria at home and is walking gaily, creating a memory that Marcel will treasure, “Mme. Swann beneath her parasol, as though in the coloured shade of a wistaria bower.”

Parma violet, photo Courtesy of M. Pierre Barandou, Geraniums d’ Aquitaine, S.A., Agen, France, AmericanVioletSociety.org

A note about the images: like any successful author, Proust immerses readers in a world that would have been immediately recognizable to contemporaries but becomes more obscure as time passes. Thanks to film and the internet, it’s possible to locate or recall Gilded Age interiors, fashions, manners, and even plants and trees. But Proust goes further, referencing works of visual and musical art. In a future life I may track down the musical references, but for now I’m satisfied if I can find images of the art, whether natural or man-made, that plays meaningful roles in this novel. Somehow, in the original post, I didn’t include a photo of a Parma violet, so I add it here. Colors are as important to Proust as any other visual image.

Remember my reader who commented that one must reread Proust? I wonder if that was a subtle curse. Judge for yourself as you read the next update.

Within a Budding Grove, pp. 406-416

Mathilde Bonaparte, courtesy Wikipedia

So, as I was plodding away this week, hiking through Proust’s dense prose, I started to notice something weird, something akin to déjà vu. The narrator seemed to be repeating himself. The occasional passage was like an echo of something I’d read earlier, and Marcel was suddenly younger and once again out of favor with the Swann’s. It didn’t make sense, but I figured Marcel had his reasons for the repetitions and would eventually explain what was going on.

Then it hit me, like a kick in the shin: I’d started reading at page 306, when I should have begun at 406! Very irksome, for two reasons. First, of course, is that I wasted a half hour re-reading 5 pages from Swann’s Way. And second: that I didn’t notice sooner. Most of those 5 pages seemed brand new. Had I not been paying attention when I read them the first time? Oy!!!

So, back to Marcel in his proper place, hanging out with the Swanns and pining away for Gilberte. He even makes the explicit comparison to Swann’s initial frustrated love for Odette but goes no further with the analogy.

I heard on the radio a few days ago that worry is future-focused. This is definitely Marcel. He (so far) has no regrets (which are, clearly, past-focused; the related present-focused emotion has to be fear, which Marcel exhibits only as reluctance to approach adults). For the most part, Marcel is a worrier — will Gilberte ever realize that she loves him? will she ever express this love? will she be at home? will she speak with him? etc., etc., mutatis mutandis.

Yet it’s a strange relationship. Marcel seems to be more appreciative of Gilberte’s parents than he is of her. He writes of going out in the carriage with M. and Mme. Swann, and I picture the three of them (who knows where Gilberte is? who cares?) driving through the Bois, bowing to various personages. Marcel looks admiringly at Mme. Swann and imagines the admiration and jealousy that others feel when they see him with her.

Then, out of the blue, Mme. Swann introduces him and Gilberte to someone they meet — Gilberte’s been there all along! And just as quickly she moves into the background. On these excursions, she says nothing, and Marcel thinks only of her parents. Very odd.

Are his affections changing? Not really. I suspect this is more of what he has touched on earlier, the idea that anticipation is much more exciting that reality. Thinking about Gilberte is more satisfying than being with her, even if she’s actually there.

These few pages end with a tiff between Gilberte and her father, about going to the theater on the anniversary of her grandfather’s death. M. Swann doesn’t want her to go, but she refuses to submit. “I think it’s perfectly absurd,” she explains to Marcel, “to worry about other people in matters of sentiment. We feel things for ourselves, not for the public.”

The tiff transfers to Gilberte and Marcel when he, emulating Swann, tries to stop her.

“But Gilberte,” I protested, taking her by the arm, “it is not to satisfy public opinion, it is to please your father.”

“You are not going to pass remarks upon my conduct, I hope,” she said sharply, plucking her arm away.

Les Invalides, courtesy Wikipedia

Marcel, in supporting the father’s wishes, risks losing the daughter.

A note about dates: a chance meeting between the Swanns and Princess Mathilde in the Jardin d’Acclimatation leads to a reference to Tsar Nicholas II’s visit to les Invalides (the site of Napoleon’s tomb), a visit which, after just a few moments on the internet, can be dated to October 1896. FYI: Dreyfus was first convicted in 1894, evidence implicating someone else was discovered (and suppressed) in 1896, Zola wrote J’Accuse! in 1898, and Dreyfus was finally exonerated in 1906. I don’t know what the Swanns talk about when they’re on their own, but in front of Marcel they seem totally unaware of the anti-Semitic storm that’s raging around them.

There’s something about December afternoons, with the days shortening and chill winds or damp rain pressing against my windows — ideal napping weather. This post dates from early December 2010, with big family holidays nearing.

But now it’s a warm March morning as I reblog this post, and the dangers of dozing over Proust are the same in any season. Good thing Proust offers gems like the one I discuss below. 

Dreyfus (photo H. Roger-Viollet)

Within a Budding Grove, pp. 386-406

Lesson 1: Don’t read Proust while in a reclining position (say, on one’s couch), wrapped in layers of blanket, on a rainy afternoon. I kept falling asleep through most of the latest 20 pages, so it took me about 5 hours to make this week’s meager progress. To paraphrase The Who, hope I finish before I get old!

Lesson 2: Even 20 pages of truly dense ruminating prose can hold some gems. For example, this section reminded me of the social one-up-manship well known to all Luciaphiles.

Although Tilling may equal only the tiniest corner of middle-upper-class Paris, the scrabble to get on top and stay there — and to be sure that everyone knows you’re on top — is the same in both places. As Odette and Charles aim for the best guests and pretend not to care, I could see Lucia and Georgie conniving against Daisy (for her guru) and Mapp (for Mallards). Did E. F. Benson read Proust?

One of the best lines is from Marcel’s mother, who watches the Swanns’ social contortions with total comprehension. Marcel’s father can’t understand why they’d want to invite someone so low-class and low-value as the Cottards, but his mother gets it:

Mamma, on the other hand, understood quite well; she knew that a great deal of the pleasure which a woman finds in entering a class of society different from that in which she has previously lived would be lacking if she had no means of keeping her old associates informed of those others, relatively more brilliant, with whom she has replaced them. Therefore, she requires an eye-witness who may be allowed to penetrate this new, delicious world (as a buzzing, browsing insect bores its way into a flower) and will then, as the course of her visits may carry her, spread abroad, or so at least one hopes, with the tidings, a latent germ of envy and of wonder. Mme. Cottard, who might have been created on purpose to fill this part, belonged to that special category in a visiting list which Mamma … used to call the ‘Tell Sparta’ people.

We all know a few Tell Sparta people, but to what extent do we cynically use them to engender envy as they broadcast news of our party guests? 

NB: The Dreyfus affair enters the scene, briefly, in this section, and for the first time (I think, although I might have missed earlier references), Marcel states that the Swanns are Jewish. After reading de Waal’s memoir, these overlaps with the Paris branch of the Ephrussi family resonate.

Here’s a reaction to the original post: 

au contraire! you must read Proust lying down! you *must fall asleep every page! you must reread the same section over and over again without noticing! it must NOT make sense, either!

whatever gives you the notion that Proust is a book like any other — one to be read (Damn, English lacks perfected forms of verbs! I must improvise!) … read from cover to cover rather than read in (or better yet, “read about”)?? hain?!

one reads in Proust, not reads Proust!

give it up!

i have been reading Proust for three years and have not yet made it through book one!

It’s nice to be confirmed in my belief that I’m not the only one. Rereading this response, however, just makes me more determined: this is the year I finish Proust.

Interspersed with my summaries of and reactions to Proust’s novels are a few posts on related topics, highlights of which I’ve excerpted and combined below. It amazed me at the time how Proust-related books and articles would fall into my lap. Coincidence? Serendipity? Whatever the case, it’s all very interesting.

Courtesy Flickr, ilvic

Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, reviewed in the NYRB (Oct. 14, 2010) reveals a possible connection to Proust, for de Waal’s great-grandfather’s cousin, Charles Ephrussi, could have been an inspiration for Swann.

de Waal is a potter/artist (beautiful work; photos of his installations are available on his website; he’s also recently published a new book, The White Road, a history of porcelain) who inherited a huge collection of netsuke from a great uncle. This inheritance sent him on a journey through Europe and Asia, tracing the netsuke through generations of family members who had owned them. It’s a book about outsiders (Jews, artists, collectors, homosexuals) that perfectly matches Proust’s work.

Gustave Caillebotte

In the first few chapters of de Waal’s book we find where the real Charles Ephrussi overlaps with the fictional Charles Swann. Ephrussi develops an all-consuming interest in Dürer, Swann in Vermeer. Ephrussi hangs out in Mme Lemaire’s salon, Swann in Mme Verdurin’s. Ephrussi’s religion separates him from polite society, whereas for Swann it’s his marriage.

De Waal references Caillebotte’s painting (right), Jeunne homme à sa fenêtre, saying it could easily be Charles Ephrussi on his arrival in Paris:

Here [he] stands at the open window of their family apartment looking out onto the intersection of the rue de Monceau’s neighbouring streets. He stands with his hands in his pockets, well dressed and self-assured, with his life before him and a plush armchair behind him. ¶Everything is possible.

A sense of wealth exudes from this portrait, as well as from de Waal’s memoir. The Ephrussis had an astonishing amount of money, with family homes across Europe — a different one for each season, plus 2 or 3 more for side excursions. Those were the days, my friend!

Charles Haas

Trolling through a French wiki brought me this bit of info about another possible model for Charles Swann (my mediocre translation from the original French):

Charles Haas, “marvelously endowed with intuition, finesse and intelligence” (Boni de Castellane), had a fortune large enough to save him from having to earn a living.  de Castellane adds, “Shy due to his Jewish heritage, he was the only one of his race (all poor) who was a friend to all women, was cherished in the salons, and was appreciated by men of good taste.  He gave to this category of the spiritually and uselessly idle that were like a luxury in the society of those days, and of whom the main value consisted of being able to gossip, before dinner, at the Club Jockey or at the Duchess of Trémoille’s home.  His lack of a job didn’t spur him to try harder; rather, his intelligence was justification enough for all his ambitions.”

Charles Haas was a regular at literary salons, especially those of the Countess Robert de Fitz-James and Mme Emile Straus, at public auction houses, the lobby of the Comédie-française, at the ateliers of painters, particularly that of Degas, whom he had met at the home of Mme Hortense Howland.

Le Cercle de la Rue Royale, courtesy Wikipedia

How thoughtful of the wiki to reproduce a painting by James Tissot, where Haas is depicted in the top hat at the far right. Another note of interest: Haas was one of Sarah Bernhardt’s lovers.

Note that Haas’s shyness about his Jewish blood overlapped l’affaire Dreyfus and Zola’s “J’accuse!” Heady times! (BTW, see Jacqueline Rose’s essay in the 10 June 2010 LRB for a great exploration of Zola’s continued relevance, more than 100 years later. Great writing, and dedicated to the late Tony Judt, one of my favorite public intellectuals.)

Source of Charles Haas’ image and original French text: Dictionnaires et Encyclopédies sur ‘Academic’. More information about Tissot’s painting can be found at the Musée d’Orsay’s website.

That’s enough for one set of excerpts.

This post’s title was “Per viam rectam”, which I explain at the end. The post is dated October 29, 2010, just before I wrote the first draft of what became Kenning Magic. Make of that what you will.

Within a Budding Grove, pp. 369-382

The Trocadero, Paris

After a hectic week, it was a pleasure to sit down with Marcel and read a few pages. Proust’s text takes me away from the madness of NYC — the noise and crowds and torn up streets that have made cycling to work this week a daily challenge — and into the calm of poor Marcel’s infatuation with Gilberte.

Yes, he’s still going on about her. But in this section he crosses a threshold, literally. After hearing that Mme. and M. Swann “can’t abide” him, Gilberte suddenly begins inviting him to tea, where the Swanns treat him with polite distancing. Before, he would stand in the street and stare up at Gilberte’s windows, imagining what went on up there. But now, he stands at the window and looks down on the street, to see other guests arrive.

Palais de l’Industrie, Paris

It’s very sweet to see him finally spending time with Gilberte, finally allowed entré to the world of the Swanns, but I can’t help wondering if there isn’t some kind of disaster waiting for him. We’ll see.

One passage stood out as Marcel rues writing an impetuous letter to Gilberte stating his wish for more time with her. No response comes, and it nearly crushes him:

I had spent the New Year’s Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year. Presents I had indeed received, but not that present which alone could bring me pleasure, namely a line from Gilberte. I was young still, none the less, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shewn.

And then, a few lines later, thinking about Berma surrounded by admirers but inured to their attentions, the older Narrator wonders if a letter from Gilberte could have fulfilled Marcel’s expectations:

At that moment, a message from Gilberte would perhaps not have been what I wanted. Our desires cut across one another’s paths, and in this confused existence it is but rarely that a piece of good fortune coincides with the desire that clamoured for it.

“The sadness of men who have grown old” and “this confused existence.” Melancholy phrases for an autumnal day.

BTW: The post title, “per viam rectam” can be found in Psalms 107:7 (et duxit illos per viam rectam/And he led them forth by the right way), and it’s the motto on the Gilberte’s stationery. Even more reason to worry about Marcel.

I’m going to have to do something about the search function on my other blog, because I’ve just found several additional Proust posts. I knew something was strange when Update #9 took me only to p. 344, yet when I had stopped reading all those years ago, my bookmark had been placed at p. 530. A search has revealed further posts, which I’ll repost here in a quick barrage over the next week or so. This one followed a 6-week hiatus from Proust’s novel.

Within a Budding Grove, pp. 344-368

Cellini’s Perseus

Yes, it’s time we returned to Proust. Let’s see what Marcel has been up to recently.

If you recall, he’s just seen Berma, the famed actress, and was disappointed. It seemed boring, monotonous, uninspired. Nothing at all like the performance he had imagined he would witness, and he begins to worry that life will be full of similar disappointments. Yet the wild applause at the final curtain makes him doubt his first assessment:

Then, at last, a sense of admiration did possess me, provoked by the frenzied applause of the audience … the more I applauded, the better, it seemed to me, did Berma act.

I love the next few lines:

“I say,” came from a woman sitting near me, of no great social pretensions, “she fairly gives it you, she does; you’d think she’d do herself an injury, the way she runs about. I call that acting, don’t you?” And happy to find these reasons for Berma’s superiority, though not without a suspicion that they no more accounted for it than would for that of the Gioconda or of Benvenuto’s Perseus a peasant’s gaping “That’s a good bit of work. It’s all gold, look! Fine, ain’t it?”, I greedily imbibed the strong wine of this popular enthusiasm …

Can we trust our first impressions? Or do we allow popular enthusiasms to influence us?

M. de Norpois joins Marcel’s family for dinner that night, and pontificates on art, politics, diplomacy and food. (At one point he begrudgingly tastes a dessert, with the comment, “I obey, Madame, for I can see that it is, on your part, a positive ukase!”) His conversation is full of references to his wide experience, quoting or translating proverbs from other lands, including one from Arabic about how one should respond to criticism: “The dogs may bark; the caravans go on!”

Marcel is so enchanted by M. de Norpois’ hauteur and diplomatic demeanor (gained from extensive experience in The World At Large) that he practically worships the man, and at one point is thrilled to think that M. de Norpois might actually mention Marcel’s name to Mme. Swann — she would then realize that Marcel knows the ambassador and would thus be willing to welcome the boy into her home.

M. de Norpois convinces Marcel that Berma’s performance was good, that Marcel’s favorite writer, Bergotte, is a hack, and that Marcel’s best writing is a poor imitation of Bergotte’s worst. In short, the old man crushes Marcel, yet the poor boy only sees this as illumination.

I can’t help wishing Marcel could be loyal to his own ideas, less under the influence of the huge celestial bodies that surround him, but I suppose it’s inevitable. Gravity can’t be denied.

There’s a long bit at the point where Marcel, still hoping de Norpois will put in a good word for him with the Swanns, momentarily mimes the action of kissing the old man’s hands. The older Marcel considers this moment from a more informed distance, posing the idea that we are all so insecure about our abilities to have an impact on the world that we imagine no one notices anything that we do (it’s the “20 years from now, who’s going to know the difference” attitude).

The older Marcel (our Narrator) tells us that the younger Marcel thought de Norpois had missed the gesture,

And yet, some years later, in a house in which M. de Norpois, who was also calling there, had seemed to me the most solid support that I could hope to find, because he was the friend of my father, indulgent, inclined to wish us all well, and besides, by his profession and upbringing, trained to discretion, when, after the Ambassador had done, I was told that he had alluded to an evening long ago when he had seen the moment in which I was just going to kiss his hands, not only did I colour up to the roots of my hair but I was stupefied to learn how different from all that I had believed were not only the manner in which M. de Norpois spoke of me but also the constituents of his memory …

Ambassadors may have  high levels of discretion, but it seems this one, at least, had no ability for empathy.

Marcel makes one other point about M. de Norpois:

… like all capitalists, he regarded wealth as an enviable thing, but thought it more delicate to compliment people upon their possessions only by a half-indicated sign of intelligent sympathy; on the other hand, as he was himself immensely rich, he felt that he shewed his good taste by seeming to regard as considerable the meagre revenues of his friends, with a happy and comforting resilience to the superiority of his own.

If only the younger Marcel had known all this. But at least the older Marcel gets his revenge — by including this story, and this perfect caricature, in some truly celestial writing.

More on first impressions and popular enthusiasms, in this truly wacky U.S. election year. I know Proust does not have politics in mind as he reveals Marcel’s malleability, but I can’t help wondering if Proust noticed similar tendencies in the body politic. I know the Dreyfus affair comes into the story, so there’s at least one chance for the author to address my question. We’ll have to see what happens.

This is the last of my Proust posts from 2010. After this, it’s sauve qui peut!

Within a Budding Grove, pp. 326-344

Allee

Marcel’s musings on the Bois de Boulogne, at the end of Swann’s Way, made me want to hop on a plane and stroll along its allées, looking for hints of Paris 130 years ago. I took the cheaper route instead, and watched Gigi, which begins and ends in the Bois, and whose lead characters are very much like Odette and Swann.

But now, I’ve moved on to the next volume, which starts with a long introduction to a performance by Mme. Berma (based, no doubt, on Sarah Bernhardt) in Racine’s Phèdre. In Marcel’s imagination, Berma is god-like, someone to be worshipped, and he works himself into an emotional frenzy at the thought of finally seeing her on stage in a classic of French theater. Will the doctor and his parents give permission? Will there still be tickets left? Should he, perhaps, not go, because going might make his parents unhappy? But when will Berma ever again perform in Phèdre? Oh, what to do?

Titian’s Assumption, Venice

Of course, such high expectations can only end in disappointment, and we can see it coming well before Marcel does.

He has a tendency to romanticize about art, envisioning the moments when he sees famous works for the first time in situ. There’s a bit about Venice — though he hasn’t been there yet, he expects certain works by Titian and Carpaccio will be not just stunning, but an experience akin to ecstasy — and his dreams of seeing Berma are similar.

I know the feeling. My first view of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in The Louvre was a disappointment. It was so small!  There was no frisson of emotion at being so close to a legend. (Nothing like what I felt one evening, when I saw Lauren Bacall standing behind me at the entrance to a play.) I expected something within me to change upon seeing that famous portrait, but nothing happened.

Marcel’s and my disappointments upon meeting our dreams in real life raises two questions: Are our most thrilling imaginings always betrayed by real life? Would we give up those imaginings, in exchange for no more betrayals?

Chocolate madeleines, peppermint tea, my kitchen

I know I wouldn’t, and I suspect Marcel (and Proust) would agree. Despite the frequent betrayals, there’s always the possibility of greatness that goes beyond our most reckless fancies, and that’s what we hope for as we jump into each new experience, regardless of previous failures.

Dr. Johnson called remarriage “the triumph of hope over experience”; the same could be said of life in general. Marcel keeps hoping — that Gilberte will finally realize she’s in love with him, that art will finally live up to his expectations, that his parents will finally recognize his genius as a writer.

Well, let’s see where Marcel’s dreams take him next, as we continue chez Mme. Swann.

My reviews so far seem to have stressed Swann’s and Marcel’s disillusionments. I’m hoping for a shift in tone, but we’ll see. Keep in mind, however, that the next 1500 pages (!) will pass slowly, perhaps lasting through the end of this year. Since I overlap books — sometimes as many as five at a time — I’ll be sprinkling some other reviews here and there, as time permits. Now, onward and upward!

I don’t know whether to be encouraged or dismayed that it took me 8 weeks to read a bit over 300 pages, an average of about 36 pages a week. Someone recently pointed out that I’d do better with a 6-volume edition — larger type, fewer words per page, minimal soporific effect. But I’m too stubborn to take the advice — I’ll stick with my 2-volume set, bought at a used book store in 2009. But I know now not to read it in bed, or even in a comfy chair. I must sit at a table, notebook at my side, if I’m to expect any progress.

pp. 293-325

C. Guys: Une femme dans une victoria

I’ve finished Vol 1: Swann’s Way, and the next stage is Vol 2: Within A Budding Grove.

Swann’s Way ends on a melancholy note, which I’ll get to in a bit, but recall that Marcel has become obsessed with Gilberte Swann, an obsession that mirrors Swann’s feelings for Gilberte’s mother, Odette. It’s all such familiar territory to us, and to Marcel as well, for he at one point makes the connection.

This section of the volume is also about the power of names — of almost anything: trees, flowers, streets, as well as people — to evoke emotions and memories. Just like the flavor of the madeleines dipped in tea, these words call up images and moments with Gilberte that the narrator can now savor, with more enjoyment than he had while actually immersed in them, because at the time he was too busy worrying when he would next see her. 

In one long sentence, Marcel presents his image of a perfect relationship with Gilberte (the same sentence in which he notes the resemblance of his obsession with Swann’s for Odette), his emotions having evolved from loving her because he knew so little about her, to loving her because she had just given him a book he had mentioned wanting. He calls this change a “reincarnation,”

… discarding my own separate existence as a thing that no longer mattered, I thought now, as of an inestimable advantage, that of this, my own, my too familiar, my contemptible existence Gilberte might one day become the humble servant, the kindly, the comforting collaborator, who in the evenings, helping me in my work, would collate for me the texts of rare pamphlets.

I had to laugh at that final phrase, at the image of worldly Gilberte giving up so much, to sit beside Marcel in a candle-lit room, messing about with yellowed publications. So much for romance!

1880

1910

And the melancholic ending? It’s all about the futility of revisiting old haunts, because you won’t see what you once saw. An adult Marcel goes back to the Bois de Boulogne, where he used to see an elegant Mme. Swann walking, or riding in her victoria, in gowns and hats no longer in fashion. The older Marcel misses the styles, which have been replaced by “Greco-Saxon tunics, with Tanagra folds, or sometimes, in the Directoire style, ‘Liberty chiffons'”. And the men? “They walked the Bois bare-headed.” Gone are the “tile hats” (top hats), so distinguished, and so appropriate for a sweeping salute to ladies met along the way.

Here are the last few lines of Swann’s Way:

[I understood] how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, road, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

It’s a perfect explanation of why going back to a house where you once lived, or to any place that holds critical memories, always results in a let-down.

And now, on to Vol 2., which begins with a long section called “Madame Swann at Home.”

Roger Shattuck calls Marcel’s inability to be in the moment “soul error” (“the incapacity to give full value or status to one’s life and experience”, pp. 84-85) and suggests it may be common to all people, despite Marcel’s belief that it’s something only he suffers, due to a special infirmity. Proust (who, of course, is not Marcel, nor even the much older “Narrator” remembering his past) must have recognized the universality of this infirmity, even if Marcel and the Narrator don’t. This is part of the comedy of Proust’s work: even as the characters moan about how no one knows the trouble they’ve seen, readers can sympathize because we’ve all been there.

Arabella Huntington

One more thing: I never commented on how it is that Swann and Odette married after the end of their affair. Proust doesn’t explain, and we can only guess at why. For propriety? To protect Gilberte? An early version of “settling”? Momentary madness? I recently learned about Arabella Worsham (1851-1924), a wealthy American who began her career much like Odette — only she didn’t marry her child’s father. When he went back to his official family, she found someone much wealthier — C P Huntington, of the transcontinental railroad. She eventually married him, and then, when he died, she married his nephew. She built a world class art collection, sold some of her property to the Rockefellers, donated to charities and Harvard, and was perhaps the wealthiest woman in the U.S. It wasn’t madness that hooked her up with two Huntingtons. I believe it was sheer strength of will. I’d like to believe that’s what dragged Swann into marrying Odette — her own strength of will, to get her a place in society that would allow no one to snub her. This is what Aunt Alicia was talking about in Gigi when she tells her grand-niece, “Marriage is not forbidden to us, but instead of getting married at once, it sometimes happens we get married at last.” This makes me wonder if someday we’ll get a feminist retelling of Swann’s story, from Odette’s point of view.

August 2010 was a full month for me, for I was returning to work after a year’s sabbatical. This post was originally dated 20 August, a week before the start of classes, which may explain why I’d read only 12 pages. Of course, there could have been other impediments, including Proust’s writing, a dull point in the story’s progression, or even just sheer laziness. But let’s find out what occurred.

pp. 293-305

A busy week, so not much progress. But I digress.

A treat this week (for me, and, I hope for you): I’ll deconstruct one of Proust’s sentences. Not a long one–that would be way too difficult. Instead, I’ve chosen a shorter one that is still fairly typical of Proust’s style. Here it is:

Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during my long nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with the motes of an atmosphere granular, pollenous, edible and instinct with piety, than my room in the Grand Hôtel de la Plage, at Balbec, the walls of which, washed with ripolin, contained, like the polished sides of a basin in which the water glows with a blue, lurking fire, a finer air, pure, azure-tinted, saline.

“Ripolin” is paint. I’m sure you’ve figured out that Marcel is basically saying that the rooms at the Grand Hôtel are quite different from those at Combray. Those are the bare bones of this sentence, but Marcel packs in so much more. First of all, we get the initial bit of information–that he envisions many many rooms as he tosses in his bed each night (we knew this from the first section, “Combray”).

Then he shows us the rooms at Combray: “thickly powdered …” etc. The air in these rooms seems thick, almost liquid, “edible”. Full of grains and pollen and imbued (“instinct”) with piety. Note Moncrieff’s syntactic inversion in the phrase “an atmosphere granular, pollenous, edible and instinct with piety”, where he places the adjectives after the noun they describe (thus giving us the French flavor of Proust’s original, “une atmosphère grenue, pollinisée, comestible et dévote” — but raising the question of why Moncrieff translated dévote as  “instinct with piety” rather than “pious”).

Grand Hotel, Cabourg

Then the rooms at the Hôtel: Proust compares the painted walls to a basin of clear water. But this part is complicated, because you have to read carefully through all the commas, to figure out what the walls contain. They contain the “finer air, pure, azure-tinted, saline”; that is, air finer than what the walls at Combray hold.

Combray is in the countryside near Paris, Balbec is by the sea. This sentence reveals differences between the countryside and the shore that one senses rather than sees. Anyone who’s been to the ocean after a long time inland will recognize the difference that Marcel describes with such particular detail.

That’s as far as I’ll go with that analysis. But imagine doing something along those lines several times per page, for 2000+ pages! Sometimes my mind glides over these, but sometimes I HAVE to stop and figure out what he’s doing. I know some of the credit goes to Moncrieff, but Proust, even in English, is a gorgeous writer.

So, the plot so far: Marcel is back as an active character (the bit about Swann’s affair with Odette happened before Marcel was on the scene). He was hoping to travel to Venice, but an illness has limited his travels to within Paris, particularly to the Champs-Elysées, where, as luck would have it, he has his second encounter with Gilberte (Odette’s daughter).

And suddenly, we’re back in the world of obsession and disappointment, where the woman (or girl — here, Gilberte) tortures the hero (Marcel) by sometimes showing up and sometimes not. Poor Marcel. It can only end badly.

Three addenda: First, Roger Shattuck adds Venice, despite the canceled trip, to the list of critical “places” in Search, alongside Combray, Paris, Balbec, and Doncières. Shattuck writes, “The image of Venice haunts [Marcel] all his life until he finally makes the journey with his mother long after the desire to do so has passed.” Once again, that theme of disappointed desire.

Second (and no surprise), fictional places in Search, as with Proust’s fictional characters, have their twins in real life. In 1971, Illiers changed its name to Illiers Combray to recognize its role as inspiration for Proust’s novel (despite Auteuil laying its own claim to that role). Balbec’s real-life counterpart is Cabourg, on the English Channel. Proust evidently spent 2 months every summer there for several years, rising late, visiting the casino next door, and then writing late into the night. According to Adrian Tahourdin on the TLS Blog, “As the Proust scholar and biographer Jean-Yves Tadié wrote, “it all began in the Grand Hôtel”. The Hotel’s website offers bookings for a “Memorable Moment”–the Hotel’s chef leads a one-hour class on making madeleines–and lists Le Balbec as one of the Hotel’s restaurants.

Proust’s cork-lined room. Courtesy Bed Writers on Pinterest

Third, for anyone with the linguistic chops, here’s Proust’s original sentence the first in the section “Nom de pays: le nom”:

Parmi les chambres dont j’évoquais le plus souvent l’image dans mes nuits d’insomnie, aucune ne ressemblait moins aux chambres de Combray, saupoudrées d’une atmosphère grenue, pollinisée, comestible et dévote, que celle du Grand-Hôtel de la Plage, à Balbec, dont les murs passés au ripolin contenaient, comme les parois polies d’une piscine où l’eau bleuit, un air pur, azuré et salin.

Poor Swann. But also poor Odette. Marcel shows no mercy in what he writes about her, thereby revealing his own snobbery. I already know that the Swann-Odette arc will repeat itself with Marcel and … but I won’t give that away yet.

pp. 236-292, end of “Swann in Love” and beginning of “Place-names: The Name”

Lac du Bois de Boulogne, Courtesy Wikipedia

“For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be.”

That quote comes near the end of the section about Swann’s affair with Odette, at the point where he is resigned to ending his torturous affair with her. It comes after much anguish, as he realizes that Odette had been unfaithful to him from the first moment of their liaison, not only with several men, but also with women (in the Bois de Boulogne, no less). Up to this point, he had clutched at his love for her:

In former times, having often thought with terror that a day must come when he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had determined to keep a sharp look-out, and as soon as he felt that love was beginning to escape him, to cling tightly to it and to hold it back.

But finally, it happens. He falls out of love.

This decline begins with Swann’s jealousy, which leads to suspicions that Odette no longer loves him, and culminates with his realization that she never did love him. (The arc here reminded me of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, made into a passable film in 1983 by Granada Television. Read the book at Project Gutenberg.)

Bellini, courtesy Webb Gallery of Art

A high point in these pages is Swann’s wish that Odette could die a swift and painless death. In his usual fashion, he connects his own feelings to works of art, this time to Bellini’s portrait of Mahomet II, who

on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of his wives, stabbed her, in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly relates, to recover his spiritual freedom.

I realize it’s strange to describe such revenge fantasies as a “high point”, but poor Swann sorely needs someone like Loretta Castorini (Moonstruck) to slap him and shout, “Snap out of it!” Instead, it takes an anonymous letter and weeks of Odette’s denials and careless slips to convince him it’s time to leave Paris for Combray, to escape Odette’s power over him, a step he’d been unable and unwilling to attempt even at the lowest point of his despair.

The section ends with Swann’s exclamation, “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!”

Ironically, he’s about to start again with someone equally inappropriate, Mme. de Cambremer (the former Mlle. Legrandin–remember the snobbish man from my earlier post?–this is his sister, the one who spends time in Balbec; she’s evidently as vulgar as Odette), whom we first see at a musical party that Swann attends. Once again, Swann’s emotions are whirled along by music and art. Marcel mentions one of the pieces played: Liszt’s “St. Francis Preaching to the Birds”. Enjoy!

(Liszt)

I’m pleased the YouTube link is still live. The piece is glorious, and a times Licad’s hands are like birds fluttering in response to St Francis’s sermon. 

As reward for your patience reading my longer posts, here’s a short one:

Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (2011)

12-year-old September is whisked away to Fairyland by the Green Wind on the back of the Leopard of Little Breezes. Her job: retrieve a long-handled spoon taken by the Marquess. Take a bit of Alice Liddell, add Dorothy Gale and the Reluctant Dragon, plus a large dollop of the Snow Queen, and you’ll have an idea of this fantasy novel’s tone.

But the book is neither pastiche nor parody. Valente builds a world whose rules frequently require cruelty. September is repeatedly faced with choices: Lose your way, life, mind, or heart? Lose your voice or your shadow? As she should, September is joined by a trusty comrade, and aid appears just in time, although in unusual forms.

One such form is Lye, a golem made of soap. Lye washes September’s courage, explaining

When you are born … your courage is new and clean. You are brave enough for anything: crawling off of staircases, saying your first words without fearing that someone will think you are foolish …. But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk and crusty things and dirt and fear and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you’re half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it’s so grunged up with living.

I bet we could all use someone like Lye.

Valente’s whimsy starts strong, and nearly put me off. But I’m happy I kept at it. The story surprises as it satisfies. Yet I have to admit that certain points brought to mind Monty Python’s Storytime, with Eric Idle — especially the third story Eric attempts. With Valente’s book, I kept waiting for the moment when I could cry, in astonishment, “With a melon?!”

My latest obsession started two months ago with Christina Hardyment’s Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint’s Trunk, an excellent study of the sources, both geographic and human, for his famous books, with a satisfying number of illustrations as well. Fans probably already know that Ransome is Captain Flint, the Amazons’ grouchy uncle and author of Mixed Moss. What becomes clear in Hardyment’s book is that Mixed Moss, although not a real book, hints at Ransome’s thrilling life of world travel, fishing, and messing about in boats. 

Ransome, born in 1884 and the eldest of four, fell in love with the Lake District during summer holidays when he was young. He seems to have always wanted to write fiction, but an early (and eventually disastrous) marriage forced him into a career as a journalist. An urgent need to leave England (the result of a lawsuit involving his critical study of Oscar Wilde) sent him to Russia just as the Tsar was going into freefall, giving Ransome a ring-side seat for the coming turmoil of revolution, WWI and civil war.

Ransome’s dispatches from St Petersburg and Moscow reveal a naive reporter unaware of how he was being used by both British and Russian acquaintances. Ransome knew Radek, Trotsky, Lenin, Kerensky, and others. He acted as go-between for British and Russian diplomats. Had he been a top-notch journalist, he could have used his experiences as the basis for an outstanding history of those critical years between his arrival in 1913 and Lenin’s death in 1924.

Yet he was clearly missing something that separates a reporter from those who are just passing through. It’s difficult to pin down, but, after reading Chamber’s profile of Ransome, along with  Ransome’s own memories of those days, a few things stand out. In his Autobiography, Ransome makes almost no mention of his younger brother, who died in France in 1917, nor of his sisters. He includes no photos of them. He mentions his own daughter once or twice, but shows little more interest than if she were a barely tolerated pet he’d left in the care of a neighbor. He doesn’t acknowledge the horrors of the revolution and civil war playing out around him — he seems, in fact, to walk through battle-torn areas in a protective bubble, never hurt, rarely threatened, and only mildly concerned. He’s dismayed at the loss of his belongings, but pooh-poohs the deaths of millions. So, problem one: not enough empathy.

Ransome leaves valuable notes, documents and books in his various apartments in Russia each time he travels back to England for his annual holiday, barely registers the murders of the Tsar’s family, and finds the revolution and civil war, although interesting, an irritating interruption of his research on Russian folktales. He actually hated his job, later admitting that the nearly two decades he spent writing for newspapers had been a useless (although lucrative) sidetrack from what he had really wanted to do, which was to write for children. Whenever he could get away from the demands of his job, it was to go fishing and to study Russian folktales. He shows no regret at being in England (fishing, of course) during the October Revolution; he could find out what he missed on his return. Problem two: not enough curiosity.

What’s more, his ease with learning Russian and the fact that he was often the only journalist around from the English-speaking world must have lulled him into thinking he was quickly becoming an expert on the situation. His friend Radek, Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs (i.e., the guy in charge of PR and propaganda), no doubt used Ransome as a conduit for favorable reports to Britain and the U.S. on the outcome of the Revolution. Ransome questioned nothing and made no effort to talk to anyone else. He had fallen in love with Trotsky’s private secretary, which probably made him even more susceptible to heart-warming tales of the Glorious Revolution. Problem three: not enough doubts.

So, ok, Ransome was not meant to be a journalist. This was probably why he suffered from ulcers and various intestinal ailments during those years in Russia, which always diminished during his fishing holidays in England. It’s a good thing he quit, but not before being sent first to Egypt and then on a separate trip to China (inspiration for Missee Lee, so perhaps we should be grateful he held on to the job as long as he did).

Old Peter’s Russian Tales, published in 1916 — two years into WWI and three years into his long stay in Russia — is the fruit of Ransome’s research in Russia, and actually quite good. The book sold well, but it took another seven years before his next success, Racundra’s First Cruise (1923). This is Ransome at his best, and it explains so much of what can be found in the Swallows and Amazons series (from Peter Duck to We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea). Soon after RFC was published, Ransome was divorced from his first wife and married to his second. And then he began his immortal series.

There’s no reason to require that a man who writes for children (or for any other audience) be a model citizen, loving parent, supportive friend, and honorable gentleman. I can get past Ransome’s blinkered assessment of the events in Russia, but it’s difficult to sympathize with someone so callously cruel to his daughter, so incapable of seeing her side — of even imagining that she had a side. Many of the people he befriended during his years in Russia later severed connections with him. He even had a falling out with the family who inspired the Walker and Blackett characters. Did he dislike children in general, or only those he knew personally?

What he never fell out with, however, was his beloved Lake District. Fishing, boating, walking, living there — these were what he wanted most. If the Walker children seem too tame and polite, if the situations too unbelievable, Ransome at least gives us a place (more than one, if we include the Norfolk Broads) that draws us back, again and again.

A final note: Ransome knew John Reed (Warren Beatty’s character in Reds) and Sidney Reilly (Sam Neill’s character in Reilly, Ace of Spies). Does this mean someone could have played Ransome in a small role in each of these? The caption for the photo on the right, from Wikipedia, identifies Radek (left) and Bukharin (right). Could that be Ransome in the middle, with the walrus mustache? The nose and chin are wrong, but I like to think so.

ESTABLISHING SHOT of road curving ahead through woods, late autumn with few leaves left on branches. Some piles of leaves beside road, wind scatters three or four across road. Day.

OVERLAY, typed out one digit at a time: 11:15 A.M.

CAMERA PAN to: RAY and CAL, dressed in blue uniforms, same road. We see red light flashing against trees, but not the light itself. CAL chews loudly on gum. RAY holds a cigarette but throughout scene never takes a puff; just occasionally flicks off ash.

RAY: She’ll be here soon. I heard the Dead-On-Road call go out.

CAL: (looking down and shaking her head) It’s a shame, ain’t it, seeing a life drain away like that.

RAY: I dunno, Cal. It don’t bother me so much. (screech of brakes) That’s her.

MEL (tall, thin, short hair; walks over, and we see her frowning at what RAY and CAL are standing next to)

CAL: ‘S another one of your pals, pal. Must-a had a death wish or sump’n.

RAY: (snickers)

MEL: (no retort; looks back down)

CAMERA follows her gaze, to road surface. Dead squirrel, not yet flattened by cars but with blood trickling from its mouth, lies in middle of road, eyes open and limbs splayed. Blood pools around its head. Next to widening circle of blood is a pile of cigarette ashes, a few acorn caps.

MEL: (squats down and examines squirrel’s body from various angles, frowns when she sees the ashes) Who put the call through?

CAL: ‘Nonymous, say, 15 minutes ago.

RAY: (nods)

CAL: Said “DOR on Route 30, half mile north of Thelma’s caff.” We been here only 5 minutes, give or take.

RAY: Seems pretty fresh, eh? And clean. Not a drop of blood anywhere else, so he couldn’t have been dragged. It’s all right there.

MEL: Looks like he hasn’t been dead long. (pokes squirrel’s foot with a penknife that was in her pocket) Not even stiff yet. Anyone call the coroner?

RAY: Yeah, your boyfriend’s on his way. (snickers)

MEL: Swell. (looks at body again) Any ID at all?

CAL: Nuttin’. My guess, local.

RAY: Yeah, that’s what I figure. A local guy.

MEL: (standing, puts penknife back in pocket, where it’s starting to wear a hole) How do you figure that?

CAL: ‘S logic. These guys don’t normally go far from home, do they?

MEL: You’re clever, you are. His family must be somewhere nearby. You haven’t seen anyone else come through here?

RAY: There was a hawk flying over, but that’s about it.

CAL: ‘N a vixen, Ray, don’t forget that vixen. Slinking ‘cross the road like she was guilty of sump’n.

RAY: (staring across road, as if remembering the fox). Yeah. Her too. (sighs) Nice tail.

CAL: (sniggers)

MEL: You two are pathetic.

MONTAGE: Police photographer with big flash. Forensics team including hunky doctor. Shoe-boxed body seat-belted into back seat of police car. Crime scene photos taped to chalkboard in precinct office. CAL chalking victim’s name under photo, in barely legible scrawl: Myron St. Peters.

ESTABLISHING SHOT of same road. Day.

OVERLAY, typed out one digit at a time: 2:30 P.M.

MEL: (Walks along road, stops near outline of squirrel’s body. Sees a nut drop from tree onto road inside chalked outline and then get crushed by a passing car. Notices several other nuts. Notices dark splotches near outline. Bends down for closer look. Touches one. Fingers momentarily stuck. Hears noise in shrubbery, backs away from outline into tree’s shadow.)

WALTER: (emerges from roadside, doesn’t notice MEL, avoids sticky patches and begins to eat crushed nuts.)

MEL: (close-up as she smiles)

MEL: (steps out of shadow) Hey! You with the nuts.

WALTER: (startled, spit-take, backs up still avoiding sticky patches) I didn’t do it!

MEL: What’re you so nervous about?

WALTER: (recognizes detective, crams another nut into mouth) Oh, it’s you.

MEL: (leans against tree, takes penknife from pocket and opens it with a click, begins paring her nails) Who’d you think I was?

WALTER: No one.

CAMERA PAN to close-up of WALTER, sweat trickling down his rounded cheek.

MEL: Kind of interesting, Walter, finding you here, not far from where St. Peters got it. Don’t you think?

WALTER: Why? What’s so interesting about that? I live here, remember? That tree you’re leaning on?

MEL: (close-up of her face, gimlet-eyed)

WALTER: Second branch up, big cubby-hole? That’s where I live. You were there once. Remember?

MEL: (crouches to WALTER’s eye-level, moving so quickly WALTER shrinks back) I remember everything, you little snitch. Now get in the car.

MONTAGE: WALTER staring out window from back seat of MEL’s gray Buick. WALTER hiding face from photographers outside police station. CAL grilling WALTER in interview room. WALTER pounding table, face in rictus of fear.

MEL: (at desk, on phone with FORENSICS)

FORENSICS: (elderly voice, OFF CAMERA as we watch MEL react to report) I was wondering when you’d get around to calling me. I checked out the corpse’s feet, like you suggested. Front paws’re ok, just one broken claw on left foot, but clean, no scabbing. It must have happened on impact.

MEL: (frowns)

FORENSICS: (OC) But the rear paws, now. They’re a different story.

MEL: (hint of a smile)

FORENSICS: (OC) The pads’re torn away in places, almost like they were peeled off. (verbal shudder) Ouchie.

MEL: Thanks. I owe you for this.

FORENSICS: (OC) I won’t hold my breath.

MEL: (hangs up and leaves desk)

ESTABLISHING SHOT of MEL entering interview room, where CAL and WALTER sit opposite each other.

OVERLAY, typed out one digit at a time: 4:07 P.M.

WALTER: (head in hands) He’ll kill me if I tell you.

CAL: And?

MEL: (again paring nails with penknife)

WALTER: Ok, ok, ok. But you can’t tell anyone I ratted.

CAL: (looks at Mel)

MEL: Sure, Walter, we won’t tell. Not a soul. What d’you got for us?

WALTER: (hesitates, swallows) Talk to Joey.

CAL: (gasps) The badger?

WALTER: Yea, him. Couple nights ago, he was at the Grill, buying drinks for everyone. He musta got that money from someone. That’s all I know. Now where’s my ride?

MEL: Get him outta here.

CAMERA PAN to MEL’s face as she hears sounds of CAL and WALTER leaving. After door shuts, MEL frowns.

ESTABLISHING SHOT of Thelma’s Café exterior. Evening. Camera follows unknown customer through door to reveal busy diner, then pans to MEL and RAY at a booth next to window, sitting opposite JOEY, muffled in worn and patched wraps so that we can’t see much of him. Head barely clears top of table. Furry nose pokes out over muffler. On the table are 2 cups and 1 bowl of coffee, pitcher of milk, sugar bowl, spoons. Usual array of diner condiments near window. RAY sips his coffee but MEL and JOEY don’t touch theirs. Ashtray holds two smoldering cigarettes.

OVERLAY, typed out one digit at a time: 5:17 P.M.

JOEY: He was something else, Myron was. Crazy, you know? Played chicken all the time. No one better. You ain’t seen nothing if you ain’t seen him get a big-ass Hummer to swerve so’s not to hit him. (sniffs at his bowl of coffee but doesn’t drink) He could’a had a fan club, you know? He was that good.

RAY: What else you know, Joey?

JOEY: (glances out window) Nuthin’ else.

CAMERA SHOT out window to reveal parking lot where streetlights are starting to come on at sunset. Brief glimpse of taillights as car exits parking lot.

RAY: C’mon, Joey. Gotta be sumthin’ else, on account of all the money you been spreadin’ ‘round.

JOEY: What money?

RAY: (takes a drag of both cigarettes at once, then blows smoke towards JOEY) We hear you been droppin’ Abes like they grow on trees. Down at the Grill. Party time for everyone. (leans forward) You ain’t got a job, Joey, so who gave you that money?

JOEY: (leans forward, to be nose-to-nose with RAY) And I repeat, what money?

MEL: (stands) We’re done. Take care of the bill, and don’t be stingy with the tip.

RAY: Who, me?

MEL: Who else? Keep in touch, Joey. We always like catching up with your news.

JOEY: (sniffs again at bowl of coffee) Any time. You know how to find me.

ESTABLISHING SHOT of MEL and RAY getting into Buick, RAY in driver’s seat. Neither one uses their seatbelt.

RAY: (starting engine) Where to, boss?

MEL: It’s time to visit Mrs. Myron St. Peters.

ESTABLISHING SHOT of Pontiac taking curves on road.

OVERLAY, typed out one digit at a time: 6:02 P.M.

RAY: (lights new cigarette from old one, then tosses spent cigarette out window. Brakes screech as he brings car to a halt next to a tree.)

MEL: (exits car) Wait here. I won’t be long.

CAMERA PAN to rear tire, half covering chalk outline.

MEL: (bangs on tree trunk)

CONNIE: (pokes head out hole; sounds of loud party come through hole) Oh, it’s you. Don’t you have a phone? (turns to shout into her den) Pipe down, you guys. I can’t hear myself think. (turns back to MEL) Wakes! I hate ‘em.

CONNIE (leaves her den, pushing bowl of nuts out of her den and onto branch at MEL’s eye level)

CONNIE: Might as well help yourself, since you’re here. Which reminds me. Why are you here?

MEL: (tossing a walnut from hand to hand) You been to a lot of wakes, then?

CONNIE: You kidding? Around here, there’s one a week. At least. Feel like I’m feeding the neighborhood. (pauses) Anything else? I gotta get back inside, before they eat my kids’ dinner.

MEL: Just one or two questions. Who hated your husband, Mrs. St. Peters?

CONNIE: (laughs mirthlessly) Who didn’t? He was a selfish little bastard. Left unpaid bar bills at every dive between here and Atlantic City and who knows how many kiddies in how many dens. (brushes off YOUNG SQUIRREL trying to get her attention) Get back inside, kiddo.

YOUNG SQUIRREL: Does the officer know where our daddy is?

CONNIE: I’ve told you a hundred times, kiddo. He’s laid out on a cold brick down at the morgue, and he ain’t coming back. Now get back inside and sit on the leaf pile before our (signals scare quotes) guests find the chestnuts.

YOUNG SQUIRREL (ducks back into den, where noise level is rising)

CONNIE: Kids! And me with another litter on the way. I tell you, if Myron weren’t dead already, I’d kill him myself. (realizing what she just said) And if that makes me guilty, I’m a chipmunk.

MEL: No insurance, then.

CONNIE: You know anyone in this neck of the woods who can afford insurance? If so, I’d like to meet him. My kids need a new daddy.

MEL: (turns to go, then pauses) Just one more thing. Is Walter at the wake?

CONNIE: Sure, yukking it up more than the rest of ‘em put together. Why?

MEL: Nothing. Just wondering. (heads back to car)

CONNIE: (shrugs, goes back inside)

CLOSE UP of Connie’s doorway. WALTER peeks out.

MEL: (signals RAY to roll down window, then talks in low voice) I need you. Perp run.

RAY: (with bored sigh, gets out of car and opens trunk, takes out cross bow loaded with fishing net) Why do they always have to run? I hate using this thing.

MEL: (turns as she hears creaking branch, spots WALTER) There he goes.

MONTAGE: MEL and RAY run through woods. WALTER leaps branch to branch. MEL and RAY split up. WALTER runs up thick trunk, along branch, jumps to next tree, almost misses, uses tail to throw his legs back onto branch, scrambles into thicket. RAY loses sight of WALTER. MEL points him out. More running and leaping. WALTER reaches end of branch overhanging road. MEL and RAY aren’t far behind. Next tree is on other side, where woods go up a steep hill and cliff that RAY and MEL won’t be able to climb. WALTER eyes distance to next tree, backs up and makes a flying leap. And misses. Falls to ground. RAY’s net envelops him as he scrambles to get up, despite broken leg.

ESTABLISHING SHOT of interview room. WALTER in handcuffs, one leg in a cast. CAL sits opposite, taking notes. MEL stands behind CAL.

OVERLAY, typed out one digit at a time: 7:32 P.M.

MEL: But why, Walter? Why’d you do it?

WALTER: (almost in tears) The rat was blackmailing me. Had been, for months. At first just penny-ante stuff, but then he got greedy. I couldn’t take it any more. I couldn’t afford it any more.

CAL: Blackmail? (looks at MEL)

MEL: Why was he blackmailing you?

CAL: (doesn’t want to say)

MEL: C’mon, Walter. It can’t hurt. Might even help.

CAL: (slumps) Smuggling. Only once, a kilo of skunk weed. But Myron found out, and played me like a freakin’ banjo.

MEL: Maybe we can make a deal. Give us the skinny on your smuggling connections, so that we can stick a conviction, and we’ll get the judge to lighten up on your sentence. What d’you say?

CAMERA PANS out via window in interview room door. Framed in window, we see MEL leaning on table, negotiating with WALTER, while CAL scribbles notes.

OVERLAY, typed out one digit and letter at a time: 9:57 P.M. CASE CLOSED.

OVERLAY, as one complete message:

Walter’s evidence led to the conviction of three smugglers. Walter served 2 years of a 5-year sentence, in the State Pen.

Don’t miss any of these other Mel Marcos Mysteries:

◊ Mildred Pierced      ◊ The Molting Falcon            ◊ The Thin Manx

◊ The Litter                   ◊ The Musk of Dimitrios     ◊ The Big Sheep

◊ The Petrified Ferret

This is the first in a series of short fiction written for adults.

In Proust’s Way, Roger Shattuck includes a chapter on “How to Read a Roman-Fleuve¹”. Shattuck points to Proust’s style as purposefully constructed to slow a reader down: “His sentences move through long spirals that will not be hastened and deserve to be savored. He offers few paragraph breaks to declare the steps and stages of his thought.”

It’s reassuring to learn that my slow pace is what Proust intended. And look, this post covers 80 pages! I was on a roll.

pp. 144-236.

Detail, Botticelli’s “The Trials of Moses”, Courtesy The Berger Foundation

Poor Swann. He ends up falling in love with Odette because of her resemblance to Botticelli’s rendition of one of Jethro’s daughters (remember Moses meeting them at the well?), and because of a melody played on the piano. He’s attracted by the thought that other men are attracted to her, and by the possibility of something complex and alluring to be explored underneath her simple, almost vulgar exterior.

Unfortunately for Swann, there isn’t.

A plate of home-made madeleines

But let me start from the beginning. Swann meets Odette, aka Madame de Crécy (Proust doesn’t show us this meeting), and at first finds her barely tolerable. But she, a well-known courtesan (described as being “of a certain class,” but we never learn how she became Madame), latches on to him and invites him to an evening with the Verdurins. He knows what she is, and occasionally, in conversation, her roots show:

… she let out to Swann what she really thought of his abode on the Quai de’Orléans; he having ventured the criticism that her friend had indulged, not in the Louis XVI style, for, he went on, although that was not, of course, done, still it might be made charming, but in the ‘Sham-Antique.’ ¶”You wouldn’t have her live, like you, among a lot of broken-down chairs and threadbare carpets!” she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the acquired dilettantism of the ‘light woman.’

Damned twice: middle-class AND a dilettante! Not to mention the bit about being a ‘light woman’.

Madeleines, linden tea, and Proust

Mme. V runs a salon of sorts, where each night several people gather for conversation and sometimes substantive meals: a painter, a pianist and his aunt, a doctor and his wife, a paleographer, and Odette and whichever man she happens to favor at the moment. The pianist’s aunt and the doctor’s wife rarely speak, and the pianist seems to be there only to perform, and Doctor Cottard’s main contributions to the evening are very bad puns shouted out as others are talking.

A conversation will go something along the lines of Person A: I went to Paris the other day and …. Doctor C: Lady Day!, all very much like a Monty Python routine. I even began to see Eric Idle as Doctor C, Graham Chapman in drag as Mme. V, Terry Jones as M. V, and Michael Palin, also in drag, as Odette. Of course, Jeremy Irons is Swann.

But back to the book. Mme. and M. Verdurin are great comedic inventions. Mme. V considers herself a great arbiter of culture and taste, and lives for the approbation of all who surround her. Anyone who doesn’t equal her fervor in belittling rich bores and certain artists (basically, anyone too modern and incomprehensible) loses his seat at her salon. She loves to laugh, but her version of mirth is to cover her face with her hands, bend over, and shake as though her hand were battling some kind of volcano trying to explode. And M. V just lives to support his wife’s endeavors.

So, Odette brings Swann one night, and Mme. V decides he’s suitable, and she contrives to make Swann and Odette an item. The pianist plays a movement from an unknown composer’s sonata, one that Swann recognizes (he’d heard it several months earlier and, despite all his efforts, had never learned the composer’s name). Hearing the melody again, and looking at Odette’s cheek so like that face in Botticelli, Swann falls. You can almost hear the thump as he lands in the middle of this big affair.

I’m at the point now where jealousy of others has grabbed Swann by the lapel and is dragging him along into worse and worse self-abasement. He isn’t exactly on his knees begging her to turn away her other clients, but he does try to listen at her window one night (turns out to be the wrong window), and his obsessive proprietary behavior gets him booted from Mme. V’s nightly entertainments.

You can’t help liking Swann, in spite of his disastrous affair with Odette. For years he’s been working on a book about Vermeer of Delft (we’re in the late 1800s, just as Vermeer is about to hit big among collectors), he pals around with the Prince of Wales and French aristocrats, and he knows that the Verdurins and their crowd are below his level, yet he puts up with them because they appreciate Odette.

Cattleya orchid

He’s also a bit silly. Because of some business involving an orchid corsage, he invents a euphemism, “to do a cattleya”, to replace “to make love”. (Cattleya — cat-LEE-ya — is a type of orchid.) He doesn’t like expressing an opinion, but is perfectly happy to share the facts he knows. (Perhaps this last isn’t so bad after all; these days, opinions seem to ride the wind, while facts are all hidden underground.) (And Dr. Cottard comes up with his own ridiculous euphemism: visiting the Duc d’Aumale for a minute is going to the toilet.)

At this moment in the novel, Swann is nearly debilitated by jealousy. I’m sorry to burden you with a long paragraph, but this one is beautiful. Swann is finally contemplating marrying Odette:

And yet he was inclined to suspect that the state for which he so much longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have created an atmosphere favourable to his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regretted, imagined; when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious disturbance that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sonata, but constant affection and gratitude, when those normal relations were established between them which would put an end to his melancholy madness; then, no doubt, the actions of Odette’s daily life would appear to him as being of but little intrinsic interest — as he had several times, already, felt that they they might be …. Examining his complaint with as much scientific detachment as if he had inoculated himself with it in order to study its effects, he told himself that, when he was cured of it, what Odette might or might not do would be indifferent to him. But in his morbid state, to tell the truth, he feared death itself no more than such a recovery, which would, in fact, amount to the death of all that he then was.

That’s the perversity of love. You want what you can’t have, yet you wonder if, when you finally get it, you’ll still be as happy. To love is to be a masochist.

I’m still trying to figure out why Proust made Swann fall in love with someone so perfectly unsuitable. But this post has gone on long enough.

If memory serves, I never figured out why Proust tortured Swann with Odette. Perhaps this time around I can get an inkling. More to come, soon, ish.

¹Roman-fleuve = novel cycle (from the French, “novel river”), where several novels feature the same characters (or generations of families) over time. Reading other romans-fleuves, such as Scott’s Raj Quartet and Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, didn’t prepare me for the challenge of Proust. Ah well.

For the past 3 weeks, it hasn’t been Radio WTWP (wall-to-wall Proust, with a tip of the hat to Prof. Peter Schickele) on my reading shelf. Here’s some other stuff I’ve been clearing out:

Desmond Seward’s The Demon’s Brood, a 300-page bare-bones history of the Plantagenet dynasty, from a myth-tinted beginning in the forests of 8th century France, to its 15th century end on Bosworth Field and Richard III’s burial in a pauper’s graveyard (a few hundred years later, a car park). What I already knew of this dynasty came from Shakespeare (Henry IV to Richard III), film (Peter O’Toole twice as Henry II!), and some “classic” children’s books about Robin Hood and William Wallace (Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs, written in 1810 and gorgeously illustrated by N. C. Wyeth in 1921). In other words, much of what I knew was probably based more in local legend than in actual fact. Seward’s book, although jam-packed with information, is marred by confusing typos (e.g., in Edward III’s ancestral chart, Fulk II the Good is noted as living 987-961, and in another chart the son of the Black Prince is listed as Richard III — anyone ought to know this is Richard II!), as well as a flurry of Henrys, Edwards, and Richards, as well as Margarets and Elizabeths — at least one per generation, and often more than one; when Seward mentions Henry II, I don’t know if this is the king of England or of France. Worst of all, there are no maps! Yet I finished the book, a quick read despite the problems. I now have a slightly clearer sense of the Wars of the Roses and the 100 Years War, and of the shifting alliances among the various rulers of England, France, Scotland and Wales.

Some books by and about Arthur Ransome, beyond the Swallows and Amazons series. More on these in a separate post, but what an amazing life Ransome led: not just sailing the Norfolk Broads and the Lake District, but also as war correspondent (WWI) in Russia, working his way up the ranks to hang out with (or at least meet) Trotsky, Lenin, and several others. In at least one instance, his input may have changed the course of history.

Jean Craighead George’s The Talking Earth, in which Billie Wind, a Seminole girl, is challenged by a village elder to learn how to listen to nature. Stranded by a storm in the Florida Everglades, she discovers the meaning of tribal myths and finds that science and myth aren’t mutually exclusive. George is best known for her Newbery Award winning Julie of the Wolves. The Talking Earth, a similar novel featuring a young woman who relies on animals to help her survive, although shorter, has a much stronger ecological focus.

Susan Cooper’s Ghost Hawk, another book featuring Native Americans, this one is set in Colonial New England, when Europeans and the Wampanoag nation met and clashed. Last fall, I heard Cooper talk about writing this book — about living near a tidal marsh untouched by centuries of development. The land seemed to tell this story for her, and all she needed to do was listen. It covers several decades of history, with European settlers slowly encroaching on Wampanoag territory. Historical characters such as Roger Williams and Massasoit appear, at a distance, grounding Cooper’s tale in fact, but never overshadowing the mystical themes. It’s a lovely story, and quite different from her Dark is Rising series.

Finally, Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona, a graphic novel (first seen as a webcomic), about a medieval supervillain and his Girl Friday, Nimona. The back cover reads “NEMESES! DRAGONS! SCIENCE! SYMBOLISM!” All promises are kept in this funny, surprising, intelligent book. Nimona (note her zaftig figure) tells the villainous Lord Ballister Blackheart that the agency sent her to be his new sidekick (my reaction: does this mean I can hire a sidekick?). She has a superpower, of course, that helps her help Blackheart in his constant battle with the gorgeous Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin. (Stevenson is obviously having fun with names.) Be ready for plot twists.

No, I haven’t given up on this. I’ve been finishing up some other tasks, in a metaphorical desk clearance before spring term begins.

Roger Shattuck, in his helpful guide, Proust’s Way, advises us to “read with a kind of patient faith that Proust is not leading us down the garden path and that he will bring the sentence, the scene, and the book to a clear conclusion.” Shattuck suggests that Proust’s style forces a slow reading, to create “a season of the mind outside temporal limits.” I feel a bit better now about needing several years to complete this.

pp. 116-143. End of Combray. Start of Swann in Love.  Let the story begin.

A couple of weeks ago a friend told me that he found Proust boring. I can see how a person would have that response. Combray isn’t easy. It wanders. The sentences are long. There’s no plot. Basically, 140 pages of this and that, with a whole lot about flowers and trees (quite a few hawthorns).

But the “this and that” turns out to be crucial for the rest of the novel, setting up relationships, yearnings, understandings, and expectations that I now get to follow as I move through the real story.

Combray ends where it begins, with the narrator (I’ll call him Marcel, just to make things easier) back in bed, connecting a taste (that tea, again) with memories of a time and place. As the sun rises (“the uplifted forefinger of day”) after a sleepless night in an unfamiliar bedroom, Marcel turns from detailed images of his childhood eden, to Swann’s story, and the tone of the writing shifts.

Combray is all “I” — with Marcel’s remembrances filling every page. But the third word of Swann in Love is “you”. Marcel grabs me and puts me right into the story. I don’t know how long he’ll be talking directly to me (I’ve read only the first paragraph), but the shift is almost shocking. It made me sit up.

A few brief notes.

1. Marcel doesn’t do a lot of explicit foreshadowing, but there was one sentence near the end of Combray that caught my attention. While introducing an odd scene between Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover, he writes

And it is perhaps from another impression which I received at Montjouvain, some years later, an impression which at that time was without meaning, that there arose, long afterwards, my idea of that cruel side of human passion called ‘sadism.’ We shall see, in due course, that for quite another reason the memory of this impression was to play an important part in my life.

OK, noted. I’ll keep an eye out for whatever it is that this memory links to. Marcel writes that the “one true cruelty” is “indifference to the suffering which [people] cause” — his final statement on that scene of sadism he accidentally witnessed.

2. Some great language: Buttercups, in French, are called boutons d’or (literally, buttons of gold). A carp, “crushed by the burden of idleness”, leaps from a river.

3. There’s a brief episode, where Marcel quotes something he wrote when he was young (perhaps 12 or so?), and his conclusion is that the writing helped him to relieve an obsession — in this case, with the changing views of three Martinville steeples during a drive he frequently took when young. The steeples disappear behind trees, then reappear after the road turns, but different in aspect and color. A bit like one’s memories.

And that’s as close to symbolism as I care to get at this point.

Stay tuned for the next installment, wherein we meet Swann and find out (I hope) who his mysterious love is.

Reviewing this post, I’m amused by my sense that the “real” story will finally get going. It does, but not in the way I had expected.

I’m starting to worry that these posts won’t be enough to ease me back into the story when I rejoin it in just a few weeks. Even in 30 pages, only a little bit happens, but so much is there to be pondered. Imagine, if you will, an atom: too tiny to see, but a tap from a special hammer unleashes tremendous power. That’s Proust’s writing. It reminds me of the Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten (watch it here): a world in a grain of sand.¹

Recipes for madeleines

pp. 72-116

It finally happened. At last, this story has captured me, and now I can eat up huge chunks of Proust’s massively thick prose as though these were pieces of dense European bread layered with butter, cheese, and apricot jam.

I’ve been reading for nearly 6 decades, and I’ve come to know that all books require an initial contract of faith: I believe that this writer will, at some point, give me a good reason to keep going. Usually that point comes somewhere within the first chapter or so, but occasionally I may have to wait for 50+ pages. And, yes, sometimes I give up, but not after giving the writer a fair chance.

But I promised to read Proust, so I didn’t give up (I was tempted to do so at least 8 times over the past 4 weeks), and I’m glad now, because yesterday I hit that magical point: page 101. I suppose, in a 2200-page novel, that’s about right — the equivalent of page 10 in a 200-page novel.

It was at this point that M. Legrandin displayed the most astonishing form of snobbism ever conceived. Let me see if I can give a short version (Proust’s, of course, goes on for pages):

Legrandin is a friend of the narrator’s family whom they see occasionally around Combray, their village near Paris. Lately, the narrator has noticed that Legrandin would snub them if he was walking with women of a higher class. But if he was with no one, he would happily talk with the narrator’s family, mostly flowery nonsense about Nature, etc.

So, the narrator’s family is thinking of sending the boy with his grandmother to Balbec, and they decide to ask Legrandin if he has acquaintances there; they know that his sister lives there, but they don’t want to be so crass as to directly suggest an introduction.

Legrandin stonewalls, and in answer to the father’s question, “Have you friends, then, in that neighbourhood, that you know Balbec so well?”, Legrandin answers:

I have friends all the world over, wherever there are companies of trees, stricken but not defeated, which have come together to offer a common supplication, with pathetic obstinacy, to an inclement sky which has no mercy upon them.

The father persists:

That is not quite what I meant…. I asked you, in case anything should happen to my mother-in-law and she wanted to feel that she was not all alone down there, at the ends of the earth, whether you knew any of the people.

But Legrandin will not be pinned down:

There as elsewhere, I know everyone and I know no one…; places I know well, people very slightly. But, down there, the places themselves seem to me just like people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality which would have been corrupted and ruined by the gift of life.

Legrandin goes on for another 20 lines in the same manner, then ends with advice that Balbec may be too much for the young and sensitive narrator and that perhaps he shouldn’t go at all. “‘No Balbec before you are fifty!’ he called out to me, ‘and even then it must depend on the state of the heart.'”

A character so deserving of ridicule, and so perfectly drawn for us. That’s my kind of writing.

As for the rest of this section, I was right in believing it’s meant as a stage setting for the rest of the book — its scenes as well as its themes. I haven’t yet pinned down all the themes, but here are the ones that stand out: love from afar (the narrator’s for various unattainable girls and women), love for the wrong person (Swann and Vinteuil each make this error), class consciousness, aging and death, idealized childhood, and a few more but it seems silly to go on. Already the list is looking cumbersome, but I have faith in Proust’s ability to deal with all of them.

Two critics* say that the section on Combray is like “the first circle of a spiral which rises toward the final revelation of Le Temps Retrouvé“. I’m happy to report that I’m now caught in that spiral.

*Germaine Brée and Carlos Lynes, Jr., eds., Combray, Appleton, 1952.

¹William Blake, Auguries of Innocence.