Thus my body builds around it room after room: wintry rooms where one loves to hold the outer world at bay, where one keeps the fire going all night and wraps about one’s shoulders a cloak of warm air, smoke-colored, smoke-scented, and shot with ruddy gleams; summer rooms where one loves to be gathered to the breast of nature, rooms where one sleeps, a bedroom I had in Brussels whose proportions were so pleasing, so spacious and yet so cozy, that it seemed a nest to hide in and a world to explore.
—Marcel Proust
Back to the Present
Roger Shattuck
Without official approval, I should like to dedicate these proceedings to the reading groups and secret Proust readers who are here tonight, and who have produced something called a house. A full house, for Marcel Proust. And we will honor Proust most, I believe, if we stick for just a few minutes to what I call scripture. Therefore, here beginneth the first verse of the first chapter of the book called A la recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time:
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: “Je m’endors.” Et, une demi-heure après, la pensée qu’il était temps de chercher le sommeil m’éveillait…
And now a translation of the opening passage composed for this occasion. Those of you who have tried to translate the first sentence will know that it is impossible. Therefore it has to be translated.
Early to bed with a book. I have tried that for years. Many times I would blow out my candle and drop off to sleep so fast that I didn’t register what was happening and, half an hour later, the thought that it was time for me to go to sleep would wake me up again. During that brief sleep, I had entered into the life of the book I was reading, had entered it so utterly, that I became its subject. A quartet, a church, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V. This belief in a new identity didn’t trouble me, but like a film over my eyes, it prevented me from noticing that my candle had blown out. Tenderly, I pressed my cheek into the plump pillow, so cool and soft that it seemed to offer me the cheeks of childhood itself…
At this point Proust does go on to describe the magical childhood of the young Marcel. But something not often noticed happens first: there comes the great fall. By about page three, we are carried away into a swift and deep descent, a descent back to childhood, a descent back to Adam and Eve, a descent back to the cavemen, and finally, back to the condition that Proust calls “the abyss of non-being.” This distinct fall at the beginning links Proust’s book to Genesis, to Dante, with the descent into Hell at the beginning of The Divine Comedy, and to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, beginning with the rabbit-hole. But Proust’s descent, or his narrator’s fall, is much more dire and dreadful than that of these other books. If you grasp the true significance of that immense fall at the beginning, then you will also understand why it took Proust three thousand pages to climb back up out of that hole to find the present again, to find his own skin, and finally, to find that puzzling set of conventions that we call civilization. Along the way, Proust offers us a million little details, delicious items, small things like—I shall only mention it—the asparagus. Like the street cries, which the narrator listens to in his bed. And, if you’ve read far enough, like the two pimples which appear on Albertine’s forehead, signifying what, we never quite learn.
But all these millions of little things add up, I believe, to one big thing. In Search of Lost Time offers us a record of how it feels, of how it feels in our very system, to be alive—both to be alive as generic human beings, and to be alive as our own sorry, yearning selves. Proust, many of us feel, is the most sensuous novelist who ever lived and wrote for us, and we give thanks.
Theories of Relativity
William C. Carter
Marcel Proust lived from 1871 to 1922, an era that he characterized as the Age of Speed. These exciting, momentous years, encompassed the Fin de Siècle, Belle Epoch, and World War I. By the time Proust was forty, the gas-lit world of his youth had been transformed by electric lighting, the telephone, the phonograph, the automobile, the airplane, and motion pictures. When he began writing his novel, Paris streets bustled with an astonishing variety of pedestrians, ambulatory vendors, drivers and their horses, and a number of the new self-propelling vehicles called automobiles. He could see the past and future on parade, as horse-drawn carriages made way for cars. Part of the fascination of reading In Search of Lost Time derives from its vivid depiction of the major social, political, and technological forces that changed daily life, and the way people perceived time and space.
In September 1905, when Proust was thirty-four, his mother died. His intense grief lasted until 1907, when a summer vacation brought about a dramatic change in him. Depressed and ill, he had in recent months gotten out of bed only once a week, without dressing. After he arrived at the seaside resort, the pure air, joined with a deadly dose of caffeine—seventeen cups—allowed him to hire the driver, Alfred Agostinelli, and go out every day in a closed car. 
Proust’s elaboration on the theme of time shows that he is not only aware of the constantly shifting nature of things, but is haunted by it. Change, and reaction to change, set the tone of the period. The Great War, in which common soldiers became the heroes, and also the first one in which airplanes were used to launch bombs, accelerated the process of transformation. After the war, the Guermantes’ salon, once the epitome of aristocratic elegance and snobbery, is described as a broken-down machine no longer functioning properly and unable to maintain its fierce exclusivity. This is but another turn of the Proustian kaleidoscope. Even the ultra-chic Faubourg Saint-Germain must yield to the forces of time, as the narrator observes: “Thus it is that the pattern of the things of this world changes. That centers of empire, assessments of wealth…all that seemed to be forever fixed is constantly being refashioned, so that the eyes of a man who has lived can contemplate the most total transformation, exactly where change would have seemed to him to be most impossible.”
Late in life, the narrator returns to the Bois de Boulogne, hoping to find living memories of his youth. “Smitten by a desire to see again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me many years before along the same paths, I wished to see anew before my eyes at the moment when Mme Swann’s enormous coachman…endeavored to curb the ardor of those horses,” frenzied and light as wasps on the wing, as they thundered over the ground. “Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars driven each by a moustached mechanic….How horrible! I exclaimed to myself. Can anyone find these motor-cars as elegant as the old carriage-and-pair?”
“The places we have known,” he concludes, “do not belong only to the 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; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
The new heroes of the Age of Speed—the cyclist, the chauffeur, and the aviator—all appear in Proust’s novel. Albertine the cyclist is a mysterious, erotic creature, while the aviator symbolizes the artist. At the beginning of the novel’s climactic scene, the narrator, at last looking inward for the keys to his past, suddenly feels himself rising in flight, like an airman who, hitherto, has progressed laboriously along the ground, abruptly taking off. “I soared slowly toward the silent heights of memory.”
The Architecture of Thought
Lydia Davis
The apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in which Proust wrote most of In Search of Lost Time is now owned by a bank. The bedroom in which Proust slept, rested, ate, received visitors and wrote is used by the bank for meetings with clients. And it is relatively bare of reminders of Proust. There is a portrait of him on the wall and some of his books in a bookcase. The only other furniture is a table and four chairs and a sideboard. What is still there that Proust looked upon daily is the marble fireplace, the doors, the two tall windows, and the wood floor with its herringbone pattern. Sparsely furnished like this, it does not seem very large, though Proust described it as vast.
Sometimes, after he’d been awake a few hours, though still in bed, Proust would decide on impulse to go out and see a friend. At ten or eleven at night in a dark bedroom, the only light comes from the lamp by his bed, and the fire in the fireplace if it’s winter. The dark room is crowded with furniture, including two large bookcases, a wardrobe, a grand piano, an armchair for visitors, and various little tables. Proust leaves his bed, crosses the short hallway and gets dressed. His suit is made to measure and his patent leather boots were bought at the Old England Shop. He does not tend to wear out his shoes. He is transported by taxi and walks on carpet and parquet floors.
“Please break up these long sentences” is the plaintive request that a translator of Proust hears at least once. No, the book is really more about thought than plot. And in any case, in Swann’s Way at least, there is a nice balance. Eighty percent of the sentences are not excessively long. The sentences must be kept intact, long and short, and they must retain as many elements of their complexity as possible, the parallel structures, the pairs of phrases, the triplets, the alliteration and assonance, the meter. But above all the intricate architecture of syntax by which Proust inserts his parenthetical remarks and digressions, delaying as long as possible the outcome of the sentence. So this means in the end trying to preserve not only the ease of a sentence when it is easy, but also the difficulty of a sentence when it is difficult, and it means asking oneself the same question with each sentence, though with a different problem in each: If I can’t produce, for example, the hexameter which Proust has so beautifully embedded in this phrase, by just how much will I have changed his thought?
Recognitions
Marilynne Robinson
When I was in college, it was my good fortune to be a student of John Hawkes. Momentously for me, he once put a blessing on a paragraph of mine. He called it Proustian. He did this to shelter it from the criticisms of my fellow students, who were aflame then with a stern undergraduate passion for truth-telling, for tearing away veils and dispelling illusions. I was as impressed by this project as anyone, and I made certain poor attempts at it, which the formidable Mr. Hawkes discouraged by invoking this great name to approve one straying memory of my primordial Idaho.
Given the vagaries of historical reputation, it is startling to find anyone whose influence is what it ought to be. Why is this so singularly true of Proust? It is as if the great purity of Proust’s motive in writing—I take this to be a profoundly courteous desire to give us back to ourselves—has made the whole phenomenon of his work proof against an alteration. He restores us to our purest innocence as readers. His young narrator, Marcel, tells us how it was, and is, to pass a summer morning engrossed in a book:
This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity.
He tells us that the very limitations of the art—its very departures from strict truth—have an intrinsic moral, that is, compassionate, value. He says, “A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion. Indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea that he has of himself, that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.” The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections impenetrable to the human soul their equivalent in immaterial sections. Things, that is, which one’s soul can assimilate.
Reading Proust, we are always recalled to a sense of the elegance of our most ordinary perceptions, and how richly they are changed by habit, by accidental associations, by regret and yearning, by misapprehension and disenchantment, and by time. I will not say, by love, since love, if it exists, is merely the great sum of all these things. Just so does truth, if it exists, impartially include in its great sum, and among its marvels, the shabbiest and the most opulent of veils and illusions.
Toward Total Recall
William H. Gass
Was it in the summer? It probably was…when you thought you had a enough time on your hands to fill them with a book, when an unappointed space had appeared in your life…the summer when you decided to read Proust. Perhaps the impossible purpose appeared to you in late afternoon, at an hour customarily assigned to tea and to fingering volumes by Henry James. You would have had to have been—hear the toll of those terrible tenses?—you would have had to have been young. Or recently retired. Ambitious. Or convalescent. Feeling the need, sensing the opportunity, to improve yourself.
When André Gide first looked into Swann’s Way, it must have seemed a stack of sheets like any other, so his mind would not have been filled with the kind of foreboding that faces the climber of a mountain while still in the foothills looking up at his goal, a blanched peak whose slopes are already dotted with many a failed ambition. Gide’s encounter with the name “Proust” would not be like any of ours. He would remember the frivolous social snob while we would be ready to regard that same person as bearing a title, perhaps like others so often in the literary news—Joyce and Kafka and Mann—so that if we didn’t positively love what of Proust we finally read, we would never let on, for some small sins are more shameful to the soul than many a public crime.
Yet that’s the way we should have got into Swann’s Way—unaware, when it first came out—because during every decade after, in addition to the rambling work itself, books of commentary and criticism would begin to surround it like a barricade, adding to one’s trepidations. Not to mention idle conversations about the great work’s length, its difficulties, and laughable place in summertime’s hammock—attitudes that built its popular reputation. Am I ready? Am I worthy? Couldn’t I settle for Colette or even Sagan, each equally French?
When we begin Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, how much of the story does the author expect us to keep in mind as we read along? He expects us, I think, to remember about as much of Tom Jones’s history as Tom Jones does—for instance, to remember that Tom broke his leg, but not to remember all that was said by the visitors who appeared at his bedside. The text is meant to dwindle away, as past times do, and if some element is supposed to be retained for future use, we can be confident that Fielding will prompt us. How otherwise it is with Joyce, to name the most guilty. He would have us recollect Bloom’s orangeflower water hundreds of pages after its first appearance, while recognizing that the soap with which it is associated is even more important. The text is not a boat’s wake, meant to subside behind us; instead it rises up like a tidal wave, and pursues us as we read, ready to flood each succeeding page with previous meanings, and altering all that has gone before the way Henry James’s predicates surprise and abash their subjects with an ultimate turn of phrase.
When the world is remembered in writing, it alters almost utterly in its density, in its absence of detail. “It, my body,” M says about waking, subsiding, waking up again, “my body would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I woke.” And the master makes certain that the reader has M’s sense of fullness, as if nothing has been or will be overlooked: “and my body…brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its ball of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling…” Yet it is only the suggestion of completeness that is given, not its reality, for those chains are darkening their brass with dust, the blue in the flame is rhythmically retreating before the orange, and in the chimney-piece of Siena marble that M mentions, there is a noticeable nick that I just put there—in short, no description possesses as much “this or that” as a camera might catch in the flicker of a finger, not to omit the states of mind that furnish a room from time to time with longing, appreciation, and panic.
Things and creatures in the real world buzz and blossom by the billions and we know to beware of their brevity, because decay and death are as continuous as being born or burgeoning.
If the distance between what happens and what we have understood about it is dismaying, what of the difference our memory makes on the third day thence, the fifth week after, the seventh year just passed? An habitual victim of his body, Proust knew how great the chasm was between the mind and body. Outside M. Teste’s and Paul Valéry’s theater of the head, there was a reality indifferent to the plays put on by consciousness. We knew that world in part; it supplied our senses; it gave us occasion for concern, for delight, for desire; it gave us our place—Balbec, Paris, Combray—yet of us that world of matter and motion remained utterly unaware. Our lungs knew their air, but not our aspirations. Speaking of his grandmother’s failing health, M says, “It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.”
The real world is full of pointless purpose, inattentiveness, confusion, pain, and perplexity, as well as the hazards of its satisfactions. Yet in Proust’s pages, it is perceived, it is felt, it is contemplated, in a manner so utterly satisfying that those pains, in their depiction, become pleasures; confusions are given an order only we are permitted to understand; defeats are now worth every word of their account; failures victories if only in their voicing. And that is why—to live for a while, as we ought, in a fully realized world, though its understanding will be forever incomplete and quite beyond us—that is why we read Proust.
Cross-Pollination
Nadine Gordimer
There are two ways in which great literature impacts upon society. The one is cultural, a narrow definition of culture as practice of the arts. The writer breaks the traditional seals of the word, takes off into exploration of new modes of expression, challenges and changes what fiction is. After Proust, after Joyce, yes, the novel could never be the same. How Marcel Proust changed the concept of the novel as a form, I know, has been and will be expounded in this company of eminent Proustian scholars, and so I shan’t have the presumption to enter the debate, which I find, so far, has been a very fascinating one.
But later, as I read and returned to that book, its effect was something different, prophetic to the series of presents, existential stages, I was coming to, passing through. Holed up in an armchair in the tin-roofed house of a mining town in the South African veldt far, far away from Combray, Balbec, and the Boulevard Haussmann, I discovered that the intense response that I had to natural beauty, to flowers, trees, and the sea, visited once a year, wasn’t something high-mindedly removed from the drives of existence I was struggling with, but was part of a sensuality which informs and belongs with awakening sexuality; the conflation of emotional and the aesthetic formation.
Every time—anytime—one turns back to the novel, one finds the delight of something relevant to past perception that one had missed before. For example, in my recent rereading of A la recherche du temps perdu, my third in French, I’ve seen how pollen recurs: the natural product become a metaphor, the wind-distributed fecundity part of the very air which we breathe. First coming from the regard of the girl—you will remember that the narrator follows with his eyes on the drive with Mme de Villeparisis in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. And then there’s that bumblebee that enters the courtyard with pollen that signifies the attraction cast in the air between the Baron de Charlus and the lowly waistcoat maker Jupien. Proust himself pollinates ineffable connections between needs and emotions aroused by various means in us. In the context of projected existence, I came to Proust from D. H. Lawrence and Blake. Sexuality was fulfillment guaranteed to the bold, to anyone who would flout interdictions and free desire:
Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs & flaming hair,
But Desire gratified
Plants fruits of life & beauty there.
And this Blakian gratification between men and women was the image, to me, of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, dancing on simulated clouds. Like Italo Calvino, I formed my notion of future emotional life as innocently and lyingly portrayed by the movies of the time.
The processes of loving, as exemplified in the desperate pilgrimage of Swann—and what a way that is: ecstatic, frustrating, impossible to turn away from, viewing the pursued beloved from the terrible angles of suspicion, losing the will to continue, grabbed by the will to go on. Always, moving along with him, one has moments when one wants to shake him and say, “Stop!” And one sees he cannot, he will not. Maybe that’s the principle of love. And in the end, of course, that devastating conclusion, this woman, for whom he spoiled years of his life, was really not his type at all.
Proust reformed, informed, my youthful understanding of the expectations of sexual love, showed me its immense complexity, its ultimate dependency on the impossibility of knowing the loved one—the very defeat of possession—and this concomitant process of self-knowledge, often dismaying. The cloud-mating of Fred and Ginger dispersed forever. In the life of the emotions I was embarked upon, my expectations were tutored by the greatest exploration ever made of the divine mystery of the sexual life in its ambient world of sensuality.
There’s no time to discuss the continuation of the theme with Albertine, only I’d like to observe that not only does it not matter a damn if Albertine was really an Albert transformed by the alchemy of imagination rather than a sex-change operation. No one has written better than Marcel Proust, himself a homosexual, of heterosexual relations. Perhaps literary genius can be defined yet once again as creativity that is all things, knows everything, in every human.
After early readings of the book, I read Les Plaisirs et les jours, Jean Santeuil, and Contre Sainte-Beuve, but to these I haven’t returned. I have more or less the gamut of Proust scholarship in English and French, but all has been surpassed, for me, by the publication this year of Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Way, an amazing feat of originality where one would have thought that all the gold-bearing ore had long been brought to the surface. My present reading of The Book has become a new one because of Roger Shattuck’s book, filled with new understanding, possibilities, and new joys, through the variety of lenses provided by Shattuck’s radiant vision:
At the grand and poignant final social gathering of all social gatherings, narrator Marcel finds past friends and acquaintances unrecognizably changed by age while still having the sense of himself as he’d been in his mother’s eyes. And you’ll remember that he replies to a young woman’s invitation to dine: “With pleasure, if you don’t mind dining alone with a young man.” And only when he hears people giggle, he adds hastily: “or rather, an old man.” Later he realizes that the span of time represented by the aspect of that gathering not only had been lived through, but was his life presented to him. As I grow old, I find myself ready for the revelation in Time Regained, of this Proustian source, when among old friends with whom I was always the youngest of the circle, I realize we are now, all alike, disguised in the garb of aging. And I, like everyone else, have to be introduced to myself. Proust makes it another epiphany.
The Consolations of Art
Edmund White
Parce que c’était lui…
André Aciman
The little phrase I’m about to read comes from a famous passage in Sodom and Gomorrah when Marcel the narrator is suddenly reminded of his grandmother. He had stayed at the same beach resort in Balbec with her once, but now, more than a year after her death, he’s back at the very same hotel. What he finds, as Proustian characters always find when they expect maximum emotion is, however, minimum sensation. He encounters, more or less, what he experienced at the time of her death, a sense of surprise at feeling so singularly numb, almost indifferent, blasé. All of it is colored by Marcel’s overloaded feeling of not feeling enough, and by the hope that this shamed admission of emotional inadequacy might itself pass for a form of genuine emotion. Now, surrounded by the indolent charm of the grand hotel, what the young adult Marcel thinks of when he arrives at Balbec is not his grandmother, but the social life awaiting him, of the band of young girls he had met there once before, and of the vague, tantalizing thing which Marcel always looks forward to: something exotic, someone new, unexpected, different, who might ultimately lure him out of his humdrum, bookish cocoon, into what Proust calls a new life.
This is how life works in Proust. Conversely, one may bump into the right people, but never when one wants to. One may get what one wants, but only after giving it up, or wanting something else instead. We reach out to seize precious moments not as they are happening to us, but once it’s clear that we’ve lost them. So far, so good. The set up is familiar enough.
No reader of Montaigne can forget that stunning moment when, after probing why he loved his deceased friend Etienne de La Boétie so much, the author of the essays, this master-stylist of baroque prose, breaks down and scrawls out one of the most beautiful sentences penned in French: “You ask me why I loved him,” Montaigne says. “I don’t know. All I can say is parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.” Because it was he, because it was I. Proust too knows how to cut through layer after layer of searching and probing prose and write as brief a sentence, if only because it too, like his sudden outburst, wells up in him and erupts on something that is more than just paper now. “You ask me why I love my grandmother,” he says. “I don’t know. All I know is this”—and here is the little sentence I promised you earlier— “Elle était ma grand-mère et j’était son petit-fils.” She was my grandmother, and I was her grandson. And if that’s not enough, a few lines down, Proust will say it again, more forcefully. While staring at her photograph in his hotel room, he will say it in even more guileless terms: “C’est ma grand-mère, je suis son petit-fils.” It’s my grandma. I’m her grandson. Anyone can write this. But of course, what surrounds it makes it eloquent. More to the point: life can’t compete with this. Life doesn’t even come close. And, come to think of it, perhaps no one alive can today.