I began reading Swann’s Way in May, just about the end of my last semester of teaching. I had read it in a class in college—I can’t recall what class or who taught it—but I can’t imagine what I made of it then. I finished the book on June 9th in Tucson, and then I went to Bookman’s and traded some books for the English translation of the Pléiade edition of the whole of Remembrance of Things Past.
Swann’s Way is the first of seven parts in the English translation of A la recherche du temps perdu, which Marcel Proust published in eight parts from 1913 to 1927. The translation is by C.K. Scott Moncrieff (the first six parts in English; the first seven in French) and Stephen Hudson and Andreas Mayor (the last part), completely revised by Terence Kilmartin after the French Pléiade edition in 1954 used a holograph ms. Scott Moncrieff wasn’t aware of. Swann’s Way begins with the narrator talking about waking up after having gone to sleep early, not knowing where he is or what the time is, and the mechanisms of memory being set in motion by this waking, because “it always happened when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years.” And so he begins to recall evenings when he had to go to bed early when the family was staying at his great-aunt’s house in Combray as well as other places such as Balbec, Paris, “remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.” The narrator tells us, in the beginning of the book in the “Overture,” about his desperate attempts to get his mother to come up and kiss him goodnight (this practice being omitted on the nights when Charles Swann comes to dine—without his wife, whom the narrator’s family considers infra dig, since he’s married the courtesan Odette de Crécy); at the end of the book, in the section “Place-Names: The Name,” he describes in detail his longing to see Swann’s daughter Gilberte (“The Name” is presumably Gilberte) at their playground in the Champs –Elysées. It’s not at all clear in the long middle section “Swann in Love” whether the description of the torments of jealousy Swann goes through in his affair with Odette, before their marriage, belongs to either of the categories above—what the narrator actually saw or what he was told: it may be his projection of his own jealousies, and in fact he makes an explicit comparison at one point: “And he [Swann] did not have (as I had, afterwards, at Combray in my childhood) happy days in which to forget the sufferings that would return with the night,” and a few pages later, “he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed, as anxiously as I myself was to go to bed, some years later, on the evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray.” There are other thematic links, about the way memory works: the narrator is moved to think again about Combray when he tastes a madeleine cookie soaked in tea; Swann’s love for Odette is tied up with a phrase from a sonata for piano and violin by the composer Vinteuil (whose misery when his daughter brings home her lesbian lover is described in the section “Combray”), and flowers are also a touchstone of memory for Swann, since their first lovemaking began with his rearranging her orchid and afterward their phrase for making love was “to do a cattleya.” The narrator can be very funny, as when he describes at length the blue, pink, and mauve colors of fresh asparagus in the kitchen at Combray: “I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who . . . allowed me to discern in this radiance . . . these hinted rainbows . . . that precious quality which I should recognize again whe, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.” He is surgically satiric in his treatments of the conversation at both the bourgeois and the aristocratic gatherings: “We are indulging in the most refined form of humour, my dear Charles, in the very best of taste,” says the Princess des Laumes, about her and Swann’s dissection of the Cambremer name into two scatalogical parts (“since he couldn’t stop himself beginning the second [unfinished part, that is, merde], he’ld have done better to finish the first [Cambronne, as in, le mot de Cambronne, euphemism for merde, which General Cambronne supposedly shouted at Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo].” A delightful paragraph lampoons styles in monocles and the affectations of their wearers. He can be axiomatic and sententious: “it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to find out about our own can be no more than what other people have shewn us,” or “The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.” The Princess des Laumes can’t understand why Swann throws himself away on Odette; the Princess has “the wisdom invariably shewn by people, who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man ought to be unhappy only about such persons as are worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the common bacillus.” Swann does not at first realize Odette is cheating on him: “Like many other men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind, and was slow in invention. He knew quite well as a general truth, that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of any one human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was.” The narrator can be lyrical, as in this passage describing a summer afternoon when the narrator’s family, knowing Swann is away, visits the grounds of his house, Tansonville, on the day the narrator first sees Gilberte:
Not a footstep was to be heard on any of the paths. Somewhere in one of the tall trees, making a stage in its height, an invisible bird, desperately attempting to make the day seem shorter, was exploring with a long, continuous note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repurcussion of silence and of immobility that, one would have said, it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.
In the “Combray” section the narrator describes the two “ways” the family would go when they took their walks: one went toward Méséglise-la-Vineuse (though they never went so far as this town, and this they also called “Swann’s way,” because it went along the boundary of Charles Swann’s estate of Tansonville. The other way, the “Guermantes way,” went along the river Vivonne. These two “ways” give their names to two parts of the book. Swann is an interesting character, an art connoisseur who plays at writing about art but never quite seems to finish his essay about Vermeer. He has bold green eyes and, when young, red hair; later he is bald. Swann has friends in high places and low tastes in women, about whom he is fairly detached until he meets the great love of his life, Odette de Crécy, for whom he spends his time among incredibly stupid, rude, uninformed and uninteresting company at her friends the Verdurins’, and of whom he becomes obsessively jealous. The affair with Odette begins about the time of the birth of the narrator, who much later “began to take an interest in his [Swann’s] character because of the similarities which, in wholly different respects, it offered to my own.” The Modern Library edition’s introduction (1928) is written by Lewis Galantière, who says Swann’s Way contains the evidence for a psychological law “that we do not profit by experience; we learn only that to a given stimulus we will react in a predictable way, and this repeatedly.” Thus we watch both Swann and the narrator replaying their parallel scenes of love and jealousy.
A friend thinks that the sentence structure, with many long relative clauses and parentheticals, has to do with his theme: “One of my wacko theories,” he writes, “is that since he was writing about memory he built this into the grammatical structure by writing such long sentences that you have to work to remember in the middle of one how
it started out.”
A representative tissue of Proustian moments—and such tissues form the gossamer architecture of the book—starts in Swann’s Way: in Combray one day, Charles Swann condescends to speak to the old music-master Vinteuil, who is being gradually destroyed by shame because his daughter has brought into his house as her lover a sadistic older woman. Swann talks to Vinteuil, writes the narrator, with an “almost arrogant charity” and complete assurance that Vinteuil will be grateful for the gesture. After their conversation and after Swann has left, Vinteuil remarks to the narrator and his father that Swann is a charming man, and then he adds, “What a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage!” In this tragicomic little scene, Proust makes us wonder who is condescending to whom, but though he has painted the figures, he does not fill in the background for another seventy-five pages, when we have moved from the section “Combray” to “Swann in Love.” There we read that some years earlier Swann had been enchanted with a phrase in a sonata for piano and violin, but had been unable to discover who composed it until one day at a salon he hears it again and finds that the sonata was written by a composer named Vinteuil. He has been invited to this salon by the woman he will eventually marry, the courtesan Odette de Crécy. The phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata becomes the theme for Swann’s falling in love with Odette. Moreover, Swann refuses to believe that the composer of the sonata might be the same man as the old music-master he knows in Combray. Then, fifteen hundred pages later, as the narrator is about to dump Albertine, one of the jeune filles en fleurs he meets in the second volume, he makes a chance remark about Vinteuil that leads Albertine to reveal that she considers Vinteuil’s daughter and her lover as her “two big sisters.” This revelation, confirming the narrator’s suspicion of Albertine’s lesbianism, because of the economics of love in the novel (the unavailable is precisely the longed-for), cancels his decision to break with her and puts him in the same position Swann was in when besotted with love for Odette. In the next novel, The Captive, the narrator listens to a longer Vinteuil piece, a septet that also contains the phrase that so enchanted Swann, being played by a young violinist named Morel at the Verdurin’s (at whose salon, much less fashionable in those days, Swann first heard the phrase played). In the audience is Morel’s lover, the Baron de Charlus. The phrase keeps recurring throughout the septet, but changed each time, “as things recur in life.” In this scene the three great passions of the book—Swann’s for Odette, the Baron de Charlus’ for Morel, and the narrator’s for Albertine—are tied together. It is precisely at this moment that the narrator feels the “strange summons” to art which is to give him satisfactions he has never found in love or his other pleasures.

Within a Budding Grove begins with the narrator’s obsession with Gilberte, where the previous novel left off; he plays with Gilberte in the Champs-Elysées and is finally invited to her house. The narrator is disappointed at the actress Berma’s performance, which a pretentious friend of the family, M. de Norpois, enables by speaking to the narrator’s parents, who forbade the boy’s attendance at the theater because they feared for his health. But then the narrator revises his opinion of Berma after hearing de Norpois’s conventional praises of her acting. When the narrator learns de Norpois has dined the previous evening at the Swanns’, there is a funny section as the narrator tries to get himself mentioned to the Swanns by de Norpois; he says while de Norpois is talking to him and before he realizes his obsession, it’s as if he were a sane man talking to a lunatic just before he realizes it’s a lunatic. Another comparison: de Norpois’s talking to the infatuated young man is “as when a stranger with whom we have been pleasantly exchanging impressions which we might have supposed to be similar about passers-by whom we agreed in regarding as vulgar, reveals suddenly the pathological abyss that divides him from us by adding carelessly as he feels his pocket: “What a pity I haven’t got my revolver with me; I could have picked off the lot of them.”
Proust is good on how art affects the developing perception of his young narrator, who tells us about “streets whose elegant pink houses seemed to be washed (because exhibitions of water-colours were then the height of fashion) in a lightly floating atmosphere,” and, talking of Parisian architecture: “Once only one of Gabriel’s palaces made me stop for more than a moment; this was because, night having fallen, its columns, dematerialised by the moonlight, had the appearance of having been cut out in pasteboard, and by reminding me of a set from the operetta Orphée aux Enfers, gave me for the first time an impression of beauty.”
He continues with his aphorisms: “I marvelled at the impotence of the mind, the reason and the heart to effect the least conversion, to solve a single one of those difficulties which subsequently life, without one’s so much as knowing how it went about it, so easily unravels.”
On art and posterity: “What is called posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work . . . should create its own posterity.”
This book is divided into two unequal sections. The first two fifths or so is called “Madame Swann at Home” (I finished this section 6/24, in a Tucson library copy of the book) and recounts the narrator’s visits to the Swanns, first to see Gilberte, and then, after he has sworn not to see her again, to visit Mme. Swann. The narrator’s dilemma is that since Gilberte does not especially care for him, it is only by not seeking her company that he can either inspire affection in her or at least keep her from despising him. Our own nature, says the narrator, “creates our loves, and almost creates the women we love, down to their very faults.” During these three hundred pages, the name of Albertine, Mme. de Bontemps’ daughter (niece?) is mentioned three times, the faint introduction of the next theme.
The second, longer section is called “Place-Names: The Place,” and recounts the narrator’s first visit to Balbec, with his grandmother, who runs into (literally) the Marquise de Villeparisis, an old friend, one day, and thus enables the narrator to meet the people who are successively introduced in this section, beginning with the Marquise’s nephew Robert de Saint-Loup en Bray, who is about to be deployed to Saumur(?) and is preparing at a garrison at Doncières, nearby. Saint-Loup is good-looking, appears arrogant at first but is quite friendly, despises his own caste, is an intellectual who reads Nietzsche and Proudhon, and has a domineering mistress in Paris with whom he is in love. Saint-Loup and the narrator have a mutual friend in Bloch, who is staying at Balbec with his sisters and and other relatives, and who comes in for some ridicule for his Jewishness. Saint-Loup’s uncle, the Baron de Charlus shows up, acting strangely and apparently making a veiled pass at the narrator, who does not recognize it. (We first saw the Baron at Tansonville, with Mme. Swann, whose lover the Baron was locally imagined to be; the narrator sees them when he gets his first glimpse of Gilberte when they are both children.) The last 150 pages have to do with the narrator’s first seeing of Albertine Simonet and her friends on the beach, his daydreaming about them, and ultimately his meeting with them through the painter Elstir (who turns out to be the painter in the Verdurin salon, the butt of jokes, known there as M. Biche), and his friendship with them, and his growing obsession with Albertine, including an unsuccessful pass at her when she was staying overnight at the Grand Hotel, where the narrator and his grandmother are living during the season. I finished the second section of Within a Budding Grove on 8/5/03. ( )

Deft and detailed portrait of French society at the turn of the last century, as the aristocracy gives way socially to the bourgeoisie that has already supplanted it economically? That's the boilerplate, but I dunno, dude. Bourgeois pathology, maybe. What Proust does really, really well - the obvious comparison is of course Ulysses, and I'd contend that even if Joyce is a better entertainer and all-round more interesting guy, Proust is the more talented writer - is take you on this Family Circus-style "Billy wander" - the sentences that twist and turn and yet remain so, yes, cartoonishly level and followable like a well-laid row of bricks (bourgeois novel indeed!), or to complete the Billy analogy and get it off my back, like those dotted lines that fall out of his backpack and you can follow them forward and back - in and out through the self and the landscape and the great genius here, or one of the geniuses, is the way Proust captures the effect of impressions of the world around him on the self, and the way they can create permanent change in a body as well as fleeting change that, in its (fleeting) impact, seems like permanency too. Maybe that's why he's so good at people when he treats them like landscape - the extended meditation on Albertine's cheeks and so on, the stock fixture of Françoise who manages generically to make his (nasty but no doubt not entirely invalid) case about the servant classes.

And then sometimes the narrator starts to palpitate and get worked up enough, his feewıngs about a girl or actually often just a paintng or whatever which shows that it is still really just the feelings, the self, not the people, but leave that aside - sometimes the narrator decides to try to treat people like people and it gets him, and Proust, ınto trouble. A lot of it is just France, I suppose - I'm no freedom-fries-surrender-monkeying American knee jerk, but it occurs to me that outside of Tintin and le Petit Prince (and weren't they Belgian?), every French novel I have ever read in my life has been about nasty people doing unlovely things to each other and then being smug about it later. (And every French person I have ever met in real life has been alternately sneering and preciously sentimental, but let it pass - we'll trust that is just chance). And where Balzac and Zola just bring it, and Flaubert with all his genius and crossdresslust gives it so much pathos, and Sartre uses it to get right into the nitty-gritty of the self-loathing that one hopes underlies most or all of these people really - Proust just drops you into the decadence; and like, not the sex, that would at least give this some blood and vigour, but into the decadent, minute-gradations-in-social-status-and-hypernervous-aestheticism mental state of his narrator, which doesn't interfere with the swoony beauty of the walks along Swann's way, but does, when you get into his relations with his boys who are all closeted and his girls - Albertine, Gilberte, Andree - who are all boys - you just want to have a wash. And that's before his creepy insinuating lesbian fixation pops up. And now all of a sudden the proper comparison ıs Humbert Humbert, except that

1. almost everybody in this book has a tinge of Humbert to them, not just Our Narrator. Humbert ıs European snobbery withering in '50s America - this is it in full flower, and makes you want to go "Guys, you're just France, not semidivine beings of pure critical judgment" and also raises the intriguing possibility that I will see a lot of this in new light if I ever get to the next volume and the humiliation of the Great War;
2. for all the biographical reasons, and because he is nameless, we are encouraged to identify the narrator a lot more with the author, making Proust kind of icky himself;
3. against the odds, a teenage Humbert is even creepier than an old one, because like, at least we know how an old guy can get that creepy but for a young kid it is a feat - maybe possible only for a 'sickly' one like our hero;
4. We have to spend a lot longer in Proust's company.

And that's the thing too - around 2/3 through (page 685 for me) you start to get a bit, or a lot, "Okay dude, I getcha. Move on," not because of the abovementioned yuck factor, but because he's just spinning his wheels - repeating, not developing anymore. This certainly is the kind of book a sickly bourgeois with a lot of time on his hands would write. And the sad thing is, it buries the playful glory of his genius, which comes through when he is a kid (because you don't know he sucks yet) and in the charming Swann story in the same way as the beauties of Chopin which he sketches so neatly - but imagine a hundred-hour Chopin nocturne.

And so yeah - tonnes of talent in this warped masterpiece, which I could never have conceived if it did not exist - but hey, Proust was a weird guy. A weird bourgeois guy, and don't you forget it. It would just be easıer to take if he told us at less length. ( )