Finding the time
Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (or, in English, How Can I Possibly Find the Time to Read This) is the cornerstone of modern literature; it is also a book few people have actually read. Proust wrote it after the death of his mother, when he withdrew from society to his famous cork-lined room to reflect on memory, art and guilt. He spent the next two decades there, emerging only occasionally and usually at night. This is very much the method to employ if you intend to read his masterpiece.
For 80 years, with the honourable exceptions of Terence Kilmartin, Alain de Botton and Michael Portillo, we have been meaning to read Proust but not quite managing it. We know it is important; we know that the way he treats time, cuts between past and present, and replicates the workings of the mind changed the art of novel-writing forever; we know his baroque style, those endless, loopingly lyrical sentences, piling metaphor upon metaphor, going on for page after page, losing themselves in the folds of his boundless imagination, one sub-clause giving way to another like endless waves breaking on a beach beneath a lowering November sky, the peeling paint on the neat row of beach huts redolent of a lost innocence that somehow… sorry; we know his style is extraordinary, enveloping, captivating. Yet still we do not read him; or, rather, we try and, more often that not, we fail.
That may now be set to change; there are signs that this is Marcel’s moment. The catalyst is Raul Ruiz’s film of the last part of the novel, Le Temps Retrouvé, which has just been released to critical acclaim. The history of the film-hating Proust on screen has been patchy: Visconti, René Clement and Joseph Losey all failed to get their projects off the ground; Volker Schlöndorff’s film of the first volume (Swann in Love) was widely panned; and Percy Adlon’s Céleste was more biopic than film of the book. Ruiz has gone some of the way to disproving the adage that great books make lousy movies.
Better still, this week the book jumped 3,000 places in the Booktrack bestseller list. Admittedly, that represents just 217 copies in a flat post-Christmas market and it only sits at number 544 in the fiction list; but it is a big book, a major investment, a lot of book tokens. A spokeswoman for Booktrack (“I’ve heard of Proust but I’ve never read him”) is convinced there is a trend: “It wasn’t even in the top 5,000 in December, but it’s suddenly appeared.”
There are other straws in the wind: the success of De Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and of Phyllis Rose’s The Year of Reading Proust; a major Proust exhibition in Paris; a controversial comic-book version by Stephane Heuet; a biography by Jean-Yves Tadie, due in July; the final volume of a new edition of his letters out this month; and an unlikely-sounding Proustian guide to gardening. The Proust industry is working overtime; the figures show a modest boost in sales of the novel; all that remains now is to find the time to read it.
The film has presumably helped sales of the book, but it only opened last Friday and may not alone account for the increase. De Botton identified another factor: “It is a new century and people are saying, ‘I’ll finally conquer Proust before I die.’ “ You didn’t manage it in the last millennium, but the slate is wiped clean; you’ve been given another chance; you can have your cake and eat it.
Reading the book, as De Botton pointed out, can be a seminal experience. Harold Pinter spent a year reading it to write a screenplay for Losey’s aborted film (his screenplay was published in 1978 and the National Theatre plans to stage it next year); far from being time lost, he sees it as time exquisitely well spent. Clive James learned French just to read it in the original. San Francisco boasts a Marcel Proust Support Group, which holds an annual wake for the master at which Prousties wax their moustaches, dunk madeleines and take turns lying in a coffin (whether they actually read the book is not clear).
Proust has always had influential champions – the finishers, the re-readers, members of the Marcel Proust Support Group (Hampstead branch), dinner-party Proustians who spend hours dissecting various translations, Harold Bloom (“Proust defeats his critics”) – but they have been outnumbered by the life’s-too-shorters, those for whom there are no longueurs longer than Proust’s. Even Proust’s brother, a doctor, was less than convinced. “The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to read A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu,” he said.
A straw poll of a dozen of my Guardian colleagues unearthed seven who had never set off; one who had started in English and stopped; one who had started in French and in English and stopped both times; two who had happily dipped with no apparent intention of reading the whole thing (three, six, seven, eight, nine or 12 volumes, depending on how you slice it; 3,000-plus pages; 1.3m words; not many sentences but that hardly helps); and one, hero of heroes, who had spent the best part of a year reading it, to the exclusion of pretty well anything else. Now he swears by it (not, like many, at it) and plans to read it in French.
Here, I have to make an admission. I have tried to read Proust several times without ever getting very far; further than Alan Coren, who took five years to read 53 pages and has now given it up in protest at the French ban on British beef, but not very far. In the middle of December I fell victim to millennial angst and began again: I am now further in than ever before and enjoying it. I am still only at the edge of the forest but I want to proceed along these strange, circuitous paths to the interior; I think I can do it.
I am reading it in an old Penguin edition: three volumes, 1,000 pages each. This is not a good idea: heavy, intimidating and the yellowing pages fall out. Go for something smaller, more easily digestible. The six-volume Vintage paperback edition is ugly – this should be a lovingly, leisurely experience after all; the Chatto & Windus edition which was published in 1995 (same text, lavish design) is still theoretically in print, but isn’t much in evidence; the hardback American Modern Library edition (same text again, DJ Enright’s revision of Kilmartin’s revision of Scott Moncrieff) is available, though it’s double the price of the far-from-vintage Vintage; and it is published in French in seven paperback volumes (a more rational arrangement) by Gallimard. Penguin will re-enter the lists in two years with a new translation by a team of academics. Advice to potential buyers: avoid the big and the badly produced; think madeleine, not Black Forest gateau.
Even with my hard-to-swallow old Penguin, this time I know I will persist: I will reach the end, enjoying the journey for its own sake but also thankful, when I reach my destina tion, to have gained a kind of literary absolution. A few years back, Waterstone’s conducted a poll to determine which books people felt most guilty about not having read. A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu was an easy winner. How wonderful, at the dawn of a new century, to be free of that feeling, finally to have finished Proust.
That just leaves The Old Testament, the Koran, the Mahabharata, The Divine Comedy, The Decameron, The Scarlet Letter, Tristram Shandy, Clarissa, The Pilgrim’s Progress, some of Borges, most of Freud, all of Goethe, Moby Dick properly, Billy Budd at all, Homer and Virgil seriously, Cervantes comically, Pessoa, Hugo, Balzac (how many novels?), Horace, Pliny (older and younger), Dumas (père and fils), Descartes, Kant (oh yes you kan), Confucius, Lao Tzu, Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone, Gogol, Goncharov, early Nabokov, late Conrad, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, Machiavelli’s Discourses, Schopenhauer’s aphorisms, Kierkegaard’s ramblings, Augustine, Aquinas, Stendhal, Montaigne (there to be climbed), Racine, Rabelais, Gérard de Nerval’s ephemera, Heine’s phemera, Hegel on aesthetics, Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson (not to mention Lake and Palmer), Dos Passos, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Pascal’s Pensées… I could go on, but I have a book to read.
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