As the immortal Jesse would say: “This week, I ’as been mostly readin’ Proust!”. To be more precise, I’ve just finished reading Swann’s Way, the first of the seven volumes which go to make up Marcel Sprout’s (sorry: old habits die hard) Marcel Proust’s gargantuan novel À la recherche du temps perdu (‘In Search of Lost Time’) and am now halfway through volume two, Within a Budding Grove.
“So what?” you may well ask. “You’ve always read books like there’s no tomorrow. You gulp them down faster than Moby Dick could swallow squid. What’s new?”
‘What’s new’ is that it’s taken me nearly sixty years to get around to reading this one.
In spite of anything that Germaine Greer & Co might say, size does matter. Like, I suspect, most people, I’ve always found the thought of starting a seven-volume, 3,500 page, 1.4 million word novel just a bit daunting—even bearing in mind that one of my most re-read favourites is War & Peace, which, let’s face it, is hardly a ‘pamphlet’ itself. So I kept on putting off till tomorrow what I couldn’t face starting today; and, somehow, tomorrow never came—despite constant badgering from my old friend Mike Mooney (whom God preserve! as Beachcomber used to say), of Bradford, to the effect that if I (a) liked, and (b) had the staying-power to keep reading W&P again and again, then I really wouldn’t have any trouble with ALRDTP. But ‘tomorrow’ has finally arrived, because two important things have changed.
Firstly, I don’t have to work any more (in fact, those nice people at USS pay me not to work: it’s a great system; I can’t think why I didn’t try it years ago) and so I have a lot of ‘spare’ time. And secondly, I discovered that some good souls at the University of Adelaide have ever-so-kindly translated Proust’s magnum opus into Kindle format (since retirement, I’ve been working my Kindle almost to death) and will magnanimously allow me to download the novel, in its entirety, for free. At this point, since the last obdurate leg that I’d been standing on for the best part of sixty years had been unceremoniously yanked from under me, I promptly downloaded all seven volumes and started reading.
This, of course, is the point at which readers of popular fiction (in which category I include most national newspapers) would expect me to have been deluged with Bitter Disappointment (or, at the very least, Disenchantment): “After so long a wait,” they would wail (doubtless with all the plaintively-shrieked conviction of a Cassandra on amphetamines), “it must have been a dreadful anticlimax.” Well, I’m sorry to disappoint them… it wasn’t: I loved it. I read Volume I in just over a fortnight, and then moved straight on to Volume II. I am, as the vernacular has it, hooked on Proust.
But it wasn’t exactly a case of ‘love at first sight’. Indeed, at that first sight, Proust’s style seemed, in a word, tough: I had to learn how to read him. Why? Well, partly because he was writing in the post-Freudian era and was more than aware of the fact. So he doesn’t so much describe his characters’ thoughts and actions (there being far more of the former than the latter, it has to be said) as psychoanalyse them—and he is prepared to dig very deep in order to get at what he considers to be ‘the whole truth’. But thoughts never exist singly, in a sort of mental vacuum: they’re always linked to other thoughts. And these, in turn, may well provoke yet more related thoughts, which also need to be analysed; and so the delving process goes on and on… and down and down. This concept I could cope with. But it did cause me some initial problems when, from time to time, all these inter-related thought-galaxies were combined into one enormous sentence.
I’d read a good deal by William Faulkner in my late teens; and since he, too, was never averse to creating unbelievably long sentences when the Muse so-ordered, I ought to have been able to cope pretty well. But either I’d lost the knack over the years, or Proust’s sentences are somehow intrinsically different. Whatever the reason, I felt as though I was having to learn to read all over again. It took me several days to get my mind acclimatised, after which I went back to Page 1 and began again. Since then, everything has been fine. I no longer have any problems, and the novel has become a real ‘page turner’. I only wish I’d started reading it years ago!
For those of you who have never dipped even a single toe into the apparently bottomless depths of The Gargantuan Proustian Sentence (and therefore think I’m exaggerating), I offer a gentle pastiche of one, together with a link to a page that shows a sample of the genuine article. The ersatz version takes as its starting point a single line from an English folk song: “One man and his dog went to mow a meadow.” This comprises only ten words, no commas, and one full stop—which would be far too minimalist a structure to satisfy M. Proust’s impassioned cry (echoing Browning’s Grammarian) of “Let me know all!”…
On that summer morning, with June already two-thirds spent, the farmer came out of his cottage at seven o’clock, his habitual time during this season of the year (all his life, he had made a point of rising either with or before the sun, and hence had finished his breakfast over an hour before); and, having called to his dog—who, in his usual fashion, shot out of the house and raced down the path to toddle along beside his master, with much devoted tail-wagging and trouser-snuffling—he opened the garden gate onto the road which led down the hill, past Simon’s farm, to the village church, and then paused to survey the sky with the look of one who appears to be asking himself if the clear weather might not break before long; but, seemingly reassured, he returned to his shed and took out his scythe and whetstone: for today, he had decided, was the day on which he was going to mow the much-overgrown lower meadow (it was a pity that his son could not be there, he mused, as he sharpened the blade, to mow the meadow with him: for then the task would have been completed so much the faster; but heifers have to be taken to market, and someone has to take them).
Peter
Well done Peter. Your concentration levels must be at a high right now. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I hope you are well. Missing you lots, Will.
Hi Peter – see? I TOLD you you’d like it!
BTW, the longest sentence in there turns up in Volume 4 (Cities of the Plain), and goes something like this… (a-one, a-two, a-one-two-three-four…)
“Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy–at times from the society–of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.”
Laydeezngemmen, Marcel Proust has left the building…
It reminds me of reading a Physics text book. After line 5 my brain has turned to mush and the words have lost their meaning. I want to shout ‘Your point is?’ at the page. It also reminds me of the interminable prayers from the church of my youth. ‘GET ON WITH IT!’ Maybe I, like you, will be in the right place to read it after I retire.