Swann's Way: Combray Chapter 2 (5th post)

 In the second chapter of Combray (or the only chapter called Combray in the Scott Moncrieff (SM) and Kilmartin (TK) editions, their having called the first chapter Overture instead), we are introduced to a number of  characters, mainly local and of varying degrees of importance such as Aunt Léonie, M. Legrandin, Uncle Adolphe, the Lady in Pink, Bloch, M. Vinteuil, Gilberte, and Mme de Guermantes, and also to places and things which figure largely in Marcel's mind such as the church of Saint Hilaire, Swann's Way (also referred to as the Méséglise Way), the Guermantes Way and hawthorn blossom.

Proust animates each brilliantly by a variety of techniques. Even buildings such as the church spring to life: "the worn old stones of [its spire] the setting sun now illumined no more than the topmost pinnacles, which, at the point where they entered that zone of sunlight and were softened and sweetened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly far higher, to have become truly remote, like a song whose singer breaks into a falsetto, an octave above." (p.84 SM, p.69 TK). A couple of pages later, we are treated to this: "while the cries of the birds wheeling to and fro about [the steeple] seemed to intensify its silence, to elongate its spire still further, and to invest it with some quality beyond the power of words." A spire and a steeple vivified by the sun and birds (which were identified a few pages earlier as jackdaws - p.83 SM, p.68 TK).

When M. Vinteuil is introduced, Proust deploys a technique that he uses more than once whereby he intertwines two separate subjects before finishing by, as it were, tying them together with a neat bow. A series of evening services are being held during May in the church, which is decorated with blooming hawthorn (this is the first strand of the braid). It was at this time that Marcel had "first fallen in love with hawthorn-blossom" (p.151 SM, p.121 TK). M. Vinteuil attends the services with his daughter (they are the second strand). He is a former music teacher and deplores contemporary mores. When he denounces this or that modern vice, he also reveals a certain irascibility by tending to end his strictures with sarcastic phrases that the condemned practice "seems to be encouraged in these days" or "seems to be the fashion these days". We are told of his "intense prudishness" but we are shown by his own phrases that he carries an air of bitterness and disillusionment.
"His one and only passion was for his daughter", who is described as freckled. Passages about the Vinteuils mingle with those about hawthorn blossom until, as Marcel leaves the church, the fragrance of the blossom draws his attention to the flowers where he notices little spots of a creamier colour wherein he imagines the fragrance lies, in the same way as the sweetness of Mlle. Vinteuil's cheeks lies in her freckles (p.153 SM, p.123 TK) (and this is the bow). We are left with a picture of M. Vinteuil as finickety and embittered, the sort we would cross the road to avoid having to listen to his censure of untidy youths or unsuitable wives. The present flat view we have of him, and his daughter, will later change more than once, allowing Proust to round out his character.

A slightly less immediately flat character is that of M. Legrandin. Two-dimensionality is avoided by making him a grandiloquent talker, given to tirades at the aristocracy, fashionable life and snobbishness, while also being a snob himself (p.89 SM, p.73 TK) and making those two traits war against each other: Legrandin "the talker was now subordinated to another Legrandin, whom he kept carefully hidden in his breast, whom he would never consciously exhibit, because this other could tell stories about our own Legrandin and about his snobbishness which would have ruined his reputation for ever" (p.175 SM, p.140 TK). We are informed that he was sincere when he inveighed against snobs because he could not be aware from his own knowledge that he was one too, "since 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. Upon ourselves they react but indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our actual, primary motives other, secondary motives, less stark and therefore more decent." A remarkable general insight. 

In a highly comic episode, the absurdly floral and prolix nature of Legrandin's conversation serves him well in avoiding answering a question which Marcel's father has asked him. He has forgotten that he had previously told Marcel's family that his sister lived near the seaside resort of Balbec and so when Marcel's father later tells Legrandin that Marcel, his mother and his grandmother are going to stay there and asks if he knows anyone on whom they might call in an emergency, Legrandin at first pretends to be concentrating on something else so intensely that he did not hear the question. Marcel's father cruelly persists, asking whether Legrandin perhaps has friends there. The latter extemporises with the deliberate vagueness of a modern politician: "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." (p.179 SM, p.143 TK). Marcel's father doggedly repeats the question and Legrandin, who is not yet willing to surrender, replies: "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. Perhaps it is a castle which you encounter upon the cliff's edge, standing there by the roadside, where it has halted to contemplate its sorrows beneath an evening sky ... etc etc" going on in this vein for so long that he can eventually and seamlessly bid Marcel's father goodnight and hastily depart. Whenever Marcel's father sees M. Legrandin in the future, he tortures him with the same question, to no avail, and Marcel comments that Legrandin, "had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy, sooner than admit to us that, within a mile of Balbec, his own sister was living in her own house", even though he must have known that they would never have dreamed of making use of any letter of introduction that he might have given them (p.181 SM, p.144 TK).

In the next part of this blog we will travel with Marcel along Swann's way and the Guermantes way, but first I would like to end this post with a description which follows fast upon the comedy of M. Legrandin's evasions.

The family have returned from their walk on a summer evening and are paying the invalid Aunt Léonie a visit in her bedroom before dinner. The rays of the sun are described as "sinking until they touched and lay along her window-sill" (p.181 SM, p.145 TK). That's it - just a short phrase, but containing the  beautiful "lay along", although I cannot explain its beauty (because sometimes beauty is ineffable). Incidentally, DJ Enright's no-nonsense translation omits the "touched" as redundant even though it is essential to the balance, and hence beauty, of the phrase - and this despite it being included in the French original: "[la] lumière qui s’abaissait et touchait la fenêtre". Nevertheless, it has to be noted that the English versions are not at all literal translations, which would have been: "the light [of the sun] which was going down and touching the window". The great translator Scott Moncrieff has created something poetical from the more prosaic original.