Cities of the Plain: Part I and Part II Chapter I (22nd post)

First edition in Great Britain
 of Sodom et Gomorrhe
translated as Cities of the Plain 

 We have already discussed Scott Moncrieff's loose translation of the title of the novel (see my third introductory comment). Here is perhaps the place to make a couple of comments on his translation of the titles of the separate parts of the novel. Proust, having been alerted by Stephen Hudson (who later completed, badly, the English translation following Scott Moncrieff's death), was worried that his translator had rendered Du côté de chez Swann as Swann's Way on the basis that it might be misunderstood to mean Swann's manner or style. This is a baseless worry that credits the English reader with too little sense, a concern that is carried to the extreme by Lydia Davis' recent rendering of the title as The Way by Swann's, which is laughably fussy and awkward, the hanging possessive being surely too puzzling to the sort of reader who cannot be trusted to understand Swann's Way as a title. Within a Budding Grove for A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is a cryptic translation where “budding” is supposed to suggest young girls in flower. The English title comes from a poem by William Allingham. I have generally tried to stay faithful to Scott Moncrieff's titles but I feel The Sweet Cheat Gone (a quotation from Walter de la Mare) for Albertine Disparue is a translation “ni belle ni fidele” and I will be using the more prosaic Albertine Gone in its place. However, Cities of the Plain was, for Scott Moncrieff, a choice less influenced by ideas of beauty or faithfulness than of necessity: a novel entitled Sodom and Gomorrah would not have been publishable in Britain at the time (the first UK edition was 1929, the first US edition was 1927). Incidentally, Proust uses Sodom and Gomorrah metaphorically for, respectively, homosexuality and lesbianism, although Bible scholars might dispute the identification of Sodom with sodomy, and there is no textual support whatsoever for believing that the punished sins of the inhabitants of Gomorrah were of a sapphic nature.

Cities of the Plain is divided unequally into two parts: Part I consists of 45 pages, while Part II is nearly 700 pages long and is subdivided into four chapters.

Part I is mainly an account of a surprising encounter which the narrator witnessed during the period covered by The Guermantes Way but decided, because of its nature, would be better postponed until Cities of the Plain. It will be recalled that Marcel feared that an invitation to the Princesse de Guermantes' party was a hoax and went to check with the Duchess of Guermantes (see my 21st post). Finding her out, he positions himself on a staircase overlooking the courtyard of their hôtel particulier to watch for her return. From there he observes a small orchid tree in flower awaiting fertilisation by an insect. Instead, Marcel is to witness a rather different coupling. He sees first the former waistcoat maker Jupien (see my 18th post) and then the Baron de Charlus, looking like “a great bumble-bee”, crossing the courtyard. As the two strangers spot each other for the first time, they start to perform a silent courtship ritual. Eventually, Charlus speaks to Jupien and they quickly retire to the latter's shop where we are led to believe they have sex: “From what I heard at first in Jupien’s shop, which was only a series of inarticulate sounds, I imagine that few words had been exchanged. It is true that these sounds were so violent that, if one set had not always been taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought that one person was strangling another within a few feet of me, and that subsequently the murderer and his resuscitated victim were taking a bath to wash away the traces of the crime” (p.12 VII Scott Moncrieff, p.631 II Kilmartin). Meanwhile, Marcel spots a real bumble-bee. He compares Jupien and Charlus to the flower and insect: “The most extraordinary devices that nature has invented to compel insects to ensure the fertilisation of flowers […] seemed to me no more marvellous than the existence of the subvariety of inverts destined to guarantee the pleasures of love to the invert who is growing old” (pp.39-40 VII SM, pp.651-652 II TK). Unfortunately, Marcel, having become so engrossed “in the Jupien-Charlus conjunction”, misses the opportunity of “witnessing the fertilisation of the blossom by the bee” (p.45 VII SM, p.656 II TK). The scene puts Marcel in mind of a similar act that he had witnessed as a boy on the Méséglise way when, passing Vinteuil's house at Mountjouvain, he saw through the window Mlle Vinteuil embracing her girlfriend. In both scenes, Marcel has hidden himself and is a voyeur rather than an accidental observer. For the closeted Proust, it is perhaps important that his hero views homosexual acts in this way, ie at a distance. Before long, as we shall see, Marcel will find himself once again the voyeur in a similar episode.

Part II Chapter I is largely devoted to the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes' soirée. Unlike at the previous party thrown by the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, something actually happens at this event. After his arrival, Marcel catches sight of Swann but before he has chance to speak to him, the Prince de Guermantes whisks him off. It is generally assumed that the prince has shown him the door (p.78 VII SM, p.680 II TK). On learning there has been an altercation between Swann and the prince, some of the guests speculate as to the cause. M de Beauté claims it was to do with a play depicting the prince that had been performed at Swann's house, whereas Colonel de Froberville says it was because Swann was a Dreyfusard. The Duc de Guermantes takes up this latter idea and says Swann's conduct towards him and his wife has been “beyond words”. Swann's support of Dreyfus shows his ingratitude to them for having adopted him into their society. And the duke adds how hurt they had been by Swann's marriage (pp.105-109 VII SM, pp. 700-703 II TK). However, all this conjecture is rendered otiose when Swann enters the room, evidently not having been ejected. His face reveals the signs of approaching death and we are shown how he has altered in another way: “I could not bring myself to understand how I had been able to invest him long ago in a mystery so great that his appearance in the Champs-Elysées used to make my heart beat so violently that I was too bashful to approach his silk-lined cape, that at the door of the flat in which such a being dwelt I could not ring the bell without being overcome by boundless emotion and dismay; all this had vanished” (pp.124-126 VII SM, pp. 715-716 II TK). Marcel wants to talk to him but is diverted by Saint-Loup who, during their conversation, points out to him Charlus talking to Mme de Surgis in what his nephew, ignorant of his uncle's sexuality, assumes to be an attempt to seduce her, when really he is angling for an introduction to her sons. Meanwhile, Saint-Loup declares that, now he has split from his mistress, the actress Rachel, he has finished with love, literature and Dreyfusism (pp.127-137 VII SM, pp. 716-724 II TK). The intertwining of the separate stories of Saint-Loup, Charlus and Swann comes to an end when Marcel finally gets to talk to the latter, who reveals that all the suppositions about him having been asked to leave the party were untrue: the real reason was that the prince had become aware that Dreyfus was innocent and wanted to inform Swann in private. The princess had come to the same conclusion but she and her husband had kept their opinions secret from each other, which underlines how riven French society had become as a result of the Dreyfus affair (pp.142-155 VII SM, pp. 728-738 II TK). Marcel leaves the party with the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. When they get home, they are informed of the death of the duke's cousin. Desperate to see his mistress at the masked ball to which they are going after the princess's party, the duke continues the selfishness we saw earlier that evening (see my 21st post) by dismissing his cousin's death as an exaggeration (pp.161-174 VII SM, pp. 742-751 II TK).

The rest of the chapter consists of a section titled The Heart's Intermissions (Proust had originally intended to call the whole novel Les intermittences du coeur). It concerns Marcel's second visit to Balbec and contains one of the most moving passages in the entire work. But before that (in an emotional contrast similar to Shakespeare's use of comic relief), Marcel is greeted by the malapropist manager of the Grand Hotel where he has taken the same rooms as on his first visit. The manager's verbal near-misses are as impossible to translate faithfully as the Duchesse de Guermantes' word play (see my 20th post) and Scott Moncrieff has to more or less invent his own solecisms. However, the mood suddenly darkens when Marcel is left alone in his rooms. He bends down to take off his boots. “But no sooner had I touched the topmost button than my bosom swelled, filled with an unknown, a divine presence, I shook with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes”. Prompted by the recollection of his grandmother in these very same rooms, he suffers a delayed reaction to her death one year earlier. He recaptures the living reality of his grandmother before her stroke. He now becomes conscious that she is dead, and he feels close again to the self he had been when he had shared those rooms with her. He realises that “she would never again be by my side, I had only just discovered this because I had only just, on feeling her for the first time, alive, authentic, making my heart swell to breaking-point, on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her for ever. Lost for ever; I could not understand and was struggling to bear the anguish of this contradiction: on the one hand an existence, an affection, surviving in me as I had known them, that is to say created for me, a love in whose eyes everything found in me so entirely its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might have existed from the beginning of the world would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects; and on the other hand, as soon as I had lived over again that bliss, as though it were present, feeling it shot through by the certainty, throbbing like a physical anguish, of an annihilation that had effaced my image of that affection, had destroyed that existence, abolished in retrospect our interwoven destiny, made of my grandmother at the moment when I found her again as in a mirror, a mere stranger whom chance had allowed to spend a few years in my company, as it might have been in anyone's else, but to whom, before and after those years, I was, I could be nothing" (pp.211-221 VII SM, pp. 778-785 II TK).