Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

The death in 1930 of Scott Moncrieff prevented him completing Remembrance of Things Past and it was left to Sydney Schiff, under the pseudonym of Stephen Hudson, to translate the final volume, Time Regained. I find his version awkward to read and will therefore quote instead the translation by Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, as revised by DJ Enright. For the sake of completeness, I will continue to use page references of both the 12-part Chatto & Windus edition (Scott Moncrieff and Hudson) and the three-part Kilmartin version. For this final volume I will additionally give the page references of the Enright version.  I intend to divide the volume into three sections: Marcel's return to Paris during World War I; his attendance at the new Princess de Guermantes' party; and his resolution to become a writer. That resolution occurs before he enters the party but I am going to deal with it last as it draws together a number of threads in a conclusive way.  * * * * *  ...

 The remaining three chapters* of Albertine Gone deal with Marcel coming to terms with loss, finally visiting Venice, and revisiting Combray. Chapter II It is said that there are five (or seven) stages of grief, but for Marcel there are only three: anguish; suspicion; and oblivion. Chapter II finds him fluctuating between the latter two. By the beginning of this chapter, his love for Albertine has altered. On his way to forgetting and indifference, Marcel sees his feelings go on a reverse journey. He now finds himself back at the beginning of their affair and experiences again the sentiments through which he had passed before “arriving at my great love”. His memories of those sentiments “retained the terrible force, the happy ignorance of the hope that was then yearning towards a time which has now become the past, but which a hallucination makes us for a moment mistake retrospectively for the future” ( p.195 XI Scott Moncrieff, p.569 III Kilmartin ). He presently feels a charm in ...

 I have already indicated (see my 22 nd post) that for this part of the novel, I would be departing from Scott Moncrieff's volume titles as I find his use of The Sweet Cheat Gone, a line from Walter de la Mare's poem Ghost, to be forced, awkward and unsuitable. The title in French is Albertine disparue, but it was originally going to be La Fugitive, and publishers sometimes still use this latter title. That has prompted a number of English translators to call the volume The Fugitive, which has the merit of following on logically from The Captive. However, I think Albertine Gone is to be preferred because, although she was subject to Marcel's controlling behaviour, Albertine was not a prisoner as she was free to leave (see my 25 th and 27 th posts), which she did at the end of the previous volume. Accordingly, as she has not escaped, she is not a fugitive either. Albertine Gone is a more literal translation of Albertine disparue and importantly, like the French, contains ...

 The third and final chapter of The Captive marks a dramatic change in Marcel and Albertine's relationship. After returning from the Verdurins' soir é e (see my 26 th post), which he had dissuaded Albertine from attending and to which he had then secretly gone himself, Marcel finds her waiting up for him in her room. She is annoyed by his revelation that he has been to the Verdurins'. She asks whether Mlle Vinteuil had attended, which for him confirms his suspicion that she had intended to meet the composer's daughter there (see my 25 th and 26 th posts) ( pp.175-176 X Scott Moncrieff, p.338 III Kilmartin ). Albertine confesses to Marcel that when she had told him that she had been a friend of Mlle Vinteuil's friend (see my 24 th post), she had been lying to make herself more interesting to him by pretending she was connected with the great composer. Marcel feels sorry that Albertine thinks the Verdurin circle look down on her and he offers to pay several hund...

 The Verdurins, who figured largely in Swann in Love and then reappeared at la Raspeli è re near Balbec in Cities of the Plain (see my 23 rd post), are once more central to the narrative in this chapter. Marcel is visiting their Parisian salon in the Quai Conti and is longing to see the room where Swann used to meet Odette. His wish is disappointed when, on the way there, he learns from Brichot that the couple had frequented the salon when it was at the Verdurins' former home in the rue Montalivet, before it was partially destroyed by fire. Marcel now reveals that Swann's death, which had been briefly mentioned in passing in Cities of the Plain, had been a “crushing blow” to him and he quotes a newspaper obituary before reflecting that, as a result of his “remarkable personality in both the intellectual and the artistic worlds”, his name could survive for a while after his death. Le Cercle de la rue Royale by James Tissot. Charles Haas is furthest right. There follows a stran...

 When Descartes sought to discover what he could know for certain, he discarded everything he could doubt, and by this method found that the only thing he knew for sure was that in doubting, he was thinking . Hence, the famous “cogito, ergo sum”. However, Descartes' certainty is solipsistic and this creates other philosophical problems, in particular what philosophers call the “problem of other minds”. Any Proust reader who has studied philosophy will have noticed passages over which the ghost of Descartes (and sometimes Plato) seems to hover. For instance, in the first chapter of The Captive, taking the Cartesian method one step further, Marcel tells us that the real life of another person is unknowable to us ( p.74 IX Scott Moncrieff, p.56 III Kilmartin ). This could be taken as the theme of this section of the novel: the impossibility of Marcel knowing what is going on in Albertine's mind. All he has to go one are suspicions, confessions and the reports of others: each of w...

   The third chapter of the second part of Cities of the Plain in some ways echoes the second part of Swann's Way and could, for the sake of symmetry, have been called Charlus in Love. As in Swann's affair with Odette (and also Saint-Loup's with Rachel), the relationship is unbalanced: the pursuer's passion is far greater than that of the pursued. Morel, like Odette and Rachel, is inconstant and repeatedly fobs off Charlus, sometimes resorting to fabrication. And Charlus, like Swann, bluffingly responds with pretence as each player struggles for dominance in a game of make-believe. A violinist by Vlaho Bukovac Matters come to a head when Morel tells Charlus that he has an engagement and leaves Charlus alone and disappointed, “the tears trickling down and melting* the paint beneath his eyes”. Charlus, “waddling obesely”, goes to a caf é, where he drinks beer to fortify himself and writes a letter to Morel saying that he is going to fight a duel the next day against some...

  The second chapter of Cities of the Plain sees the development of Marcel's relationship with Albertine, the commencement of the amorous entanglement of Charlus and the fianc é of Jupien's niece, and the reappearance of the Verdurins. We have already observed Marcel's duplicitous approach to relationships when he feigned indifference to Albertine and a preference for Andr é e (see my 17 th  post). Despite his now having grown closer to Albertine, he is still acting in the same manner, and has added suspicion and jealousy to this unhealthy romance. It is hard for the reader to judge the validity of Marcel's suspicions that Albertine is lying and cheating on him because we are only presented with his thought processes, not hers; he is not honest with her and is maybe not being honest in his narration; his distrust is largely the result of inferences rather than direct evidence; and the suspicions are so recurrent as to suggest he is suffering from a paranoid personali...

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 Swan...