Where Memory Resides

Swann’s Way a novel by Marcel Proust.  A new translation by Lydia Davis.  Penguin Classics.  468 pp.  $20.00  *****

In the fall of 1969, I was ecstatic to be taking Wallace Fowlie’s course on Proust.  My brother had taken it two years before, in the spring.  On the counsel of my writing mentor, Reynolds Price—he always said, “Take the professor, not the course”—I had taken two Fowlie courses the year before, on 20^th century poetry and 20^th century drama.  I had read some great things—En Attendant Godot for one—but my real interest was in the novel and especially the great modernists; I couldn’t believe my luck that Fowlie was teaching Proust again.  That spring, he would teach a class that he’d taught just once before, on Dante’s Inferno.  That was quite a year for me.

I was never the linguist my brother was, and was not nearly as proficient as a student of French, though in my sophomore year I’d read Madame Bovary and La Chartreuse de Parma in a course on the nineteenth century novel.  In some ways I found Madame Bovary as difficult as Proust, especially because of Flaubert’s mammoth vocabulary.  But I will have to say that, in my senior year, when I was taking some amazing and time-consuming classes, Proust was a challenge.

There was the whole thing of the vocabulary; my Pleiade was studded with vocabulary words I had laboriously looked up in a dictionary.  I would make my way through a sentence, looking up words, then go back and read it again, trying to make sense of it; a page could take ten or fifteen minutes.  Some of the sentences were immense, so the whole effort could be plodding.  Fowlie’s lectures were inspired, of course, and I was surrounded by interesting students.  I enjoyed the class, if I struggled with the reading.

We would finish the novel, Fowlie said, if we read 200 pages per week.  Those were 200 pretty tough pages.

What finally defeated me was my honors program in English.  In the fall we took three month-long seminars on a particular author, and I was trying to get Buford Jones, whom my brother had highly recommended.  I took Henry James, and that did the trick, but the reading he assigned was colossal, three novels, a book of stories, a book of criticism, in one month.  James’ sentences weren’t as long as Proust’s, but they were formidable.  I decided that I would have to start reading Proust in English (confessing that to Fowlie was tough, though he understood).  And I never did finish the novel.  I had to be on my toes with Buford Jones.  I discussed the books with him and two other students, first in his office and then at his home (as we sipped liqueur with a beer chaser.  Those were the days).

I’ve been thinking of returning to Proust for some time, because he seemed to understand something I’d discovered in my Zen practice (of all things): that memories are sometimes lodged in the body.  I had found, as I practiced zazen and systematically relaxed my body, that all kinds of things from the past came up, including trauma (my father’s death when I was sixteen).

I had realized that, in order not to feel certain feelings, we tighten up particular parts of our body, particularly our torso.  I felt a great deal of anger about my father’s death—anger at the universe, at God, something—but had trouble getting into the sadness and fear that were also there, because I was afraid they would tear me apart, or that I would disappear into them and never come out.  That left me rather limited as an emotional being.

As I practiced meditation, I relaxed somatically, and things came up that I could now engage with emotionally.  I could, in effect, go through the experience I should have gone had many years before.  I understood those things from practice (though I’m not sure they are spelled out specifically in the Zen literature), but I also realized that Proust saw this truth in his fiction.  It was the taste of the “petite madeleine” that opened up his entire past.  (Faulkner was getting at the same kind of thing in the Benji section of The Sound and the Fury).  Seeing my experience replicated in literature made me feel it wasn’t some crackpot theory.

I also wanted to return to Proust because, in my mid-seventies, I was assailed by memories from earlier years.  I don’t know what has happened; maybe my life has just slowed down, or maybe such phenomena are a function of old age, especially when you’ve lived in one place for many years and have gone through various life changes there.  But I take a walk around Duke’s East campus and am overwhelmed by things that happened there.  I go to a basketball game in the Indoor Stadium and remember buying my books there in 1966.  It’s as if I’m living in several time periods all at once (it’s like Roger Ebert’s statement right before his death: “I’ve been to a place where the present, past, and future are all happening at once.  Vast doesn’t begin to describe it”).  People say your life passes before you before you die.  Maybe I’m taking a slow-motion tour.

That’s essentially what Proust did, over the years he stayed in his cork-lined room and wrote his novel.  He relived his life, inventing as he went along.

The sentences are magnificent.  I don’t know if they’re particularly good because of Lydia Davis’ translation, but they are something else.  Proust will take the smallest moment and analyze it in overwhelming detail, see more in it than anyone else ever has, but it’s a huge pleasure to read the sentences, as long as you’re not in a hurry.  (That can be a factor at my age.  Do I really want to read his 1.25 million words instead of that number of words in four or five other people?  On the other hand, sometimes when I look back at my Goodreads list—I try to pick good books every time out—I think, what a trail of mediocrity.  They’re good, but do I really remember anything that happened in most of those books?  Maybe I do just want to read Proust.)

We begin with Marcel’s famous problems in getting to sleep because he’s waiting for his mother to come upstairs and kiss him.  What he wanted was what every little kid wants, but he was overly neurotic, sensitive from the time he took his first breath.  He lived in a world largely of adults, where people were cultivated and read good books, saw good art, listened to music and knew it well (Proust’s grandmother gave him books as gifts, but refused to give him the kind of trivial crap that is usually given to children; he was reading Georges Sand as a child).  And I must say, the kid was intellectually precocious.  His age is vague throughout the first volume, but at an age when he was still playing hide and seek with a bunch of little girls, he seemed to have a lot of literature, music, and art under his belt.

We then have the famous episode of Swann’s love itself, told in excruciating detail (and sometimes read as a simple small book, Swann in Love).  We have no idea, of course, how Marcel knows any of this, especially in this much detail, since it all happened before he was born.  It’s also an eye-opening study of French “haute bourgeoisie” (I guess that’s what you’d call them) in the time of Proust’s youth, people who have money and are close to the aristocracy but don’t have the family name and background to qualify.  Their whole lives are social.  They have friends over every night, often for a meal.

Swann’s love affair with Odette is classic, everything from not especially caring for her to slowly being attracted to changing his mind about how he felt, to making a move on her (that seemed to take forever), having sex with her most days, starting to feel jealous about how she is with other men, then worrying over every detail of her daily life and living more or less in agony: nothing is ever enough.  We see this and, of course, see ourselves in it; at the same time, we want to say (as we’ve wanted to say to every lovesick fool we’ve ever known): get a grip, man.  This is ruining your life.  At the end of 200 pages of agony, he seems to realize that himself—it is still long before Marcel is born—but somehow, nevertheless, he marries her.  It stunned me to realize that.  People devote their whole lives to emotional triviality.  That may be because they don’t want to face something larger.

All of this will prefigure future events in the novel; I remember enough to know that.  Marcel’s neurotic agony and Swann’s tortuous love affair will repeat themselves in other ways in the six volumes that remain, as will the elaborate social lives, the incredible snobbery, the jockeying for social position, gossiping, backbiting.  But also—this may be the saving grace—the real understanding of and appreciation for human culture.  This, compared to anything that has come since, is a cultivated group of human beings, at least Marcel and his closest compatriots.

I’ve bought the next volume (translated by a different person.  The idea of this project is brilliant).  I’m reading other things in the meantime.  But we’ll see if I eventually crack Volume II and go on to the others.  It’s an enormously rich reading experience.  It’s also just enormous.