In Search of Lost Time Read online

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  Finding Time Again

  Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. In his twenties he became a conspicuous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. After 1899, however, his chronic asthma, the death of his parents and his growing disillusionment with humanity caused him to lead an increasingly retired life. From 1907 he rarely emerged from a cork-lined room on the Boulevard Haussmann. Here he insulated himself against the distractions of city life, as well as the effect of the trees and flowers – though he loved them they brought on his attacks of asthma. He slept by day and worked by night, writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of In Search of Lost Time. He died in 1922.

  Christopher Prendergast is Professor of French at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College.

  Ian Patterson is a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he teaches English. His translation of Charles Fourier’s Theory of the Four Movements was published by Cambridge University Press in 1996. His most recent book of poetry is Much More Pronounced (Equipage, 1999). He is currently writing a book about modernist poetry from 1912 to 2000.

  MARCEL PROUST

  Finding Time Again

  Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Ian Patterson

  General Editor: Christopher Prendergast

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  Le Temps retrouvé first published 1927

  This translation first published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2002

  Published in Penguin Classics 2003

  5

  Translation and editorial matter copyright © Ian Patterson, 2002

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the translator and editor have been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195679-4

  Contents

  Translator’s Introduction

  Finding Time Again

  Notes

  Synopsis

  Translator’s Introduction

  The last volume of In Search of Lost Time begins, as the previous one ends, with the narrator staying with Gilberte de Saint-Loup at Tansonville. It is there that he is given a recently published volume of the Goncourts’ journal to read in bed, a wonderfully accurate pastiche of the Goncourt style which leads on to a series of revisionary retrospects of his own life. Proust had written an earlier pastiche of the Goncourts’ journal, in Pastiches et mélanges (1908), and various sorts of pastiche in fact crop up at different times in Finding Time Again, contributing implicitly to its continuing interest in questions of authenticity, reality and representation. This can be seen, for example, in more topical form in the pieces of fashion journalism, or in Charlus’s comments on Brichot’s newspaper articles. The journal extract that Proust reads provides a different perspective on his own past experience, since it deals with the Verdurins’ salon and describes several figures – Swann, Elstir, Cottard – well known to him. His response to its ornate, mannered and precious style is significant: by focusing his attention on his own capacities, it allows him to work out his interest in general psychological features rather than in the specificities of visual and aural observation. This enables him to launch what is to be the central theme of the book, the question of how to write his book. Whether it should it be a novel or a philosophical essay was a question which had occupied him when he first considered the subject matter of In Search of Lost Time, and woven tightly into the complex folds of the narrative structure of Finding Time Again are many essayistic sequences in which the significance of the enterprise is gradually drawn out.

  The pastoral prelude at Tansonville is interrupted by the war, the account of which, as experienced in Paris, is structured by the narrator’s two brief returns to Paris from the sanatoriums where he is undergoing unsuccessful cures. The first visit coincides with the outbreak of war, in 1914, and provides him with an opportunity to discuss the tradition of strong, silent masculinity in relation to homosexuality, and to contrast Saint-Loup’s courage with Bloch’s false patriotism.

  The second, in 1916, continues this theme at much greater length, with Baron de Charlus at its centre. The narrator has returned to the capital for a while and, in a conversation with Robert de Saint-Loup about the progress of the war, evokes the abstract aesthetic pleasure of aerial warfare above the darkened streets, described as a Wagnerian extravaganza of Zeppelins, biplanes and searchlights. Then, picking his own way through the pitch-black maze of small streets, he comes to the boulevard and runs into Charlus. We learn of the Baron’s exclusion from society, his vilification by Mme Verdurin, and his relative unconcern for the external affairs which had plunged the world into war. Proust’s clear-sighted depiction of a Paris in which war throws moral behaviour into a sharper focus is the backdrop for the narrator’s most surprising discovery, when he takes shelter unwittingly in a sado-masochistic homosexual brothel owned by the Baron, and is witness to the Baron’s own pleasures and to the comings and goings of a varied and well-connected clientele. For all this, the episode takes its place in Proust’s extended meditation on love, as the narrator reflects that Charlus’s ‘desire to be chained and beaten betrayed, in its ugliness, a dream just as poetic as other men’s desire to go to Venice or to keep a mistress’.

  The war represents a watershed, and the narrator’s final return is marked by a quality of retrospection that culminates in the recapitulatory sequence of involuntary memories that makes up the substance of the episode in the library of the Prince de Guermantes. In these epiphanic moments, from his stumbling on the paving-stones in the courtyard, through the sound of the spoon to the starch in the napkin and the copy of François le Champi, he experiences a joy which prompts renewed investigation (or ‘recherche’) into the meaning of these ‘impressions’ and the purposes to which they can be put in his attempt to write his book. But instead of offering memories for his disposal in the traditional way, their effect is so powerful as to make him start to doubt the coherence of his own sense of self, and it is this that now dominates his quest to turn the experience of lost time into a way of writing his book. The ‘inner book of unknown signs’, as he calls it, ‘the most painful of all to decipher, is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the only one whose “impression” has been made in us by reality itself’. ‘The writer’s task and duty are those of a translator,’ he writes, in what is a prolonged autobiographical essay on the role of writing and memory in making sense of a life; the material is all there, and only the framework, the work of selection and the sense of purpose need to be found. When he is finally u
shered into the afternoon party, it is his first extended impression that all the guests are wearing make-up to make themselves look old. Only as it dawns on him that they really are old, and that he is too, does he gradually come to recognize the foundational importance of the element of time in his life and all the lives around him and, despite his age and poor health, is overwhelmed with the need to devote himself at last to the task of writing the book whose shape and purpose he can now finally discern. His only worry, as the last volume of this work comes to its close, is that he should have sufficient time to complete it, an anxiety which itself points up the significance of the place we all occupy in Time.

  The title Le Temps retrouvé appears for the first time in a letter Proust wrote in the autumn of 1912, and at that time designated what was to be the concluding (second or third) part of the novel; the first was to be called Le Temps perdu (Lost Time). Between then and its first publication in 1927, five years after Proust’s death, the projected novel underwent a series of changes, additions, alterations and rewriting, changing and developing almost out of recognition. Some things, however, did not change. The heart of this last volume, the chapters known as ‘Perpetual adoration’ and the ‘Bal des têtes’, were already quite extensively drafted by 1910. When Proust died in 1922, the manuscript of Le Temps retrouvé was complete, and at least to some extent revised, but it had not yet been typed. It contained contradictions, mistakes, repetitions and omissions (some of which are indicated in the notes to this translation), as well as the immense difficulties created by Proust’s corrections and alterations, both in the text and its margins and on the additional pieces of paper glued to the edges of pages, or interleaved between them. It fell to his editors – his brother Robert, and Jean Paulhan (who had succeeded Jacques Rivière as editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1925) – to produce a coherent text for publication, which they achieved with a certain amount of cutting and pasting, omitting illegible passages, and adjusting many of the points where repetition or inconsistency occurred. Consequently, the text published in 1927, and translated into English in 1931, was not entirely an accurate presentation of what Proust had written. When Clarac and Ferré published their revised text in 1954, they made a number of changes and corrections, most noticeably in the starting-point for the book, which they moved back some seven pages to the beginning of the narrator’s stay at Tansonville. (The 1988 Pléiade edition under the general editorship of Yves Tadié restores the original beginning, on both internal editorial and aesthetic grounds.) A massive and lengthy process of re-evaluation of all Proust’s manuscript corrections, insertions, additions and probable intentions resulted in the 1988 edition of the text with its variants, along with a great number of preliminary draft sketches, and although this text itself is not uncontroversial, it has provided the basis for all editorial decisions in this translation.

  The translation history of Finding Time Again differs considerably from that of the earlier volumes. C. K. Scott Moncrieff died before he was able to begin translating it, in 1930, and the task was taken on by Sydney Schiff, a wealthy patron of the arts, a novelist under the name of Stephen Hudson, and a friend of Proust. (His grief at Proust’s death was so demonstrative, and his devotion to Proust’s memory so well-known in Paris, that he was nicknamed ‘la veuve Proust’, Proust’s widow.) For copyright reasons, his translation, though, was not published in America, where a separate translation was made by Frederick A. Blossom, a professor of French. In 1970, Chatto published a new translation, based on the 1954 Pléiade edition, by Andreas Mayor, and it is this translation which was reprinted unrevised in the Terence Kilmartin edition, and again, lightly revised by D. J. Enright, in 1992. Mayor had planned to make a complete revision of Scott Moncrieff’s translation, but died before he was able to do so: his preparatory notes provided the basis for Kilmartin’s revision. Although the revisions were ostensibly done in order to take account of the 1988 Pléiade edition, there are numerous points at which no alterations were made, or where errors were allowed to stand uncorrected. The most noticeable difference is in the division between The Fugitive and the last volume, where both Mayor and his followers retained the 1954 division, beginning Finding Time Again with the narrator’s visit to Tansonville, rather than dividing that episode in two, as the first edition did and as the 1988 edition, on persuasive evidence, also does. I have followed the 1988 edition in reinstating the original opening. Mayor also did quite a lot of unacknowledged editing of his own, transposing the order of sentences or omitting words or phrases, occasionally sentences. Enright did not correct all these. Another characteristic feature of Mayor’s translation is that he persistently extends or enlarges what Proust actually wrote in order to interpret or clarify his sentences. Sometimes this entails inserting some explanatory reference, sometimes spelling out a metaphor, sometimes expanding a pronoun into a recapitulatory phrase, sometimes merely varying nouns or verbs where Proust uses the same one a number of times. There is hardly a sentence without at least a trace of the rewriting of Proust’s text. Allusions are spelled out, lexical neutrality (Proust’s frequent use of ‘avoir’ for example) abandoned in favour of greater specificity. While this can occasionally be helpful, the cumulative effect is to add a layer of rather pedantic information, often too ornately phrased, which obscures the idiosyncratic precision of Proust’s own style. In this translation I have tried to aim for equivalence rather than explanation.

  Equivalence is a mark of recognition of the endless possibilities of interpretation, a quality that is inherent in both the thought-processes and the writing of the novel. The narrator’s encounter with the Baron de Charlus on his way to the Guermantes’ stands at the gateway to the novel’s climax. It marks his first profound encounter with the process of ageing, which, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, is the external counterpart to the interior process of remembrance. ‘To observe the interaction of ageing and remembering means to penetrate to the heart of Proust’s world, to the universe of convolution. It is the world in a state of resemblances, the domain of the correspondences; the Romanticists were the first to comprehend them and Baudelaire embraced them most fervently, but Proust was the only one who managed to reveal them in our lived life.’ He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. If it is the writer’s task to translate his ‘book of inner signs’, it is the translator’s task to render it correctly: Mayor, Kilmartin and Enright departed from earlier versions by turning those signs, quite wrongly, into ‘symbols’, but they have to be signs.

  Questions of vocabulary are not, in the end, all that difficult to resolve. And much of Proust’s curious syntax, with its sinuous sideways movements into a series of digressions, each one displaced by the next, reminiscent of his beloved Arabian Nights in miniature, can be more or less adequately imitated. What remains a constant frustration, for this translator at least, is the near-impossibility of conveying the more detailed pleasures of Proust’s writing, its poetic features, alliterations, anagrams and paragrams, and everything that Malcolm Bowie has described as ‘the rhythm of concentration and dispersal in which Proust’s details are caught’. It would take another lifetime of translation to find a way of doing that.

  Translator’s acknowledgements

  My first debt is to Jean-Yves Tadié and the editors of the Pléiade edition, for their meticulous scholarship: I have drawn on their work for some of the notes, and have made constant use of it in the process of translation. I would also like to thank Christopher Prendergast, and the other translators, and those who answered specific queries, especially Christine Adams, Martin Crowley and the late Tony Tanner. I would also like to thank Jenny Diski for her patience and her advice as I forced her to listen to drafts of paragraphs, pages and chapters when she had many better things to do.

  All day long, in that slightly too bucolic residence, which looked like no more than a place for resting between walks or sheltering from a downpour, one of those houses whe
re every sitting-room looks like a conservatory and where, in the bedroom wall-paper, either the garden roses or the birds in the trees are brought vividly before you and keep you company, in a rather isolated way – it being of the old-fashioned sort in which each rose was so clearly delineated that if it were alive one could have picked it, each bird so perfect that it might have been caged and tamed, without any of the exaggerated modern décor in which, against a background of silver, all the apple trees of Normandy are arrayed in profile, Japanese-style, to turn the hours you spend in bed into a hallucinatory experience; all day long I stayed in my room, which looked out over the fine greenery of the park and the lilacs by the gateway, over the green leaves of the great trees shimmering in the sunlight beside the water, and over the forest of Méséglise. But really the only reason I was enjoying the sight of it was because I was thinking: ‘It is nice to see so much green from my bedroom window,’ until the moment when, within the vast verdant scene, I suddenly recognized, coloured a contrasting deep blue simply by virtue of being further away, the steeple of the church at Combray. Not a representation of the steeple but the steeple itself, which, setting thus before my eyes the full extent of miles and of years, had appeared in the middle of that brilliant green, a completely different colour, so dark that it looked almost as if it were only a sketch, and inscribed itself within the rectangle of my window. And if I went out of my room for a moment, at the end of the passage I saw, since it faced in another direction, like a band of scarlet, the wall-hangings of a small sitting-room which were only a simple chiffon, but red, and liable to blaze into colour if a beam of sunlight should fall on them.

  In the course of our walks Gilberte spoke to me of Robert as turning away from her, but in order to be with other women. And it is true that his life was somewhat cluttered with them and, as with some kinds of male friendships for men who love women, they had that sense of unavailing defensiveness and of space taken up to no purpose which in most houses characterizes useless objects. He came to Tansonville several times while I was there. He was very different from the man I had known. His life had not thickened him or slowed him down, like M. de Charlus, but, quite the reverse, by working the opposite change in him had given him the confident ease of a cavalry officer, to a far greater degree – despite his having resigned his commission upon his marriage – than he had ever attained before. And just as M. de Charlus had grown heavier, Robert (and he was of course infinitely younger but one felt that he could only approach even closer to this ideal state as he got older, like those women who determinedly sacrifice their face to their figure and after a certain point never leave Marienbad,1 deciding that, as they are not capable of retaining a plurality of youthful features, their shape is the one best able to represent the rest) had become slenderer and swifter, a contrary effect of the same vice. The swiftness of his movements, moreover, had a number of psychological causes: a fear of being seen, the desire not to appear to have that fear and a febrility created by dissatisfaction with himself and by boredom. He was given to visiting various unsavoury places, into which, as he did not like to be observed entering or leaving them, he would suddenly dive in order to provide the ill-disposed glances of potential passers-by with the least possible visible surface, as if launching a military attack. And this habit of conducting himself like a gust of wind had stuck. It may also perhaps have represented the superficial intrepidity of someone who wants to show that he is not afraid and does not want to give himself any time to think. A full description would also have to take account of his desire, the older he grew, to appear young, as well as of the impatience characteristic of men who are always bored and blasé, being too intelligent for the relatively idle life they lead, in which their faculties are never fully stretched. In many cases this idleness may appear as listlessness. But, especially since physical exercise has come to enjoy such a vogue, idleness these days has taken on an athletic form, even outside the confines of sport, and has come to be expressed in a feverish vivacity that seeks to deny boredom the time or space to develop, rather than in listlessness or indifference.