In Search of Proust Time - David Loftus

I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna finish Proust this year.

Last night I started “The Captive,” volume 5 of the 7 volumes of what has long been known in English as Remembrance of Things Past. For those of you who did not major in either English lit or French, the more literal translation of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, is In Search of Lost Time, but the first English translator, a Scot named Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, cribbed a phrase from the second line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 30 for the title of his version in the 1920s. There was no other English edition (or corrected title) for nearly 60 years.

The work is 3,200 pages long (4,300 in the Modern Library version I’m reading) and contains more than 2,000 characters. Proust labored over it for most of the final 13 years of his life. Graham Greene called Proust “the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth,” and Maugham called this book “the greatest fiction to date.” Given that his health had not been good since childhood (he was a severe asthmatic) Proust may have been lucky to get even three of the seven volumes published before he died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922, at the age of 51 (my age, in fact!).

Many of my friends have expressed admiration that I have tackled the thing -- more than one has called me brave -- but it’s been a long time coming. (And I know people who have read it multiple times, some even in the original French, which is far beyond me . . . * sigh *.) I think I first attempted to read Proust the summer after high school graduation, and didn’t get much beyond the first volume. Several years later, I got through two or three books. I didn’t finish because I had to return them to the library in Coos Bay, Oregon because the summer was over and I had to get back to college. As recently as three or four years ago, I had another bash, with the comfort of having purchased paperback copies of the first three volumes and therefore fearing no time pressures. I raced through “Swann’s Way” (the first volume) for the third or fourth time, and then wandered off again.

2010 would be it, I told myself toward the end of last year. I got a running start by opening “Swann’s Way” a couple days before Dec. 31, and managed to whip through the first three books in January and early February. But things got especially slow in the middle of volume 4 (despite the racy title on that one, “Sodom and Gomorrah”), and it didn’t help that I was memorizing lines and rehearsing for a production of “King Lear.” I wandered off (literarily speaking -- I was still reading dozens of other books) yet again.

But with the calendar ticking away, I figured I’d better get moving again or fail yet again. So a week ago I picked up volume 4 (the bookmark was still tucked where I’d stopped) and was off to the races. Tomorrow, I’ll describe a little of my experience of Proust, so far.

Go to part 2, My Year of Proust