Having referred to Hitchens on Hutton in my previous post, I happened on this article by the man, published in The Atlantic online, occasioned by the release of a new translation of Swann's Way by Lydia Davis. It's not so much a review as an opportunity to reflect on Proust in general, and the various English translations in particular. The whole article is well worth a read.
I was moved to write something by Hitchens' claim early on that:
[...] one does well to postpone a complete reading until one is in the middle of life, and has shared some of the disillusionments and fears, as well as the delights, that come with this mediocre actuarial accomplishment.
- and I thought, no, I don't agree. I read it in my twenties, and loved it. You don't need to be world-weary. In fact being world-weary is a positive hindrance, not least when it comes to having the energy to get involved in such a massive enterprise as reading Proust, when a lapse of concentration half-way through a paragraph-long sentence ruins the whole chain of thought.
I know of no other book which has quite the same effect on finishing it. You immediately want to restart: you feel that somehow the next time through you'll be reading the book one level up, with an added layer of understanding, as art rather than life - which is the magic that Proust works, turning his life into art.
Well I didn't start again straight away. I waited fifteen years or so, and took the publication of a new translation by Terence Kilmartin as my opportunity. The problem I had with re-reading turned out to have nothing to do with concerns about a new translation: my memory of my original reading was already quite faded. The problem rather was that I now had children of my own, and was, as it were, a man of the world, a man with responsibilities. Reading Proust requires an identification with the emotional extremes of childhood and adolescence, and the self-absorption which that entails. Not that all Proust's characters are emotionally immature: Swann himself, a mature man, suffers the agonies of jealousy which Proust so relentlessly describes. But there's that self-centredness which in some respects you lose, partly in growing older but more specifically in having children.
I made it through Swann's Way, then started on In a Budding Grove, when the young Marcel has Swann's daughter Gilberte as his playmate. The author is exquisitely, agonisingly, aware of every change in their relationship. When she says this, what exactly does she mean? When she does that, what's the real reason? How special is he to her?
At one point, the young Marcel can't bring himself to eat any lunch; he's too wound up. The father, driven to distraction by his son's hyper-sensitivity, cries out, "Oh for goodness sake what is wrong with the boy?" Fatally, at that point I found myself in profound sympathy with the father. I knew just how he felt. The magic had gone. I couldn't get back into it.
I always thought that someday when I had the time I'd read it again. But writing this now makes me wonder if I'm not perhaps kidding myself.
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