{"id":9300,"date":"2020-08-28T23:59:55","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T23:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/?p=9300"},"modified":"2026-08-27T04:07:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:07:52","slug":"in-search-of-english-proust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2020\/08\/28\/in-search-of-english-proust\/","title":{"rendered":"In search of \u2018English Proust\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

W<\/span>riting to his publisher Gaston Gallimard, Proust opted for an unusually crisp register: \u201cI refuse to let the English destroy my work.\u201d He was protesting at translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff\u2019s use of a pretty Shakespeare quotation (Remembrance of Things Past<\/i>) for his analytically more precise title (\u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/i>), not to mention the now iconic but misleading\u00a0Swann\u2019s Way<\/i>\u00a0(for\u00a0Du c\u00f4t\u00e9 de chez Swann<\/i>). He softened, though his subsequent communications with Scott Moncrieff himself are best represented as polite rather than cordial. Scott Moncrieff remains nevertheless the true hero in the story of Proust in English, and any bad feeling on Proust\u2019s part is a mere bagatelle compared to how he would have felt about John Middleton Murry\u2019s unintelligible proposition: \u201cNo English reader will get more out of reading \u2018Du c\u00f4t\u00e9 de chez Swann<\/i>\u2019 in French than he will out of reading \u2018Swann\u2019s Way<\/i>\u2019 in English.\u201d It is, alas, the sort of thing that also infected Conrad, who came up with the lunatic claim that Moncrieff\u2019s Proust was superior to Proust\u2019s Proust.<\/span><\/p>\n

In short, where the reception of Proust is concerned, the English have form. It would be a truth pretty well universally acknowledged that\u00a0\u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/i>\u00a0is a \u201cmasterpiece\u201d were, for example, it not for the undiluted nonsense of Evelyn Waugh. In a letter to John Betjeman, he wrote of Proust, \u201cthe chap was plain barmy\u201d. His barminess, Waugh maintained, consisted in being constitutionally unable or wilfully refusing to narrate things in the right order. In another letter, joshing with Nancy Mitford, Waugh casts the barmy chap as a lamebrain simpleton: \u201cI am reading Proust for the first time\u2014in English of course\u2014and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely no sense of time.\u201d Proust suffered from all manner of ailments, but dyschronometria certainly wasn\u2019t one of them. The challenge here lies in swallowing one\u2019s astonishment at the number of times\u00a0Brideshead Revisited<\/i>\u00a0has been described as \u201cProustian\u201d without throwing up.<\/span><\/p>\n

There have of course been notable and even noble exceptions. Eton and Oxford educated, but wonderfully impervious to the narcissistic strain of English exceptionalism, Anthony Powell was a confessed disciple. One\u2019s heart goes out to Cyril Connolly: \u201cI tried to talk like Proust, think like Proust, and write like Proust, and had to destroy it all later.\u201d In the early years of English fandom, there was a lot of epiphanic swooning over madeleines (in the draft manuscript it was originally a\u00a0biscotte<\/i>, while Proust himself much preferred croissants). But there was also a class aspect to this, bound up with notions of \u201cgood taste\u201d. Virginia Woolf\u2019s adulation of an exquisitely refined Proust had in part to do with her supercilious detestation of that disgustingly vulgar James Joyce (\u201ca self-taught workingman\u201d and \u201cultimately nauseating\u201d). I wonder what Woolf made of Albertine\u2019s \u201ccasser . . . le pot<\/i>\u201d or the audible grunts of the coupling of Charlus and Jupien alongside the masturbating Leopold Bloom.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then there is that later English Proust, the one allegedly good for your mental health. I can well imagine Proust laughing out loud at the tale of a student friend of mine whose cure for chronic insomnia wasn\u2019t Proust\u2019s (a cocktail of drugs which came close to killing him), but Proust: the first page of the\u00a0Recherche<\/i>, itself about falling asleep and waking up, was enough to send him off.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, I very much doubt that Proust would have been well disposed to\u00a0How Proust Can Change Your Life<\/i>, the point of which can only be that the\u00a0Recherche<\/i>\u00a0is best understood as a contribution to the genre of the self-help manual. Proust falling out of his bed in the cork-lined room when presented with the notion that he might be of some use in couple-therapy, as the author of a primer on \u201chow to be happy in love\u201d is one thing. But an irrecoverable loss of the will to live would surely have been the response to the suggestion that his book could plausibly be read as offering a lesson in \u201chow to suffer successfully\u201d. Alas, this sort of thing still clings to the reception of Proust, including the reception of the most recent incarnation of English Proust, the ambitious and admirable BBC radio adaptation broadcast last year<\/span><\/p>\n

Adaptation confronts its makers with the risky business of abbreviation.\u00a0Prima facie<\/i>, compressed Proust is not just a problem but a contradiction in terms. From story to syntax, Proust\u2019s is an art of expansion, detour and return that locks the reader into the repeated experience of forgetting and remembering, losing and (re)finding\u2014the very things the novel is fundamentally about. Yet only the purist intent on putting adaptation out of business is going to use this as a sort of veto. Ellipsis (a figure often used by Proust himself) is simply an unavoidable function of the conventions of the adapting medium. For example, the only film maker who aimed at doing the whole thing on screen was Joseph Losey, an ambition sadly unfulfilled because the funding wasn\u2019t there. What remains of the project is the screenplay by Harold Pinter (described as a million and a half words brought down to 455 shots). It is a brilliant mosaic of fragments as well as a miracle of reduction to a form of Pinteresque dialogue, but with the inevitable question: is this Pinterised Proust, and, if so, what do we feel about such a creature?<\/span><\/p>\n

T<\/span>he 2019 BBC radio adaptation is also a reduction, in the form of a radio play in ten parts with a voice-over narrator. It is an example of what in broadcasting parlance is now called the Long Listen, a niche marketing term, but which here also expresses solidarity with a higher cause, as a gesture on behalf of what Proust\u2019s great work asks of its reader: to find time for his intricate exploration of time. \u201cWho has the time to sit down and read Proust cover to cover?\u201d is the question put by the adaptation\u2019s director, Celia de Wolff. It is a fair question, though whether what she calls \u201cevent radio\u201d provides what she also terms \u201csomething comprehensive\u201d depends on what you mean by the latter. Where the plot of the\u00a0Recherche<\/i>\u00a0is concerned, what we get is basically a structured anthology of the key stages and turning-points in the story of a young man exiting boyhood, embarking on a \u201csearch\u201d, and who, after multiple digressions and much delay, completes the quest in the equation of the \u201ctrue life\u201d with the discovery of the artistic vocation. In short, a skeletal narrative compendium which effectively places the work in a tradition to which it indubitably belongs\u2014that of the European\u00a0Bildungsroman<\/i>, the genre of the \u201cinitiation\u201d novel, but with most of the detours excised.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the play\u2019s the thing, and it\u2019s thus best to look beyond the bare bones of story line to the real core of the production: the dramatic personae and the acting. The cast itself is stellar and the quality of the acting for the most part excellent. The Proust snobs are terrific, with a scintillating Oriane de Guermantes and a hilarious Madame Verdurin, along with a magnificently pompous Norpois. Simon Russell Beale\u2019s rendering of Charlus (sometimes called Proust\u2019s Falstaff; the analogy has its limits) is stupendous. On first appearance there is an alarming hint of English sitcom bonhomie but it\u2019s a false alarm. Beale gives us the full-works Charlus: amiable, witty, seductive, outrageous, haughty, abject, demented, and finally broken. It\u2019s an unforgettable performance, climaxing in the at once affecting and absurd roll-call of the now dead gents and aristos who have cropped up here and there throughout the course of the novel: \u201cHannibal de Br\u00e9aute, dead! Antoine de Mouchy, dead! Charles Swann, dead! Adalbert de Montmorency, dead! Boson de Talleyrand, dead! Sosth\u00e8ne de Doudeauville, dead!\u201d Doudeauville? It\u2019s the name of a town and an erstwhile ancestral estate, but you have to believe this one came to Proust while in dodoland.<\/span><\/p>\n

The elephant in the room is of course that artistically difficult and complicated beast: the Narrator who is also a character evolving in the time of the narrative. The character \u201cMarcel\u201d (a naming that opens a whole can of worms) is divided between two actors, the boy Marcel and the older narrator. The former is unfortunately all too often stamped with (ha!) a\u00a0Brideshead<\/i>\u00a0inflection; the childhood world of Combray is a cosseted one, but the boy didn\u2019t attend Eton. The latter falls to one of our greatest living actors, Derek Jacobi, who brings his hugely versatile gifts to bear on two key dimensions of the narrating voice: rhythm and register. The key challenge is Proust\u2019s notoriously elaborate syntax. Jacobi provides a master class in how to navigate these hypotactic structures. First comes rhythmic modulation as \u201cmelody\u201d (what Proust called \u201cthe melody of the song beneath the words\u201d). But there is also something else, linked to Proust\u2019s life-long breathing difficulties. Walter Benjamin shrewdly observed that \u201casthma became part of his art . . . Proust\u2019s syntax rhythmically and step by step reproduces his fear of suffering\u201d. Benjamin\u2019s point is that as we read we hear someone listening to himself breathing as he writes and sometimes pausing for breath. Jacobi gives a hint of this with beautifully placed mini-hesitations. It qualifies as one of the finest tributes a practising artist could pay to another.<\/span><\/p>\n

With a work like Proust\u2019s, \u201cadaptation\u201d, however carefully it combines the inventive and the sensitive, will always be a problem. Yet, when all is said and done, and given the constraints, this is a signal achievement, an authentic and valuable contribution to the story of \u201cEnglish Proust\u201d. Where there is genuine cause not just for lament but for outright lamentation is the spectacle of the commentariat reaching yet again for therapeutic Proust. One reviewer saw fit to consult a specialist in \u201cpsychology\u201d assuring us of the incomparable benefits to be had from the interaction of \u201cepic audio\u201d and \u201cneural response\u201d. But the specialist then ups the ante with the claim that there is greater \u201crichness to a voice than there is to plain text\u201d. This would have bemused Proust, who wrote ardently of silent reading as what brings us to \u201cthe threshold of spiritual life\u201d. Whatever the neural benefits of listening, the passive consumption of the latter is no match for the more arduous but rewarding challenge of reading. Recall the Gallimard ad for its collection of the classics, the poster featuring a young woman lost in the\u00a0Recherche<\/i>\u00a0and with the caption: \u201cSoyez jeune, lisez la Pl\u00e9iade<\/i>\u201d. The clue is in the word \u201clisez\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the meantime, as counter measures to what in another connection Samuel\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Beckett termed \u201cpitiless therapeutic bombardment\u201d, there\u2019s always the\u00a0Monty Python<\/i>\u00a0\u201cAll-England Summarise Proust Competition\u201d, that gloriously anarchic parody, the\u00a0Recherche<\/i>\u00a0as if edited by an English\u00a0Ubu Roi<\/i>. Or if your thing for stress relief is a short, sharp shock to the neural pathways, we can go all in, with a Proust in the service of English poetry. When in 2015 Al Johnson (some call him Boris) announced his intention of becoming an MP again, writer Nick Tyrone marked the moment with a poem organised around four basic components: Johnson\u2019s statement of intent to run; a substantial chunk of Enoch Powell\u2019s \u201cRivers of Blood\u201d speech; a list of \u201c10 top things to do in London\u201d, and\u2014the jewel in the crown\u2014\u201ca random section of text from Marcel Proust\u2019s\u00a0\u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/i>\u201d. But if this is all too much, calmer shores beckon courtesy of Proust himself. I began my listening Odyssey by doing what Proust famously describes in the very first sentence of his novel: I went to bed early.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can the Recherche be adapted and remain Proust? And should it really be seen as therapy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9504,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[664],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critique"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9300"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9356,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9300\/revisions\/9356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}