BOOKS
Proust finds a vocation
JOHN FLETCHER
Proust, as a writer, was happiest in meta- phor. So he compared his million-word novel, Remembrance of Things Past, among other things to a cathedral. The keystone of the edifice is the last section, Time Regained and yet that's not quite fair, because a key- stone is a massive, utilitarian peg, and the image hardly does justice to what is perhaps the finest conclusion to a novel that has ever been written. It is more like a gigantic and elaborate coda to a symphony of Mahleres- que proportions.
Until recently it wasn't possible to read Time Regained in a reliable edition, because Proust (who wrote, prophetically, 'how many great cathedrals remain unfinished!') had died when it was still only in manuscript form. The first French editors did not do a very good job of making Proust's bundles into a book. This was rectified in the Pleiade edition published in 1954, which has permitted Chatto and Windus to commission an entirely new translation based on the definitive text. In some ways the new Time Regained (translated by Andreas Mayor and published this week at 63s) is better than the Pleiade text: the numerous foot- notes, which represent passages which the French editors were' uncertain where to place, have been worked in to the English translation, and not infrequently the para- graphs have been rearranged in a more logical fashion. There are still the unavoid- able blemishes, such as lack of proportion (we hear far too much about the vices of Char!us, for instance), and repetition (Gil- berte is twice introduced to us at the Guer- mantes reception, and the two appearances are not without inconsistencies). But no translator could do anything about these defects, which Proust would have remedied had he lived, and which in any case, as the French editors say, give Time Regained its movingly unfinished aspect.
Another moving aspect is the way Time Regained sums up an account of a life and a society, both of which grow old in the course of the long narration. At the close, Marcel returns to Paris high society after an absence of many years in sanatoria. As he mingles with the guests at the afternoon party given by the Princesse de Guermantes (who is none other than the Mme Verdurin of the first volume), he is at first under the impression that his friends have been made up to look old, as if for a fancy-dress ball. Only after a while does he realise, or is told, that the face he is looking at is his friend's, transformed by the passage of time to re- semble stage make-up. or the face of a parent he recalls. Gilberte then approaches him—the pretty little girl of precocious lasciviousness of the first volume has be- come a stout and matronly widow—and suggests that they dine together by them- selves in a restaurant. Unthinkingly, he re- plies 'Yes, if you don't find it compromising to dine alone with a young man'. The amused laughter of those within earshot brings it forcibly home to him that he too, like the other guests, has grown old.
This would not matter too much if life could continue for him in the future much as it has gone on in the past, a trivial round of visits paid and received. But it cannot.
While waiting in the library to be admitted to the drawing-room, he had a mystical experience which revealed to him the nature of his true vocation, that of an artist. He first hears a clumsy servant striking a plate, and in an instant he is transported to the time when, one summer, he had been in a train which had stopped near a cool wood while a railwayman had put right a defect on a wheel with his hammer. He then wipes his mouth on a stiff napkin and is once more in Balbec, at the hotel, drying his face with a starched towel, and looking out through the open window on to the brightness of the sea. He thereby learns that the sensations of touch and hearing can occasionally unleash the machinery of involuntary memory and convey one into the past, or bring the past vividly and truly back to life in the present. In this way time can be redeemed, and we are vouchsafed a glimpse at the only true paradise, the paradise that we have lost.
The resurrection, brief as it is, provokes a deep and lasting joy, and makes death 'a matter of indifference' by giving life its pur- pose, and directing attention to the only form of permanence we can aspire to—the work of art which it impels us to create in order to enshrine it. 'And thus', the narrator can write, 'my whole life up to the present day might be summed up under the title: A Vocation'. The purpose of his life—and of the book whose closing pages we are reading—is only revealed when almost over. The destructive action of Time, in whitening hair and carving wrinkles, is revealed at the selfsame moment as the narrator conceives the ambition 'to make visible, to intellec- tualise in a • work of art,, realities that are outside Time'.
So the novel that draws upon a life also transcends it: since 'every reader, when he reads, is reading only about himself', the narrator has no regrets that the account of his love-affairs, by aspiring to universality, commits infidelities towards the women he once loved. In fiction (unlike autobiography) the portraits are. not individual but com- posite, so that 'the profanation of one of my memories by unknown readers was a crime which I had myself committed before them'. In art, as in life, the names are defaced from the tombstones of the mind. The work of art automatically transforms individual experience into a 'spiritual equivalent'—in discovering ourselves we uncover the work of art that lies within us.
The artist's duty then is to render his vision through style: 'the function and the
task of a writer are those of a translator'. Yet this insight does not come easily to the narrator. Early on in Time Regained he finds himself reading a passage from the Journal of the Goncourt brothers. This depresses him. He is envious of the brothers' powers of observation, and yet he is simul- taneously aware that their acute eyes see nothing worthwhile because, being quite uncritical, they miss the essential. So he is both gloomy because the Goncourts con- vince him of his own lack of literary ability, and relieved because literature, which he had esteemed so highly, seems capable only of elegant belle-lettrism and of no use to him in his desire to resurrect the past.
But this is only a preamble to • the triumphant demonstration a little later that the narrator can find both the incentive and the subject-matter to become a writer after all. Through his mystical experiences in the Guermantes library, he foresees the time when the literary work he contemplates writing will become the book which we hold in our hands. The fictional wheel thus comes full cycle, just as the two 'ways' of the beginning, 'Swann's Way' and 'the Guer- mantes Way' are seen not to be as irrecon- cilable, in fact, as in his youth he had been led to suppose. Antinomies are resolved: the volume which had been the witness of his mother's capitulation to his neurasthenic lack of will in the first part, George Sand's Francois le champi, becomes, when it is fondled in the Guermantes library, the instrument of the literary self-discovery which will redeem that weakness, and enable him at last to make something of what remains of his life. No wonder, then, that he has the highest regard for the artistic calling: 'Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in con- sequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature'.
The demonstration is triumphant, as I said. The novel, having shown how and why it came to be written, can move towards its conclusion: that we who occupy so small a part of space, are truly giants in time, because we stand on the lofty stilts of our years. We can look clown, from this vantage point. on the ground of our childhood, far below. The last volume, coming after the recital of so many disappointments and griefs, could have been sadder than the rest. But it is serene and confident, because according to Proust it is possible for us, in rare and precious moments of illumination, to span our intervening years and short- circuit the 'slow accretion of many, many days'. In doing so we recapture an instant from the past we had believed dead.
Andreas Mayor's new translation of this magnificent work replaces the one done by Sidney Schiff in 1931 to complete what Scott Moncrieff left unfinished when he died. Mr Mayor's occasional excessively literal rendering, in such phrases as `to bring about a rupture' and `to multiply quarrels' between one person and another, is amply compensated for by the expert way in which he matches Proust's rhythms and cadences. His English really has a Proustian flavour about it, and his readers can be certain that, as they wend their way through his masterly periods, they are com- municating directly with the inimitable spirit of the original.
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