Proust on tape
Peter Levi Cover to Cover have now produced the first 32 tapes of Proust, read by John Rowe, who is brilliant; if a little too fast at times, he keeps you going through any longueurs that the early chapters may con- tain. He can be faulted on fewer pronunci- ations than almost anyone, though I was disconcerted by Benozzo Gozzoli pro- nounced like Gorgonzoli. His French names are faultless, which is what matters. The translation is the old one by Scott Moncrieff, perhaps because he is a great panjandrum, and Proust's first translator, or because Penguin may have demanded too much for Terry Kilmartin's version which I had always heard was far better than the knobbly old Scotsman's, which certainly seems to make some mistakes. I seemed to hear of ultramine pears, which are unlikely.
The first I knew of Proust was when I left school and came across an article which quoted the sentence: 'Le temps des lilacs approchait de sa fin.' That has stuck in my mind ever since but I failed to identify it in this reading. I have always read Proust in the three fat volumes of the Pleiades, most- ly on those endless trains from London to Athens which were laughably called expresses. But I gave away the second vol- ume to a Greek friend and I now find almost the whole story unwinding as if it were quite new to me.
Proust is terribly long and 32 tapes by no means exhaust him. Though he never cor- rected the last part of his novel, it has an enchantment unique in literature. One begins rather unwillingly but, setting aside the experience of readers, what it offers to listeners is a series of great, broad sweeps in which the lies are as thrilling as the true parts.
This brings us to the difficulty that much of Proust has been commented on and analysed with such teaming that one believes one can see through every false- hood. And yet I do not know whether his seaside town is really Cabourg, which is not far enough from Paris, and the disguise of boys he was in love with as girls seems to me perfectly convincing. I do not suppose his attempt on Albertine's virtue stands for an attempt to rape Albert.
There are some very queer trailing ends and contradictions, but they do not matter. The character of Swann is crucial. We are admitted to the circle of Madame Verdurin through Swann's eyes and yet Proust seems to know everything that went on there: even Odette has few secrets from him. Here the translation may be at fault, because Proust's laughter is subtle and, as I recollect it, subtler in French than in this version which is like thick porridge. He uses Madame Verdurin's attempt at a salon as a fish-pool for his later characters. She has a musician who begins as a joke but ends as a composer of important talent, and a painter who is equally ridiculous at first who ends up an important figure in Proust's seaside town. None of this mat- ters; it is only the wonderful mix-up that does. The sentence that most thrilled me was about the decline of elegance in the Bois, when suddenly there were no more carriages with fine ladies but only a long stream of motors, every one driven by a chauffeur with a footman in full regalia sit- ting upright beside him.
A lot has been made of Proust's Jewish- ness, and he is one of those unfortunates who lived through the Dreyfus case, but it may be important to notice that he is sup- posed to be a third-generation Christian ('Some people say,' mutters an old lady, 'that they are the worst') and so is his friend Bloc, who is further down the social scale, and a terrifying snob. He calls his seaside town Baalbek, and we get a chapter of some unpleasantness about the behaviour of the sub-world of Jews there. One of them is called Nissim, like one of my father's brothers. Proust's great friend, the Marquis St Loup, is luckily a socialist, so their relationship so far is unclouded. The portrait of seasonal society at Baalbek is very careful and rather convincing, though I can scarcely believe the way in which it is peppered with the Guermantes family, or that Cabourg can every really have been as smart as Proust maintains that Baalbek was. I notice that there is no tide at Baalbek, so I am inclined to put it as far south as Pau: to get there you not only travel all night from Paris, but you pass between mountains. It is a conundrum and need not detain us.
'Welcome to hell. . . a family Christmas all year round.' Thread by thread the old spider entan- gles you, and one is now left yelling for more. The early chapters are somewhat plagued by the childish appurtenances of religion; the observances of the French in May are something I experienced only as a Jesuit novice. But Proust, who is perfectly familiar with every tinkle of the church bell and its meaning, never in all these pages goes inside a church, not even at Baalbek. What is much more interesting is to keep an eye on Frangoise, whether she is grum- bling about Proust's clothes, or prophesy- ing evil of various characters. It is not easy to tell what age Proust has reached: he never goes to school, or at least it is not reported, and seems to have gone to a brothel at a remarkably early age, even by French standards of the day. No doubt Proust is saving up sex for some later vol- umes. His deepest and therefore most secret feelings seem to be reserved for a ladies' convenience in the Bois where Frangoise knows the attendant lady. The dankness of this horrid little place thrills him.
There is somewhere an article by Grosslcurth which tells us that we are meant to suppose that Proust masturbated. One of the instances was his perching one afternoon among currant bushes and leav- ing a silvery slime on the leaves: it is not very convincing and the slime might as eas- ily have been left by a snail. But the other place is an upstairs lavatory at Cambrai which is his sanctum, with currant blossom breaking in through its window. Dankness and the smell of currants may offer a con- necting thread to anyone starved of sex- interest in this part of the book. And there is certainly something odd about a currant bush, even a flowering redcurrant, Betje- man's 'plant of an age of railways', tall enough to climb three or four storeys. I remember it was an attempt to understand these passages that led my wife and myself to the startling discovery that the French are very ill-equipped with names for all the different kinds of currants.
It is not the broad sweep, because there is really no story in the novel so far, it is the detail that will constantly hold up the read- er and thrill him in a way that no novel of comparable length (if one exists) in English could do. I think it was Gide working as a reader for Gallimard who turned down Proust's wonderful novel. I can see what he meant, but it was a bad mistake. Proust is a genius, not only self-obsessed but one of those very great egos, like Freud and possi- bly Joyce, who have covered the century with their shadowy wings. I bow to him.
Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way — Part One 8 cassettes, 10 hours 20 minutes, £26.99; Part Two 8 Cas- settes, 9 hours 25 minutes, £26.99.
Within a Budding Grove — Part One 8 cas- settes 12 hours 30 minutes £26.99; Part Two 10 hours 50 minutes, S cassettes, £26.99. Cover to Cover. Tel: 01264 731227.
Previous page
