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Marcel Proust · 1913–27

In Search of Lost Time

A man who has wasted his life in drawing rooms and jealousy discovers, late and by accident, that the wasted life was the material for a book, and that the book is the one in your hands.

Contents
  1. In brief
  2. The argument
  3. The seven volumes
  4. The madeleine and after
  5. The sentence
  6. The people
  7. How it was made
  8. Joyce at the Majestic
  9. English, and what is free
  10. Readers and critics
  11. Afterlives
  12. How to read it
  13. Read next
  14. In one line

In brief

A sickly, clever boy from a comfortable Paris family wants to be a writer and cannot find a subject. He grows up, chases girls and duchesses, loses his grandmother, keeps a young woman more or less prisoner in his flat, loses her too, and finds that the duchesses are stupid and the girls unknowable. Late in life, stumbling on some paving stones on the way to a party, he understands that everything he took for a waste of time was his subject all along. That is the plot of a novel of some 3,200 pages in French.

The opening sentence of the Overture is the plainest in the book: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” What comes after is a study of how people perceive one another: slowly, wrongly and through a fog of their own wishes. Marcel Proust’s novel is also very funny, which those who have not read it are seldom told.

The argument

Proust’s claim is that intelligence cannot give us the past. Deliberate memory returns a set of facts with the life drained out. The real thing survives only in sensations, stored by accident in a taste or a noise, and it comes back when it chooses. At that moment we exist outside time, and so the fear of death drops away.

The second claim is harder and bleaker. Nobody knows anybody. The narrator’s Duchesse de Guermantes is a name full of medieval glamour until he meets her and she is a woman who repeats her jokes. Love is at its most intense when it is a form of research, and it dies when the research ends. Swann gives years to Odette and closes his volume with one of the great comic cries in fiction: “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!” He then marries her.

The third claim rescues the other two. Only art gets across the gap between one mind and another. The true voyage of discovery, he says in The Captive, would be “not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes”. At the end he will write the book, for “the readers of themselves”, the book being “only a sort of magnifying-glass”.

My own view is that the redemption is the weakest thing in the novel and that it does not matter. The promise is made by a man who has just shown, across thousands of pages, how much he wants to believe things. A book so exact about jealousy and snobbery has already done what its conclusion merely promises.

The seven volumes

The titles below are Scott Moncrieff’s, with the French beside them. Links go to the free text.

Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann, 1913)

The first volume holds the sleepless Overture, the mother’s goodnight kiss and the madeleine, then Combray, the country childhood with its two walks, Swann’s way and the Guermantes way. Swann in Love then steps back before the narrator’s birth to tell, in the third person, an entire short novel of obsession, set to a “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata.

Within a Budding Grove (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1919)

The boy loves Gilberte Swann and gets over it. He goes to the seaside at Balbec with his grandmother, meets the painter Elstir and the arrogant, charming Saint-Loup, and sees the band of girls on the front. This volume won the Prix Goncourt in 1919.

The Guermantes Way (Le Côté de Guermantes, 1920–21)

The narrator reaches the aristocracy and finds the Dreyfus Affair in its drawing rooms. The grandmother dies, in pages of clinical cruelty. It ends with the best social scene in the book: Swann tells the Guermantes that he is dying, and they have no time, because they are late for dinner; the Duke, who has noticed his wife’s shoes, sends her back to change them, and calls out to Swann, “You’ll live to bury us all!”

Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe, 1921–22)

The narrator watches the Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien recognise each other in a courtyard, with Charlus “humming like a great bumblebee” and an orchid waiting for its insect. In The Heart’s Intermissions, bending to take off his boots at Balbec a year after her death, he at last feels that his grandmother is gone.

The Captive (La Prisonnière, 1923)

Albertine lives in his parents’ flat and he has her watched. This book about the wish to own another person’s past also holds the death of the novelist Bergotte in front of Vermeer’s “little patch of yellow wall”, and Vinteuil’s septet, which restores his belief in art on the very evening the Verdurins ruin Charlus.

The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine disparue, 1925)

“Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!” Françoise’s line opens the volume, and a telegram soon reports her death in a riding accident. The narrator goes on being jealous of a dead woman and then, with appalling gradualness, stops caring.

Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé, 1927)

The last volume begins at Tansonville and moves to Paris under the bombs of the Great War, where Charlus is whipped in a male brothel kept by Jupien. Years later, on the way to a party, the narrator trips on “unevenly placed paving stones”, and the old happiness returns. In the drawing room he sees his old acquaintances, so changed they seem to be in fancy dress, and Mme Verdurin has become the Princesse de Guermantes. Hudson’s last words have them as “giants immersed in Time”. The French also ends on the word Temps, the last word of a novel whose first word is Longtemps.

The madeleine and after

The madeleine is the most famous moment in the book and the least typical. The narrator’s mother gives him tea and a little cake, the taste shakes him, he tries to work out why, gives up, and then: “And suddenly the memory returns.” It is his aunt Léonie’s room at Combray, and the whole village rises out of the cup.

Proust took pains over the prop. Early drafts of Contre Sainte-Beuve give a piece of toast and then a rusk, so that the most celebrated cake in literature began as a biscuit.

There are many of these moments, and they do not all bring joy: the grandmother’s return at Balbec is the same mechanism delivering grief. A spoon against a plate, a stiff napkin and the paving stones arrive in a cluster near the end, and only then does the narrator see the principle. The madeleine asks a question that only the last volume answers.

The sentence

Proust’s sentences are long because they refuse to let a thing be only one thing. A clause gives a motive, the next corrects it, a third offers a comparison from botany or medicine or the Paris telephone exchange, and the main verb is waiting at the end. In Scott Moncrieff’s English they acquire a slightly Edwardian lushness that is not in the French.

The narrator is an “I” twice over, the man who lived and the man who is writing, and the humour comes from the gap between them. He is nearly unnamed. Only in The Captive, and only conditionally, does a name appear: “if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book” it would be Marcel.

The comedy is of speech. Each character has a tic: Mme Verdurin’s demands for loyalty, the hotel manager’s malapropisms, Françoise’s peasant grammar. Proust had published pastiches of other writers in 1908, and these voices are what make the long middle volumes bearable.

The people

Charles Swann

Swann is a rich Jewish connoisseur, friend of princes, who writes nothing. He has the narrator’s gifts and no book to show for them. Charles Haas, a Parisian clubman, was a principal model.

Albertine

Albertine Simonet is a young woman with a bicycle and a mole, whom we see only through his fear of what she does with other women. No one in the novel is more thoroughly described and less known. Biographers link her with Alfred Agostinelli, Proust’s chauffeur and secretary, killed in a flying accident in 1914.

The Baron de Charlus

Charlus is the great comic and tragic creation, a brother of the Duke, ferociously snobbish and secretly abject. His fall runs from the courtyard to the whip. The poet Robert de Montesquiou gave him much of his manner.

Mme Verdurin

Mme Verdurin, a hostess who laughs so hard she dislocates her jaw, ends at the top of society. Her ascent is the novel’s real social plot.

The artists

Bergotte the novelist, Elstir the painter and Vinteuil the composer are the three the narrator measures himself against. Each is unremarkable or absurd in person, which is the novel’s rebuke to judging art by the artist.

How it was made

Marcel Proust was born in Paris in 1871, the son of a distinguished doctor and a cultivated Jewish mother. He spent his youth in salons, translated Ruskin with his mother’s help, and by his late thirties looked like a failure. In 1908 he began an essay against the critic Sainte-Beuve, who explained books by their authors’ lives, and it grew into a novel; by 1910 it was the Recherche.

Publishers refused the first volume. At the Nouvelle Revue Française André Gide turned it down, and later apologised, calling it one of the most serious mistakes of his life. Proust paid Grasset to print it in 1913 and paid for favourable notices as well. The war then delayed the sequel and let the novel swell. Three planned volumes grew to seven, because revision for Proust meant addition.

He wrote at night, in bed, and his housekeeper Céleste Albaret later published a memoir of those years. He died of pneumonia on 18 November 1922, still correcting. His brother Robert saw the last three volumes through the press with the editors of the NRF, and those volumes are unfinished. In 1986 a typescript corrected by Proust turned up among his niece’s papers, showing some 150 pages cut from Albertine disparue, and scholars still dispute which version he meant.

Joyce at the Majestic

James Joyce and Marcel Proust met once. On 18 May 1922, after the first night of Stravinsky’s Renard, Sydney and Violet Schiff gave a supper at the Hôtel Majestic for Diaghilev’s company, with Stravinsky and Picasso among the guests. Ulysses had come out in Paris three months before. Proust had six months to live. The Literary Review’s account of Richard Davenport-Hines’s A Night at the Majestic has Joyce arriving late and drunk; an Irish Times essay by Enrico Terrinoni adds that he fell asleep, and that Proust came between two and three in the morning, in furs.

Beyond that the sources do not agree, and no one can say what was said. William Carlos Williams has them comparing ailments: “I’ve headaches every day”, says Joyce; “My poor stomach”, says Proust. Ford Madox Ford, in the longest version, has them talking illness until morning. Italo Svevo, who had it from Joyce, has Proust asking whether Joyce knows certain princesses. Nabokov put them silent in a taxi. Violet Schiff’s story is the most circumstantial: Joyce got into the Schiffs’ taxi with Proust, opened the window, had it closed again, and at Proust’s door was offered the cab home. Joyce’s own summary, told to Frank Budgen, was that the conversation consisted of the word “no”. Proust, as far as anyone has found, left no word about it at all.

Joyce sometimes said he had not read Proust and once allowed that he had seen a few pages without finding “any special talent”, though he envied the cork-lined room. The only tribute is a joke in Finnegans Wake, which Terrinoni quotes: “The Prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta”, with Proust folded into the Irish Father Prout.

The real links are smaller than the legend. Schiff finished Proust’s English translation and knew Joyce and Eliot. Samuel Beckett, then in Joyce’s circle, wrote his short book Proust for Chatto in 1931. And 1922 holds Ulysses, The Waste Land, Swann in English and Proust’s death. As a comparison, it is simple enough: Joyce gives one day from outside the mind’s control, in many styles, with no one looking back; Proust gives a lifetime in one voice, with nothing but looking back. Neither needed the other, and the supper shows it.

English, and what is free

C. K. Scott Moncrieff, a Scottish war veteran, began publishing in September 1922 under the title Remembrance of Things Past, taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30. Proust read the first volume with his shaky English and complained in a letter that verses were “no substitute for the intentional ambiguity” of temps perdu. The translator was unrepentant and continued through six volumes until his death in Rome in February 1930. His version has two weaknesses: it adds polish and euphemism (Budding Grove for girls in flower, Cities of the Plain for Sodom), and it was made from the early French text, later much corrected.

The last volume is a separate case. After Scott Moncrieff died, Time Regained went to the same Sydney Schiff, writing as Stephen Hudson, whose English version appeared in 1931; a different one by Frederick Blossom, The Past Recaptured, appeared in America in 1932. Schiff had only the flawed French edition of 1927. When the Pléiade text of 1954 appeared, Andreas Mayor’s note says, reworking Hudson would have meant changes “in almost every sentence”, so Mayor translated it afresh in 1970. Mayor’s version, not Hudson’s, stands at the end of every later revision of Scott Moncrieff.

Here is what can be had free:

The modern versions are all in copyright. Terence Kilmartin revised Scott Moncrieff against the Pléiade in 1981; D. J. Enright revised Kilmartin in 1992 and gave the book its present English title; William C. Carter’s annotated Scott Moncrieff from Yale (2013–25) corrects the errors and keeps the music. The Penguin of 2002, edited by Christopher Prendergast, is a new translation by seven hands: Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson. Oxford’s new set under Adam Watt began with Brian Nelson’s The Swann Way (2023) and is still appearing. Compare the first line: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Scott Moncrieff adds “used to”, a habit the French only implies.

Readers and critics

The novelists arrived first. Virginia Woolf wrote in 1922, “Oh if I could write like that!” Graham Greene called Proust the greatest novelist of the century. Nabokov, in a 1965 ranking, put Ulysses first and only “the first half” of Proust’s “fairy tale” fourth, which is a fair statement of the most common objection, that the Albertine volumes drag.

Samuel Beckett’s essay of 1931 remains the strangest and the sharpest. It reads Proust as a pessimist for whom habit deadens and the sin is having been born. George Painter’s biography (1959–65) long read the novel into the life, and Jean-Yves Tadié’s (1996) corrected it from the manuscripts. Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Way is a good short guide. Recent readers ask whether his portraits of Jews and homosexuals are self-knowledge or self-hatred; often they are both within a page.

Afterlives

The word “Proustian” now means a smell that brought back childhood, which is a small part of the book. Film has mostly lost. Harold Pinter wrote a much admired Proust Screenplay, published in the late 1970s and never filmed, and it later became a play at the National Theatre in 2000, staged by Di Trevis. Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love (1984) has Jeremy Irons, Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999) attempts Proust’s form, and Chantal Akerman’s La Captive (2000) moves the jealous lover to modern Paris. Stéphane Heuet has been drawing the novel as a graphic work.

How to read it

  • Choose by what you want. Free and beautiful: Scott Moncrieff. Best text and notes: Carter at Yale, or the Kilmartin and Enright set. Modern English: Penguin’s Davis or Oxford’s Nelson, though the Penguin’s seven hands do change voice.
  • Do not stop at the first volume. Many do, and the comedy thickens later.
  • Allow for the middle. The long party in Cities of the Plain and the jealous pages in The Captive are where people give up. Skim if you must, but not Bergotte’s death or the septet.
  • Read the end even if you skip. If you stall, jump to the paving stones and the final party, in Mayor’s version if you can.
  • James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). The book of that same spring, and the counter-case: the present tense, the street, many voices in place of one.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922). Memory and desire in 434 lines rather than three thousand pages, and also from the Schiffs’ acquaintance.
  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857). The earlier French master of the sentence, whose style Proust analysed in a famous essay of 1920.
In one line

Nothing you love can be kept, except by the slow act of writing down exactly how you failed to keep it.