Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [53]
Modern readers are responsive to Proust’s tireless and brilliant analyses of love because we, too, no longer take love for granted. Readers today are always making the personal public, the intimate political, the instinctual philosophical.
Proust may have attacked love, but he did know a lot about it. Like us, he took nothing for granted. He was not on smug, cozy terms with his own experience. We read Proust because he knows so much about the links between childhood anguish and adult passion. We read Proust because, despite his intelligence, he holds reasoned evaluations in contempt and knows that only the gnarled knowledge that suffering brings us is of any real use. We read Proust because he knows that in the terminal stage of passion we no longer love the beloved; the object of our love has been overshadowed by love itself: “And this malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.”
Proust may be telling us that love is a chimera, a projection of rich fantasies onto an indifferent, certainly mysterious surface, but nevertheless those fantasies are undeniably beautiful, intimations of paradise—the artificial paradise of art. I doubt whether many readers could ever be content with Proust’s rejection of rustling, wounded life in favor of frozen, immobile art; but his powerful vision of impermanence certainly does speak to us. The rise and fall of individual loves on the small scale and of entire social classes on the grand, the constant revolution of sentiments and status, is a subject Proust rehearsed and we’ve realized. Proust is the first contemporary writer of the twentieth century, for he was the first to describe the permanent instability of our times.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY PROUST
In Search of Lost Time (Modern Library, 1993), in six volumes (volume 5 contains both The Captive and The Fugitive, and volume 6 contains both Time Regained and an extensive guide to Proust). In addition, every volume ends with a plot synopsis. This is the original translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, later doctored by Terence Kilmartin before it was extensively revised by D. J. Enright. Proust’s seven-volume novel, A la Recherche du temps perdu, was first called in English in Moncrieff’s version Remembrance of Things Past before it was retranslated, more literally, under the present title. The first volume, Swann’s Way, first appeared in the Modern Library in 1928, and the last volume, Time Regained, was not published by the Modern Library until 1951 (under the title The Past Recaptured ).
Penguin Books has commissioned a new annotated translation of In Search of Lost Time, due to be published in 2001. An announcement from Penguin reads: “As part of the translation process we have opened the Web pages to invite ideas and suggestions from interested Proustians around the world. Suggestions can range from particular points of translation to a wider consideration of the whole question of forms of English appropriate to a twentieth-century [ sic] translation. . . . All e-mail will be read by the General Editor, Christopher Prendergast, at whose discretion comments will be posted to the Proust Bulletin Board. www.penguin.co.uk/proust.”
For French readers, the best edition is the relatively cheap current paperback edition in Folio (Gallimard). Each volume benefits from the