On first reading

Something a bit more personal for the start of term

Towards the end of last year I started reading Proust.

Madeleines and a pot of tea. Photo by Juliane Amimer on Unsplash

Although I am hardly in the first dew of my youth, I came to him quite fresh: I have never tried to read Proust before, either in translation or in the original. I happened to pick up a battered copy of “À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur” (the second volume of À la recherche du temps perdu), which my husband had had to read back in the mid-90s. I read the first page and, though my French was really barely up to it (my husband fielded a lot of questions about the use of the imperfect subjunctive for a while), I was irresistibly and immediately drawn in. It was my night “off” the baby, and I was in the spare room along with the bookcase full of my husband’s old school books: anyone who’s done the nights with a small baby know how precious a night “off” is, but even so I stayed up late puzzling my way through a dozen or so pages, so extraordinary did I find the style. This encounter with Proust is already established for me as one of that series of major “first readings” that mark out life for keen readers: those (we could almost say Proustian) moments when you first encounter something which is both obviously excellent but also (much rarer, this), quite new, quite different from anything else, opening up a whole new vista of what literature might do. The true Proustian moment, of course, is a random experience (like the taste of madeleines, or the sensation of treading upon an uneven paving-stone) that triggers an intense though previously entirely forgotten memory; but reading the very greatest literature for the first time does feel a bit like that: an encounter with something both quite strange and also somehow absolutely right, just as it should be, as if recalled. The Proustian moment also has to be unlooked-for, and though sometimes we have intense reading experiences on the basis of a recommendation, I think the most formative ones tend to have that element of happenstance, too — of picking something up at random.

Jem Wikeley

writes wonderfully here about his similar recent experience reading Middlemarch for the first time. I was a bookish young person so most of my experiences of this kind happened when I was under 25, and many of them as a teenager. It is rather cheering and rejuvenating to find myself having such an experience at, shall we say, a more advanced age, and amid all the usual chores and responsibility of middle age. (One has to admit that Proust himself doesn’t seem to have had to worry too much about either chores or responsibility.)

What is distinctive about Proust, what makes it like nothing else? At first encounter, certainly, it is the style: the length of sentences, the relative lack of punctuation, the curious balance between absolute control and quasi-conversational fluidity, one idea, thought, image flowing directly from another, often aside into a quite separate channel before rejoining the main sentence. I hadn’t read anything quite like this before though structurally and rhythmically it is certainly a bit like several other major modernists (such as Joyce and Woolf).

My second response related specifically to Proust’s images, what I (trained as a classicist) would call and recognise as “epic similes”: major comparisons as the central mode of perception and of understanding. The way they mark the prose, and mark it out, and (as one reads further), the way the similes themselves are rhythmically clustered, gathering in groups in passages of greatest intensity, is not (to my mind) entirely unlike anything else but the things that it is most like are themselves a surprise: I found myself thinking of Homer, especially the Iliad; of Pindar; even of Claudian. One recognises, as I don’t think I have in any other prose work, and despite the enormous difference in subject, something of the majesty of epic. (There’s something remotely Homeric, too, in the repetition in Proust: a bit like set scenes, things come round repeatedly.) Of course in terms of subject matter, Proust has pretty much nothing in common with any of these authors.

On the other hand, the intense and repeated attempt to use simile and other devices of comparison to capture experience (especially sensory and emotional experience) in something like ‘real time’, as it happens; the link between this and the passing of time itself; the attention to the most minute and incremental of developments; the piling up of associations and comparisons; the sheer plenitude of the writing: none of this is very classical in that Greek (or Latin) sense. Oddly, perhaps, this element of Proust reminds me most of Kalidāsa, the Sanskrit poet and playwright, especially in his major poems, such as the Raghuvamśa (‘The Lineage of Raghu’), a poem I’ve been, appropriately enough, reading extremely slowly for a very long time.¹

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These shaping encounters can be life-changing: I knew that poetry mattered to me more than almost anything else after I picked up a copy of Thomas Hardy’s poetry while browsing in the adult section of Shenfield Public Library, in Essex where I grew up. I was about 11 but my mother had agreed with the librarian that I could take out adult books as long as they did not appear to be inappropriate. I still remember exactly where I was standing when I started to read this book and how physical was its effect on me: I went on to read through all of Hardy’s poetry and from there to educate myself, systematically if somewhat haphazardly, in English poetry as a whole, following my nose and the scattered footnotes and references I encountered from one text to another, building a list of poets I thought I should have read and, where they weren’t available at the library, bit by bit saving up and ordering them from our small local bookshop, or asking for them as presents. (The patient shopkeeper printed out catalogue entries for me on an extremely slow dot matrix printer so I could decide what to order next.)

Photo by Celine Ylmz on Unsplash. Pied Piper bookshop in Shenfield was not at all like this. But charmingly, there are still loads of bookshops like this in Paris.

A little after I started to read Hardy I also began to read seriously (rather than just voraciously) in English fiction: I mean I started to read “grown-up” literature, beginning not, perhaps surprisingly, with Hardy’s own prose (which I didn’t get on with until I was quite a bit older) but with the great modernists, especially Lawrence and Woolf, captured by how close to poetry this prose seemed.²

I missed a lot in those books as a teenager. Solemn in the manner of most adolescents, I failed to notice almost all the humour in Woolf, and was very surprised on rereading it as an adult to find her so funny. Passionately seduced by Lawrence’s style and the beauty of his images, I was nevertheless young enough to be completely oblivious to much of what was really going on. (It’s hard to believe, but I read almost all of Lawrence — though not, admittedly, Lady Chatterly’s Lover — with great pleasure, but without fully realising that anyone was having any sex at all: I took all the oiled furrows as so many lovely poetic metaphors, though for what I wasn’t quite sure.) I certainly missed or misunderstood a good deal of Proust, too, at the start, and surely still quite a bit even by the time I reached the end of it in July (I finally read the first volume after the sixth, before looping back to the last). But just as the English modernists were a gateway for me at the start of adolescence into real English prose, so has Proust been for me in French (having really only read French poetry before). In the last few weeks and months I’ve read Maupassant, Mauriac, Flaubert, Marguerite Duras and Brigitte Giraud, whose Vivre vite last year won the Goncourt, the prize Proust won with À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur over a century ago, in 1919. (Spoiler: Proust is unfathomably better.)

1. Funnily enough, Proust actually mentions both Sanskrit and Kalidāsa a few times, and indeed I own myself a very nice French translation of Kalidāsa’s play ‘The recognition of Śakuntala’, from the late nineteenth century, of the kind Proust may have also have read. But I don’t think he could have known Kalidāsa’s long poems, which don’t seem to have been available in French at this period.

2. Bunting, in a letter to Pound in December 1926, remarks ‘I have read E. M. Forster and consider that on the whole he is the best novelist now working, taking the works of Joyce as something other than novels'. ‘Something other than novels’ seems right to me for Proust too, whom, surprisingly, Bunting does not seem to comment on.