In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

The two-minute 'Shadow'

Marcel makes quick work of Gilberte Swann. As with Swann before him, the more he loves the girl, the less interest she has in him. So he decides to put his love on ice, while maintaining his friendship with her parents.

Then, two years later, it's off to Balbec. (By my calculus, Marcel is now 16, and still astonishing dependent on his mother and grandmother.) He spends a seemingly endless summer at a grand hotel on the Normandy coast, watching strange places and people become familiar to him. He becomes an improbably close friend of the Guermantes aristocrat, Robert de Saint-Loup, and of the painter Elstir (whom we met as a foolish young man belonging to Madame Verdurin's "little clan" in Swann's Way). He also meets the Baron de Charlus, who deigns to make a move on him, an overture which only mystifies Marcel.

More important than any of these is his acquaintance with the "little gang" of girls whom he describes as adolescent, and who sometimes behave that way, but who surely are older. (Two seem to be sitting for the bac or high-school leaving exam, which Proust himself passed—in economics and mathematics—just as he turned 18.) Marcel focuses his adoration, first on one, then on another of these young women, but it is obvious to everyone except him that Albertine Simonet will be the love of his life.

This new Penguin/Viking edition

In the second volume of his masterwork, Proust deals with the theme of friendship (including the curious sort of friendship that is carnal love). How do we bridge the gap between the stranger and the dear person he or she becomes, as friend or lover? First up: Gilberte Swann, whom Marcel first adores and then, after some pain, learns to ignore. Then there's Robert de Saint-Loup, so marvelous that the modern reader wants to kick him in the pants. And of course there is Albertine, the obsession toward which Marcel has been working all this time.

There are others, too, notably the odious and social-climbing young man named Bloch. He seems to have no first name; nor does he have much in the way of physical characteristics. Bloch seems to be a year or two older than Macel, though they were schoolmates at some point.

James Grieve swings a bit wilder than Lydia Davis in Swann's Way. Where Scott Moncrieff translated "petite bande" (of girls) with "little band," Grieve uses "little gang," which to an American ear sounds a bit tough. Then there is the astonishing conversation between Bloch and Marcel, referring back to the occasion when Marcel was walking in the Bois-de-Boulogne with Gilberte and her mother. Along comes Bloch, who takes his hat off to Odette without eliciting any recognition from her in turn; then, afterward, she refers to him by a name not his own.

Now, at Balbec, Bloch wants to discover her name, but Marcel is so puzzled by the whole affair that he doesn't oblige. Bloch then rattles on to claim an anonymous sexual romp with Madame Swann. This is how it appears in the original:

"En tous cas, tous mes compliments, me dit-il, tu n'as pas dû t'embêter avec elle. Je l'avais rencontrée quelques jours auparavant dans le train de Ceinture. Elle voulut bien dénouer la sienne en faveur de ton serviteur, je n'ai jamais passé de si bons moments et nous allions prendre toutes dispositions pour nous revoir quand une personne qu'elle connaissait eut le mauvais goût de monter à l'avant-dernière station."

In Within a Budding Grove, Scott Moncrieff translates this quotation in words superficially close to the original, though perhaps not entirely comprehensible to the 21st century American, who has probably never heard of a Zone railroad, never mind "zone" as synonym for a woman's girdle:

"Whoever she is," he went on, "hearty congratulations; you can't have been bored with her. I picked her up a few days before that on the Zone railway, where, speaking of zones, she was so kind as to undo hers for the benefit of your humble servant; I have never had such a time in my life, and we were just going to make arrangements to meet again when somebody she knew had the bad taste to get in at the last station but one."

In In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by contrast, James Grieve is much more liberal in his translation. He doesn't even try to make a pun on girdle, or zone, but simply has Bloch getting "a nice ride."

"Well, anyway," he said, "you deserve to be congratulated—she must have given you a nice time. I had just met her a few days before, you see, riding on the suburban line. She had no objection to yours truly, and so a nice ride was had by one and all, and we were just on the point of arranging to do it again, on a future occasion, when someone she knew had the bad form to get on, just one stop before the terminus."

In general, I like the liberties Grieve takes with the text. I will never read the book in French, so I don't need a "trot" (do students still use that term?); what I want is an English-language equivalent of what Proust wrote in the opening decades of the last century. Still, there is one passage where he quite mangles one of my favorite passages, which I underlined some 40 years ago. As Scott Moncrieff phrased it:

"It is one of the systems of hygiene among which we are at liberty to choose our own, a system which is perhaps not to be recommended too strongly, but it gives us a certain tranquillity with which to spend what remains of life, and also—since it enables us to regret nothing, by assuring us that we have attained to the best, and that the best was nothing out of the common—with which to resign ourselves to death."

In my judgment, Grieve falls far short in his version:

"[T]herein lies one of the modes of mental hygiene available to us, which, though it may not be the most recommendable, can certainly afford us a measure of equanimity for getting through life and—since it enables us to have no regrets, by assuring us that we have had the best of things, and that the best of things was not up to much—of resigning us to death."

Remembering the past

As suggested by its title, memory is a major theme of In Search of Lost Time. Proust's understanding of memory is clearly stated in this second volume:

[T]he greater part of our memory lies outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind ... disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away.... It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no longer care about.

This is what Roger Shattuck calls Proust's "binocular vision." The crumb of madeleine dipped in an herbal tea does not return us to the past: we bring the separation with us, and it is this double vision that makes the experience so poignant.

Gotcha!

On page 95 of the Viking edition, Swann is playing games with his wife's guest-list, and he proposes to add Dr. Cottard and his wife to the circle of those invited to dinner. Madame Bontemps (who by the way is Albertine's aunt) is horrified. Previously she had gloated over her inclusion at the expense of the Cottards. "Would she even have the heart to tell her own husband that Professor Cottard and his wife were not to partake of the very pleasure she had assured him was unique to themselves?" Not of course is a typo for now, an error that reverses the meaning of the sentence—indeed, two full pages in which Proust revels in Swann's warped sense of humor.