It went off very smoothly, despite the astonishment of Mme Verdurin, who had had a nodding acquaintance with my grandfather. And as she had no tact and hated family life (that dissolvent of the little nucleus), after telling me that she remembered seeing my great-grandfather long ago, and speaking to me of him as of somebody who was more or less an idiot who would have been incapable of understanding the little group and who, to use her expression, "was not one of us," she said to me: "Families are such a bore, one longs to get away from them"; and at once proceeded to tell me of a trait in my great-grandfather's character of which I was unaware, although I had suspected it at home (I had never known him, but he was much spoken of), his remarkable stinginess (in contrast to the somewhat excessive generosity of my great-uncle, the friend of the lady in pink and Morel's father's employer): "The fact that your grandparents had such a smart intendant only goes to show that there are all sorts of people in a family. Your grandfather's father was so stingy that at the end of his life when he was almost gaga - between you and me, he was never anything very special, you make up for the lot of them - he could not bring himself to pay a penny for his ride on the omnibus. So that they were obliged to have him followed by somebody who paid his fare for him, and to let the old miser think that his friend M. de Persigny, the Cabinet Minister, had given him a permit to travel free on the omnibuses.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 940
There's not a lot going on here, although I do love the anecdote that Mme Verdurin shared about Marcel's great-grandfather being an incorrigible miser. I also appreciate the comments of Mme Verdurin, who "had no tact and hated family life", which she described as "that dissolvent of the little nucleus." As the pseudo-patriarch of the Bleak House Orphanage for Mournful and Petulant Teenagers I can completely vouchsafe this observation.
As I've mentioned several times I've done my best to avoid learning more about Proust, mainly so that this blog is my response to Remembrance of Things Past and not simply a summary of my intellectual betters. However, my good friend Brian Murphy sent me an interesting note yesterday about an interview with Gregory Rabassa, the famous translator (the one who's translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was, at least according to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, better than his Spanish original). Rabassa has a few interesting things to say about Proust, including the fact that the title, which some had criticized him for because they claim that In Search of Lost Time, which you'll sometimes see in other translations, is more appropriate, is actually drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnet number 30. Somehow, and once again this proves the gaping holes in my inbred Hoosier upbringing, I didn't realize the connection.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's song since cancell'd night,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think of thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.
Rabassa proposes that all of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is contained in the sonnet, which, if he's correct, would have saved me 3200 pages of reading. It is an extraordinary work, and reminds me once again how oddly underrated Shakespeare (much like Proust) is in that he's such an obvious choice, and thus in many ways unfairly ignored as we rush for more obscure topics for adoration.
No comments:
Post a Comment