My personal history with Proust

Friday 18 November 2022 is the 100th anniversary of Proust’s death.  For this date, I have written about ‘mon histoire personnelle avec Proust’ for the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lille. 

Here’s my English version: 
 
‘I have been pretending to have read Proust for years but this autumn M. and I both took the plunge’ – Katherine Mansfield, p.344, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield Vol IV : 1920-1921 (Clarendon Press, 1996) eds. Vincent O'Sullivan & ‎Margaret Scott

I met Proust for the first time when I was fifteen, and if I’d vaguely heard of him, I didn’t know he was an extremely famous writer, hard to access, and formidable mainly because of his very long sentences where you can sometimes (as Iris Murdoch admits) have trouble linking the object with the subject, there are so many subordinate clauses, not to mention the many cultural and historic references that would mean pages and pages of notes (to rival in quantity those of Joyce’s Ulysses) in later editions, so I could open the first book of À la recherche du temps perdu, Du côté de chez Swann, and read ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’, bewitched, without all those obstacles, this mental baggage (that is to say, in English, ‘mental garbage’) which, I’d be happy to bet, spoils the pleasure for many readers. 

My father gave me À la recherche du temps perdu – a beautiful Gallimard complete NRF edition in 15 volumes in a cardboard box handed to me without ceremony – for my 15th birthday.  I remember exactly where I was : Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa NZ.  I was a budding writer (and lesbian) , so it was the ideal present.  I had been learning French for hardly more than two years (at Wellington Girls’ College, the school of the short story writer Katherine Mansfield, who wrote ‘I have been pretending to have read Proust for years but this autumn M. and I both took the plunge’).  I’m not going to say I understood much at 15 years old.  But reading a few paragraphs of Proust as I could, through this veil (of lack of vocabulary etc) only added to the magic.  I immediately related to the little boy who adored his mother who used to read stories to him at night.  And I appreciated Proust’s self-deprecation, and the humour that he aimed at some of his characters.  I have understood a little bit more as years go by.  If it has taken me, from book to book, decades to finish À la recherche du temps perdu, I have at last finished reading them all.  The last three books kept me company after my father died eight years ago. 

And I continue to read À la recherche du temps perdu.  I reread it, with real pleasure.  Especially since I learnt fifteen years ago in the autobiography of Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae, that Spark liked reading Proust, in French, before writing.  Which I’m going to get back to now.  But first, I’m going to read a few pages from Le temps retrouvé.

 
Mia Farlane