On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

You know, perhaps, that ever since I have been ill, I have been working on a long book, which I call a novel because it isn’t as fortuitous as memoirs (it is fortuitous only to the degree that life itself is), and the composition is very severe although difficult to appraise because of its complexity; I don’t know how to describe the genre. Certain parts take place in the country, some in one kind of society, others in another kind; some have to do with family life and much of it is terribly indecent.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Louis de Robert, between October 7 and 15, 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Louis de Robert (1871–1937), novelist and Dreyfussard. Proust listened to his nightly accounts of the trial.

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Fran Lebowitz at the Morgan Library

“When you look at manuscripts or letters and they’re written in the hand of the writer, you are closer to that writer, you’re closer to the person”: Fran Lebowitz looks at manuscripts and letters at the Morgan Library.

Related posts
A visit to the Kolb-Proust Archive : Gregory Corso’s poem “I Held a Shelley Manuscript”

NYRB sale

New York Review Books is having a summer sale: buy two books, save 20%; buy three books, save 30%; buy four books, save 40%. I would like to see “buy ten books, save 100%,” but I know they have to draw the line somewhere. The sale ends on Monday the 24th at midnight Eastern — that is, right before Monday becomes Tuesday. Again, they have to draw the line somewhere.

My first NYRB book: Céleste Albaret’s Monsieur Proust. There have been at least a couple of more than three dozen since. (I counted.) The press has greatly expanded my possibilities of reading. Long may it wave.

The Proust aisle, revisited

I saw Wal-Mart’s madeleines again and had to try some. (This time they had a future expiration date.) These madeleines are not bad. In fact, they’re surprisingly good.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard) : Madeleine (With the beginning of the key Proust passage)

[I prefer the traditional hyphenated spelling: Wal-Mart.]

Siebold

I had written a sentence from W.G. Sebald on the blackboard, and a student in the front row said that she had begun trying to figure out how the parts of her life fit together. ”Oh,“ I said, ”then you have to read Proust.“ I held up my hands to show the approximate length (width?) of all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. ”Three thousand pages!“ I said. Was that accurate? And then I saw that I had misspelled Sebald as Siebold.

This is the twenty-ninth teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has gone wrong.

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All OCA Proust posts : Sebald posts : teaching dream posts (Pinboard)

In the Proust aisle

[Click for bigger cookies.]

Elaine says that these madeleines bring back memories of Wal-Mart.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard) : Madeleine (With the beginning of the key Proust passage)

[Photograph from May 31. Notice the expiration date.]

Pretty Proustian

Vladimir Nabokov, Glory, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladimir Nabokov (New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1971).

Not just the moment of involuntary memory but also the shifting mountains, reminiscent of the church steeple in Combray.

Venn reading
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Proust Barbie

Lucy Boynton reports that Proust Barbie was cut from Barbie because audiences didn’t get the joke: “it turns out that contemporary audiences don’t know who Proust is” (Rolling Stone).

This contemporary audience does. When our fambly saw Ratatouille some years ago, my kids had to calm me down when this Proust moment happened. (”Dad!“) I was going slightly bonkers in the theater.

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is one angry puzzle: 4-D, seven letters, “More than sore”; 10-A, three letters, “Expression of hate”; 40-D, seven letters, “More-than-sore manifestation.” Yow. But I didn’t mind. I thought this Sewell puzzle was swell. I did so well. The clue that got things going for me: 6-D, eight letters, “When Troy was founded.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

4-D, four letters, “Group advocating for ministries.” Didn’t fool me.

5-D, six letters, “Bluetooth or flash drive.” I had no idea that Bluetooth may be had in this form.

9-D, eight letters, “Fall event promoting mustache-growing.” I had to dig for this one. I’m long done with the growing season.

13-A, five letters, “3-D, e.g.” Delightfully Stumper-y.

16-A, fifteen letters, “Stand in time.” I started thinking about Proust. Not appropriate here. Time is on the move.

17-D, four letters, “WITCH PARKING ONLY, ALL OTHERS WILL BE ______.” A little levity.

20-A, six letters, “Spade accessory.” Didn’t fool me.

23-A, four letters, “‘I love you.’” A bit hilarious.

27-A, six letters, “Timbuktu’s country’s capital.” It pays to listen to a lot of music.

43-A, eight letters, “Bag handler.” Nice defamiliarization.

45-D, six letters, “Ring of Pluto.” This answer made me happy.

54-A, letters, “‘Trust me for now.’” Movie-esque.

My favorite in this puzzle: 35-A, seven letters, “Extra ambition.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Tin yars in Versales, Mazura”

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

This novel, which began with overtones of Dickens and Proust, shifts to a Jamesian (Henry) manner with many touches of Austenesque satire.

Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor : “The odors” : “Oh, piffle, you dumb-bells” : No Remington, Ticonderoga : “Flatteringly, like the dentist”

“Flatteringly, like the dentist”

Sonie Marburg — who’s never, so far as we know, read Proust — drops into the Proustian “we.”

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

“Madam had been playing”: the harpsichord.

Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor : “The odors” : “Oh, piffle, you dumb-bells” : No Remington, Ticonderoga

A pallet on the floor

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

The opening sentence of Boston Adventure announces the key signatures, so to speak, of the novel: D and P. The novel is Dickensian, beginning as the story of a girlhood spent in poverty, and Proustian, beginning with sleep. Proust: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Or in Lydia Davis’s translation, “For a long time, I went to bed early.”

The moments of involuntary memory in the novel, the miniature essays that universalize the narrator’s experience into a “we” — so Proustian. But Proust’s narrator, unlike Sonie Marburg, never had to sleep on the floor.

Boston Adventure has been reissued by New York Review Books. My only relation to the link is that of a happy reader.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, Max, TCM, YouTube.]

From the Criterion Channel’s Pre-Code Divas feature

The Divorcee (dir. Robert Z. Leonard, 1930). A tour de force for Norma Shearer as Jerry, a rich young married who gets even with her one-night-stand adulterous husband Ted (Chester Morris) by having a one-night stand of her own. Her husband objects — and the movie makes clear his hypocrisy. Complications follow, in this marriage and that of Paul (Conrad Nagel) and Dorothy (Judith Wood), who married after she was disfigured in a car wreck caused by his reckless driving. Look for Robert Montgomery as Ted’s friend Don, and Charles R. Moore, a member of later Preston Sturges’s stock company as First Porter Opening Window. ★★★★

Night Nurse (dir. William A. Wellman, 1931). Here we have a new nurse, Lora (Barbara Stanwyck), her colleague and roommate Maloney (Joan Blondell), a bootlegger (name unknown until the last scene), an alcoholic mother of two young girls, and the mother’s murderous chauffeur Nick (Clark Gable), intent upon keeping the mother drunk as her daughters starve to death. (There’s a trust fund he’s after.) Toss in a drug-addicted doctor, some grim hospital jokes, and gratuitous scenes of Stanwyck and Blondell undressing, and glory in the shock of the pre-Code world. Stanwyck’s Lora has courage and smarts as the fierce protector of the helpless girls, and as — I can’t help seeing it — Mary Richards to Blondell’s Rhoda Morgenstern. ★★★★

Daughter of the Dragon (dir. Lloyd Corrigan, 1931). “I have taken the oath of a son”: so says Princess Ling Moy (Anna May Wong), vowing to exact the vengeance her father Fu Manchu (Warner Oland) demands of her as he dies. The Hamlet-like scenario is complicated by two love stories, with the princess (a professional dancer) drawing the attention of an English aristocrat (Bramwell Fletcher) and a dashing Chinese detective (Sessue Hayakawa) working with Scotland Yard. Wong is an extraordinary screen presence: her character made me think of Louise Brooks, if Louise Brooks were murderous and not just insouciant. With mind control, poisoned tobacco, a secret passageway, and moments of wild violence. ★★★★

Back Street (dir. John M. Stahl, 1932). From a novel by Fannie Hurst. True romance — or is it self-abasement? — run rampant: Ray Schmidt (Irene Dunne) gives up a position as the highest-ranking woman in her firm to live in a paid-for apartment as the mistress of banker-philanthropist Walter Saxel (John Boles). Best scene: Walter’s son confronts the adulterous pair. “There isn’t one woman in a million who’s ever found happiness in the back streets of any man’s life.” ★★★★

Three on a Match (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Three girls from P.S. 62 take different paths in life: Mary (Joan Blondell) is a thief turned showgirl; Ruth, a stenographer (Bette Davis); Vivian (Ann Dvorak), the unhappy wife of a wealthy lawyer (Warren Williams). An overheard conversation in a beauty parlor reunites the three women, with dramatic changes in fortune to follow. Dvorak is the standout here, and her desperation and courage bring the story to a shocking end. With copious alcohol, implicit cocaine, and Humphrey Bogart. ★★★★

[The other movies in this feature: Hell’s Angels, Dishonored, No Man of Her Own, Scarface, This Is the Night, Baby Face, Design for Living, I’m No Angel, and She Done Him Wrong. Also these two.]
*

Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022). I’ve never been impressed by Adam Gopnik — see his inane comments on Armstrong, Ellington, and Proust — so any movie that begins with the real Gopnik interviewing the fictional conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is already in danger of losing me. This movie did lose me: it’s one of the most pretentious I’ve seen, dropping knowing shorthand references to musical personalities and institutions with alarming frequency. Lydia Tár is driven, humorless, manipulative, sexually exploitative, and vengeful: we’re meant, I think, to ooh and aah at the posh furnishings and tsk deeply at her personal history — and tsk again, perhaps, at the punishment exacted for that history (all while not laughing at her conducting). What bugs me most is the movie’s spooky, faintly stalker-y, supernatural dimension, never made enough of: what’s it doing there? ★★ (DVD)

[For a markedly different take on the movie, see an essay by Dan Kois. It’s spoiler-rich.]

Brief Encounter (dir. David Lean, 1945), We watched it again (for the third or fourth time?) so as to share it with friends who’d never seen it, and now I’m wondering why it’s never shown up in one of these movie compilations. It’s a profoundly bittersweet movie, the story of two married people, Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who meet by chance in a train station’s refreshment room, and whose further chance meetings develop into love. And always time is running out: whistles blowing, an unseen station master announcing incoming and departing trains (the voice of Noël Coward, who adapted his play Still Life for the screenplay). Think of Dido and Aeneas in England — with a difference, because it’s England. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Manic pixie dream girls

Sweet November (dir. Robert Ellis Miller, 1968). I adore Sandy Dennis, who here plays Sara Deever, a Brooklyn Heights resident who every month chooses a new man to move in with her — just for one month — so that she can improve him. Her project for November is Charlie Blake (Anthony Newley), a British manufacturer of boxes, and a man who is, in the language of the time, uptight. For most of its length, the movie feels like a ditzy comedy, with Sara as a manic pixie dream girl and Charlie composing dopey poems and submitting to a mod makeover. That these two people will fall in love is to be expected, but things take a semi-unpredictable turn that casts a new light on all that precedes the end. ★★★★ (TCM)

After Hours (dir. Martin Scorcese, 1985). A chance encounter in a Manhattan coffeeshop pulls hapless word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) into a night of funny, sad, crazy episodes in Soho. Joseph Minion’s screenplay is deadpan funny in countless ways; I began to think of this movie as a Buster Keaton comedy — if Keaton were making the downtown scene in the 1980s. The movie is also a set of dark variations on the manic pixie dream girl, with the women Paul encounters (played by Rosanna Arquette, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and Verna Bloom) becoming ever more hazardous to his well-being. My favorite line: “It’s not even 2:00 yet.” ★★★★ (TCM)

[I thought I’d seen this movie before, but I had it confused with Something Wild (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1986.]

*

Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (dir. Hannah Olson, 2023). Amy Carlson, a McDonald’s manager, figured out that she was Mother God, God incarnate, and thus attracted a small group of followers to form Love Has Won, a community in Crestone, Colorado, a town that draws spiritual seekers. This documentary series explores Carlson’s life and death and eclectic theology, which draws upon ancient myth (the Anunnaki), New Age beliefs (portals), pop culture (Carlson was in constant communication with the dead Robin Williams, leader of “the Galactics”), and conspiracy theories (Carlson was queen of the universe, and thus the Q of QAnon), all informed by a vague Manichaeism, all fueled by generous intake of alcohol, tranquilizers, and colloidal silver. And there’s a series of Father Gods (Carlson’s lovers), the last of whom we see wearing an ankle monitor. What would make this three-part documentary more compelling: a Frontline-style narrator, a voice of sanity to counter the unrelieved blather of Carlson’s followers. ★★★ (M)

*

Man’s Castle (dir. Frank Borzage, 1933). In Depression Manhattan, Bill (Spencer Tracy) and Trina (Loretta Young) shack up together — literally, living without benefit of marriage in a makeshift encampment off Park Avenue. Bill, who’s more than a bit of a jerk, has itchy feet — he’s always alert to train whistles and birds taking flight, even with his caring, self-sacrificing, incredibly beautiful partner by his side. A showgirl with money (Glenda Farrell) and a camp hothead (Arthur Hohl) cause trouble; an old alkie (Marjorie Rambeau) is there to step in as a deus ex machina. Remarkably pre-Code, with Bill and Trina lying in a bed together — withnot one foot on the floor. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942). Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale, a young woman deeply damaged by a tyrannical mother (Gladys Cooper). A sister-in-law’s intervention brings Charlotte to a forward-thinking psychiatrist (Claude Rains), who helps her to develop the means to a life of greater freedom. Enter Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), an architect, unhappily married. After seeing this movie a second time, I think it’d make a great double-bill with Brief Encounter: happiness is happiness, however fleeting, however partial. ★★★★ (TCM)

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All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Proust and turbines

From The Times: “Remembrance of things past halts turbines in Proust country”:

The Council of State, the highest bench for litigation involving the state, rejected a project to install eight 150-metre tall wind turbines within sight of the town where the writer spent his childhood summers, now named llliers-Combray, southwest of Chartres.

The article can be read only in part without a subscription, but there’s enough to get the gist of it.

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James Joyce holiday cards

The Reader’s Catalog, a New York Review of Books enterprise, is offering James Joyce holiday cards, six for $29.95. The card has an illustration of a man in suspenders looking dreamily at the night sky. Next to the picture, a partial sentence from “The Dead,” source unidentified:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.

So cozy. But look at the entire (final) sentence of “The Dead”:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Not cozy. Not cozy at all!

Random House’s Proust gift tags and note cards (no longer available) also took statements out of context and wildly distorted their meanings.

In search of lost passage

Elif Batuman asked ChatGPT to find a passage from Proust, something about love affairs in the past and present. Here’s what happened.

I think that the passage Batuman was looking for (and still is looking for?) might be this one, from the narrator’s recollections of the “young girls in flower” of his youth, girls who are now much older or already dead:

It was painful for me to have to retrieve these for myself, for time, which changes individuals, does not modify the image we have of them. Nothing is sadder that this contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory, when we understand that what we have kept so fresh in our memory no longer has any of that freshness in real life, and that we cannot find a way to come close, on the outside, to what which appears so beautiful within us, which arouses in us a desire, seemingly so personal, to see it again, except by looking for it in a person of the same age, that is to say in another being. It is simply, as I had often had reason to suspect, that what seems unique in a person whom one desires does not in fact belong to her. But the passage of time was giving me a more complete proof of this since, after twenty years, spontaneously, I was trying to find, not the girls whom I had known, but those who now possessed the youth that the others had had then.

Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

Unlike Elif Batuman and ChatGPT, I have that passage (or most of it) at hand in a post about Proust gift tags and note cards. But that passage might not be the one in question.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Reunion

Steven Millhauser, “The Place,” in Voices in the Night (2015).

Reminiscent of the Bal des têtes [masked ball] in Proust’s Time Regained. Proust’s narrator, who has been away from society for many years because of long illnesses and hospital stays, thinks he’s attending a costume party and that everyone has been made up to look old. And then he realizes: no, they are old.

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Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

One thing hurt me, which you certainly did not say out of malice! At the moment, when I am to publish Sodome et Gomorrhe, and when, because I talk about Sodome no one will have the courage to defend me, you (without malice, I am sure) blaze the trail in advance for all the mischief makers by calling me “feminine.” From feminine to effeminate is a mere step. My seconds in duels can tell you whether I behave with the weakness of an effeminate man. Again, I am sure that you said this without malice aforethought.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Paul Souday, November 6–8, 1920. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Paul Souday (1869–1929): journalist, literary critic for Le Temps. He wrote a largely negative review of Swann’s Way for Le Temps but later claimed to be the first critic to have discovered Proust. For a previous Proust letter to Souday, see this 2021 birthday post.

Proust, a duellist? In February 1897 he fought a duel with pistols with the writer Jean Lorrain, who had published a nasty review of Pleasures and Days. Neither man was hit. Proust’s primary concern “was not the bullets but having to rise, dress, and go out in the morning. Fortunately, his seconds were able to arrange an afternoon confrontation”: William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

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Public Domain Day

Today is Public Domain Day (Duke University School of Law). Featuring Louis Armstrong, Willa Cather, George and Ira Gershwin, Frank Kafka, Fritz Lang, Marcel Proust, and Bessie Smith, and many more.

While at the DUSL site, take a look at Theft: A History of Music, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins.

A new Swann in Love

From Pushkin Press, Swann in Love, translated by Lucy Raitz and billed by the publisher as “the perfect introduction to one of the world’s great novelists.” The Washington Post has a review (caution: it’s all spoilers).

I dunno: I’d think of “Combray,” the first section of Swann’s Way, as the perfect introduction to Proust. After all, it’s the beginning to the novel, and it gives the reader the madeleine, which to my mind is all one needs to want to keep going.

Here is the first paragraph of “Un amour de Swann,” as translated by Raitz and by Lydia Davis:

[Lucy Raitz, 2022.]

[Lydia Davis, 2004.]

And the original:

[Marcel Proust, 1913.]

What do you notice?

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[I’ve omitted note numbers for Planté, Rubinstein, and Potain from both translations.]