In Search of Lost Time, Vol. II: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

"Penguin, again, tries to capture the original French more literally. In that edition I think it is called something like ‘In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.’ Which is more accurate, but doesn’t trip off the tongue. Again, I like the less accurate title here. And, actually, that’s a little theme in Proust. When do you want the truth? Oftentimes you do, and you’re frustrated when you can’t get it. But there are times when a bit of benevolent, harmless self-deception can be preferable. This leads us to the second volume, where the narrator of this first-person novel makes a little trip to a seaside town called Balbec in a train. Proust’s narrator loves train travel. Later on, he drives a little bit in a car and he notices that car travel gives you more accuracy but less enchantment. And at the end of the day, in a situation that is not like—you know—a medical diagnosis, where you really need the truth, why not go for the enchantment? The train almost magically takes you somewhere else. In those days, train travel seemed almost impossibly rapid. I mean, it was already maybe 100 years old, but nonetheless it could whisk you from one place to another place, and you had the feeling of the world being divided into magically unique and distinct zones. Go to sleep in Paris, wake up in Florence. As though you were in a different world. What you don’t want to do is make that same schlep in the car, where you notice all the gradations. So, that’s a recurring theme in Proust, that occasionally the truth isn’t what you want. It continues the flavour of the end of the first volume. For the most part, it is light and bright. I think of the whole novel as having a ski jump shape over the 3,000 pages. You start off reasonably high, go down and down and down with increasing rapidity and terror, until suddenly you have lift-off and soar majestically into the sky. So, here, we are still at a decent elevation. In the second volume, there is travel, excursions within Balbec, you’re meeting a lot of people—some a bit weird, some friends for life—and the character’s grandmother is there. She is all kindness, with a huge heart. We also meet a new love interest, who turns out to have a mole on her chin, except no, it’s actually on her cheek, except no, it’s actually on her lip. It’s a really interesting move by the narrator, to trick us that way. Lots happens in this volume, but maybe the biggest thing is a visit to an artist’s studio. Now, I’m saying this not as a ‘war’ guy, or a ‘peace’ guy, but an aesthetics guy. There are three prominent artists in the novel—a painter, Elstir; a composer, Vinteuil; and a novelist, Bergotte. Here we have the character looking at some paintings by Elstir and having deep thoughts about what art is capable of doing. Yes and no. It’s so many things. It’s a novel about selfhood, what it means to be ‘you.’ (What happens if you change across time?) It’s a novel that thinks about time and memory. It’s a novel that thinks about same-sex love. It’s a novel that thinks about love more broadly—sometimes the character calls it a ‘disease.’ Is love a disease? Does it always have to involve jealousy? So, it’s a book about a lot of things, but yes, art is one of the biggest questions it raises. What can art do for us? That’s an enormously important question the novel keeps thinking about, and it’s connected to a question about enchantment—whether a world without God can be re-enchanted. This is not a character that believes in God, but he really seems to be looking for something like God. He wants the world to be mysterious again. He wants the world to have wonder. He wants epiphanies, a new kind of infinity, new forms of depth and order. Yes, that’s right. So if you are more of a fan of the social portrait side of Proust, then you are going to like this volume. It’s a kind of Balzac side of Proust, and he does it very well. He does everything very well. But I’m not that kind of person. There are a couple of things in there that I like a lot. There’s a segment about art, where the narrator—on one of his visits to high society—makes a special pilgrimage to a painting. It’s a beautiful scene. And there are some brilliantly savage depictions of the aristocracy. In one, an aristocratic couple are waiting for a carriage to take them to a party. They talk to an old, close friend, and ask him if they will see him at such-and-such event. He says: probably not, I’ll be dead by then. He’s been told by his doctors he doesn’t have long to live. And instead of staying to console their friend of many years, they go to the party. They tell him: I’m sure that’s not true, you’ll outlive us all! And that licenses them to go on. So there are some wonderful things in there, and in the fourth volume— Sodom and Gomorrah — as well. The title is obviously an allusion to the biblical story, which is often taken to be a punishment for same-sex love. The fourth volume is heavily taken up with same-sex love in Parisian society. And it’s brilliantly done. (The part I’m less excited about, again, involves the endless dinner party conversations and salon events.) If you’re tempted to skim volumes three and four, I highly recommend spending time with the first part of volume four. It’s very short, maybe 30 pages, and it’s a fantastic scene of two men finding each other in a kind of miraculous way. And I won’t say more than that, because it’s so great and I don’t want to spoil it. Yes, exactly. Proust himself, as a person in the world, was gay, and when he was drawing these portraits of the world of same-sex love in Parisian society, he knew what he was talking about. But, yes, he created a character who isn’t gay and is completely mystified. It’s almost funny, right? He’s so obtuse, and not only obtuse but sometimes bigoted. But he goes back and forth. He has moments of thinking, maybe same-sex desire is fine, and no different to any other kind of desire—which, by the way, doesn’t necessarily mean great, because he thinks of all love as a disease, so he thinks people are going to suffer regardless of whether they like people of the other or the same sex. He even has moments of thinking that same-sex love is something wonderful. However, he has moments of castigating it as a “vice.” So it’s an interesting move on Proust’s part to create a character who, unlike himself, is straight, and as you say, so straight sometimes as to be homophobic. This is the character through whom we are getting this depiction of a world of same-sex love. Still, there are interesting moments, especially in this first part of volume four, which is about the community of gay men and lesbian women who—unlike the communities that this character spends most of him time in, these stifling, aristocratic salons full of petty rivalries and vanity—form connections based on something genuine and important. This is a complicated world, complicated not just by external persecution but by internalised prejudice, sometimes, as well. But it’s a world where people meet and bond over something that is really part of who they are. It was very dangerous to be open, and Proust himself was not ‘out.’ I mean, even Oscar Wilde was not ‘out,’ exactly, but his preferences were sufficiently known about that he got into trouble with the authorities. Proust knew about stories like that; it was a very bad time for gay men at the turn of the 20th century. In his biography of Proust , Edmund White described Proust as “closeted,” even though “everyone near him knew he was gay.” So, in short, there was a concern to preserve confidentiality at a broader level."