GEORGE ELIOT (LADY EVANS): “MIDDLEMARCH. A study of provincial life”

 

GEORGE ELIOT (LADY EVANS): “MIDDLEMARCH. A study of provincial life”

 

Any writer who begins the first chapter with such a simple and charming phrase must be able to write, at least, one marvelous novel:                                                                                                          

 “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”[1]

 And after eight-hundred and thirty-eight pages (yes, 838…), one has to conclude that, indeed, the authoress did accomplish the task. Middlemarch. A study of provincial life, published between 1871-72 by the pen-name of George Eliot, belonging to May Ann (Marian) Evans (*1819-†1880), whom, after reading her novels, I took the decision to call henceforth only “Lady Evans”.

 Already as a young woman, Lady Evans fascinated the intellectuals of London, in the main thanks to her translations, and her initial work as an editor and critic. By her early 20s she had a solid grounding in Greek and Latin, as well as German, having translated David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus (1846), “Das Leben Jesus, kritisch bearbeitet” (first edition 1835), later Ludwig Feuerbach The Essence of Christianity (1854, “Das Wesen des Christentums” (first edition 1841). In 1851 she met George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), with whom she started living together, although Lewes was a married man, and could not divorce. A long trip to Germany in 1854 allows them to live almost like a legal married couple, but the trip also introduces her to la crème de la crème of German cultural life. It is usually assumed that Lewes convinced her, she should do “some literature of her own”.

 

 

Cover: detail from a salted paper print from a calotype negative of the statuette of La Venus d’Arles by William Henry Fox Talbot, c. 1840s.

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 The guidance for my voyage through the opus of Lady Evans, which began in 2017, rested chiefly on a good Londoner friend of mine, ANGLORVM LINGVA LITTERARVM PERITVS, mostly active at and around the British Library, whom I know since the end of the 1980s. The Londoner peritvs suggested, to begin with:

 “I had already connected you in one respect with George Eliot because her time in Berlin was so important to her writing at the crucial early stage. I expect you know about her elopement with George Lewes which took them first to Berlin and to Weimar where they were received by List and his Polish wife Caroline.

 Lewes himself was her guide to German literature (as he also to her reading of Shakespeare), and he supplied her with a number of recent publications by German or Swiss German writers who were experimenting in the genre of the Dorfgeschichte- the village story.

 I won't name specific writers or works here but simply advise you that when you read The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861) (my recommendations here) you must be aware that to a significant degree the characters, the descriptions, and even the complexities of the plots have all being borrowed from her reading- some French some Polish but mostly German writers.

 To ensure that her early novels had authenticity for the English reader (and John Blackwood was the key figure here), G H and Mary Ann Evans (her real name) made extended travels into specific parts of England in the summer months to discover locations, and breathe the true English air.”

 About a week after the email of the Londoner peritvs, I answered as follows:

 “Dear...

 I have just finished a first reading of The Mill on the Floss. Graciously written, a delightful and intelligent humour, especially with regard to Latin, a mastery of dialect again, like Thomas Hardy later – and yet, getting to about one third of the novel I was asking myself: “Where on earth is this Lady taking us?” Up to there, it all looked to me like a perhaps more spiritually elevated female version of Mark Twain (*1835-†1910), ex ante. I had been enjoying to the utmost his Huckleberry Finn (1884), last year, in the original American text. Then comes the “family ruin”, and the whole world is turned upside down. The book as well. A rule, perhaps, for coming young writers: Nothing better than a full-blown tragedy, including the cacophony of casseroles and silvery being taken away by the bailiffs, to “tense” the narrative, to wake us up and await anxiously the coming events.

 A female Bildungsroman, a genre she was fully aware of, begins to take shape, taking the upper hand on the marktwainian Dorfgeschichte she was advancing before. Her portrayal of the inner changes in Maggie is extremely well done. No young man of some taste and moral elevation will fail to fall in love with her (including myself…). “

 Shortly afterwards, the Londoner peritvs answered:

 “I too fell in love with Maggie when I first read it- very young and well before I had learned that literature is an art, and that its effects can be contrived- our emotions manipulated.”

 After more than 150 years, the writing of Lady Evans is still capable of stirring up deep emotions in grown-up male. And many others.

We then went to read Silas Marner, to which we hope to come back much later on in this blog.

It would be absurd to attempt to present herewith even half-a-résumé of what not few people consider to be one of the finest English novels of all times. Middlemarch is a fictitious universe created to portrait, and to de-construct in detail “provincial life”, as it might have been sometime between the late 1820s and early 1830s, somewhere in the English Midland (with a brief interlude in Rome, Italy). There are many political and social events boiling up in the background, including the arrival of the early railways, improvements in the medical science, and key political reforms, like the 1832 Reform Act, which introduced major changes in the electoral system in England and Wales.

 Yet it is the portrayal of the inner turbulences and aspirations of the key characters, and the way they interrelate in that provincial milieu which conforms the backbone of the novel, a realistic one, perhaps also a historical novel, above all a tratactus on the psychology of male and females, from the point of view of a woman, Lady Evans, who combines classy humour, biting irony (not always scenting of malice), and acute debunking of the hidden motives of human beings, either well-off, or struggling somewhere in the social ladder.

Let us concentrate on the figure of Dorothea Brooke:

“Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her statute and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible...”[2]

Dorothea does not want the follow the expected traditional role of a woman at that time, marry a rich gentleman, breed children, and learn to be satisfied with that. She aspires to a high status of knowledge, wisdom and artistic realization. She desperately wants to find someone who would help her to improve her Latin and grant her the basics of Ancient Greek.

Against the advice of her sister Celia‒perhaps not as clever as Dorothea, yet more perceptive, and mistrustful of logorrhea‒she falls into a feverish infatuation with the clergyman Casaubon, much older than her:

 “Dorothea was altogether captivated (…) Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies’ school literature: here was a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.”[3]

 Thus ensued marriage, “a disastrous one”, as it would start to become evident during the voyage des noces in Italy,

 Yet it could well have been the case that Mr. Casaubon was not only incapable of satisfying Dorothea’s durst for a higher intellect rooted on the Ancient Classics. Perhaps there was another level, at which this “disillusion” took a concrete shape.

 It is the beginning of Chapter 28, which begins with the arrival of the newly-wed, from their honeymoon, Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon, back to England, “in the middle of January. A light snow was falling...”[4] In the first twenty-six lines the words “white, brightness, snow”, and related,  are repeated about fifteen times. 

 In the middle of line 18:

 “...there was a red life in her lips, her throat had a breathing whiteness above the different white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling down her blue-grey pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the crystalline purity of the out-door snow.”[5]

 

Censorship was then very binding, in particular with regard to explicit, and also implicit, references to intimate intercourse, or just simple caresses.  Much more so, if it referred to a clergyman. It would take decades for those restrictions to be lifted, gradually and hesitantly. Even in 1940, in the black-and-white film version of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, “the clergyman Mr. Collins” disappeared, to give place to an anodyne and professionally undefined character, as censors would not have accepted such an ironic portrayal of a God’s servant.

 Is then the authoress using the recurrence of “whiteness” in a liaison with “purity” and “innocence” to indicate, that the marriage as such was not properly consummated, neither in Italy, nor in England, as required by religion, law and social norms?”

 The London peritvs was, at first, sceptical regarding my interpretation, attributing it perhaps to this humble scribbler having put on his “French-Spanish” spectacles, while reading those particular pages:

 “But this is England and it (or rather she), is George Eliot.  This accumulation of colour adjectives and nouns is a favoured technique. The design is to intensify everything: we understand Dorothea's intensity through this re-iteration of remarks re her dress, her skin and the elements in the world through her window.

That's how I would explain it (inexpertly). I can however refer you to a whole chapter devoted to this chapter in a “Companion to George Eliot”, 2013. The author is a prof of English at John Hopkins. - Andrew H. Miller.

This will give you a better idea of how the higher criticism treats Eliot's prose and the technical terms it uses- intimation, attention, etc., metonymic.

Your reading is, however, perhaps the more interesting‒it suggests how a French or Spanish reader might understand what was being said, or implied.

Miller suggests that it is this very compounding of images, this intensifying, which elevates Eliot to the highest plane of achievement in English novel writing of her era.”

 Well may that be the case. Yet we cannot but remain curious about “too much of a coincidence” in the words chosen in those lines.

 An example of the richness of the text, of the many layers behind the surface of letters of words, which, at times goes by, acquires new dimensions, unleashes hidden codes, demands a new reading.

 Lady Evans was no doubt one of the most remarkable British femmes de lettres of the 19^th century. She constructed dialogues capable of enticing any reader, and possessed a breath-taking ability to portray, in few lines, the facade and the inner core of the characters:

 “The remark was taken up by Mr. Chichley, a middle-aged bachelor and coursing celebrity, who had a complexion something like an Easter egg, a few hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of a distinguished appearance. “[6]

 Or the mother of the Rev. Camden Farebrother, a no-nonsense, down-to-earth Protestant lady, who knew her catechism, convinced that beyond the Prayer-book there was nothing to be learnt, and no need to change opinion (“If you change once, why not twenty times?”):

 “My mother is like old George the Third”, said the vicar, “she objects to metaphysics.”[7]

 

George Eliot. A replica by François d’Albert Durade, oil on canvas, 1850-1886, based on a work of 1850.

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Let us just celebrate Lady Evans, her unique parcours, as an independent woman in a society which did not tolerate such a deviance, as a talented writer, as an acute gazer and crystalliser through words of the world surrounding her. Quintessentially English, yes, perhaps, but also very much opened to what Germany and Italy had to offer then.

 Above all, true to herself, to her dreams and feelings. As stated in the poem which epigraphs Chapter 56:

 “How happy is she born and taught,

That serveth not another’s will? 

Whose armour is her honest thought,

And simple truth her only skill?

 

This woman is freed from servile hands

Of hope to rise, or fear to fall:

Lady of herself, though not of lands,

And having nothing, yet hath all.”[8]

 

 

 

 

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[1]P. 7. “Middlemarch”, George Eliot, Penguin Classics, edited with an introduction by Rosemary Ashton, 1994.

[2] P. 7.

[3]P. 25.

[4]P. 273.

[5]Ibid.

[6]P. 89.

[7]P. 169-170.

[8]P. 552, Sir Henry Wotton, The Character of Happy Life, 1651.  We changed the original masculine pronouns and possessives.

MARCEL PROUST : Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu I). Second part.

 

MARCEL PROUST : Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu I). Second part.

 

Proust belongs to the “late encounters” in my literary biography, although I was aware of him, and glanced rather hastily at some pages of À la recherche..., decades ago. That was the epoch of being more obsessed with trying to decode the “economic” and “political” bottlenecks, real or apparent blind alleys, as well as revolutionary proposals, inebriated by moody voluntarism, of our societies, particularly in developing countries. To engage too much time and energy (which is what Proust demands from his readers) in deciphering the divertimenti, imbrogli, amoretti, and

Cover of the Gallimard edition „folio classique“, 2017, detail of Portrait de Madame Charles Max, by Giovanni Boldini, Musée d‘Orsay, Paris.

 tradimenti of the French (rather Parisian, perhaps...) haute bourgeoisie at the peak and the (end?)  of the belle époque before the First World War seemed to me, then, a useless venture, perhaps even an immoral one. I am extremely glad to be able to report that such a “black-and-white” prism has been substantially eroded by time. And by all that goes with it.

 

The decisive encounter took place mid-2011. Living in Spain, I was on my way to South America, making what I thought was going to be a short stop in Paris. Yet black clouds arising over the political horizon in one of those countries, “down there”, forced me to extend my Parisian sojourn, in an hotel in the 14^th arrondissement. Not far from the Rue Daguerre (where I lived for a whole year in 1998), I found a copy of Du côté de chez Swann in a second-hand bookshop, and said to myself, “well, now or never…” The owner, a tall man with a large white beard, looked at me with very much perplexed eyes, saying “are you really going to read this? No one does it nowadays...” He was, of course, exaggerating—though perhaps not that much.

 

It is thus how I began my long, cyclical, off-and-on expedition trough À la recherche..., which has landed me, up to now, at the end of the 3^rd volume, Le côté de Guermantes, after having read, and re-read, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, second volume.

 

A first confession has to be admitted. As I start reading Proust, almost always, a poisonous irritation sets upon myself, parallel to a feeling of being forced to do something I should not. It takes about ten, fifteen minutes for that indisposition to fade away, at a slow pace. I believe it has to do with the frustration of not finding “solid ground”, of looking (unsuccessfully) for a kind of Ariadne’s thread which will guide me through the labyrinth. The latter is indeed there, the former also, yet invisible. This irritating prelude is akin to someone stumbling across thick fog, looking for the house which should shelter him, becoming increasingly uneasy at not bumping onto the right path.  

 

Then one just seems to float in a bathtub full of perfumed cotton, letting oneself be transported by the text, which steadily acquires the form a very long dream, a Bruckner symphony, where each moment is in itself a separate symphony.

 

This volume is divided into three parts. The first one is “Combray”, signifying today “Illiers-Combray (re-baptised as such by President Pompidou in 1971, to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Marcel Proust), where his father, Adrien Proust, was born.  It encapsulates mostly the numerous voyages undertaken from Paris to the town where his parents still kept a house, the sojourns thither, the efforts by a child and then a teenager to reconstruct dreams and reality (and the mixture of both), postponing sleep until the weight of souvenirs imposed its law. The teenager constructs his own paradise through books and reproductions of painting and architecture. Both Monsieur Swann and the Guermantes are introduced.

 

“Un homme qui dort, tient en cercle autour de lui le fil des heures, l’ordre des années et des mondes. »[1]

 

It is there, in bed, when the great battle of the memories begins, the struggle to recall the souvenirs, to fix the real experience with persons and art in the unconscious, for ever. So that they might resurface, at their own will, whenever they are needed to console and illuminate the path towards the extinction of life. Proust was, from his earlier hours, a hyper-sensitive human-being. He needs only, either the soundless flaring of the wings of a butterfly, or the reflections of sunshine onto the painted glasses of the church in Combray, or anywhere, for that “other-world” to be reborn.

 

The second part, “Deuxième partie. Un amour de Swann”, often sold separate as an independent novel, begins with one of the most delicious paragraphs of the whole volume:

 

“Pour faire partie du « petit noyau «, du « petit groupe «, du « petit clan « des Verdurin, une condition était suffisante mais elle été nécessaire: il fallait adhérer tacitement à un Credo dont un des articles était que le jeune pianiste, protégé par Mme. Verdurin cette année-là et dont elle disait:»Ça ne devrait pas  être permis de savoir jouer Wagner comme ça!», enfonçait à la fois Planté et Rubinstein...»[2]

 

Cover of the Gallimard Edition, „Un amour de Swann“, prefaced by Volker Schlöndorff, portraying Monsieur Swann (Jeremy Irons) and Odette (Ornella Mutti). 

Yes, Proust was a “Wagnerian”, as were Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, J.R. Tolkien and many others, hence one might wish to capitalize on that cognisance, to be able to navigate more at ease through the Proustian ocean. And not altogether directionless. 

 

The axe of this part of the novel is the relationship between Monsieur Swann and the odalisque Odette, an odd and unstable liaison (socially a faux-pas which would render Monsieur Swann a pariah in the salons of the haute-bourgeoisie), plagued by jealousies, betrayals and obsessions. When Monsieur Swann could not see her, as she has travelled elsewhere, he

 

“… il se plongeait dans les plus enivrant des romans d’amour: l’indicateur des chemins de fer, qui lui apprenait les moyens de la rejoindre, l’après-midi, le soir, ce matin même!”[3]

 

The most exhilarating romance-novel: the timetable of the trains which could make a  tête-à-tête possible, at the urge of a whim, as soon as possible… Many will find one’s own echo in this concrete example of one of the techniques in the outillage of Proust’s narrative: that of injecting magic into the most unsuspected, even trivial objects of daily life.

 

An aged (and ill) Monsieur Swann (Jeremy Irons) paying his respects to the Comtesse de Guermantes (Fanny Ardant), under the eyes of the Compte de Guermantes (Jacques Boudet), 1984.

 

The third part, „Troisème partie. Noms de pays: le nom”, is centred on the fictitiously-named Balbec. (largely inspired by Cabourg, on the French Atlantic coast), with the Gran Hôtel de la Plage occupying the centre of the stage. Balbec seems to have been an old family-name in France, though there is the phonetic coincidence with Baalbek, Lebanon, known in antiquity as the Greek Heliopolis, “the city of the sun”. It has already been suggested that the coincidence was not such, rather a chosen signal by the author. 

 

It is the shortest of the three parts of the volume (44 pages out of more than 400), yet perhaps the densest, and the richest in terms of metaphors with regard to the literary reconstruction of the places where the young man seemed to have achieved happiness (or expect to achieve it). What does he dream of, while in Balbec? Of Florence, Venice, Pisa…:

“Sans doute si alors j’avais fait moi-même plus attention à ce qu’il avait dans ma pensée quand je prononçais les mots « aller à Florence, à Parme, à Pise, à Venise « je me serais rendu compte que ce que je voyais n’était nullement une ville, mais quelque chose d’aussi différent de tout ce que je connaissais, d’aussi délicieux ; que pourrait être pour une humanité dont la vie se serais toujours écoulée dans des fins d’après-midi d’hiver, cette merveille inconnue : une matinée de printemps. « [4]

 

What is paradise? Quite simple, it is the arrival of a spring morning in a civilization which has only known hitherto wintery afternoons.

 

And he also dreams about Gilberte, the young lady he used to wait for at the Champs-Elysées. His descriptions of the emotions and the hide-and-seek imbroglios with the young lady do not fail to turn the reader into a becalmed yet also enthusiastic admirer of the writer.

 

 Leaving aside the usual small minority of aesthetes and writers who would not be put off by the apparent boredom of a lengthy text, or the tedious descriptions of social gatherings, and beyond the requirements of syllabi at the Licée in France, and at some universities, at home and abroad, is it worth reading Proust nowadays? The answer is affirmative, at least in the sense of a paleontology approach, which seeks to fix for ever the rites, moers and tastes of the French aristocracy between the end of the 19^th at the beginning of the 20^th century, and of the “haute” – perhaps also not too “haute” - bourgeoisie, seeking to be accepted, or at least respected, by the descendants of the elite which used to run France until 1789.

 

Marcel Proust may belong to that special category of most mentioned, but less read novelists, which can also apply to James Joyce. Between 2004 and 2012, 790.000 copies were sold of Proust’s books, occupying the 38^th position in a ranking of the first 50 “classical” authors (including foreigners) sold in France, Agatha Christie in the 6^th position with 2.650.000 copies and the Austrian Stefan Zweig in the 7^th, with 2.510.000 copies [5]

 

Yet there is more, a “Proustian” Weltanschauung, a vision-of-the-world which has not been constructed as an aleatory, perhaps even arbitrary combination (“Enfin je trouve un lecteur qui devine que mon livre est un ouvrage dogmatique et une construction! »[6], rather on a systematic attempt to discover “une realité plus profonde”[7] underneath the images we perceive from the material world, and the surface of the dreams, the mementos, imposed upon us.

 

To navigate through the Proustian ocean may equal swimming in opaque waters, looking for tiny diamonds, three-four feet below. Many will wonder whether the effort justifies itself, others will point out to more contemporary, easier-to-access novelists. But the diamonds, down on the seabed, ils y sont.

 

One should perhaps imitate the Marilyn Monroe’s method, while reading Ulysses of James Joyce. Just jump at any page, from time to time, and then at another. One may go forwards, and then backwards. One could begin by the end, and end by the beginning. What the text has to offer us remains unaltered. There is, then, “substance” ...

 

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[1]P. 5

[2]P. 185

[3]P. 288

[4]P. 383

[5]Le top 50 des auteurs classiques les plus vendus, https://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2012/03/14/03005-20120314ARTFIG00604-le-top-50-des-auteurs-classiques-les-plus-vendus.php, 27.7.2020.

[6]Lettre de Proust à Jacques Rivière ; février 1914, p. 461.

[7]„Esquisse pour les deux côtés », p. 436.

MARCEL PROUST : Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu I).

 

MARCEL PROUST : Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu I).

 

 A few months ago we were wandering at night through one of those mixtures of dream and nightmare, echoing a discussion on European writers we had with friends in Berlin, the preceding morning. One of them said as of sudden, very loud:

 

“Marcel Proust (*1871-†1922)  is one of the most boring, yet also fascinating and relevant writers in the whole history of French literature.”

 

 “Croquet” (detail), James Tissot, Art Gallery of Hamilton (Canada). Cover of the Gallimard edition, Folio Classique, 2017, read and referred to in this post.

 

We woke up, shaken by the outrageous remark. How could anyone, even if it were just in a nightmare, utter such a statement, related to the opus magnum (and to some extent also opus unicum) of the French writer, supposed to have been qualified by Graham Greene (*1904-†1991)) as “the greatest novelist of the 20^th century”?[1] We have learned, of course, to be cautious vis-à-vis such slippery and dubious superlatives, but the English author of The Power and the Glory was not known to issue eulogies just for the sake of it.

 Yet perhaps there is a reasoning, a founded cogitation in it. The issue is the meaning of “boring”, “ennuyant” in French. Let us ask for the help of the German language, which would render “langweilig”, that is, “long-whiled”. It could mean that it takes the writer “too long” to “get to the point”, in the case of Proust many thousands of pages. But it would be unfair to apply such an adjective to a literary work which explicitly states that there is no “point” in reading it, if you happen to be looking for a “point”… It is quite apart from the traditional novel, centred on a story with a beginning, a development and an end. In fact, it is quite apart from almost anything. Volker Schlöndorff (*1939)[2], the German film-director, was also warned by his classmates in France, when at the age of sixteen he expressed his desire to read him: “Proust is boring...”[3]

 Let us summarise briefly the well-known vicissitudes of the first volume of “À la recherche...”, rejected by most of the prestigious publishing houses in Paris (including by André Gide (*1869-†1951), for the NRF, Nouvelle Revue Francaise, who later repented and begged for excuses from Proust). The “rapport de lecture” de Jacques Madeleine, having confronted the manuscript of “Du côté de chez Swann” :

 

 “Au bout des sept cent pages de ce manuscrit (...) on n’a aucune, aucune notion de ce dont il s’agit. Qu’est que ce tout cela vient faire ? Qu’est que tout cela signifie ? Ou tout cela veut-il mener ?» (...)  La lettre jointe au manuscrit apporte quelques éclaircissements (...)    Elle avoue qu’il ne se passe rien dans ces sept cent pages, que l’action n’y est pas engagé...»[4]

 700 pages were “nothing” really happens… Who is going to read it? The publishing house Fasquelle refuses it. Another prestigious maison d’édition, Ollendorf, does not hesitate to also close the doors to the ambitious author :   

                                                              
“Je suis peut-être bouché à l’émeri, mais je ne puis comprendre qu’un monsieur puisse employer trente pages à décrire comment il se tourne et se retourne dans son lit avant de trouver le sommeil »[5]

 «I might not be the smartest of fellows, but I cannot understand why a gentleman should employ thirty pages to describe how he turns and turns on his bed, before falling asleep.”

 Yet such an achievement does require talent–and stamina.

 Printed in 1913 by Grasset at the “author’s expenses”, the initial reception was not very enthusiastic.  Letters discovered not a long time ago confirm that Monsieur Proust did pay at least three journalists, to publish favourable reviews of his work, for Le Figaro and La Revue de Deux Mondes. Today’s equivalent of such” sweeteners” would be around 1,300 Euros each. It is with the Prix Goncourt, 1919, for “À l’ombre des...”, that Proust reputation and readership begins to enter a stable and solid path, within and outside France.

 Let us concentrate on the first volume, though having the next two not that far away.

“Cathédrale de Rouen. Le portrait de la Tour Saint-Romain à l‘aube“, Claude Monet. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Cover of the Gallimard edition, Folio Classique, 2001. We apologise for the derelict state of the book, but we bought it second-hand in 2011, and it then underwent further suffering during numerous voyages. Apart from constant annotations, insertion of markers and supplementary material.

We will begin by using a “film” to, first of all, state what is at stake, even now, when any attempt to “recreate” Marcel Proust is engaged. Another puzzle: Perhaps one of the less “cinematic” writers of modern times (almost no “action”), yet it seems to have had a sorcerous impact above all on cinematographers.  It is the Proustian approach which fascinates, rather than the intertwined perambulation of it dozens and dozens of characters in his novel. Edgar Reitz (*1932), the famous German film-director of Heimat[6], was asked at the end of 2013, on the occasion of the first screening of the sequel Die andere Heimat, which were the film-makers who had the greatest influence upon him:

 “None. My whole approach comes from Marcel Proust.”[7]

 The French writer keeps exercising an almost enigmatic enchantment on cinematographers and writers alike.  It makes an unexpected appearance in the historic film-version (1946)[8] of the novel of Raymond Chandler (*1888-†1959), The Big Sleep (first edition 1939), whose screenplay was the work of William Faulkner (*1897-†1962), Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman. Here is one of the iconic dialogues, perhaps the one to be remembered for ever, between Humphrey Bogart (private eye Marlowe) and Lauren Bacall:

 

 

 

 Humphrey Bogart answer is: “Come into my boudoir.” An endearing and pertinent appearance, as Chandler can be considered the classiest and relevant “opposite” of Marcel Proust in terms of narrative, the American being acknowledged as the master of “hard-boiled” thrillers.  No doubt the Nobel-Prize winner William Faulkner had a key role in drawing the rainbow between the two very much dissimilar writers.

 Decades afterwards, we find again Proust in one of the most remarkable, moving and aesthetically brilliant films of the first twenty years of the 21^st century: La Grande Bellezza, (2013), directed by Paolo Sorrentino(*1960)[9]. In the middle a huge, and noisy, probably also decadent, party of the flashy, snobbish society of Rome, a woman and a man seek to find refuge in the French writer:

 

 

 

Translating from Italian into English, the woman “I am devoting myself to my first novel, a sort of Proustian thing...”, the man: “ah, do you know that Proust is my favourite writer? “

Some efforts have been made (with mixed results) to reproduce Proust’s world onto the screen. The most remarkable is the 1984 film directed by Volker Schlöndorff, “Un amour de Swann/Eine Liebe von Swann”, a French-German co-production based on the second part of “Du côté… [10] Lead male and female figures were Jeremy Irons (Charles Swann), and Ornella Mutti (Odette). Accompanied by Alain Delon (Baron de Charlus), and a ravissante Fanny Ardant (Comptesse de Guermantes), among others.

 The “Making of the Film”[11], which is centred on an interview with Volker Schlöndorff, gives us some delicious insider details of what it means to tackle one of the “monuments” of French culture in the 20^th century. It equals throwing yourself into a wasp-nest, where highly sensitive commercial, linguistic and political issues had to be confronted with, plus the ego and the mannerisms of world-known actors and actresses.

 It seems that one branch of the Rothschild family was in possession of at least the cinematographic rights of the novel, yet they needed to make a film, in order to avoid the rights falling onto the public domain (1987). A first attempt, with Peter Brook et al conceiving the screenplay, had to be abandoned, and Schlöndorff was hired, as he had been French-educated, having also worked as assistant to Jean-Pierre Melville (*1917-†1973). The German director chose Jeremy Irons for the main male role, “Monsieur Swann”, as he was able to speak fluent French. The Italian Ornella Mutti would not have been the first choice for many (she herself was surprised by the offer…), but Schlöndorff insisted, as she could best incarnate Odette, the still young, innocent-looking courtisane . No less important, she spoke German, her mother having been born near the Baltic sea, hence the communication with the director was smooth and effective. Alain Delon was imposed right from the beginning to incarnate le baron de Charlus, as commercial proprietors of the rights were aware that a big “French name” was needed to assure the critical reception, and the expected profit-maximising revenues.

 The complex question to be answered is whether, as Schlöndorf stated,  “Kann man den Stil eines Autors verfilmen?”, you can “cinematise” the style of an author. “You cannot really film Proust, we will have a go at it anyway, to see what comes out...”

 A first solution to the overwhelming complexity of the whole oeuvre, translated onto the screen: The action is reduced to only one day (plus a short epilogue thirty years later), trying to summarise in twenty-four-hours the relationship between Swann and Odette, in “Un amour de Swann”. There is, of course, an echo of Ulysses (1922) of James Joyce (*1882-†1941), where seven hundred pages are used to describe the wanderings and the inner world, the “stream of consciousness”, of the main protagonist, during twenty-four hours. “A day which contains the whole life”, is the sub-title, or paraphrase, of the version proposed by Schlöndorff.

 A second solution, having in mind how to compensate “the lack of “action”. Great emphasis is given to the re-creation, up to the tiniest details, of the époque. Architecture, furniture, wardrobe, members of the French aristocracy participating as “extras” in many scenes, accents, postures (women of the upper class, when seated, never touched the backrest, so as to force themselves to keep their back a straight as possible) and mannerisms were all studied before, counting on the advice of experts. The jewellery for the ladies, created between the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries, was obtained on loan from Cartier, as the famous Parisian house keeps a register of all jewels sold ever since, and re-buy those originals which re-appeared at auctions. Schlöndorff: “A woman notices the difference between a true diamond, and an artificial copy. And she acts, walks, speaks differently...” It meant that for most of the shooting of the film body-guards of Cartier were present, as well as the personal one of Alain Delon, plus a shepherd dog, “which obeyed only instructions from Delon, and kept terrifying all of us” (so Schlöndorff).

 Yet the great “power game” did not take long to erupt. Delon could not accept that he was a “secondary male figure”. Returning to the shooting-location one evening (he had forgotten something) Schlöndorff finds, to his greatest astonishment, Delon and Mutti in costumes, posing embraced together, with photographers working under headlights. “What is this? You are not the couple in love of the film?”. Delon: “It is just for the family album...”  On the following Monday all newspapers and magazines in France headlined the photos, portraying Delon as the “partner” of Odette, and the main male character of the film.  Jeremy Irons was understandably devastated.  Schlöndorff also, as he feared the French would think he was an “ignorant, a barbarian German”, who knew nothing about Proust. The shooting lasted two weeks more. Schlöndorff never spoke again to Alain Delon, giving him only written instructions, transmitted by an attendant.

 We should not be surprised if we were to learn, in the near future, that the Culture Minister of France then, perhaps even the President, urged Alain Delon to “do something”, in order to avoid one of the cathedrals of French literature being “kidnapped” by an English actor, an Italian actress, and a German film-director.

 We will come back soon with a more detailed analysis of the first volume of “À la recherche...“.

 On the 18^th of May of 1922, six months before his death, Proust went to a dinner at the “Ritz” in Paris. Among his fellow diners were James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso. What could have been the main subjects of conversation?

 

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[1]Quoted as such in White, Edmund (1999), Marcel Proust, a life, Penguin, p. 2.

[2]Became a well-known director worldwide thanks to the film version of “Die Blechtrommel” (The tin drum), the novel by Gunther Grass, which received the Oscar for the best film in a foreign language in 1980. Golden Palm in Venice, 1979.

[3]“Un amour de Swann/Liebe von Swann”, Presseheft,

[4]Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, Gallimard, Collection Folio Classique,  2001. Pp 446-450. Pseudonym of Jacques Normand, who had some old scores to settle with Proust.

[5]Proust (2001), Préface d’Antoine Compagnon, p. XXII.

[6]Heimat I (first part of a trilogy) came in 1984, causing a sensation, as the audiences were asked to sit through all 15 hours 40 minutes, in four consecutive nights. “BBC 2 later screened this colossus over 11 consecutive nights, and on the channel’s 40^th birthday last year (2004), Heimat was voted one of its 40 highlights – the only foreign name on a list that ranged from “Civilisation” to “Faulty Towers”. The Independent, 04.05.2006.

[7]He has, many times, been labelled as “the Marcel Proust in the history of cinema”. An article in The Independent, on 04.05.2005, states: “The epic films of Edgar Reitz have been compared by some to the works of Tolstoy, by others to soap operas. Reitz himself says that his inspiration was Marcel Proust, and the connection seems suddenly so obvious that I’m surprised nobody has made it before.”

[8]Director, Howard Hawks. There is a 1945 version, unreleased, which was restored and released in 1997.

[9]Screenplay by Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello, Toni Servillo in the main male role. Awarded the Oscar in 2013 for the best film in a foreign language, idem by the Golden Globe Awards (2014) and the British Academy Film Awards (2014).  The epigraph at the beginning of the film is a quote from the novel Voyage au bout de la nuit, de Louis-Ferdinand Céline (*1894-†1961).

[10]Original screenplay by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carriere, Marie-Helene Estienne. Retained by Schlöndorff.

[11] #Making of the film, 2008