In Search of Lost Time Volume II Within a Budding Grove [Paperback]

Having just finished reading WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE for the fourth time, it remains (with SWANN'S WAY) at the top of my list of favorite novels. Influenced by John Ruskin, Henri Bergson, Wagner and the fiction of Anatole France, in his "universality and deep awareness of human nature," Proust (1871-1922) is considered "as primordial as Tolstoy," and "as wise as Shakespeare" (Harold Bloom, GENIUS, p. 218).

I most recently returned to Proust's BUDDING GROVE through the Modern Library's 2003 edition of the Montcrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Volumes I through VI. Through a continued series of what Walter Pater has called "privileged moments," or what James Joyce might call "epiphanies," the narrative of WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE gracefully transitions away from the childhood recollections of SWANN'S WAY, to the narrator's exquisite memories of his adolescence spent with his grandmother in the seaside setting of Balbec. We find that Charles Swann's turbulent affair with the "illiterate courtesan" (p. 124), Odette de Crecy, has resulted in marriage; and although the narrator's "enchantment" with Swann's daughter, Gilberte, gradually fades, he soon encounters unrequited love once again upon meeting the "charming, pretty, intelligent" and "quite witty" (p. 116) Albertine Simonet. In Volume II, Proust further develops his notion that human love is synonymous with suffering, failure, exhaustion, ruin, and despair. To love and believe in a woman completely becomes the "cause of the greatest suffering" (p. 713). "There can be no peace of mind in love," Proust's narrator reflects, "since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for future desires" (p. 213). "In reality," he adds, "there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excrutiating" (p. 214). WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, much like SWANN'S WAY, is by no means a feel-good novel. Proust reveals that while love may allow us to touch the sublime, it also teaches us that there are no limits to human suffering.

In Volume II of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Proust introduces us to all the major characters of his subsequent volumes. Serious readers will experience uncommon pleasure in reading Proust. SWANN'S WAY and WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE are perfect examples of why it's worth one's time to read "a good book." In fact, a life without experiencing the rich pleasures of reading Proust would be real poverty.

G. Merritt

Searching for ideals seems to be the young Marcel's goal in life. Whether he is enamored with the actress Berma at the theater, the writings of his literary model Bergotte, or the paintings of the artist Elstir, he immerses himself headlong into what he believes to be the supreme examples of artistic experience and absorbs the impressions so that he may reflect them in his own future writing. Oddly enough, his feminine ideal is no girl of his own age but Odette, the courtesan who was the obsession of his parents' friend Swann in the previous volume and is now Swann's wife, and whose checkered past casts a lingering shadow over her husband's social status, excluding them from the higher strata of Paris society (the Faubourg Saint-Germain) and keeping Swann suspicious about her behavior with other men.

Marcel is trying to develop a relationship with the Swanns' lovely, lively red-haired daughter Gilberte, and he agonizes over the fear that he will not succeed in impressing upon her parents that he is good enough for her. It may seem strange that an adolescent Marcel should spend so much time talking about the Swanns, as though they were potential in-laws, rather than his own parents, but this is an indication of his preoccupying desire for Gilberte's company. Finally he comes to the realization that she does not feel the same way about him as he does about her, which accompanies his bitter shock at seeing her with another boy. Long after his passion for her has faded, however, he still treasures his memories of the time he has spent in Odette's salon.

The second half of this volume concerns Marcel's summer sojourn with his grandmother in Balbec, a seaside resort. There he meets his grandmother's friend Madame de Villeparisis, whose father spent the nineteenth century hobnobbing with all the great French writers of the era, and befriends her grandnephew Robert de Saint-Loup, a young man a little older than himself, who is embarking on a military career. One day he notices a remarkably attractive girl walking a bicycle with a group of her friends; this turns out to be Albertine, with whom he forms a relationship that is more playful than the tense one he had with the frigid Gilberte but ends sourly with a refused kiss and a confused Marcel pondering her intentions.

Marcel's hypersensitive nature grants him many advantages as a narrator, giving him the ability to overanalyze every situation that shapes his consciousness, but arguably limits his lifestyle. His parents coddle him about his health, even supposing an evening at the theater will debilitate him, and, as we see at Balbec, he accustoms himself to a new setting in an abnormally awkward manner. But perhaps his awkwardness, in love as in life, can be explained partly by the nymphic philosophy by which Odette guides her life: "You can do anything with men when they're in love with you, they're such idiots!" The truth hurts.

Proust published "Swann's Way" in 1913, and waited 6 years to publish Volume 2, "Within a Budding Grove"; I presume that in the interim he reorganized his ideas, deciding to expand his novel and explore his themes in greater detail. This volume is much more leisurely and intricately paced than the first, as Proust masterfully tells us of the end of his relationship with Gilberte, his relocation to Balbec, and the beginning of his relationship with Albertine. The slow dying of love, the vaguely confusing experience of a new dwelling as it gradually becomes a home, watching beautiful young girls (the "budding grove" of the title) enjoying their beauty and youth as they walk down a city street...these things and more are plumbed and ruminated upon, with Proust's typically intricate and gorgeous language.

These books, if the first two are any guide, are like nothing ever attempted in the history of literature. Rather than dealing with WHAT happened, Proust settles himself in for the long haul to try and understand WHY it happened; to quote Christopher Hitchens, Proust "exposes and clarifies the springs of human motivation...with a transparency unexampled except in Shakespeare or George Eliot." But I don't think Bill nor George ever dug this deep; Marcel Proust is absolutely one of a kind, and he's not easy to read in this world of flash-images and expressways. He takes his time. Though he was dying with every labored breath (he didn't live to see the entire novel published), Proust was in no hurry to finish. His thoughts, like his sentences, have multiple branches. Follow them and you'll cherish the experience like it was your own.

Moving on to Volume 3.....