The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 3 September 2007
by Marcel Proust
This book is the fourth of seven volumes of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's popular translation of Proust's massive semi-autobiographical novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (as published by the Modern Library in the 1930s). Its title was once translated as Cities of the Plain, perhaps because the mention of Sodom was once too suggestive to earlier readers. This book entails the last few pages of The Guermantes Way and the two volumes of Sodome et Gomorrhe that Proust published near the end of his life. Indeed, this is the last volume of the novel that Proust guided through publication. Proust's writing throughout the thousands of pages of the Search... fluctuates in its ability to hold a reader's attention. This volume exhibits a sharper wit, more acute cultural critique, and even a surprising vulgarity not so much in evidence in the previous volumes. It opens, more or less, with our narrator, Marcel, witnessing an assignation between the Baron de Charlus and Jupien, a tailor and guide to brothels of either men or women. It is a vivid and sordid affair, and we see it from young Marcel's improbable but revealing eavesdropping. Later, the first half of the book becomes dominated by a sprawling party Marcel attends with the Guermantes set. Characters walk on and off stage over hundreds of pages, though the text moves quickly and is often hilarious. It can be just as often dark, with numerous references to the extraordinary Dreyfus case, as well as the treatment of an aging Charles Swann at the hands of the social anti-semitism of the Guermantes and others. Here, also, Proust expands on one of his most memorable and enduring characters, the foppish Baron de Charlus. Charlus is a closeted (of course) homosexual whose sexuality is generally known but not acknowledged in his presence. He loves to orchestrate the behavior of others around him, and has a bragging pride in his impeccable royal pedigree. He appears again at Balbec, in the second part of this volume, when Marcel goes to the seaside to spend a busy summer of dinner parties and automobile outings. Here, he is courting Albertine, who he met at Balbec back in Within a Budding Grove and with whom he carries on a passionately ambivalent affair. He is on the brink of dumping her outright, when his paranoid visions of her assumed lesbian affairs drives an obsessive possessiveness in our somewhat pathetic narrator. All the while, he has been joining the "little clan" at the Verdurin's weekly soireés in a country house they rented from the Cambremers. Charlus joins the group as well, along with his young lover, Morel, a violinist and soldier who is the son of the footman of Marcel's estranged uncle. It all sounds so sordid and entangled. It certainly is, and there is the usual dizzying array of characters littering the pages. Charlus is at the mercy of Morel's youthful abuses, and is also obsessively posessive of the young man. Marcel Proust does a brilliant job here. It is widely assumed that Albertine substitutes for Proust's own male lover, Alfred Agostinelli. His conversion of his own history into Marcel's (the narrator) heterosexual, homosexually paranoid, affair is a paradox, a bizarre and brilliant expression of self-knowledge in a time when homosexuality was well-known but socially anathema. It is unlikely that any one volume of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu could stand on its own (except perhaps Swann's Way), but this volume shines above some of the others.
Also by Proust: [Swann's Way] [Within a Budding Grove] [The Guermantes Way] [The Captive] [The Fugitive]