The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 29 May 2016
by Marcel Proust
edited by Harold Augenbraum
Marcel Proust, besides being one of the greatest writers in any language, was also a shameless collector of social connections. One imagines that the cultured social milieu into which he insuated himself didn't particulary object to that kind of social climbing. It was flattering. Proust himself was a witty and sometimes revealing observer of his world, but one also imagines he was a flatterer, too. Proust wrote some literary criticism, some non-fiction, his famous vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu, and a number of poems, many of which were published, and others that were written to friends and acquaintances (to be published later, of course, after the author's death).
This book collects 104 of Proust's poems, printing them in translation face-to-face with their originals in French. The first part of the book collects fond poems Proust wrote to honor the friends of his youth, most of whom were young men to whom he was attracted to one degree or another. The poems are playful and sweet. It is hard to tell if the fond feelings expressed in them were ever fully requited. Later poems are pastiches, joking poems naming friends and acquaintances from Proust's social milieu. He mocks their social graces. He mimics the poems of other writers. He tells little romantic stories. Many of these were published in the papers of the day, and others were found among Proust's papers, or in the letters he wrote to his friends. It is hard to place oneself into the world he describes here. So much of what he writes are little in-jokes amongst friends. The poems tell us a little about the social scene of the day, and the child-like playfulness Proust had throughout his life. But as something to connect to other human beings, the poems seem to lack some core of human feeling. These are light pieces, little leaves floating on the stream of living, but never going too deep. We have Proust's vast and engrossing novel for that.
The editor of this volume, Harold Augenbraum, appends a vast collection of notes on each of the poems, clarifying its context and identifying many of the people Proust mentions. The notes give us a sense of place and time. They tell us something of the man, and of the people with whom he populated his life and his work. Without the notes, the poems would be left as incomprehensible feathers from another time.