Marcel Proust
Penguin ($25)
In a century when the novel
supplanted the epic poem as the major vehicle for literary artists reaching for
the highest level of accomplishment, Marcel Proust stands alongside perhaps
only James Joyce as the modern writer who comes the closest to achieving the
scope of Homer, the fineness of Vergil, and the encompassing vision of Dante.
Proust’s great work, In Search of Lost Time, is like nothing else in
literature, with a structure that attains to the most extraordinary works of
music, a visual and symbolic order comparable to the aesthetic of the gothic
cathedral, and featuring a cast of characters as rich and memorable and
multifaceted as that of Shakespeare, who’s probably the only writer who created
a larger and more vivid world. It took Proust decades to discover both his
voice and his genre, however, and in his early years he was considered by
friends and enemies alike to be little more than a talented dilettante, a
frivolous dandy casting words about in stories, essays, parodies, pastiches,
and occasional poetry in what seems in retrospect like a halfhearted attempt to
make his sparkling personal genius substitute for real literary effort. His
great work makes his lesser work interesting by reflection, though, and as 2013
marks the centenary of the publication of Swann’s Way, the astonishing
first volume of his magnum opus, Penguin Books has released The Collected
Poems to ply the ever-consuming appetite of the Proustian reader with yet
more marginalia.
Collecting
104 of Proust’s poems, including six poems not published in Francis and
Gontier’s Cahiers Marcel Proust: Poèmes,
this volume is now the most complete collection of Proust’s poetry in
any language. Edited by Harold Augenbraum, the founder of the Proust Society of
America, The Collected Poems includes parallel French and English text
rendered by nearly twenty different translators, including the exceptional
Lydia Davis, and features almost one hundred pages of exhaustively Proustian
end-notes provided by the fascinating and idiosyncratic Augenbraum. At the
beginning of the notes, there’s a quote from Proust’s friend Robert Dreyfus
that says, “Marcel Proust read footnotes,” and it’s in fact in this section of
the book where the reader finds the most insight into Proust’s creative and
personal world. Like most writers of fin-de-siècle France, Proust was
engaged in a constantly evolving public discourse that raged in literary
journals, in salons, and in loaded and coded correspondence—a discourse whose
referents and meanings were commonly understood and therefore often left
unspoken—and so Augenbraum’s notes supply a large percentage of both the
information and the pleasure to this volume. For instance, take poem 49
(“Chanson”):
Bigger than the whale
And
the narwhal
Is the belly, the belly
Of
Bréval!
Despite a sentence too severe
By
a singing rival
For her talent my signature
Rattles
its rifle.
History! God what an eyeful.
Such love bequeathed to A.B.:
Daudet, Lautier, Pol Neveu, Leygue,
And the chaste author of Ferval.
The very love of Pierre Lalo
O
Meretrice
Makes your brow like a halo
From
Berenice.
Proust wrote this poem in August
of 1906 and included it in a letter to his bosom friend Reynaldo Hahn, who was
intended to be its sole audience and who was instructed to burn both the poem
and the letter. Like a large portion of Proust’s poems, “Chanson” assumes a
common understanding with the reader, using proper names (and sometimes just initials) rather than poetic
language to convey meaning and imagery, and so it really only works if you’re
friends with Proust. Augenbraum’s nearly three pages of notes to the poem tell
some of the back story, which is full of intrigue and interest, with the dramatis
personae of Proust’s life crowding into this volume with the interconnectedness
of In Search of Lost Time, but on its own there’s little to catch hold
of in the naked lines themselves.
The
shorthand references Proust uses so often in his poetry serve as a stark
contrast to the mature method of his novel. In Search of Lost Time is a
work so wholly imagined and conveyed that even its most arcane aspects come to
light somewhere within its endlessly generous pages. It’s a work that holds all
of its own keys, and so when for instance the character Odette is described as looking
like Zipporah in Botticelli’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, the reader can visualize
the painting from the book’s descriptions rather than the other way around.
Proust the poet simply mentions a painting and lets the reader fill in the
details, but Proust the novelist has learned that this is insufficient and that
the work must be its own world.
This
is not to say that Proust’s poetry is bad. It’s just that the poems mostly
serve as a series of rejoinders among friends and colleagues, and taken as such
they’re often amusing and enlightening, if not exactly moving or meaningful or
startling as works themselves. As a poetaster who hadn’t seriously studied
prosodic form or ensconced himself in the real work of forging a poetic
identity, Proust the poet mostly sounds like an echo of his times, which means
that he sounds a bit like Baudelaire in some of his imagery and subject matter,
but with none of the originality and none of the sense that he’s pushing
forward any kind of artistic project, which is hardly the Proust we know from
his novel, which is an entire literary movement in itself. For readers of In
Search of Lost Time, these poems (and their notes) will delight when they
engage the people that Proust would later take up in fictional form, such as
his beloved maid Céleste Albaret, to whom a late scrawled poem of appreciation
is addressed. Not exactly gems, these poems are more like relics that the
Proustian faithful will read volumes into, and if you’re not someone who’s
already immersed in Proust’s world, The
Collected Poems is not for you and is certainly not the place to get
started. If you’ve never read Proust, skip this book and go for the real thing.
—David Wiley
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