A Modern Library eBook Edition
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I Biographical note copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I Introduction copyright © 2003 by Richard Howard.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I Revisions to the translation copyright © 1992 by D. J. Enright.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc., copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume III copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc., copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc., copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume V copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc., copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI Biographical note copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI Revisions to the translation copyright © 1992 by D. J. Enright.
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Modern Library and the Torchbearer design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This translation is a revised edition of the 1981 translation of Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, and The Sweet Cheat Gone by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, published in the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus. Revisions by D. J. Enright.
This translation is a revised edition of the 1981 translation of The Past Recaptured by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, published in the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus. Revisions by D. J. Enright.
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © Tina West/Graphistock
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann’s Way
The Modern Library
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64178-0
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
The Modern Library
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Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64179-7
In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way
The Modern Library
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Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64180-3
In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah
The Modern Library
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Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64181-0
In Search of Lost Time, Volume V: The Captive, The Fugitive
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Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-75537-7
In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained
The Modern Library
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Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64183-4
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged: 6-Book Bundle
The Modern Library
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann’s Way
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way
In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah
In Search of Lost Time, Volume V: The Captive, The Fugitive
In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI: Time Regained
2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Biographical note copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2003 by Richard Howard
Revisions to the translation copyright © 1992 by D. J. Enright
Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This edition was originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus and in the United States by Modern Library in 1992.
This translation is a revised edition of the 1981 translation of Swann’s Way by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, published in the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus. Revisions by D. J. Enright.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922.
[Du côte de chez Swann. English]
Swann’s way/Marcel Proust; translated by C. K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; revised by D. J. Enright.
p. cm. — (In search of lost time; v. 1)
Translation of: Du côte de chez Swann.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64178-0
I. Title. II. Series.
PQ2631.R63D83 1992
843′ .912—dc20 92-25657
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1_r2jc
MARCEL PROUST
Marcel Proust was born in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil on July 10, 1871. His father, Adrien Proust, was a doctor celebrated for his work in epidemiology; his mother, Jeanne Weil, was a stockbroker’s daughter of Jewish descent. He lived as a child in the family home on Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, but spent vacations with his aunt and uncle in the town of Illiers near Chartres, where the Prousts had lived for generations and which became the model for the Combray of his great novel. (In recent years it was officially renamed Illiers-Combray.) Sickly from birth, Marcel was subject from the age of nine to violent attacks of asthma, and although he did a year of military service as a young man and studied law and political science, his invalidism disqualified him from an active professional life.
During the 1890s Proust contributed sketches to Le Figaro and to a short-lived magazine, Le Banquet, founded by some of his school friends in 1892. Pleasures and Days, a collection of his stories, essays, and poems, was published in 1896. In his youth Proust led an active social life, penetrating the highest c
ircles of wealth and aristocracy. Artistically and intellectually, his influences included the aesthetic criticism of John Ruskin, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, the music of Wagner, and the fiction of Anatole France (on whom he modeled his character Bergotte). An affair begun in 1894 with the composer and pianist Reynaldo Hahn marked the beginning of Proust’s often anguished acknowledgment of his homosexuality. Following the publication of Emile Zola’s letter in defense of Colonel Dreyfus in 1898, Proust became “the first Dreyfusard,” as he later phrased it. By the time Dreyfus was finally vindicated of charges of treason, Proust’s social circles had been torn apart by the anti-Semitism and political hatreds stirred up by the affair.
Proust was very attached to his mother, and after her death in 1905 he spent some time in a sanatorium. His health worsened progressively, and he withdrew almost completely from society and devoted himself to writing. Proust’s early work had done nothing to establish his reputation as a major writer. In an unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil (not published until 1952), he laid some of the groundwork for In Search of Lost Time, and in Against Sainte-Beuve, written in 1908–9, he stated as his aesthetic credo: “A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.” He appears to have begun work on his long masterpiece sometime around 1908, and the first volume, Swann’s Way, was published in 1913. In 1919 the second volume, Within a Budding Grove, won the Goncourt Prize, bringing Proust great and instantaneous fame. Two subsequent sections—The Guermantes Way (1920–21) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1921)—appeared in his lifetime. (Of the depiction of homosexuality in the latter, his friend André Gide complained: “Will you never portray this form of Eros for us in the aspect of youth and beauty?”) The remaining volumes were published following Proust’s death on November 18, 1922: The Captive in 1923, The Fugitive in 1925, and Time Regained in 1927.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Biographical Note
An Introduction by Richard Howard
A Note on the Translation (1981) by Terence Kilmartin
A Note on the Revised Translation (1992) by D. J. Enright
Dedication
Part One: Combray
Part Two: Swann in Love
Part Three: Place-Names • The Name
Notes
Synopsis
AN INTRODUCTION
Richard Howard
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
OSCAR WILDE
Dear Proust, I’d like you to meet your new readers. Most of them have heard about you for some time (there have been at least four films made of In Search of Lost Time; there has even been a film about you, and your housekeeper, and your asthma, and your cork-lined room—a film of course about the inaccessible last years of your life), and certainly they have had many opportunities to get acquainted with your great work—everyone has been told it is great—but for one reason or another they haven’t done so.
Why not? you’d like to know. Well, to begin with, your reputation as a difficult author is widespread, and many readers are daunted. For instance, you’re said to have written the longest sentence in the history of literature; there’s even a parlor game that challenges people—bright people!—to diagram it. And of course the Search itself is one of the longest novels in modern literature—long and intricate and allusive; why, there are even some critics (you know how we’re all intimidated by critics) who say it isn’t a novel at all.
What do they say it is? Oh, a cultural cosmogony, a Menippean satire, and most overwhelming of all, a sort of evangel. For you offer us the postulation that we can, in the shadow, or rather the radiance, of your own enchiridion, go and do likewise. Each reader, instructed and inspired by your own salvationist exercises, has a capacity to redeem his own past, to regain the time. I myself have … or have had … two friends, Jean Stafford and Roland Barthes, they’re both dead now, who felt your book was more like a gospel than a novel. Jean used to say she had to start your book over every five years because each time she read you she had already become a different person. And Roland, near the end of his own life in 1978, wrote that he
like Proust ill, threatened by death (or believing himself so) came back to the phrase of Saint John which Proust quotes in Contre Sainte-Beuve: “Work, while you still have the light.…” Does this mean that I am going to write a novel? How should I know? I don’t know if it will be possible still to call a “novel” the work which I desire to write and which I expect to break with the nature of my previous writings. It is important for me to act as if I were to write this utopian novel, to put myself in the position of the subject who makes something, and no longer of the subject who speaks about something.
It is of more than incidental interest, with regard to the Search as this sort of gospel and prototype, that Roland Barthes found himself qualified to make certain reservations, certain criticisms, which do not alter his soterial purpose. He readily acknowledged that he preferred certain parts of the Search to others, but that each time he read the book again, the parts he then preferred were different ones, and that was why Proust was a great writer.
But the real trouble new readers have with your book is reading it for the first time. And most of that trouble, frankly, is the length—what you call longueurs. Now, if you get to know each other a little, there are ways of solving this problem. For instance, one could moderate the “academic” insistence that a reading of Proust has to be conducted straight through, from beginning to end, no dipping here and there, no looking ahead, or back.… There’s no need to stipulate such draconian conditions for achieving some sort of intimacy with you. That’s why I’m so eager to introduce you to your new readers. But for now, let me say that in introducing them to you, I want you to understand that there might be some problems—what appear to be contemporary problems.
Such as? Well, American readers are likely to be in a hurry—they haven’t time, they often say. It’s an expression you might appreciate. And you’ll have to admit you’re a very deliberate writer. You need to be patient with your American readers—actually, I think you are: you’ve already devised a technique for patience, at least for their patience. I’ve noticed that often on any one page or in any one passage—somewhere between a chant and a chapter—you manage to cast your spell, to sound your note, to tell your truth, for goodness sake! so that readers don’t have to read all the way to the end of the whole book to get what Proust is about.
You’ve seen to it that the message is sent on every page. Readers can read, and stop, and then, another time, resume. There are other books like that; we call them “wisdom literature,” and their matter is casually crystallized quite as often as it is likely to be exhaustively secreted. Of course I think there’s a real advantage in building up sufficient momentum to read straight through from “For a long time I would go to bed early …” to (six volumes on) “… between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time.” But say you had provided (or permitted) a way of reading your book which took our new readers’ impatience into consideration, which summed up as they went along—even that kind of epitomizing might well strike your new readers as a sort of jungle, a sort of maze—you remember all those comparisons critics have made of the Search to a Gothic cathedral, or a Wagner opera, or even a flying carpet. You’re not generally considered pithy.
Yet all through the tangled volumes of your work, you do crystallize the world into aphorisms and epigrams—I think you’re as succinct as any of those classic French moralists politely murmuring somewhere behind you. Why sometimes you’re faster than La Rochefoucauld himself (as when you say, “It’s from adolescents who last long enough that life makes its old men”). If I could admonish your new readers to watch out for tho
se “moments of speed,” as it were, among the prolonged dimensions and the plethoric details, I think they would find the going a lot easier than they’d expected.
But all I want to do, for now, is to make sure that in meeting your new readers you know what to expect of them, what you have to come to terms with—as I hope to tell them what to expect of you and what they have to come to terms with when they start reading the Search.
Oh, there is one more thing you ought to be aware of if you’re going to confront these new readers of yours with a modicum of good will. Even though you managed to include, with a really Tolstoyan appetite, such “modern” manifestations as the Great War, and airplanes, and telephones (wonderful what you did with them), for new American readers in the twenty-first century, the time you keep referring to as lost—in French lost means “wasted” as well—is over and done with, of no account. And a search for the past, even one recent enough to include automobiles and airplanes, is an unlikely, even an unlikeable enterprise. You see, we have a kind of allergy to the past; it’s our national disease, and the very assurance with which you insist that the past is within the present is likely to seem quite repellent, even offensive, to these new readers. I know you intend to be gentle with them—your ferocity is elsewhere—but I feel I must warn you about the reception you’re likely to meet when you release one of your zingers on the subject. I think it will take the American readers of the twenty-first century a long frequentation of themselves as well as of you to believe it when you say:
It’s no use trying to evoke our past, all the efforts of our intelligence are futile. The past lies hidden beyond the mind’s realm and reach, in some material object (in the sensation that material object gives us). And it depends entirely on chance whether or not we encounter that object before we die.
Finally, what your new readers will want to know is Who’s saying such a thing? Who tells it like it is? Who is the discoursing person? And these questions bring me to the other part of my project: introducing your new readers to you, Proust.
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