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Within a Budding Grove

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Volume 2 of Marcel Proust's 4000+ page masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time", is, if it's possible, an even greater book than the first volume. I read Volume 1, "Swann's Way", with the kind of astonishment and joy generally reserved for Tolstoy and Maugham, constantly amazed at Proust's (via Moncrieff, Kilmartin, & Enright) ability to deepen sensation and memory to almost religious proportions, and when I finished I thought, "There's no way he can keep this level of beauty up for another 5 volumes." Judging from Volume 2, I was dead wrong.

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.....

For the second book of Proust's masterpiece, 'In Search of Lost Time', his attention turns away from the black and white realities of childhood to the greyer realms of adolescence, and with that, the deep, burning sensation of unrequited love. In essence, the second book is a 530-page essay on the different forms of young love, from deep obsession to airy neglect, from the savage loneliness of rejection to the dizzying heights of a love returned.

The book is split into two rough sections, the first of which is called 'At Mme Swan's'. Here we are introduced to Gilberte, Proust's first great love. The feelings he harbour's for her are ridiculously exaggerated, and oh so reminiscent of most people's teenage years. Every action, every word, every glance is analysed, studied, explored for meaning and intent. If, one day, Gilberte invites him to tea, the implications and potential meanings behind the invitation are debated internally for pages. If not, then even more pages are spent examining the pit of despair that Proust' soul fall in to. On top of this unhealthily obsessive love, we have his infatuation with Mme Swan, Gilberte's mother. There is almost a sense that Proust loves Gilberte because she is his age and he 'should' love her, whereas his affection towards Odette Swan is more real because there is no obligation or pressure from anyone, but less likely because she is twenty years older than him, and married.

When Proust's love for Gilberte is over - as it inevitably must, in those tender years of a boy or girl's life - the terrifying lows to which his emotions descend is as remarkable as the highs of his spirit not twenty pages previous. He obsessively analyses the ways in which he will get revenge, plotting to make her love him again, just so that he can reject her, to let her know how it feels. He tortures himself emotionally, visiting Mme Swan and purposely avoiding Gilberte.

What we have in this first part is a fascinating study on the tormented, melodramatic loves of early adolescence. Proust is too young at this stage to understand that love may not be forever, and can speak only in grandiose, exaggerated terms. If not for the fact that the prose is written with such grace and intelligence, his despair would come across as teenage angst at its very blackest.

In the second part of the novel, 'Place-Names: The Place', Proust and his grandmother retire to the beach to aid in the recuperation of his body and mind. Always a frail child, the rigours of new love have taken their toll on the young man. He rejects love, deciding that he shall become a writer once more, a passion that he had denied himself when his love for Gilberte had seemed so real and assured. He is introduced to a variety of characters which, we are told during the narrative, will come to play a great part in his later life: Robert de Saint-Loup, the Baron de Charlus and of course Albertine.

It is in this second section that Proust falls under the shadows of young girls in flower. He meets a group of girls, a 'gang' he calls them, and befriends first one, then all of them, reasoning that out of four or five girls, at least one would be worthy of love. Keeping with the true spirit of adolescence, he falls in and out of love with them all, needing only a stray glance or a casual smile to move from one girl to the other. Only two of them, Albertine and Andree, seem to return his emotions, and even then, everything remains chaste.

Interspersed throughout, we have long, insightful remarks on what love can do to the body, to the mind, and to the relationships we have with other people. Speaking as a male recently finished with his teenage years, I can say that Proust has captured the depth of feeling, the obsessiveness, the surety that everything in the universe will be perfect if only the love is returned, the electric thrill of acceptance, the deep darkness of rejection with such skill that perfection is a word that springs to mind.

Other topics are touched on throughout the novel. Early on, Proust is introduced to an author he holds in high esteem, one Bergotte. He is crushed upon discovering that the man does not exactly coincide with the image he had created while reading Bergotte's books, and ruminates on the fact that a man need not display the same intelligence and wit in reality as he does on the page. We must all focus our attention on achieving either a great reality or a great fiction, for Bergotte, his attentions were focused upon the fiction, and his personality and demeanour when interacting with flesh and blood people suffer. For Proust, it is an introduction to the idea that people can have two - or more - identities, and that a certain one is presented to a certain group of people.

The writing is, of course, typical Proust. Sentences are long, paragraphs are longer, and not very much happens. Dialogue is scarce, action scarcer. The reader is there to observe Proust's thoughts, not to use him as a mirror to the world he inhabits. Luckily for us, Proust's thoughts are never dull or boring. He says early on in the novel, 'For genius lies in reflective power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected', and Proust's reflective power more than reveal the truth of this maxim.

Penguin's new translations of "In Search of Lost Time" were just the nudge I needed to read Proust's masterwork again. I was particularly impressed by the job the American writer Lydia Davis did with "Swann's Way". By contrast, I have a few complaints about James Grieves's rendering of "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower". Where Scott Moncrieff translated "petite bande" (of girls) with the expected "little band," Grieves uses "little gang," which to an American ear sounds rather tough. He mangles one of my favorite quotations. And there's a typo on the bottom of page 95: "not" instead of "now"!

Overall, though, I like the liberties Grieves takes with the text, and we were certainly overdue for a freshened-up translation of one of the most important books of the 20th century. Unlike Proust's French, Scott Moncrieff's English has come to seem dusty and overblown. (For example, he rendered the title of this volume as "Within a Budding Grove", the literal translation being too racy for his 1920s audience of post-Victorians.)

The American edition (from Viking) is particularly handsome. The four volumes now available are uniform in appearance when it comes to their cloth covers (grey and black with silver lettering), and the dust-jackets, though following a general theme, are distinctive enough that you're not likely to mistake one volume for another. Altogether, a wonderful gift for your library or that of a friend.

-- Dan Ford at readingproust dot com

We were introduced to the narrator of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME in Volume 1, SWANN'S WAY: We saw a few scenes from his childhood in Combray and the beginnings of his love for Gilberte, the daughter of his family friend Swann, whose disastrous love affair (and subsequent marriage) with a courtesan named Odette de Crecy takes up the majority of the volume.

In WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, the narrator makes his first tentative attempts at love. His plan to ingratiate himself with Gilberte by becoming friends with her parents backfires badly when Gilberte begins to distance himself from him. He agrees then to spend a season with his grandmother in a Norman oceanside resort named Balbec. There, in the most memorable scene in the novel, he makes the acquaintance of a "little band" of eight girls whose poise and sang-froid disarranges his senses. He falls in love, with first, then another. As the novel ends, we see him select one of them, Albertine, for future conquest.

This is my second time through the budding grove of Proust's great multi-part novel with its crescendo of (unfulfilled) sensuality. Such was the impact of the Balbec scenes that I thought that the narrator's pursuit of the band of girls took up most of the novel. In fact, it does not appear until well into the last part and takes up less than 200 pages. It is simply that Proust imprinted that scene so strongly in my mind that, over the years, I mistook a part for the whole.

WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE introduces some memorable characters that will come back in future volumes: In addition to Albertine, there are Robert de Saint-Loup, the painter Elstir, the Marquise de Villeparisis, and the Baron de Charlus. In the later volumes, we will see how Marcel (for that is the narrator's name) will fare with Albertine, and how the world that he saw as a shimmering fairy castle will shatter with the working out of his destiny, that of his friends, and that of the French in the years before the Great War.

One of the great chess grandmasters commented on the opening setup position -- before any moves had been made -- by saying "All the mistakes are there, waiting to be made."

Reading Proust presents the challenge of understanding his complex method of conveying the impressions made upon him by various people, places, and things, impressions which are so deeply personal and unique that they can be very difficult for the detached reader to relate to. Proust can recall the torrid emotions of a teenage crush with the articulate language and clarity of an extremely intellectual adult with a literary voice so distinctive it practically exists in a genre of its own; and in "Within a Budding Grove," the second volume of "In Search of Lost Time," he subjects his narrator, now in his young teens, to the charms of two girls who will define for him a youthful ideal by which he standardizes love and beauty.

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.

If you're looking at reviews of this volume, then I assume you've read Swann's Way and are considering buying more Proust. Within a Budding Grove continues the brilliance of Swann's Way, applying Proust's unequaled powers of observation to such experiences as struggling to be with his childhood idol, staying at a seaside resort, glimpsing and ultimately working his way into a clique of teenage girls, developing a friendship with an aristocratic youth, and visiting the studio of a great painter. As with Swann's Way, you will have frequent "aha!" moments when Proust's narrator opens your eyes to the previously overlooked drama at your elbow (and within your own mind).

Beautiful writing, and brilliant observations and well-drawn characters. Some caveats are the often labyrinthine sentences and multi-page paragraphs. Most people read SWANN'S WAY and no further, so those who make it through the 2nd volume might praise it excessively out of a slight superiority complex. Also, "Marcel" is also a little bitchy in his tone, and his "happiest when I'm alone" philosophy is kind of sad and self-absorbed, and his visiting whore houses is jolting after you've been reading graceful sentences and events. And some of his anthropological and psychological observations are trite and nothing most readers haven't concluded for themselves, and Proust sounds like he believes he's letting you in on some insights of which you're undoubtedly ignorant. But, yes, many of his insights are brilliant and eye-opening. And the sentences that are over-loaded actually are the exception, and the rest are doubtless among the most beautiful sentences ever written. Proust must have been extremely introspective to have thought so extensively about the most minute of moments...and good for us he was, since we get to enjoy the fruits of his introspection in this book. The humor that comes across is delightful, too. Proust has one thing you can't learn in any MFA creative writing program, and that is CHARM!

How can anyone summarize even a single volume of Proust's massive six volume novel? Within a Budding Grove (sometimes translated as In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) is the second installment of In Search of Last Time. We find the narrator perhaps marginally older on vacation with his grandmother living in a luxurious hotel in Balbec off the coast. This volume, paired with the first (Swann's Way), is really the introduction to the work entire if you can believe it. In it, the narrator perhaps matures slightly; he cultivates his keen awareness of art, meets new people, and ultimately falls out of love with Gilberte and falls in love with Albertine. His relationship with his grandmother is certainly expanded, and the reader comes to learn that the narrator is not merely motivated by a trivial pursuit of pleasure and bourgeois charm. He is in fact, a truly full human being, complete with fear, love, desire, and ambition. He meets one of my favorite characters in the whole book, the impressionist painter Elstir, a character clearly based Monet, Manet, Pissaro, and others. He introduces the narrator to Albertine through his paintings, and teaches him about the joys of life and art. There are some passages in this section of the book (the latter half) which I just can't resist from quoting,

"I could never have believed that I should now be dreaming of a sea which was no more than a whitish vapour that had lost both consistency and colour. But of such a sea Elstir, like the people who sat musing on board those vessels drowsy with the heat, had felt so intensely the enchantment that he had succeeded in transcribing, in fixing for all time upon his canvas, the imperceptible ebb of the tide, the throb of one happy moment; and at the sight of this magic portrait, one could think of nothing else than to range the wide world, seeking to recapture the vanished day in its instantaneous, slumbering beauty" (pg. 657).

also (how French is this?),

"For a convalescent who rests all day long in the flower-garden or an orchard, a scent of flowers or fruit does not more completely pervade the thousand trifles that compose his idle hours than did for me that colour, that fragrance in search of which my eyes kept straying towards the girls, and the sweetness of which finally became incorporated in me. So it is that grapes sweeten in the sun. And by their slow continuity these simple little games had gradually wrought in me also, as in those who do nothing else all day but lie outstretched by the sea, breathing the salt air and sunning themselves, a relaxation, a blissful smile, a vague dazzlement that had spread from brain to eyes" (pg. 669).

I certainly cannot add any insights into the greatness and profundity of this work which has not already been said by Edmund Wilson or Vladimir Nabokov. Within a Budding Grove is a deeply felt, beautiful and fleeting segment of one of the finest novels of the last century, I urge you to read it.

It's my experience, reading this novel, to be perpetually grateful for the miracle of Proust, grateful, too, that he waited until his maturity to write; as someone who's spent time in writing workshops, I can only imagine the dissipation of his energies into anemic prototypes had he been persuaded to publish prematurely. Lovingly written, every word endowed with love of life and maturity's distillation of life experience, it is a novel (which reads like a memoir) of a life devoted to the connoisseur's pursuit of pleasure-how can that not alienate? Proust is consciously writing for an elite of mental or temperamental sympathy. To say that reading Proust has helped me through hard times is true-yet how can I-someone who has, to paraphrase a T-shirt I saw recently, a blackbelt in keepin' it real-not resent a courtesan with three ladies to aid in her toilette-however tenderly rendered?

The mature Proust's vision of love-in this novel at least-is adolescent and self-absorbed, and there is no sense of a selfless or mature love, such as that of a parent for a child, which contains a dying to self as opposed to an expansion of self. (One thinks here of the authorial contempt for the too-giving parent, Vinteuil.) I pity Marcel: to lose oneself-the burden-to lose time-sometimes-is very refreshing indeed. Mired in the adolescent and egotistical point-of-view, without benefit of even the illusory counterpoint of an adult lover's (Swann's) point-of-view, the narrative does sometimes suffer from too much Marcel. Coddled, effete, he finely calibrates the shades of disillusionment that possession as opposed to reflection offers-the "psychological impossibility of happiness"-after having his wildest fantasies (Berma! Bergotte! Balbec!) fulfilled time and again. And he universalizes his singular temperamental trait, that inability to live in the moment.

Proust is only too conscious of his weaknesses, and as a result, we get his poetics: "I am aware that this is to blaspheme against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term `Art for Art's sake,' but at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner," Norpois says, and one is laughing out loud with pleasure at the dissonance between Marcel's lofty musings on Berma and the cold spiced beef jiggling in its cubes of aspic, the delicious conflict of temperaments.

He gives me back to myself-it's a long time since I've felt the sole inhabitor of my consciousness and had the leisure to puzzle out my sensations. Usually my mind is full to the brim like this: "Mommy-mommy-mommy-here comes little bear! What does little bear say?! Mommy-mommy-mommy-mommy-moooooommy! Here's little bear! Little bear is talking!" So that I don't have mental space or leisure to process even the simplest sensation, how the sun feels on my shoulders, for instance. Visiting Proust's cool room of mirrors and ocean waves returns that feeling to me, and that is precious. There is something precious in his extremity-his lack of apology for a sensitive and aesthetically-driven nature that is anathema to middle-class American values. And that rhythm like ocean waves! It gets in your head, lowers your blood pressure, no doubt alters brain wave patterns, the chemicals in neuropathways.

There is something so extreme (admirable!) in Proust's sensibility-the extremity of his pursuit of pleasurable sensation intellectually reorganized and savored-that one feels-paradoxically-something dehumanizing in his gaze. His musings on the protoplasmic nature of young girls frankly chills me! Yet I see it as part of the "green fuse," the life force pagan and repugnant at times. So, what happens in Vol.3? I can't wait, yet at the same time I hope for something I may not get.

Upon finishing WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, the reader will have been introduced to virtually all the major characters in IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME. Most importantly for later volumes, we meet and get to know Albertine, Robert de Saint-Loup, the painter Elstir, the diplomat Norpois, and Madame de Villeparasis, as well as a deepened acquaintance with such characters as Gilberte Swann, Madame Swann, and the extravagantly bizarre Baron de Charlus.

Proust's extraordinary genius is evident on every page of this amazing book. One could point to any of a few dozen moments to illustrate this. What is amazing to me about Proust is how he can take an amazingly everyday event, and build it to proportions as great as any battle scene in WAR AND PEACE. For instance, at the end of "Madame Swann at Home," the narrator recounts the times he would wait at the Arc de Triomphe to take a walk with Madame Swann and her entourage. The ensuing eight or nine pages, which merely recount the group walking through Paris, become as majestic and epic as any scene in Homer or Virgil or Tolstoy. No scene would seem to contain less potential for greatness, yet Proust is able to make it something truly unique and beautiful. Or, to take another incident, have there been many incidents in literature as filled with passion and emotion and suspense as the Narrator's first attempt to kiss Albertine? In a mere two pages, Proust is about to pack a surreal amount of dramatic (and comic) action.

Although famous for containing at least part of both of the narrator's great love affairs, I find this novel even more fascinating for the extraordinary detailing of the myriad of social and class distinctions to be found in the seemingly infinitely varied French society. The great theme throughout the book, even when not specifically mentioned, is snobbism, and Proust owns the subject of snobbery as Homer owns that of war. Proust reveals snobbery primarily proceeding from those slightly lower on the social ladder. Ironically, he reveals those at the top guilty not of snobbery but of insolence and disdain, while not even his servant Françoise is innocent of being a snob. The tensions in the novel become particularly acute given the changes that were taking place in French society at the time. This theme is not restricted to this novel alone. It featured in SWANN'S WAY, especially in the attitudes of the Verdurin "faithful" and will be a major theme of ensuing volumes, especially THE GUERMANTES WAY.

The section of the novel recounting his getting to know Elstir contains perhaps my favorite passage in all of Proust, where Elstir, upon the narrator's learning something unflattering of Elstir's past, tells him that no one has not done things that they would not love to expunge, but that no one ought to despise this, because this is the only way one can truly become wise. "We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one can else can make for us, which no one can spare, us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." This is not merely the opinion of Proust's character: it could stand as the central meaning of the novel as a whole.