In Search of Penguin’s Proust
In the early 2000s, Penguin Books embarked on one of the most ambitious literary exercises in modern history.
The publishing house had commissioned a complete English translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the first time in 80 years anyone had taken a fresh stab at the 4,250 page leviathan as a whole. Like ascending the slopes of Everest, tackling Proust meant passing a number of the failed and dead along the way. Proust himself died before completing edits on the last three volumes. His controversial first translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the one who gave the book the romantic if inaccurate title Remembrance of Things Past, also died while translating the final installment. The book, it seemed, was too much for any one person to labor on alone and survive. Penguin dodged this death curse by breaking up the work, assigning a different translator to each of the seven entries.
The project was a technical and critical success. The first volume of the now accurately retitled In Search of Lost Time, Lydia Davis’ effervescent translation of Swann’s Way, came out in 2003. The next three followed in rapid succession, but then in 2004 the project ceased publication in the United States. Ever since, my 4/7ths of In Search of Lost Time have sat on the bookshelf, aching after three phantom limbs lying long buried in a digital vault.
But there has been an awakening. Volume five, The Prisoner, will be released on January 8, 2019. Why did this project stall for 15 years? And in a year where anticipation for George R. R. Martin’s Winds of Winter, the long-delayed next installment in a very different kind of magnum opus, will no doubt drown out all other literary chatter, is there even an audience for the antepenultimate entry in one of the most praised—and unread—works of modern fiction?
Reading Proust slowly
I was one of the few people who scooped up a first edition copy of Penguin’s Swann’s Way back in the early 2000s, enticed by cover designer Mark Melnick’s evocative dust jacket that hinted at the book’s musical and labyrinthine exploration of memory. But I confess, I didn’t actually read it right away.
My mother had recently died, leaving behind a library of 158 books, largely the kind of mail-order catalog leatherbound classics and mysteries that look good lining the built-in bookshelf of a Georgian-era New England home. Rather than selling or donating them, I insisted on keeping the lot. More than that, in a very Proustian moment I committed to reading every one in her memory, though I scandalously suspect Mum herself may not have even cracked a few that in recent decades have shifted from indisputably canonical to historical artifacts (Scott’s Ivanhoe comes immediately to mind).
Cerebrating through what amounted to the St. John’s College undergraduate reading list with a fat pinch of Agatha Christie to boot was no easy feat. And while fawning over every page of Wuthering Heights and discretely skimming large portions of Tom Jones, I kept Proust at bay. But it was never far from mind. At used bookstores I always sought out P in the the fiction section on the hunt for more hardcovers with the telltale dust jacket designs, finally setting In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way, and Sodom and Gomorrah alongside my copy of Swann’s Way. A seven-pound cube of required reading, the books remained unvisited by all but a thickening layer of dust year after year.
The delay wasn’t entirely procrastination. Though I did not know much about Proust beyond the madeleine and the cork-lined room, I did know In Search of Lost Time was not a novel for speed-reading. Somewhere along the way I’d adopted a firm position that Proust was best read as slowly as possible. There is no plot, in the traditional sense. And though the characters of Odette, Swann, Charlus, Oriane, Albertine, and Marcel himself startle and intrigue with their duplicity, their vanity, their unrepentant misanthropy, it is those sentences that we come to Proust for, those synesthetic sentences that gambol line after line down arrogantly long paragraphs to create a kind of hypnotic ostinato playground that shouldn’t be rushed through any more than you’d speed up your favorite song when pressed for time. Proust is a mandala of words, traced and considered with a degree of patience and deliberation that can be physically painful to the modern reader. To plow through as just one in a long line of masterpieces crowding for attention is like opting out of an extended trip to Paris because you can get the gist on Google Street View.
In January of this year I finished the last of my mother’s books (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, meh) and was ready to sink into Proust. I read at a leisurely volume per season. The experience was a balance of delight and drudgery, as no doubt every Proust reader can attest. Swann’s Way is a gem box, self-contained, right-sized, and perfect. I will admit each subsequent volume delivered diminishing epiphanies, with the endless salon parties of The Guermantes Way serving as a low point. (I hope never to hear the phrase “the Dreyfus Affair” again.) It was only after putting down that great inflection point Sodom and Gomorrah that I started poking around used bookstores in and around Boston, as well as on eBay and Amazon for a first edition hardcover copy of the next entry, The Prisoner. But it wasn’t to be found anywhere. Not in hardcover, and not in paperback. It was only then that I realized my incomplete set of In Search of Lost Time had not terminated at volume four on accident. The last three books were never published. That is, until now.
Mickey Mouse and “insane US copyright laws”
Shortly after Penguin began publishing its new Proust translations, the project’s general editor Christopher Prendergast predicted, “Alas, due to the insane US copyright laws, American readers will not have homegrown access to the new version… until long after many of us are in our graves.” Prendergast, still very much alive, was referring to the notorious Copyright Term Extension Act, a 1998 congressional measure advanced by Californian Congressman Sonny Bono (remember that?) that ensured works published between 1923 and 1978 remain copyrighted for 95 years.
The Bono Act, derisively known in some quarters as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, was a deliberate move to protect the Walt Disney Company’s oldest and most prized asset from falling into the public domain. Mickey’s big screen debut in 1928’s Steamboat Willie was dangerously close to entering falling out of copyright and the ‘98 extension ensured Steamboat Willie was safe from malicious mashups and pornographic reinterpretations until at least 2024. The year 1923 was no doubt chosen as the vanguard of exceptional copyright protections because it coincides with the founding of the Walt Disney Company.
Unfortunately, the law locked down more than Disney cartoons from entering the public domain. Joyce’s Ulysses was originally published in Paris in 1922, but its thorny publication history in the US, where it was banned for many years, has scholars still moving with trepidation regarding its legal standing. And while the early ‘20s novels of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald, populist king of the Jazz Age, have been out of copyright for years, The Great Gatsby (1925) missed the cutoff and won’t be in the public domain until 2021.
Proust died in November of 1922, and Random House used the Bono Act to renew copyrights on a revised edition of C. K. Scott-Moncrieff’s 1920s era English translations. That renewal expires on New Year’s Day and Penguin already has The Prisoner ready to hit shelves one week later.
The magnum opus death curse
When Proust died, he joined a growing cadre of loghorreics who’d bitten off more pulp than they could chew. Authors of the bloviated epic, a by-and-large exclusively male preoccupation, includes many fallen comrades throughout time:
- Chaucer promises 120 Canterbury Tales but died having completed just 24.
- Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is both one of the longest poems in the English language and reportedly only half complete at the author’s death.
- David Foster Wallace estimated his follow-up novel to Infinite Jest was about a third finished after ten years of writing; following his suicide friends and family found a manuscript of more than 1000 pages that eventually was released incomplete as The Pale King.
And then we get to fantasy author Robert Jordan. The science fiction and fantasy genres have a nasty reputation for cultivating the most tumescent of writing projects, and Jordan, the Hemingwaysian pen name of James Oliver Rigney Jr., is perhaps the most notorious example of a self-important “world-builder” failing to deliver.
Over the course of two decades, Jordan wrote a twelve volume, 7,500 page armada of New York Times best sellers called The Wheel of Time. The story was embarrassingly derivative, ripping off every monomyth trope from chosen ones to super swords, but it was a hit that was driving toward the predictable climax of farm boy versus evil reincarnate. Then in 2007 Jordan died while working on what he’d claimed was to be the last book. It was a literary cliffhanger unmatched since Charles Dickens murdered Edwin Drood.
Like with Proust, a fanboy understudy was brought in to polish Jordan’s roughcut finale into publishable form. Of course it took three more bestsellers, not one, for the series’ lemniscate ouroboros to reach its tail. And though technically complete, it is hard to read those last 2,500 pages (2,500 pages!) as anything more than sanctioned fan fiction.
Around the same time The Wheel of Time was grinding to a halt, another fantasy epic was on the rise. Game of Thrones premiered on HBO in 2011 and the show quickly drew Harry Potter-levels of attention toward author George R. R. Martin, who was just starting work on the series’ sixth volume, The Winds of Winter. For the last seven years there has been a mounting chorus of Internet whispers and shouts that the septuagenarian Martin might “pull a Jordan” and doom his A Song of Ice and Firesaga to the expanding constellation of unfinished epics.
No publication date for Martin’s The Winds of Winter has been set, but there is muted optimism that it will come out before Game of Thrones ends its broadcast run next summer. No doubt it will be the biggest book of the year, no matter when it is released. Compare that with The Prisoner, coming out in January. Penguin doesn’t even have it listed among the most anticipated classics releases for next year. You know you’re not connecting with an audience when The Mayor of Casterbridge is blowing up your spot.
Most tragic of all, for me, is that the Proust variant of the magnum opus death curse has claimed another victim. Remember Proust’s original English translator, a brilliant Scotsman named C. K. Scott Moncrieff, died a few years after Proust himself and failed to complete his translation of the seventh and final volume, Time Regained. Penguin split up the novel among seven translators to avoid repeating this very problem. But the lengthy publication delay thanks to the Bono Act meant that Carol Clark’s translation of The Prisoner has yet to reach the largest English-speaking audience in the world. Clark, an emeritus Fellow at the University of Oxford, died in 2015. When it comes to Proust, time is always running out.
A transforming publishing industry
Dr. Clark’s Prisoner arrives in bookstores without much fanfare and without its translator to congratulate for her hard work, but it also arrives 15 years after the last book in the series came out in hardcover. The publishing industry has changed since then, and Penguin has opted to release volume five in a notably different format than volume four. The original publishing run in the Penguin series shared a common aesthetic, those complementary and haunting dust jacket designs, the same hearty hardcover proportions. The Prisoner will reportedly be about an inch narrower, an inch shorter, and only available in paperback. Gone also is the work of original designer Mark Melnick (did he ever design the dust jackets for the final three volumes?), replaced with an austere art nouveau pattern and a gothic typeface.
There’s nothing actually wrong with any of this. No one is blaming Penguin for the publication delay. And the format and cover design of The Prisoner nicely echo the paperback editions of the Penguin translations currently available new at your local Amazon. But given the fact that this novel, more than any other, is about delayed gratification, about seeking a simulacrum of the distant and irretrievable past, shouldn’t those who bought the original hardcovers be rewarded for the wait? =
There are now adults entering college who were not yet conceived when general editor Christopher Prendergast was going over final proofs of the seven translations. And it is the ebullient English majors among them who will pick up a matching set of the complete paperback In Search of Lost Time, thinking to themselves these books do look attractive on their Ikea bookshelves.
May even get around to reading them someday.
Letters Republic 