Far From Brooklyn

Proust, Faulkner, James, and Mann.

For years, these were “the unfinished.”  However many times I tried, however many different titles I dipped into, no matter how committed I was, no matter how short or long the novel, the novella or even the short story, I could not read through to the end anything by Proust, Faulkner, James, or Mann.

I’m a reader with little patience – after all, I read for pleasure, so why read something if it’s not enjoyable? – but even a very impatient reader like myself tends to find something engaging in a major author’s oeuvre (engaging enough to read all the way through, at least).

Proust was in many the ways the most difficult of the four.  After all, there is but one Proust work to read.  There’s no “easy” Proust, no slim novella (like for instance Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49”), no plays (like for instance Beckett’s plays, to get around “Malone,” “Malloy,” and “The Unnameable”), no collection of stories.  No, there’s just the monolith.

(As an aside, when referring to Proust I still prefer “Remembrance of Things Past” over the newer “In Search of Lost Time” not only because the Moncrief/Kilmartin translation sat silvery and forbidding on my shelf for so many years, but also because it’s such a gorgeous, ornate title, however inaccurately rendered from the original.)

Given that there was just the “Remembrance,” I assumed I would never get through an entire volume of Proust. It represented the K2 of literature to me. (I have read “Ulysses” cover to cover several times, so my literary Everest is already scaled.  I’m not counting “Finnegan’s Wake” and neither should anyone else.) And then there were the slightly lesser heights of Faulkner, Mann and James.  Were these peaks attainable? Or was there too much technical climbing required?

“Absalom, Absalom” and “Sound and Fury” were hellaciously difficult books (I knew cuz I had tried them several times each).  “As I Lay Dying” and “Light in August” featured fewer streams of consciousness, and therefore seemed more approachable, and yet I had failed to complete those books on multiple occasions as well. “The Unvanquished” was required reading in 11th grade, but I was sly and lazy (bad combination) and read only enough of it to be able to talk the talk in class and complete the writing assignment.

The fact is, I couldn’t even finish a short Faulkner work like “The Bear.”  Indeed, I did not even finish “Barn Burning.”

All right then, what about James?

Of the great unfinished authors, James was the only one I actively disliked.  I could not abide his endless parenthetical noodling, his circular sentences, his self-satisfied lipsmacking.  You see, it wasn’t just the novels that I disliked – it was the sentences.  Those awful sentences.

Aside from the endless wheezing of “The Golden Bowl,” the pinpricking of “Portrait of a Lady,” the lapidary refinements of “The Ambassadors,” James did of course produce two entirely manageable novellas commonly taught at the high school level: “The Turn of the Screw” and “Daisy Miller.”  And guess what: Like “The Unvanquished,”  James’s “Turn of the Screw” was required reading for me at some point in high school, but likewise I bailed on it without having finished.

(A footnote: It’s possible that I read all of “The Spoils of Poynton,” a lesser known and fairly short James novel, in college.  But I’m not counting it very specifically because in fact I can’t remember.  I’m not sure anyone is capable of remembering “The Spoils of Poynton.”)

As for Mann, well, it was actually strange that I had not finished anything by him. I loved “Buddenbrooks” and only failed to finish it because I misplaced the book somewhere around the time that Christian marries Aline.

I read at least a portion of “Felix Krull” with pleasure, or let’s say in any case that I seem to remember that I read it with pleasure, and I certainly read some portion of “The Magic Mountain,” although aside from the premise of the novel and the name Hans Castorp, I could not tell you a thing about it – except of course that I had failed to finish it.

And then there was “Death in Venice.”  Like other Mann works it had always struck me that I rather liked these stories, but in total honesty I can’t say that I finished any of them – I’m quite sure I did not.  I don’t know why.

So there was my mountain range – the might peaks of Proust, the only slightly lesser majesty of Faulkner and Mann, and the glowering Mt. James.

I really wanted to finish at least something by each of them (admittedly Proust seemed all but impossible) because that would mean I had read, by my tally, at least some of every major Western author in history, from the beginnings of modern literature (Shandy, Quixote, etc.) through wellspring of the 19th Century (the Russians, the English, oh my) and then the florescence of the 20th Century (the Americans, the Latin Americans, the Eastern Europeans, and everyone else).

I just had to get through Mann and Faulkner and James and Proust.

Faulkner was the first I summited. Armed with a Cleanth Brooks volume to guide me (and by the way how does one pronounce “Cleanth?”) I opened “The Sound and the Fury,” a novel that had refused me so many times, and, thank you Cleanth, I parsed the multiple Caddies and time-shifted narratives and yes, it was good – I loved it, I gulped it down, and it was done within a week.  From there, “Light in August” and “As I Lay Dying” were pleasant extensions of my accomplishment. “Absalom, Absalom” was a thorny, profound experience – I knew as I was reading it that it was possibly the greatest novel of the 20th Century – but also overwhelming.  I left it incomplete, I must admit.

And so Faulkner was dispatched.

Not long after my triumph over Faulkner, I happened to pull a lesser known James volume off the shelf – “Washington Square.” I’m not sure why I pulled it down, but I did, and I read the first sentence, which made me snort with laughter:

During a portion of the first half of the present century, and more particularly during the latter part of it, there flourished and practised in the city of New York a physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional share of the consideration which, in the United States, has always been bestowed upon distinguished members of the medical profession.

I ask you, could there be a more Jamesian sentence? Overly fussy, cautiously couched, twisty without getting very far at all?  I particularly love that first careful delineation of the time frame involved – the “latter part” of the “first half” of the “present century.”  And I loved that the physician in question enjoyed “perhaps” a bit more respect than other doctors.

Thereafter followed three or four excruciating sentences discussing the fact that being a doctor is an honorable profession. The tedium of these sentences had the peculiar effect of energizing me – oh, how I hated the way he wrote!  It drove me crazy with impatience and rage!

And yes, I was enjoying hating him, enjoying it to such an extent that I kept on with the novel, until – what do you know! – I actually became engaged in the story and the characters.  And in fact the writing of this short novel was by and large clear of James’s typical throat-clearing.

I was like Mikey – I liked it!  And I finished it.

But I certainly wasn’t going to push my luck.  With James, unlike Faulkner, it was one and out, thank you very much.  Maybe some day I’ll go back and try “The Spoils of Poynton” again, but I know what he’s about, and I also know that “Washington Square” is an anomalous volume – James himself pretty much disowned the book, and it’s well-liked by many James haters like me.  Definitely a one-off.

This left me Mann and Proust – the latter of course I had no expectation of actually reading thoroughly.

Then, to my amazement, came the new translation of Proust, and in particular the first volume by Lydia Davis.  I picked up a copy at the bookstore and considered the first few pages suspiciously.  It did not seem like the familiar Proust.  The paragraphs were long, the sentences were beautiful, but it lacked that meandering tone I was familiar with.  It felt less like a dream described and more like – wait for it! – a memory.  Which of course is what it should seem like.

So I bought it.

Having learned a lesson from reading Faulkner in the company of Cleanth Brooks, I figured I would gird myself for Proust with a Roger Shattuck volume, but before I could order a copy online (there was none to be had at bookstore or library), I started the new translation and found, to my amazement, that it went down like a cool glass of water.  Who knew that Proust could be funny?  Who knew that Swann’s Way actually was rich not only in texture and description and characterization, but also in event and plot?  Soon I was wrapped up in the story of Swann and Odette, and I had no need for Shattuck.

As with Faulkner, I plunged happily into other Proust volumes, but with a different outcome – the further I read, the less I retained and the less I enjoyed.  “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” I did manage to complete, but “The Guermantes Way” was simply impossible after a while.

Still – I had fulfilled my self-set goal of completing at least a single volume.

Which brought me to Mann.  Having read so much of “Buddenbrooks” already, having started and abandoned so often the stories of “Death in Venice,” I bought an attractive new translation of “The Magic Mountain” (John Woods – published by Vintage) and prepared to scale the last of the major Western novelists of history.  Victory would be mine.

Except that I couldn’t finish the damn book.  My god, what a bore!

I guess I’ll have to get to Mann later.

Photo Credit: Proust’s bed, Musee Carnavalet, via Wikimedia Commons