W. J. Weatherby recently described in the Times Literary Supplement his fruitless pilgrimage through New York bookshops on the day the Nobel was announced for Patrick White. None of White’s books was in stock. The grotesque riposte of the book business to this situation would of course have been, “We didn’t know he was going to win the Nobel Prize.”
The publishing and marketing of books is in a generally grievous state. However, in recent years it would always have been possible to find, in reputable London bookshops, not only a number of White’s novels but also a selection of contemporary Australian writing—Hal Porter’s heart-shaking Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, for example, or a new novel by Elizabeth Harrower or Judah Waten. No American journal performs the service, provided in England by the Times Literary Supplement, of bringing new talents of the English-speaking world regularly to general attention. The Nobel citation itself proclaims that Australia has now been “introduced into literature”—as if literature were some august academy outside of which Australian writers had hitherto been practicing their art.20
As with all important novelists whose testimony implicates their native land, the fact that Patrick White is Australian is, from the literary standpoint, both essential and irrelevant. The hit-and-miss geography of the Nobel lottery, which has this time devolved on a master craftsman, will bring White more readers, but it is otherwise possibly of little consequence to a man immune to acclaim and obdurately remote from the distracting ritual of commercial caperings, pontification, and self-praise. Patrick White has donated his Nobel Prize money to the establishment of a fund for Australian writers, remarking (like his incorruptible Sister de Santis), “There is nothing I want.” A man who is engaged in such an enterprise as his has no time to “want” anything—unless, perhaps, the well-being of other writers.
ORDINARY PEOPLE
Review of Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn and Excellent Women
Interest in the work of Barbara Pym was recently stimulated when several writers independently named her as Britain’s most unjustly neglected living novelist. The two books now published in the United States—Excellent Women, first issued in England in 1952, and Quartet in Autumn, a new work—are in my opinion her very best so far. Her candid, penetrating humanity can be disconcerting, like a quiet, strong, perceiving presence in a busy room. Similarly, her wit forms an undercurrent of realization. Her distinctive style, while quite her own, belongs to an English tradition that in painting would include Gwen John, in literature Charlotte Mew: a stillness vibrant with a piercing sense of human frailty.
George Eliot, in her Scenes of Clerical Life, urges us “to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.”1 It is to this tragicomedy that Barbara Pym’s talent is directed, and her Quartet in Autumn builds to a stronger pathos than her previous books. Four office colleagues—two male, two female—reach retirement age and face the slim pickings of pensioned obscurity. None has much in the way of inner or outer resources; and each has a fair measure of undistinguished eccentricity, developed throughout a doggedly parochial life. The extent to which change is intolerable to them dictates their diverse lonely fates. Among modern incongruities, their timid or rigid virtues are extinguished, along with an entire and helpless past, before our eyes.
Quartet in Autumn moves within a smaller compass than Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, which treats a similar theme; and Miss Pym is poignant, where Mrs. Spark is masterly. But this is fine, durable stuff, an originality that, however you approach it, gives back the truth.
Excellent Women is so entirely delightful that its tremor of pain takes the reader unaware. (As Miss Pym would say, “It was rather sad, really.”2) The novel’s narrator is a woman in her thirties, pious, comely, and kind, whose willingness merely to assist at other people’s lives is taken for granted by her friends, and very nearly by herself. Here too an English dread of change acts as a brake on existence, let alone passion. (Transferred to a new room in a government office, one character laments: “Different pigeons come to the windows.”3) The heroine’s very worth practically ensures that she will be overlooked—a risk that Miss Pym herself has fearlessly run and triumphed over with the excellence of these two books.
TRANSLATING PROUST
I felt that this last sentence was merely phrase-making.
—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive
The ever engrossing question of rendering into English Marcel Proust’s A la recherche still turns, irresistibly, on the adjusting or supplanting of Charles Scott Moncrieff’s long dominant Remembrance, a work that having been the touchstone for generations of Proust’s English-reading public continues—despite necessary amplifications, commendable reworkings, and persistent criticisms—to preside, a lion in the path.
“Reworking” is the word of the late Terence Kilmartin, in his prefatory note to the three-volume edition that, revised by him, incorporates in its final volume the translation of Le temps retrouvé by Andreas Mayor. These later translations had the benefit of the elucidated text, in the annotated Pléiade edition, of Proust’s labyrinthine manuscript—dense, in its closing section, with the author’s insertions and emendations as painfully indicated on his deathbed: matter that had seemed, to the eye of the layman, virtually indecipherable. Proust died in 1922; Scott Moncrieff in 1930. The “reworked” edition of A la recherche, revised by Kilmartin, is justly presented as “Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin,” and retains its title Remembrance of Things Past. Working with close and sympathetic attention to Proust’s words and intentions, Kilmartin made adjustments, for the most part necessary and pleasing, to Scott Moncrieff’s version, paying tribute to that pioneering translation, which—as Kilmartin says in his prefatory note, has long been regarded “almost as a masterpiece in its own right.”
Himself in ill health, Kilmartin—like Scott Moncrieff—carried his enterprise close to conclusion. That in itself marks him out among revisionists and critics of Scott Moncrieff. The road back from intended retranslations of part or all of the Recherche had come, over many years, to resemble those nineteenth-century paintings of the retreat from Moscow, in which somber marshals astride drooping horses lead an exhausted multitude through snowdrifts charged with the bodies of their fallen comrades. In the epic of retranslating Proust, considerations of time, health, finances, fatigue, and no doubt much else have contributed to withdrawals from the field. New millennial translations have as yet dealt with assigned portions, only, of the work. Whoever tackles Proust’s novel is taking on the translation, from a most exigent original, of a million and a quarter words scrupulously assembled by one of the most prodigious and complex authors who ever lived. They are confronting, also, a nineteenth-century capacity for magnitude.
In 1853 Gustave Flaubert, seized with the creation of Madame Bovary, was already lamenting a literary decline, from the luminous power of the great masters into the troubled assiduity of contemporary writing: “We must pile up a mass of little pebbles to build our pyramids; theirs, a hundred times greater, were hewn in monoliths.”1
The genius of magnitude nevertheless persisted, in its terminal phase, into the generation—to which both Proust and Scott Moncrieff belonged—that outlived the 1914–18 war: the Great War, with its everlasting debilitation of civilized conviction and sense of purpose. A reiterated commendation of Scott Moncrieff’s approach to his task has logically touched on his close relation to the ambiance, atmosphere, and culture of the Proustian era. Proust’s own concept of his immense endeavor had been visionary; as was the decision of his first English translator “to devote his life,” in George Painter’s words, “to the translation.”2
A dozen years or more ago, during a particular irruption of criticisms of the Scott Moncrieff rendering, I set myself the game, on summer evenings, of comparing favorite passages of the Recherche—spreading the original, in the Pléiade
volumes, alongside the Scott Moncrieff, together with the “reworked” Kilmartin. One’s lasting impression was one of admiration for both translators, and a renewed sense not only of Scott Moncrieff’s achievement but of its importance as a precedent for every subsequent contender. The thing had been attempted, it had been done. It was incontrovertibly there—to be read, enjoyed, praised, patronized, carped at, disparaged. In the realm of translation, it is a colossus—daunting even to the most confident of its critics, since, if it is to be challenged, it cannot merely be “redone”; it must be conspicuously bettered.
These impressions brought to mind—with allowance for the great discrepancies of the analogy—remarks by the nineteenth-century historian François Guizot on his successive readings of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
After a first rapid perusal, which allowed me to feel nothing but the interest of the narrative, always animated…and always perspicuous, I entered upon a minute examination of the details of which it is composed; and the opinion which I then formed was, I confess, singularly severe…. I allowed some time to elapse before I reviewed the whole. A second attentive and regular perusal of the entire work…showed me how much I had exaggerated the importance of the reproaches which Gibbon really deserved; I was struck with the same errors…but I had been far from doing adequate justice to the immensity of his researches, the variety of his knowledge…. I then felt that his book, in spite of its faults, will always be a noble work.3
Some such deference lingers with this reader toward the work of Scott Moncrieff in relation to the persistent, and sometimes derisive, criticisms to which it is subjected. Aside from essential inclusions of “new” material, and clearly justified modification, the quality of the huge task—accomplished in relatively few years and quite without the vaunted apparatus of modern electronic innovations (which, in fact, in artistic affairs, seem of little assistance when certain ineffable chips are down)—still commands wonder, still gives pleasure, still dispenses beauty. Kilmartin acknowledges his fundamental debt to his predecessor. It is unlikely that any full and future rendering into our language of this great novel will not build upon and appreciate Scott Moncrieff’s achievement, by now historic—and moving, also, in its evocation of a past ability to embrace the impossible single-handed and carry it to term.
Readings of recent new translations of separate portions of the Recherche suggest that these most often fall below their best standard out of a wish to differ at all costs from Scott Moncrieff. Illustrations of that tendency appeared, some years past, in a lively article in the New York Times Magazine, where a group of prominent revisers tried their respective hands at retranslating Proust’s celebrated opening sentence: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”—conveyed with faithful simplicity by Scott Moncrieff as “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” This article was much discussed at the time on the New York literary scene, the verdict falling heavily—in my own experience, unanimously—in favor of Scott Moncrieff’s unforced choice of words over the attempts, sometimes ingenious, sometimes desperate, merely to differ. Terence Kilmartin himself discreetly stuck with Scott Moncrieff’s plain rendition.
That particular pitfall, familiar as it must be to experienced translators, inexorably lures them. Kilmartin himself is not immune, and in his “reworking” the temptation occasionally makes a significant appearance within more superficial flickerings. To my mind, it blights one of the most poignant exchanges between Proust’s lovers—in the days when Albertine, ceasing to be the Prisoner, becomes the Fugitive.
On the eve of her secretly planned departure from Marcel’s house, Albertine is invited by Marcel on a twilit drive out of Paris. In the carriage, in an atmosphere of dream, calm falls on their long-tormented relations. For the girl, aware that she is about to put an end to a situation grown intolerable, it is an episode of high sadness, which she invokes in her conclusion to a letter written to Marcel following their rupture:
Croyez que de mon côté je n’oublierai pas cette promenade deux fois crépusculaire (puisque la nuit venait et que nous allions nous quitter) et qu’elle ne s’effacera de mon esprit qu’avec la nuit complète.
Scott Moncrieff translates this as follows:
You may be sure that for my part I shall never forget that drive in a twofold twilight (since night was falling and we were about to part) and that it will be effaced from my memory only when the darkness is compete.4
Kilmartin’s version:
You may be sure that for my part I shall never forget that doubly crepuscular drive (since night was falling and we were about to part) and that it will be effaced from my memory only when darkness is complete.5
Kilmartin’s impulse to supplant “a twofold twilight” produces an assault on the ear. “Crepuscular,” written or spoken is unnatural in English usage, and distracting. Its sound, evocative in French, is ugly in our language—and more so, to my thinking, in its heavy-handed coupling with “doubly.” Since this brief passage has importance in Proust’s narrative (Marcel mean-spiritedly seizing on it as evidence of his having educated this ignorant girl) and recurs not only in the immediately following pages but much later in the story. Kilmartin is obliged to repeat the phrase, always with an unhappy effect. Scott Moncrieff’s “twofold twilight” does not jar on the ear, and is at melancholy ease with its Proustian era. It may be criticized but not readily replaced.
Similarly, in the same brief letter, when Albertine urges caution on Marcel in dealing with car salesmen—“Vous vous laisseriez monter le coup par ces gens”—Kilmartin’s “You would let yourself be taken for a ride” seems an unnecessary correction to Scott Moncrieff’s version, that Marcel not let himself “be taken in.” Kilmartin perhaps enjoyed the double entendre of the car salesmen and the ride, but the transatlantic note comes amiss from Albertine.
By which I suggest that Scott Moncrieff does not, as charged, always overstate the case, or add to the convulsions of an intricate story; and that his best plain words have been, at times, elaborately brought up to date.
When I, at sixteen and living in Hong Kong in the postwar years, was merely aware of the Recherche, with no idea of what was in store, I met, at a gathering, a handsome, reserved, and pleasant person, still young, who was introduced as Miss Scott Moncrieff. I already understood the name’s literary significance. It was at once explained, in her presence, that she was—the niece, was it, or a cousin?—of the great translator. She was one of the few women to hold, then, a distinguished, and beneficent, position in the colony: and it occurred to me that she possibly wearied of her reflected glory. Later, the matter being discussed in her absence, I heard, for the first time: “Of course, the whole thing will have to be redone.”
Not so easy as all that.
Here are two later versions of what will surely be a succession of versions. The first is by D. J. Enright, who revised Scott Moncrieff’s and Terence Kilmartin’s translations. The second is by Peter Collier, whose translation of The Captive / The Fugitive has been published by Penguin as part of Christopher Prendergast’s team translation of Proust’s novel.
Dear friend, thank you for all the nice things you wrote to me. I am at your disposal for the countermanding of the Rolls, if you think that I can help in any way, as I am sure I can. You have only to let me know the name of the agents. You would let yourself be taken for a ride by these people who are only interested in selling, and what would you do with a motor-car, you who never stir out of the house? I am deeply touched that you have kept a happy memory of our last outing. You may be sure that for my part I shall never forget that drive in a double twilight (since night was falling and we were about to part) and that it will be effaced from my thoughts only when the darkness is complete. (Translated by D. J. Enright)6
My dear friend, thank you for all your kind remarks. I am at your disposal and shall cancel the order for the Rolls if you think that I may be of assistance, and I do think it’s likely. You have only to tell me the name of
your agent. You would be liable to let yourself be taken in by these people who have only one thing in mind, which is to make a sale; and what would you do with a car, since you never go out? I am very touched that you should have kept such a nice memory of our last outing. Please believe that for my part I shall never forget this excursion and its twofold twilight (since night was falling and we were destined to part) and that it will never be erased from my mind until blackest night finally invades it. (Translated by Peter Collier)7
In different degree, these renderings strike me as suffering from what might be called translation fatigue—or more explicitly, version fatigue. To his impassioned (or, some would say, overwrought) rendition of La Recherche, Scott Moncrieff brought the irreducible advantage of precedence: he was breaking new ground. He would reveal Proust’s masterpiece—as far as then possible, in its entirety—to the English-reading world for the first time, in the process disclosing and developing his own interpretative powers over word and mood. He had been at work on the translation some years before being formally, and rather awkwardly, confirmed as its English translator. Every subsequent translator of Proust into English has been necessarily and monumentally aware of this precursor, and of those who followed him. Flaws have been established and corrected, revisions have been attempted, vocabulary and syntax have been weighed for possible innovation and improvement. And consciousness of these handlings and fingerings may have elusively acted on, and dimmed, the freshness of impression that inspired Scott Moncrieff and excited his readers. Assiduity has edged out élan.
In the two later translations given above, the opening lines of the passage, dealing with the prosaic car, carry none of the tension inevitably existing between two lovers who, so recently parted in emotional exhaustion, are resuming tentative contact under a flag of truce. Awaiting word from Albertine, Marcel sees her handwriting with anxiety and expectation. In Scott Moncrieff’s version, there is throughout this passage a tremor of context, ineffably conveyed: the reader is aware that Albertine’s remarks about the car are prelude to—and pretext, merely, for—her reversion to the poignant twilit drive and her declaration of lasting love. We ourselves, as readers, open and begin her letter sensing that something more is to come. In the latter versions, however, the shift comes abruptly, so that concern for the car appears to be given equal weight with the girl’s poetic invocation of loss and remembrance.
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