{"id":534,"date":"2026-07-06T05:08:48","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T05:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=534"},"modified":"2026-07-06T05:08:48","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T05:08:48","slug":"this-week-in-nation-history-100-years-of-writing-about-marcel-prousts-almost-wizard-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=534","title":{"rendered":"This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: 100 Years of Writing About Marcel Proust\u2019s \u2018Almost Wizard Power\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<div>\n<div>\n<article>\n<header>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>Books &amp; the Arts<\/li>\n<li>December 7, 2013<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1>This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: 100 Years of Writing About Marcel Proust\u2019s \u2018Almost Wizard Power\u2019<\/h1>\n<h1>This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: 100 Years of Writing About Marcel Proust\u2019s \u2018Almost Wizard Power\u2019<\/h1>\n<h2>\n<p>Proust, a reviewer wrote in 1921, \u201cmay not be what his hero set out to be in his childhood, the greatest writer in the world, but he is one of those.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=532\">This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: The Fall and Rise of American Cities, Through Camilo Jos\u00e9 Vergara\u2019s Lens<\/a><\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<section>\n<time>December 7, 2013<\/time><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>\u201cThe mere dimensions\u201d of <em>\u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/em>, the critic Ernest Boyd wrote in <em>The Nation<\/em> in 1924, \u201care sufficient to inspire respect, and to arouse curiosity in that section of the public which likes to talk about books rather than read them\u2026. The result is that there has been much more enthusiasm displayed over Marcel Proust than knowledge of his work.\u201d\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>Almost ninety years on, that has never been truer than it is now, as some of the writing occasioned by last month\u2019s centenary of the publication of <em>Swann\u2019s Way<\/em>, the first volume in Proust\u2019s magnum opus, showed. It is nearly impossible to find an article on the anniversary not containing the word \u201cmadeleine.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>From our first notice of Proust to our most recent\u2014the first-ever publication in English, in 1971, of excerpts from Proust\u2019s prefaces to the writings of art critic John Ruskin\u2014<em>The Nation <\/em>has always displayed both enthusiasm for his work and knowledge of it, consistently marveling over \u201cProust\u2019s conviction that we recapture the past, with its emotions, not by any effort of the intelligence but through the accidental stimulus of an odor, a musical phrase, an involuntary movement, a flavor upon the tongue\u201d (Dorothy Brewster in 1926), or \u201chis power to communicate an egotistical absorption in the poignancy of a cherished pain\u201d (Joseph Wood Krutch in 1930).<\/p>\n<p>Even our first review of his work, in the December 7, 1921, issue, recognized the permanent impact the <em>Recherche <\/em>would have upon world literature.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOf all that has been written of Marcel Proust,\u201d Ellen FitzGerald wrote, \u201clittle has been said of what he is contributing to the novel in this growing landmark.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Some critics dismiss it as a novel of manners; others appreciate it as a product of style. No one has pointed out that this \u201cRecherche du temps perdu\u201d is a reviving and even recreating of old matter and old method into new effects, is what every novel should be\u2014a discovery of something new both in life and art.<\/p>\n<p>This novel has no hero, no dominant character whose destiny is the reader\u2019s concern. Yet unless the reader of these volumes sees that the anonymous, negative, impersonal character of the child, boy, and youth who successively has the place of hero is a triumph of creative skill, all the more powerful because his unobtrusiveness is the very vantage point from which he observes, analyses, projects, paints whole groups, he misses the first marvel of M. Proust\u2019s skill\u2026The prologue, an exquisite bit of reverie, establishes the poetical mood of the hero, how he is to see his world. Memory has perhaps never been so demonstrated to be what Plato called it\u2014the mother of the Muses. The pain, the sensitiveness, the inexplicable suffering of a child have never been distilled into more wistful poetry. Child psychology has something precious in these pages, just as it has in James Joyce\u2019s \u201cPortrait of the Artist.\u201d M. Proust\u2019s method is of the two the more rational\u2026 \u00a0<\/p>\n<section>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h2>Popular<\/h2>\n<p><span><span>&#8220;swipe left below to view more authors&#8221;<\/span>Swipe \u2192<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h3>\n<span>Separation of Church and State: America\u2019s Best Idea<\/span><\/p>\n<p>                Separation of Church and State: America\u2019s Best Idea<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<p>\nFeature<br \/>\n<span><br \/>\n                            \/<br \/>\n                        <\/span><br \/>\nJohn Fugelsang <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h3>\n<span>The Contradictions of 1776<\/span><\/p>\n<p>                The Contradictions of 1776<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<p>\nBooks &amp; the Arts<br \/>\n<span><br \/>\n                            \/<br \/>\n                        <\/span><br \/>\nGerald Horne <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h3>\n<span>Evaluating \u2018No Child Left Behind\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<p>                Evaluating \u2018No Child Left Behind\u2019<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<p>\nFeature<br \/>\n<span><br \/>\n                            \/<br \/>\n                        <\/span><br \/>\nLinda Darling-Hammond <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h3>\n<span>Why Can\u2019t Top Democrats Just Say \u201cNo War With Iran\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>                Why Can\u2019t Top Democrats Just Say \u201cNo War With Iran\u201d?<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<p>\nSarah Lazare<span> and <\/span>Adam Johnson <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<p>Poetry deepens as memory penetrates unafraid into the sanctuary of emotion, passion, beauty of every kind. A temperamental, intellectual youth and his world live for us again, a world where the pale cast of thought admits little gaiety but touches instead to new issues a whole epoch where mood gives perspective to all the scenes. How everything expands and deepens because the mental reliving quickens consciousness to an almost wizard power!\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>* * *<\/p>\n<p>Timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of <em>Swann\u2019s Way <\/em>last month, Yale University Press published Proust biographer William Carter\u2019s \u201cnew, more accurate, and illuminating\u201d revision of the first volume of C.K. Scott Moncrieff\u2019s classic translation, itself published from 1922 (the year of Proust\u2019s death) through 1930 (the year of Moncrieff\u2019s death), which \u201ccorrects previous translating missteps to bring readers closer to Proust\u2019s intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As early as 1924, <em>The Nation<\/em>\u2019s Ernest Boyd\u2014a signer of the famous Greenwich Village Bookshop Door\u2014recognized the need for such a revision, arguing in his review of the second Moncrieff volume that he didn\u2019t see it as \u201canything more than an ordinarily competent piece of translation\u2026an exercise in the manner of Henry James.\u201d Moreover, Boyd wrote, \u201cMr. Scott Moncrieff is guilty of actual blunders, which are rather elementary in many cases, and indicate, at best, an unfamiliarity with the fine shades of French, which is a serious defect in the translator of a work which rests upon a perfect feeling for the nuances of French speech and manners.\u201d He then went on to skewer a few glaring mistakes\u2014\u201cMr. Scott Moncrieff\u2019s misfortunes with \u2018barbante,\u2019 \u2018barbifant,\u2019 and \u2018raseurs\u2019 are worthy of a place in a collection of schoolboys\u2019 \u2018howlers\u2019\u2009\u201d\u2014and to declare his work \u201cnot the greatest translation,\u201d but adding, \u201cnor is Proust himself, for that matter, the greatest French prose writer of the age.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>* * *<\/p>\n<p>Beginning with <em>The Cities of the Plain<\/em>, or in the more recent style, <em>Sodom and Gomorrah<\/em>, in 1928, <em>The Nation<\/em>\u2019s longtime drama critic (and resident Proustian) Joseph Wood Krutch reviewed each new Moncrieff translation as it was published. (The last, <em>Time Regained<\/em>, was completed by Frederick A. Blossom after Moncrieff\u2019s 1930 death.) Perhaps the most telling feature of the series of reviews, excerpted below, is that almost every single one calls each successive book under review at least as good, if not better, than its predecessors. One \u201cyields to none of the previous volumes in interest or beauty\u201d; another \u201cis at least an example as striking as any other of the nature of that sensibility peculiar to him\u201d; and another, the last, is \u201cmore essential than any of the other single volumes to an understanding of Proust.\u201d Reading Krutch\u2019s (uncollected) reviews of Proust now, one is reawakened not only to the power of Proust\u2019s writing and of the best writing on Proust, but also to the thrill it must have been to read his work, as Krutch wrote, \u201cas they have appeared one by one\u201d rather than \u201cat a single gulp.\u201d Perhaps the closest contemporary readers will get to retrieving that irretrievable experience is in the publication of William Carter\u2019s revised Moncrieff translations, scheduled to be released annually for the next several years. Krutch\u2019s commentaries from the pages of <em>The Nation<\/em> will be an invaluable aid for newcomers and veteran Proustians alike.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>Volume 4<em>: The Cities of the Plain <\/em>(1928):<\/strong> \u201cOne of the earliest English commentators upon the work of Marcel Proust was disturbed by what he regarded as a moral obtuseness on the part of the author\u2026. but he who cannot accept\u2026our author\u2019s willingness to sink the gentleman as well as the man when his curiosity is aroused had best make up his mind once and for all that Proust is not for him, because Proust would not be Proust had he not renounced all the obligations of life at the same time that he renounced life itself\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen, burying himself in his chamber, [Proust] brought his life as a human being to an end the result was not at all to detach himself from it in the sense of freeing the logical faculties from the bondage of the senses, since his consciousness remained, what it had always been, primarily a realm of finely discriminated sensations, and since he turned not from perceptions to thoughts, but merely from perceptions to the memory of perceptions. But the fact that he was dead in the sense that he no longer planned to take any part in life, that he no longer felt any desires capable of eventuating in an act, not only made it possible for him to live passionately in memory and to approach more nearly than, perhaps, any other man ever did to that \u2018total recall\u2019 which is a psychological impossibility, but also made inevitable that disappearance of all ethical or conventional standards which distressed the English commentator.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Volume 5: <em>The Captive <\/em>(1929): <\/strong>\u201cProust was doubtless led to his all but obsessive interest in the contrast between the absolute value of our desires while they last and the rapidity with which they can, nevertheless, utterly disappear, by his own experience with the complexities of the sexual passion. Though assigning a wholly romantic value to this last he nevertheless completely dissociated the idea of love from the idea of permanence, and his realization of the fact that a change in his dominant desire made, in effect, a new person of him led him to notice how many similar if less striking examples of the same phenomenon are to be observed when we consider the interests, opinions, and even manners of a man. And at last it came to seem to him that it was folly to speak of himself, of Albertine, or of Charlus as though any one of them were an entity maintaining its identity while time flowed past, and that a novel could be significant only if it were everywhere dominated by the sense that even the personalities for which the constantly recurring names stand are as fluid as the medium through which they float\u2026. Others have struggled to rescue something from the flood; they have cherished at least the delusion that there are certain rocks around which the waves break. But his is a universe in which every molecule is fluid.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Volume 6: <em>The Sweet Cheat Gone <\/em>(1932): <\/strong>\u201cDisillusioned enough he was with many things, with morals for example, and he had neither any code nor any standards besides those which his tastes supplied. Yet there were capacities and faiths which he still retained. He still believed, for example, in the sufficiency of the senses and in the value of art. He never, like so many moderns, found himself in a world limited and debased by the impossibility of escape from psychology, anthropology, and Freudianism. The world was still absorbingly, still amazingly, interesting. Women, most women, were to him magical and mysterious. Conversations were witty, salons were thrilling, and artists\u2014even contemporary artists\u2014incalculably great. In a word, he respected his desires, his tastes, and his amusements, and hence, though experience might be predominantly painful, it was neither meaningless nor mean. And that perhaps is the secret of the individual charm of his world. It is one viewed with the critical freedom of modern thought and one in which skepticism rules. Yet it is somehow glamorous as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Volume 7: <em>The Past Recaptured <\/em>(1932)<\/strong>: \u201cOnce [the <em>Recherche<\/em>] has been read, it is literally unforgettable. The experiences which it affords become never-to-be-lost parts of one\u2019s own experience. Half a dozen of the individual characters, as well as the conception as a whole, are solid, unescapable, and like some event of history they are always there whether one approves or disapproves, admires or despises. No student of literature, whatever his opinions or his tastes, can forget its existence, and it could no more be done away with in response to an aesthetic whim than a pyramid or a cathedral could be done away with by some advocate of an exclusively \u201cmodern\u201d world. Of how many other books written during the last thirty years can that be said?\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Krutch\u2019s status as one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Proust in his time\u2014and perhaps any time\u2014was affirmed in 1934, when he provided the introduction to the four-volume Random House edition of Moncrieff\u2019s translation\u2014described by Random House publisher Bennett Cerf as \u201cone of the typographical masterpieces of 1934\u201d and \u201cone of the most successful publishing projects in the history of Random House\u201d\u2014which was reviewed in <em>The Nation<\/em> by Krutch\u2019s close friend (and former literary editor of the magazine) Mark Van Doren. Though he dutifully complimented a \u201ccompact and beautiful introduction,\u201d Van Doren wrote that Proust\u2019s work itself would probably not survive the advance of his novel\u2019s great subject, Time. Van Doren\u2019s self-described \u201cminority report\u201d argued that Proust\u2014the hero of whose books \u201cspends most of his time in bed with three women\u2014his mother, his grandmother, and [his housekeeper] Francois\u2014always there to caress him and indulge him, to kiss him goodnight, to draw his curtains in the morning, to roast him a delicious fowl when he is hungry, and to tiptoe out of hearing when he wants to think\u201d\u2014was \u201cpreposterously, insufferably, spoiled,\u201d and therefore condemned to supply his readers with an incomplete world stocked with incomplete characters.\u201d The <em>Recherche<\/em>, Van Doren concluded, would not be popular forever, and seemed upon reflection \u201cboth wonderful and trivial, both mammoth and minor.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>* * *<\/p>\n<p><em>Subscribers to <\/em>The Nation <em>can access our fully searchable digital archive, which contains thousands of historic articles, essays and reviews, letters to the editor and editorials dating back to July 6, 1865.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Researched by and written with Richard Kreitner.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=530\">The Politics of Pain<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<footer>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p>                Submit a correction<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>                Send a letter to the editor<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>                Reprints &amp; permissions<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>\n<p><span> Sarah Lazare<svg>\n<\/svg><br \/>\n<\/span>Sarah Lazare is the editor of <em>Workday Magazine<\/em>\u00a0and a contributing editor for <em>In These Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><span> Adam Johnson<svg>\n<\/svg><br \/>\n<\/span>Adam Johnson is a cohost of the podcast <em>Citations Needed<\/em>, and you can follow his work at <em>The Column<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=529\">Mayor Mamdani on 250 Years of a Grand Experiment in Self Governance<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n<\/div>\n<p><input\/><br \/>\n<input\/><br \/>\n<\/footer>\n<\/article>\n<p>Ad Policy<br \/>\n<!-- <a class=\"inifiniteLoader\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/new_infi_loader.gif\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a> -->\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":533,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - 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