Neville Jason’s Proust

Was it worth the time? And by time I mean a hundred and fifty hours of my life? Yes, and I would recommend this interpretation of Proust, which in itself is a great work of art. This was the fourth time I had read Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu in the Scott Moncrieff translation. But it was the first time I followed the book, listening at the same time while the actor Neville Jason read to me, leading me along, taking on the voices of all the characters. Jason began the Naxos unabridged English audiobook recording in August 2011. One hundred years ago, in November 1913, the first volume, Du Côté de Chez Swann, appeared. The first word of that volume was Longtemps; temps was, of course, in the title of the whole sequence of books; and the last word of all, in Le Temps Retrouvé, the final volume, was temps. Every cd of the Naxos audiobook bears clockfaces.

Reading against time, I was reminded of another time-obsessed book. In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Tristram struggles to be conceived, let alone born, held up by Mrs. Shandy’s ill-timed question to his father, “have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” So begins in delay a book in which duration, the time it takes to write, the time it takes to read, is played out to the end.

Swann’s Way begins also with a delay, but Swann would be the first to sympathize if he knew the trouble he is causing. His visit to Marcel’s family delays the evening ritual. The child upstairs will have to wait for one hundred and fifty hours of our time, forty-five days of Neville Jason’s life, and roughly thirty-three years of Marcel’s own lifetime before he receives that anticipated good-night kiss of his mother.

This is in Time Regained. Almost simultaneously Marcel has, at last, accepted his “vocation”: he will write his book. But everything in those early years after the First World War reminds him that the world of his book’s setting has changed and grown old. And he has grown old, or so he feels. Will he have time to finish what he has only just begun? In Marcel’s case we cannot be sure. In his author’s case we know the answer. Proust will finish his book, even if a third remains unrevised. (“The weaker parts must be strengthened”—and extended! Proust boasts in a letter to a friend; “I’ve written a new book on the proofs.”) He dies writing of the death of his creation, the author Bergotte. Both Proust and Bergotte are here thinking of the life of their books: “One accepts the thought that one will die in ten years and one’s books in a hundred. Eternal duration is no more promised to works than to men.”

Proust’s book has outlasted his hundred-year test. It attracted attention outside France at once. Within a month Du Côté de Chez Swann received a favorable review in the Times Literary Supplement. The review, comparing Proust to Henry James, on December 4, 1913, was anonymous. All reviews in the TLS were anonymous then and for a long time afterward. But literary detective work in France and England has revealed that the review was written by the poet, scholar, and authority on French literature Agnes Mary Frances Robinson, Madame Duclaux. An astonishing beginning had been made for Proust’s fame outside France.

My own introduction to Proust was a happy accident. In 1951 I went searching my parents’ bookshelves for a book...