Sadly lacking the private funds or lottery windfall necessary to lounge about reading all day, it's taken me far longer than planned to get through Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Indeed, while snatching a few pages here and there in bed, on buses and in pubs, I've found myself thinking more and more of Robert Proust's practical-minded judgment of his brother's work: "The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time."
But while I'm sure that certain of the undercurrents that tug this way and that beneath the surface of Proust's novel have, due to my piecemeal reading, left me wholly unmolested, I could always count on one thing to snap me back to attention, something that saturates this volume as surely as Marcel's tea saturated his madeleine: premier cru snobbery.
The rise of the bourgeoisie is one of In Search of Lost Time's overarching themes, and I suspect the analysis of that phenomenon's inherent tensions to be found in this volume seeds further investigations in later books (as ever, please tell me if I'm wrong). Marcel's holiday at the Brittany resort of Balbec puts Third Republic society in a petri dish, and beneath its starched gentility the town seethes with class conflict.
As for the attendant decline of the aristocracy, Proust views it with a regret that nevertheless escapes, by way of some well-aimed barbs at the faults of nobility, the gloopy sentimentality of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. It's this same astringency of Proust's that just about prevents you throwing the book at the wall when Marcel comes out with offensive tosh such as comparing his grandmother's servant Françoise's intellect with that of a dog. There's égalité for you.
More striking still is the passage wherein Marcel considers the working classes gazing in at the Grand Hotel's dining room:
"...the fishermen and also the tradesmen's families, cluttering invisibly in the outer darkness, pressed their faces to watch the luxurious life of its occupants gently floating upon the golden eddies within, a thing as extraordinary to the poor as the life of strange fishes or molluscs (an important social question, this: whether the glass wall will always protect the banquets of these weird and wonderful creatures, or whether the obscure folk who watch them hungrily out of the night will not break in some day to gather them from their aquarium and devour them)."
Although Within a Budding Grove was completed in 1913, the outbreak of war prevented it from being published until 1919. In light of that, it's irresistible to suppose that Proust - a serial reviser who was still making alterations on his deathbed - added the parenthetical line in the above quotation following the Russian Revolution.
For all his pomposity, though, it's important to remember that Marcel, while sharing more of his creator's traits than the average literary character, is not entirely Marcel Proust. And even if Marcel's prejudice, which may be teenage arrogance that mellows in later volumes, were analogous to Proust's own, is that really so terrible?
Ernst Bloch, the Marxist literary theorist, termed Proust and Joyce "bourgeois writers of decline", and valued Proust's work highly for reflecting what he called, with typical Marxist jollity, "the mixed darkness and bleakness" of his times. To my mind an artist's views have almost no bearing on a work's quality, even if you might on more than one occasion long to give young Marcel a slap, or have that glass wall shatter.
