In Search of an Editor

Posted on January 26th, 2009 in In Search of Lost Time by benmc

A friend and I were discussing spiritual disciplines recently and he remarked that the one spiritual discipline he didn’t want to adopt is submission. Submission to God or to others, there’s something about the concept that just doesn’t fit into his perception of how God created him.

What if, I suggested, rather than thinking of submission in terms of master/slave, we submitted to God in the same way that authors submit a manuscript to an editor?

So we pondered, “What if God is our editor?”

(It’s maybe a prideful comparison for someone who spends a fair bit of time editing at work, a little like the fable where Elephant declares that God has a trunk, etc.)

One way in which the comparison worked: Sometimes in life it feels like we need a “light edit” — just proofreading, please. Other times it seems like our life plan has been rejected or comes back with “MAJOR REWRITE NEEDED.”

And although we may wish to live without editorial constraints, I believe an editing colleague of mine has it right when she insists, “Everyone needs an editor.”

Even Proust. Especially Proust.

As I started the second volume, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” translator James Grieve observes that Proust’s 6-volume work was essentially unedited. He notes: “[Proust’s] novel is one of the few masterpieces never properly edited before publication.”

Originally vanity-published, Proust’s manuscripts never received the attention that Maxwell Perkins gave to Scott Fitzgerald’s or the devoted Bouilhet to Flaubert’s. . . . It has been said that Proust’s contract with Grasset “rid him of all editorial constraints.”

This makes Proust both frustrating and interesting to read. Throughout the first volume, I wondered how old, exactly, the young narrator was supposed to be. And there are details that don’t square with the “facts” of the narrative. And interesting, because I continue to think, “Would I have included this passage? Why is that here?”

Now that I read this intro, it makes more sense.

Proust didn’t have the full editorial team that J.K. Rowling had at her disposal for the seven volumes of Potter. Fitzgerald, apparently, was prevented from burdening “The Great Gatsby” with the much inventive title, “Trimalchio in West Egg.”

Proust may not have considered “submission” a spiritual discipline worth observing. Or he may have feared that an editor would just mess things up (see article on Raymond Carver and his editor, Gordon Lish).

Was that it? What do you think?

Proust: Style is my religion…

Posted on January 21st, 2009 in In Search of Lost Time by benmc

Last night as we watched Inauguration wrap-up coverage, we saw Bryan Williams interview Robin Givhan, a style columnist, about Michelle Obama’s outfits yesterday. She gave a big thumbs up on the First Lady’s fashion sense.

Among all the things that people were buzzing about yesterday, the fact that the First Lady’s style was a major storyline points to the power of style.

Marcel Proust would have been proud.

Proust worships at the altar of style. I just finished “Swann’s Way” and in the closing section of “Place-Names: The Name,” the narrator has an extended reflection on the elegant women of his childhood who strolled along the paths in the Bois de Boulogne.

He remembers “the happy time of my believing youth, when I would avidly come to the places where masterpieces of feminine elegance were created for a few moments among. . . the pines and acacias of the Bois de Boulogne.” (441)

As Lewis Galantière writes in the introduction to my 1956 Modern Library edition, “Proust was reared in the Roman Catholic faith, but he was temperamentally and intellectually incapable of religious belief.”

It’s true, Proust talks a lot about churches, but not much about religious faith. “Faith,” “belief” and “unbelief” are terms related more to Proust’s esthetics – the beauty or ugliness of a thing or person – than to his ethics or metaphysics. Can you say “Sex and the City“?

Yet even this faith in fashion fades over time. By the end of the book, he laments the changing times and the loss of true elegance:

“I no longer had any belief to infuse into all these new elements of the spectacle, to give them substance, unity, life . . . . These were ordinary women, in whose elegance I had no faith and whose dresses seemed to me unimportant.” (442)

At a certain point, the narrator realizes he simply doesn’t care any more. The thrill of the new is gone:

“How could anyone contemplating these horrible creatures under their hats topped with a birdcage or a vegetable patch even perceive what was so charming about the sight of Mme. Swann in a simple mauve hood or a little hat with a single, straight iris poking up from it?”

(Which makes me wonder, What would Proust have thought of Aretha Franklin’s big-bowed beauty of a hat at the inauguration?)

Even when he’s lost his belief in this substitute religion, there is still the “attachment to the old things which our belief once animated, as if it were in them and not in us that the divine resided and as if our present lack of belief had a contingent cause, the death of the Gods.”