A MATURING PERCEPTION OF PROUST

I would like to report that I have finished reading Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” all six novels of it, all 2,275 pages of it. I would like to, but I can’t.

I would also like to report that I spent my summer vacation atop Mt. Everest, but I can’t do that either. Both achievements are dreamlike in their impossibility. Forget Everest, except as a measure of the insurmountability of the Proust. But I may yet conquer Proust, inspired by a book of only 153 pages.

I’ve owned the Proust for more than 40 years. As a precocious and undoubtedly pompous early teen-ager, I joined the Book of the Month Club, mostly to get Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and then or soon after I received the Proust as a book dividend.

Two volumes, boxed in dark blue and regularly dusted. The Random House Modern Library edition first printed in 1934: the C. K. Scott Moncrief translation except for the final novel, “The Past Recaptured,” which Frederick Blossom translated; a helpful introduction by the late Joseph Wood Krutch, which I read several times over the years, hoping to get a running head start into the text.

The books have lived with me in four states and two countries and at least a dozen different dwellings. For a while, the first novel, “Swann’s Way,” had a series of book marks, denoting my progress at each successive start, like pencil marks on a doorjamb recording a child’s growth. At one time or another, I began each of the six novels, thinking (I suppose) that one of them would prove less impenetrable than the others.

It begins, in the chapter Moncrief insightfully titled “Overture” (Proust left it untitled), with what must be one of the most deceptively simple sentences in all literature: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”

From so linear a start, the work, like memory itself, takes off and speeds into an astonishing weave of impressions, recollections, descriptions, evocations, scenes and feelings and wisps of conversation, scattered across time like dust before the wind. It is a doctoral dissertation on “I Remember Mama,” an effort, unequaled before or since, to pinion forever what was.

It was also formidable. And although an unfinished book was an accusing affront to me then as now, I realized eventually that I had undertaken Proust too young and hopelessly ill-prepared; and when I was older and not quite so ill-prepared, I was without the time to contemplate Time as Proust did.

But, nearly 20 years ago, the poet Howard Nemerov taught a course on Proust at Brandeis University, and his invaluable and entertaining lectures have now been published as “The Oak in the Acorn” (Louisiana State University Press, $16.95). They are as given, complete with a note that the course can be dropped without charge before Feb. 13, after that with a fee of $5.

These are not transcriptions; the lectures were written. But Nemerov says that he writes as he talks and vice-versa, and it appears so. Reading, you hear the very human voice of a man at least slightly intimidated at the idea of elucidating so massive and masterful a work.

Nemerov first read Proust, he says in an introduction, by barracks light--as a Royal Canadian Air Force cadet learning to fly. He had received the book as a college graduation present, and, in the fierce Canadian winter of 1942-43, he was (relatively) a boy going to sleep, reading about a boy going to sleep.

It helps to know all that, somehow. The reader/listener catches from the start Nemerov’s enduring love for the book, and his pleasure (which becomes ours) in deciphering, over several readings, its intricate weave of time and memory.

Nemerov is wary of studying Proust’s life in lieu of the book, although no work of fiction has ever appeared to be so exhaustively autobiographical. Still, it is helpful and fascinating to know, as Nemerov told his class, that Proust had spent three years (1896-99) warming up for “Remembrance of Things Past” by writing a 1,000-page prototype, “Jean Santeuil,” which was found among his papers and not published until 1962.

“Remembrance” was written over the 17 years between the death of Proust’s mother in 1905 and his own in 1922. Yet the major themes, as in a symphony, are all stated in the first book, “Swann’s Way,” which he published--at his own expense--in 1913. It is an amazing proof of what could be called the persistence of literary vision.

The work must have been conceived as a prodigious whole, and Nemerov indicates that Proust probably wrote the beginning and the ending before he had finished what went between.

Nemerov makes much of the analogy to music: themes stated and echoed, restated, foreshadowing other, linked themes. And all undertaken in the novelist’s attempt--fanatical in its thoroughness--to capture characters on paper in something like their full being, and to see men, as Proust says, “as occupying in Time a place far more considerable than the so restricted one allotted them in space,” so that “they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives--with countless intervening days between--so widely separated from one another in Time.”

And those, 2,275 pages later, are the last words of “Remembrance of Things Past.” If I had once persisted, I might have come at last to say, “Ah.” I might have understood--I think I do now--that for Proust as for all of us, Time fetches all our memories together, as on a limitless and profoundly affecting diorama seen from the mind’s eye.

I may yet get to finish “Remembrance of Things Past”; Nemerov has made it more tantalizing than ever before. But even if I don’t, I may be able to fake a good game if the need arises.