To pick up where I left off, in the middle of Part Two:
“The Intermittencies of the Heart” is sad and sweet and lovely. In this section, our narrator arrives at Balbec and suddenly, a year after the fact, the sorrow and loss of his grandmother’s death are real to him, start affecting him in a way they didn’t before, in his self-centered Parisian life. Of course, this sorrow is a little self-centered, too, but it’s also affecting: I teared up on the train when I was reading the passage about the wall between the narrator’s room and the room where his grandmother slept, how he turns to face the wall in the morning so as not to face the sea that his grandmother can no longer enjoy, but the wall just makes him sadder, as he remembers how he’d knock on it in the morning and she’d knock back, “those answering knocks which meant: ‘Don’t fuss, little mouse […]’” (p 220). This section captures how emotion can sneak up on you, how there’s an “anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings” (p 211). But there’s humor and beauty in this section, too: the hotel manager who knows too many languages to speak any of them properly, and talks about a man who used to take “a catnip” every afternoon, or a judge who was just given a great honor because of his “general impotence” (p 205), and then the last paragraph, with its springtime weather, sun giving way to cloud to sun to cloud to rain (the world as changeable as the heart), mud and the apple trees and the puddles in the road. The section ends with this, which I love: “Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple-trees in their grey net. But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a day in spring” (p 245).
Part Two, Chapter Two: Our narrator, though still mourning his grandmother, finds himself awake and alive and still wanting. It is spring, after all, and everything’s blooming. Early in this section there’s a passage about the apple trees and the hawthorns that’s even more pleasing when you look at the manuscript version given in the addenda: the narrator talks about looking at a row of hawthorns that remind him of the hawthorns at Combray in May, there’s that now-familiar contrast of now vs. then, and the self of now vs. the self of then, but discussed here in terms of looking and remembering all at once, at the same time, the idea that this is like having a “blurred and double vision,” eyes that don’t know “how to set their optical apparatus in order to see the flowers at the same time along the hedge and in myself” (pp 739-740). Back entirely in the present, he finds that with wanting comes jealousy: he watches Albertine and Andrée dance at a little casino and is troubled by a comment an acquaintance makes about the way the girls are dancing together; he wonders if Albertine might not be having “Gomorrhan” affairs with her female friends (ah, and just when I’d been thinking this book would be about Sodom alone). He worries about every girl he sees her talk with on the beach, until she flirts with one of his male friends, which makes him equally cranky, but at least gets the worry of lesbianism out of his head. I’m just now at the part where he takes the train to have dinner with the Verdurins, the socially-climbing “little clan” we met in Paris in Swann’s Way, now summering near Balbec.
(All page numbers are from the Modern Library paperback edition of Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright)
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