When the DeWitt Elm was cut down this summer on the corner of Main and Wheelock streets, Hanover lost a giant. Waiting at the corner of Main, I loved standing in the shade of that tree. From the window of my bookstore I used to look out on it, and I even wrote a piece for Daybreak about the way a smaller tree had planted itself into the bark of the elm and was flowering between the lofty branches. Now I stand in the shade of the memory of that magnificent tree.
This summer I’ve been reading the work of the writer most closely associated with memory, Marcel Proust. While C.K. Scott Moncreiff translated the title of Proust’s seven-volume novel as Remembrance of Things Past, other translators have gone with In Search of Lost Time. The title you’re probably most familiar with is Swann’s Way, which is actually just the title of the first volume. I’m not going to quote from Swann’s Way, arguably Proust’s most well-known volume, but rather from volumes further along in the novel, in the hopes of sharing some of the pleasures of reading Proust.
To begin with, Proust’s writing is poetic and gorgeous. This passage comes from Within a Budding Grove:
What there is so attractive about our yachts—and smaller yachts especially, I don’t like the huge ones, they’re too much like ships; yachts are like women’s hats, you must keep within certain limits—is the unbroken surface, simple, gleaming, grey, which under a cloudy, leaden sky takes on a creamy softness. The cabin in which we live ought to make us think of a little café. And women’s clothes on board a yacht are the same sort of thing; what really are charming are those light garments, uniformly white, of cloth or linen or nankeen or drill, which in the sunlight and against the blue of the sea shew up with as dazzling a whiteness as a spread sail.
It surprises people when I tell them that Proust’s writing is funny. Judge for yourself. This comical passage comes from Cities of the Plain:
I shall not dwell here, for it forms part of quite another story, in which M. de Charlus allowed a Queen to die rather than miss an appointment with the hairdresser who was to singe his hair for the benefit of an omnibus conductor who filled him with alarm.
In The Guermantes Way, Proust writes: “Each of us sees in the brightest colours what he sees at a distance, what he sees in other people.” When I first read that, I wrote it down right away, because I knew intuitively that it was true but I needed to spend some time really digesting that truth.
The DeWitt Elm was estimated to be between 120 and 130 years old at the time it was felled. I like to imagine that for the past century students and community members have been reading Proust in the shade of that tree. If you have time to spend reading a novel in seven volumes, I highly recommend picking up Proust. The passages quoted here are from the C.K. Scott Moncreiff translation. Scott Moncreiff was the first to translate Proust into English. One hundred years later, the prose sings off the page.
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.