In week 41 of the humanities crash course, I read a teeny tiny fragment of a monumentally long and famous novel and the whole of a short novel I’d never heard of. The fragment was the overture to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) and the novel Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton (1896). I also watched an exciting film noir unrelated to either of these two works.
Readings
Let’s start with Proust. In Search of Lost Time is so famous that I could’ve left it at “Proust” and you’d likely have known which work I was referring to. But this is surely one of those works more people know about than have read — not because of its literary quality, but because of its length: Lost Time spans seven volumes over 4,215 pages and holds the Guiness World Record for the longest novel.
Wisely, Gioia recommended a small fraction: the first part of the first volume, Swann’s Way, which is referred to in my translation as the Overture. It sets the tone for the work as a whole: the unnamed narrator, an well-to-do Frenchman, is recalling a memorable event from his childhood.
His parents are hosting a dinner party at their country estate. The dinner keeps his mother from coming up to his room for the customary good night kiss. Miffed about this, he contrives to stay up until the dinner is over. He gets his mother to kiss him, but at the cost of a new and unwelcome impression of how his parents understand his inner life.
This episode sets the stage for the author’s project: reconstructing the minutiae that marked his life. Memories are triggered involuntarily by sensual experiences, such as eating a piece of cake. We’ve all had such experiences; it was fascinating to read them put in words. Not to say I’m rushing to the rest of the novel — that would be quite a project!
On to the second novel I tackled this week, this one in its entirety: The Spoils of Poynton. I’d heard of James before (e.g., I knew he was William James’s brother) but had never read one of his works. Gioia recommended this one because it’s relatively short. (Certainly compared to Proust!)
The novel traces the relationship between three people: Mrs. Gereth, a widow, Owen, her son, and Fleda Vetch, a young woman who shares Mrs. Gereth’s tastes. That matters: Mrs. Gereth has exquisite taste. She’s spent her life decorating her home, Poynton. But now Owen is engaged to marry Mona, a woman of inferior taste. Mrs. Gereth worries that Mona will be the new mistress of Poynton. (Due to how English inheritance works, the estate passes to the son, not the widow.)
Mona and Owen check out the place. Mrs. Gereth is indignant. She moves to a smaller estate and takes much of her stuff there. Having already seen the full wonders of Poynton, Mona postpones the wedding until the stuff is fully restored. Mrs. Gereth would prefer if Owen married Fleda. That’s not a long shot: Fleda herself is in love with Owen, but she’s very circumspect — until Owen himself wavers.
Owen has a blowout with Mona’s mother. He tells Fleda that his relationship with Mona is over and asks her to marry him instead. But Fleda won’t believe the engagement is truly over until Mona confirms it. Meanwhile, Mrs. Gereth hears about the blowout and decides Fleda has surely won. She sends her stuff back to Poynton so that Fleda can enjoy it when she becomes the new mistress. But Fleda is distraught upon hearing this: now there’s nothing in Mona’s way.
Spoiler warning: skip the rest of this post if you’re planning to read this novel. You’ve been warned!
Mrs. Gereth and Fleda don’t hear from Owen for weeks. Then, they learn he’s married Mona. There’s lots of recrimination and teeth-gnashing. Owen and Mona depart for extended stays in Europe. Fleda receives a letter from Owen. He wants her to go to Poynton and pick out anything from the house to take for her own (implicitly: as a kind of atonement for how he treated her.) She travels there only to find that the house — with all its spoils — has burned to the ground.
Audiovisual
Music: Gustav Mahler’s Symphonies no. 2, 5, and 9. I’d already heard one of the movements in the fifth symphony, but was unfamiliar with the other two. These are long, dense, rich works, and I didn’t listen through any all the way through. I’ll re-visit them in the future.
Arts: Henri Matisse, one of the most famous painters of the modern era. I’ve seen lots of his paintings in the past, and opted to not spend much time on his work now.
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La danse (first version) by Henri Matisse via Wikimedia
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Cinema: Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN (1949), a classic noir set in post-WW II Vienna. Joseph Cotten plays an alcoholic American author trying to solve the murder of a friend who summoned him for a job in the city. To say more would likely spoil a terrific story.
This is one of those old movies that manages to feel modern and also completely of its time. It’s got great acting, smart dialogue, and beautiful black and white photography. The music, composed and performed by Anton Karas on the zithar, is completely unexpected, oddly fitting, and was an unlikely hit in the 1950 music charts.
Reflections
The Spoils of Poynton was an unexpected treat. It was hard going at first, with long paragraphs that sometimes stretched over more than one page. This style of writing kept me from making progress with Proust many years ago. The trick that unlocked both novels this time was listening to them as audiobooks. (Both are available for free with an Audible subscription.)
Some brief thoughts on Poynton, since I didn’t hear enough of Proust to form an opinion (beyond what I already wrote above.) At first, I thought this work belonged to the category of novel I dislike most: “Stupid People Doing Stupid Things for Stupid Reasons.” For me, the emblematic work in this genre is The Sheltering Sky, which I enjoyed despite its characters.
In any case, at first, I thought Poynton fit this mold. Mrs. Gereth, in particular, struck me as unrealistic: nobody could be that superficial, egotistical, and obsessed with material things. And was Fleda outright dumb or merely opportunistic? In any case, I found both somewhat cartoony. But of course, there are indeed people like that. What’s unrealistic, perhaps, is that they don’t say it outright like Mrs. Gereth does.
But what really turned me around was the novel’s ending, which was perfect. All that material stuff these characters obsessed about — the stuff that led them to sacrifice family ties for and compromise their integrity — goes up in smoke. It’s like the ending of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, but with much greater emotional resonance. Love matters. Material stuff, not so much.
Notes on Note-taking
The challenge this week was one I’ve faced several before in the course: how to capture notes for works I’ve only partially read.
Whenever I finish a book, I start a new note in Obsidian just for that book. For example, the summary of The Spoils of Poynton you read above comes almost verbatim from my notes for that book. Which is fair, since I read the whole thing. But I didn’t read all of In Search of Lost Time. What to do about this?
For now, I’ve settled on starting a note for the whole work and writing down my impressions of just the portions I’ve read. I’ve done it before with the Satyricon and other works I’ve read partially. I consider these evergreen notes; if I return to these works in the future, I’ll continue fleshing out their notes.
In one case — the Bible — I’ve started a note for the work as a whole that links through to individual books, which have their own notes. So there’s a note for the Bible as a whole that includes links to individual notes for Genesis, Ecclesiastes, Job, each of the gospels, etc. This is the correct level of granularity for the Bible, which after all is a collection of books.
I may end up doing something similar for Proust if I ever decide to plow through the remainder of In Search of Lost Time. Having the flexibility of making such shifts is one of the benefits of working with a hypertext note-taking system.
Up Next
Gioia recommends poems by Baudelaire and a short story by Flaubert. I read Madame Bovary a couple of years ago, and enjoyed it. I’m less thrilled about diving into yet more Romanticist verse, but we’ll see how that goes.
Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!