Jean Santeuil

Jean Santeuil by Marcel Proust,

Translated by Gerald Hopkins

Simon & Shuster, New York, 1956, 2nd printing, first printing 1955

Bernard de Fallios, a young Proust scholar, found several boxes of torn manuscript pages and seventy notebooks in Marcel’s cork-lined room at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Written, and obviously abandoned, when Proust was around 25, these pages were carefully reassembled by Fallios and published in Paris as the novel, “Jean Santeuil” in 1952.

This probably my foremost favorite novel, although Le Recherche is absolutely a greater work, Jean is… well, it’s like a raindrop. (And the dated, pale pink cover is really cool!)

It is the tender story of a poet. An indulgence in sentimentality. A bath of isolated sensuality. Lonesomeness. Illness. Growth. The humor of adolescence, hypersensitivity, innocence, natural voyeurism, connection points into the center of sexuality, naiveté and intelligence merged by poetic vision into the beauty of windows out onto the ‘health’ of society when one is so young and so ill. Jean Santeuil is the beacon on the lighthouse. Portrait of an artist as a lover alone. (Yet, aren’t all artists lovers alone?) It’s a bout a boy taking the boy into the man no matter what…

From page 369, when Jean’s mother calls him while he is away from her for the first time (if I remember correctly): And also, the telephone is a new invention at this time in history:

“Quickly, he put the receiver to his ear… then, all of a sudden, as if everyone had left the room and he was throwing himself into his mother’s arms- he was aware, close beside him, gentle, fragile, delicate, so clear, so melting, like a tiny scrap of broken ice- of her voice.”

The mature Marcel (see above) finds strength in fragility. Jean Santeuil creates, fashions out of clay, strength out of weakness. Strength to accept death (at such a young age!) and the weakness to love life. Hope.

The tendons of language are bruised.

The sky is grey, the ocean green, girls wear white, boys wear blue and in between, the lover, the lighthouse, fearlessly feels the world through his window, the window of all the lost time of youth that has been emptied into his shining soul.

from page 743:

“For death in a man journeys into the infinite and into nothingness. For no matter how obscure he may be, no matter how limited his intelligence, the thought of death, the coming of death, opens for him a window on the mysteries of eternity.”