For nearly eight years I was a member of a Proust reading group lead by a woman I am going to call B.
I had a long unfinished history with In Search of Lost Time—or Remem-brance of Things Past, as it was titled when I first encountered it in those mauve and gray Modern Library editions on my aunt’s bookshelves in Laurel Canyon. An omnivorous teenage reader, I felt the allure of these volumes with their curious individual titles (Cities of the Plain—what?). I pronounced Proust “Prowst.”
“You’re too young to appreciate Proust,” my aunt said.
I would hear this kind of thing later in college, from not one but two professors—of French and English. Also: you’re too young to appreciate Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Por-trait of a Lady. “Novels should be read by people who have lived.”
My aunt was right. The professors were right. And wrong. Because how does a person live without learning what life is like from reading fiction? Reading was a carousel: you hop on, you spin around, you step off to test what you’ve learned, you hop back on.
I took several trips around the carousel of Proust before getting stuck at—where else?—the Guermantes party. But from my aunt I had a number of spoilers: “Albertine is Alfred, Proust’s chauffeur.” “In the end all the flamboyant people are decrepit, with lined faces, cracked makeup, and white hair.” “The narrator finally does something—he writes!”
When we first met at B.’s apartment and she asked, “Now who already knows what?” I remained silent.
Our group consisted of B., her musician roommate, a gallerist, a photographer, a man who produced movies for the Met; eventually we were joined by an art restorer, an art historian, a writer, a painter. We were women and men, straight and gay, Jewish and not, neither young nor (so) old. We had been children and grandchildren, and some of us were parents. Each of us retained, struggled with, adored different elements of the book.
B. wore flowing kaftans and big hats with flowers tucked into their brims. She hung a gallery of Proustians—readers in previous groups—in her hall, and quoted from them comparatively. She never let anyone see her kitchen. On the occasions when we added a meal to our meeting, she forbade us from serving wine before we talked. “We do not drink and read our Marcel!” And, yes, she called Proust “our Marcel.” “My darlings” is what she called us.
B. was a big, generous personality with lots of rules that she persisted in imposing and we in challenging, though I came to respect some of them —and her. Many of them she had adapted from her originating Proust leader, a man named Harold. Harold was our Exalted Ancestor. Harold said (or maybe he didn’t, but B. said he said) that we should never read outside critical sources, never try to identify the models, never read ahead. B. said Harold said we should not pull back to identify larger thematic arcs (my least favorite of the edicts). B., independent of Harold, made us read passages aloud, taking turns, line by line, an experience I disliked until I loved it.
At first we gathered in B.’s apartment once a month to discuss fifty pages. Then, with Covid, I proposed that we meet every two weeks by Zoom, having read instead twenty-five. Reading the ultimate shut-in when we had become shut-ins ourselves helped keep us sane. I began to live in Proust time and Proust land. Everywhere I went, my random daily thoughts were less about people I knew (and never saw) than about people I constantly saw in my mind but didn’t actually know: Swann and Odette, those precursors to Albertine and the narrator, and them too, and Mme de Villeparisis and the Baron de Charlus and the Guermantes and the grandmother—and woven in there, that ever-morphing figure known as myself (“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self”).
On the Zoom, we were supposed to raise our hands. We were supposed not to talk about how Proust had a brother but the narrator didn’t; or how Proust was Jewish, but the narrator wasn’t; or how Proust liked boys but the narrator liked girls. Naturally we talked about all of these things. We spent a lot of time trying to work out how old the narrator was at various confounding junctures, while also arguing that it didn’t matter, because isn’t memory unleashed from the constraints of time? We all agreed that the only pure, or non-projected, love in the whole cycle was between grandmother and grandson. The moment when Swann comes to tell the Duchesse that he is dying twisted our hearts. Most of us found Albertine a bore.
At the beginning of the seven-plus years, I thought: people in or close to this group will die, and lives will alter irrevocably. And they did. The gallerist died. My father died. My mother died, and I read the death of the grandmother very differently when she did. A grandbaby was born (which makes me wonder: why is no one ever born in Proust?). A marriage ended.
And something happened that I never thought of, but given the transformative power of what the narrator calls “the chemistry of time,” arguably I ought to have: someone came back from the dead.
About five years in, I went to a party celebrating the publication of a new biography of—fittingly—Alfred Drey-fus. There I fell into conversation with a guest who knew a good deal about the case as it explodes into the Search. He knew the names of characters who appeared only once. He knew on which page(s) you could find the longest sentence in the novel. I found this to be charming, curious, and a little mystifying. We had been chatting for twenty minutes when I realized I hadn’t asked him his name.
“My name,” he said, “is Harold.”
“Surely you’re not B.’s Harold?”
He said, “Well, is she not Harold’s B.?”
“I thought you were dead!” I said—twice, at least.
“Far from.”
What’s more, he didn’t have a lined face or cracked makeup or white (or, in truth, any) hair. Our Exalted Ancestor, our invisible mastermind, the progenitor of our Proust group was sipping prosecco on the Upper East Side on a breezy midweek evening in March.
“To our dear Marcel,” I said, lifting my glass.
“Please don’t call him that,” Harold said.
Michael Frank writes fiction and nonfiction. His new book, The Memory Worker, will be published in the fall of 2027.