Le Crayon Proust

For a long time, it was my practice to have a pen or pencil handy to make notes in books I read. Started in high school, I suppose, but the practice really took hold in college and reached its apotheosis in graduate school. In those college days, I used a pen in textbooks, and, if I recall correctly, the favored implement was the thin, thin BIC Accountant, which I memorialized a few posts ago, HERE. That baby let one underline passages in even the most densely-set copy and still stay between the lines. I know, I know, I should have used a pencil and then erased all those marks before I returned the book to resell at Follett’s Bookstore. Let me tell you a secret, fellow students. You’re going to get a dime on a dollar for those books, if you’re lucky, no matter what. Save yourself the time and effort. (Will students be able to resell e-books?)

Fear not. For nice books, I did use pencil, when it didn’t seem appropriate to write in a nicely-printed volume with a 49-cent pen, but there’s nothing that makes the act of reading more visceral than marking up the book.

Over the years, my marginal commenting script grew tinier and tinier, and I was able to take most of the notes for Shakespeare and the Victorians almost entirely in the books themselves in a miniscule hand. That skill was really put to the test in graduate school, as I wrote frantically to capture comments of Professor Tonsor in Intellectual History as he blazed through “The Idea of Progress” and “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (which, if you’ve ever wondered, is where the phrase, “paradigm shift” originated; it is a truly monumental book that I heartily recommend).

I did a more thorough job of note-taking in my core courses in English, since I had a firmer fundamental grasp of the subject, particularly Chaucer, which was taught by the eminent E. T. Donaldson (that’s Ethelred Talbot!). Dr. Donaldson had retired from his post at Yale and was availing himself of one of the opportunities that come to noted scholars in their emeritus years, accepting visiting professorships for a year or so with other big-league English programs with good faculties and libraries, and I was at Michigan during his term there. Think of Dimaggio or Aaron making their final tour of the major leagues in the last years of their careers. (If you still have your tried-and-true copy of the “The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” you’ll find Donaldson at the head of the list of editors.)

Dr. Donaldson’s instruction was witty, charming, entertaining and no more rigorous than he wanted it to be in any given session. It consisted primarily, in my recollection, of his relating amusing anecdotes about odd word derivations and interesting scholarly discoveries and disputes over interpretation. My marginal notes for that class still survive in my battered copy of The Canterbury Tales, preserving quite a few of his little gems.

For the most part, I pray that no one ever bothers to read any of those hundreds and hundreds of lines I wrote in those books. I am positive that they are vain, pretentious and, almost certainly, dead wrong. Take, for example, my one venture into pure philosophy at the end of senior year: Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” Over my head? You might say so. Still, I knew I was going to have to write something that resembled human thought in a paper at the end of the class, so I scribbled away earnestly, highlighting and commenting to the best of my ability. I guess I can still distinguish between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge, but that may be about it, aside from recalling one line from Kant, “The mind is a unity which unifies.” Cool, huh? Write it down and you might remember it for 35 years.

After school, the marginal-comment practice gradually faded, and I gave up underlining and commenting on every book I read. One guy got me going again: Thomas Pynchon. One of his trademarks is to introduce a new character every page or so throughout an 800-page novel, and to maintain six or eight distinct plot lines, each with its own set of characters that sometimes do intersect and sometimes do not. After I’d been through the first couple of his books, I figured out that making a few notes here and there might help. For example, one could look back over a couple hundred pages to remind oneself of the origin of the talking sentient mechanical duck in Europe when it shows up again in America in “Mason & Dixon.”

Therefore, I was ready when I launched into “Remembrance of Things Past.” I knew that M. Proust, while perhaps not Mr. Pynchon’s equal in rate of characters-per-page, was going to generate a LOT of people and events to keep track of during the next 3,500 pages or so. (Read my introduction to this exercise in reading Proust HERE.) I armed myself with a new #2 and started in, noting the first entry of new characters, underlining some of the unbelievable word wizardry he generates, putting notes at the top of pages that indicate the main action, and marking a few of the mind-boggling sentences he routinely tosses off, ones which easily cover a page of solid text.

As luck has had it, I’ve kept that same pencil over the many months I’ve progressed through the book. It’s my Proust Pencil, sharpened as needed, until now, with fewer than 300 pages to go, it’s been ground down to the stub you see here, not even long enough to stick behind my ear with any security. I’ve never gotten sentimental about which pen or pencil I used, so I hope this isn’t some new idiosyncrasy — starting a new pencil on each new book.

Now, I don’t really think I’ll read Remembrance of Things Past again in this life — at least not all of it — though I’d be willing to, believe me. But it is such an utterly remarkable book, so memorable, that I do consider that I might go back to look through some of the sections again. One idea I have is to read at least one of the seven books — probably “In the Shade of the Young Girls in Flower” — in an alternate translation, just to compare what a more contemporary translator does with the text. In that case, all those hundreds of marginalia will be there. I hope they’re not as lame as the comments I left behind in Kant!

© Brad Nixon 2009, 2017