Hockney, Wolpert and Byatt: leading the pack?
❚ HOW MANY OF US CAN CLAIM to have read the whole of Marcel Proust’s literary masterwork, originally titled for its English edition Remembrance of Things Past, in seven volumes, containing 1.2million words? Not many of us. What about reading it twice? As a journalist I interviewed painter David Hockney on his 46th birthday when he revealed that he had enthusiastically read the epic twice, drawing parallels between the act of looking around Proust’s world by reading his lengthy descriptions and the time it takes for our eyes to dart around a cubist painting. They are both about duration. And the great device Proust donated to literature was his episode of the madeleine, when a simple cake triggers a moment of involuntary memory.
In 1992, when a new English edition titled In Search of Lost Time was published, novelist A S Byatt admitted, without being boastful, that she too had read Proust twice. This happened at a party thrown by the highly sociable biologist Lewis Wolpert who raised the topic as a Proustian two-timer himself, though a viral buzz through this party could find no others. More impressive still, when our paths crossed a couple of years later, Antonia remarked: “Make that three readings now. But this time in French.”
Proust’s episode of the madeleine: involuntary memory evoked in a French exhibition of 2015
➢ A S Byatt died last month and received this splendid
obituary in The Guardian
➢ Lewis Wolpert’s obituary in The Guardian, 2021
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s:
1983, Hockney’s new vision of the world
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 