Allan Massie

Getting the detail right

Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’

Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’

Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ (Joke, given the novel’s title?) ‘He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble and Françoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs Elysées, Bloch takes him to a brothel.’

Well, I can’t remember just where all this comes in A La Recherche, but suspect that either Waugh or Scott-Moncrieff, whose translation he was reading, made a confusion of tenses. Be that as it may, time is a problem for the novelist, especially one writing a ‘roman fleuve’ published over the years in successive volumes, or one who employs the same character or characters in a succession of books.

Agatha Christie, for instance, got herself into a mess with old Hercule Poirot, though she never seemed to mind and sailed serenely on. All the same, on his first appearance in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1917), old Papa Poirot, as he refers to himself there, has already retired from the Belgian police. So one may assume that he is over 60 at least. Yet he was still solving murders 50 years later.

Nobody, I suppose, minds about such oddities. Other novelists who aim at accuracy of representation may get into more serious difficulties. Even Anthony Powell, scrupulous in having friends check that he got things right, sometimes apparently muddled his chronology.

In A Buyer’s Market Mr Deacon’s death (from a fall down the stairs of a nightclub) seems to have taken place no more than a matter of months after Jenkins encountered him at the coffee-stall.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in