Proust Biographies

Proust Biographies

Marcel Proust: A Life

by William C. Carter

Yale University Press, 948 pp., $35

Marcel Proust: A Life

by Jean-Yves Tadié

Viking, 988 pp., $40

When Marcel Proust was a young sprout in the mid-1880s, it was trendy to own a keepsake album in which one's friends would respond to a set of questions that were designed to reveal the interviewee's personality without being obvious about it. "For what fault have you most toleration?" Proust was asked, to which he replied, "For the private lives of geniuses." The private life of this genius, tolerable or otherwise, has remained to a certain extent just that -- private. With a few exceptions that seem to register in a minor chord, like Edmund White's slender monograph on Proust that was published last year, there hasn't been a major Proust biography published since George D. Painter's two-volume Marcel Proust: A Biography that appeared in 1959 and 1965, respectively.

Proust Biographies

Two new biographies, both published this year, fill in the blanks: Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter, an American professor of French studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Marcel Proust: A Life by the French authority on Proust, Jean-Yves Tadié, who edited the latest Pléiade edition containing the most exhaustive version of In Search of Lost Time. The two biographies draw largely, but not exclusively, on the late Proustian scholar Philip Kolb's lifelong task of collecting and annotating over 5,000 of Proust's letters from often far-flung sources that appeared serially in 21 volumes beginning in 1970, with the last volume being published in 1993 (The Kolb-Proust Archive for Research at www.library.uiuc.edu/kolbp). Proust expressed the wish that all of his letters be burned, but when informed (erroneously, as it turned out) that he had no legal right under French law to interfere with the letters he had written to others, he scotched that mission. Proust's loss, however, is our gain.

Both biographies are stuffed with purportedly accurate information about Proust. At 900-plus pages, they are too long and detailed for any but the most hard-core Proust junkie, but then how could any biography about Proust be anything other than long and detailed? The Tadié biography was originally published in France in 1996 and one can imagine Carter reading it in French and musing to himself, I can do better than this! It would be hard to recommend one biography over the other, except to point out that Carter's very American, just-the-facts-ma'am style contrasts with Tadié's more poetic (and Gallic) approach. In any case, Proust junkies are going to want to read both of them. The biographies document Proust's spectacular rise in the faction of the French aristocracy known as the Faubourg Saint-Germain and contain serpentine accounts of the people that Proust knew, things he did with them, fights he had with them, and how, on certain occasions, he utilized his artistry by fashioning these experiences into characters and scenes in The Novel. As a result, certain aspects of The Novel become transparent for the diligent reader. The real stories about the real people in Proust's life begin to flourish in one's imagination and lock into various passages from The Novel; those passages are never viewed in the same light.

The two books succeed -- at least slightly -- in altering the conventional image of Proust, who was described by Henry Miller as "the sick giant who locks himself in his cork-lined room to take his brains apart." Proust was certainly that, but he was also an accomplished marksman and duelist who was feared by his adversaries, and served as a private in the French army, apparently liking it enough to seriously consider a military career (in Private Proust's case, the harshness of military life was perhaps mitigated by the fact that he had his own orderly). And he did manage to get out quite a bit, despite his reputation as a recluse: The Carter biography -- which has more pictures than the Tadié biography -- has a photograph of Proust in the last year of his life on an excursion to a Verneer exhibit looking remarkably fit as a Stradivarius.

Carter and Tadié delve into some of the kinkier aspects of Proust's persona, specifically the story behind the male brothel that Proust frequented (and for which he may have even been the angel investor). But Proust seems to have indulged mainly in his proclivity for voyeurism, via a peephole made available for a fee from the proprietor -- a former footman named Albert Le Cuziat who, according to Tadié, "wore the anxieties of his trade in his expression and on his face." Proust believed he couldn't write about something unless he witnessed it, and in this case his decidedly intrepid research has been documented as the source of the scene in The Novel where the Narrator clandestinely witnesses Baron de Charlus in a bedroom being flagellated by a ruffian. We know this because Proust disclosed to his housekeeper Céleste an account of a visit to Le Cuziat's brothel where he was allowed to peep in on such a flagellation. "But Monsieur, how could you have watched that?" she asked. "Precisely because it cannot be invented, Céleste," he replied. (This scene, by the way, was expertly portrayed in the recently released Raul Ruiz motion picture Time Regained -- based on the last volume of The Novel -- in which John Malkovich played the comically arrogant Charlus.)

The biographies provide a vivid depiction of the real-life French aristocrat Comte Robert de Montesquiou, who served as one of the primary models for the Baron de Charlus, easily the most outrageous character in Proust's dazzling constellation of outrageous characters. Proust conducted a campaign of flattering letters to Montesquiou that complimented his poetry and his artistic taste (he was known as the Professor of Beauty) in order to get in his good graces and thereby gain access to the salons that only figures like Montesquiou could grant him. When their relationship soured, however, Proust referred to Montesquiou as "the fatal count." Proust would openly perform impersonations of Montesquiou in some of these same salons and Montesquiou -- upon hearing about it through the grapevine -- would chastise Proust by letter. Proust would then offer a perfunctory apology and mock him with impunity at the next available opportunity. Carter provides a hilarious account of an imbroglio that was perhaps triggered by a well-known painting that portrayed Montesquiou (the vain count was painted and photographed hundreds of times) admiring with religious fervor a cane formerly owned by Louis XV. When a fire broke out in a charity bazaar tent and left 140 people dead, Montesquiou was reported to be one of several cane-wielding society men who caned their way through the rummage of panicking bodies (mostly female) and survived. Montesquiou, as it turned out, was nowhere near the tragedy but the anecdote is a striking example of the kind of camp effulgence the "fatal count" emitted in his day and which Proust was wise enough to capture in The Novel.

Where Tadié gives a rather sketchy and somewhat unsympathetic account of Proust's last days in the tail end of 1922, Carter doesn't flinch from the bedridden tedium of Proust's fatal bout with pneumonia. Perhaps the key to Proust's untimely end lies in his superdooper mother complex and his eccentric notion of time. Carter quotes Proust as saying that when Mme. Proust passed away she "took her little Marcel with her." And as for time, Proust didn't really believe in its existence, or rather he believed that time was more flexible than most people think it is. And so when he had gotten to a certain sense of completion with The Novel (which was never really completed) he decided to stop time by behaving in such a foolhardy manner that his existence could no longer be contained. And his mère wasn't there to talk him out of it.

So one thinks of Proust as immortal, flush with the scent of Madeleine cakes and staked out in some section of the astral plane where the Faubourg Saint-Germain is throwing an endless party. Perhaps he is there right now, having a grand old time, drinking bottle after bottle of expensive wine, explaining Vermeer to high-society hostesses, leaving outrageous tips for the servants, surreptitiously taking notes on the cuffs of his shirt, and chuckling to himself with the realization that he's a bigger sensation now than when he was searching for lost time.

  • More of the Story

  • In Search of Marcel Proust

    Once UT's Dr. Seth Wolitz discovered Proust, he didn't turn back, but it took a real beating for him to get to that point.

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KEYWORDS FOR THIS STORY

Marcel Proust: A Life, William C. Carter, Jean-Yves Tadié

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