Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [54]
Jean Santeuil, first published in France only in 1952, appeared in an English translation by Gerard Hopkins three years later. It is still published by Penguin. Proust’s stories Les Plaisirs et les jours, first published in French in 1896, can be found in English as Pleasures and Regrets, translated by Louise Varèse. Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve first appeared in 1954, but the Pléiade edition of 1971, edited by Pierre Clarac, is a radically different text, organized out of Proust’s fragments according to quite different principles. This later and better version was published in English by Penguin in 1988, translated by John Sturrock, who also wrote the informative introduction. This volume in English also contains many of Proust’s most important literary essays, including studies of Flaubert’s style, of Stendhal, Chateaubriand, George Eliot, and the Goncourt brothers.
A collection of Proust’s pastiches, L’Affaire Lemoine, was published in a scholarly edition, replete with extensive notes and indications of variations among the various manuscripts. It was printed in 1994 in Geneva in French by Slatkine, and edited by Jean Milly. Earlier, more readable versions exist, including the original Pastiches et mélanges published by Gallimard in 1919.
When Proust was just fourteen he answered the question “Your favorite occupation?” by mentioning writing verse (among other things), yet his collected poems were not published until 1982 by Gallimard in the Cahiers Marcel Proust.
Proust translated Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens in 1904 and Sesame and Lilies in 1906. These translations are fascinating because of Proust’s voluble notes, which at some points threaten to capsize poor Ruskin. They are available in French in inexpensive and accurate paperbacks. I drew several ideas about Proust and Ruskin from the introduction by Antoine Compagnon to Sésame et les lys, published by Editions Complexe in 1987. Compagnon also prefaced a book composed of Proust’s essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Morand.
Proust’s voluminous correspondence has been published (in French) by the American scholar Philip Kolb, who brought out the letters in twenty-one volumes between 1970 and 1993, published in Paris by Plon. Kolb was a tireless, brilliant scholar in the French department at the University of Illinois who dated, edited, and analyzed Proust’s letters; any chronology of Proust’s life owes everything to this edition of the letters, which Kolb did at the request of Proust’s niece. These volumes are slowly being translated into English. There are, in addition, many separate books of Proust’s letters (to Madame Straus, to his mother, to Reynaldo Hahn, to Lucien Daudet, to Gallimard, and to Jacques Rivière, just to mention a few). I particularly enjoyed a book written by Luc Fraisse in French called Proust au miroir de sa correspondance, published by Sedes in 1996. Fraisse organizes his book by topic (“Proust and Medicine,” or “The Agnostic on the Threshold of Faith”), writes a few linking paragraphs on the subject, then cites the relevant passages from Proust’s correspondence.
BIOGRAPHIES OF PROUST
The most famous biography in English (and one of the most influential biographies of the century) is George D. Painter’s Marcel Proust: A Biography, originally published by Chatto & Windus (London) in two volumes, the first in 1959 and the second in 1964. A revised and enlarged one-volume edition came out in 1989. This book is so amusing that it could be used as a source for a stand-up comic. Indeed, Painter scoured all the memoirs of the day to extract from them the funniest bits. Oddly enough, Painter did not interview any of the many people Proust knew who were still living when he began his research. He relied