Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [55]
Painter seems almost obsessed with discovering who were the “originals” of Proust’s characters, which can make for tiresome reading. He also has a rather mawkish and judgmental attitude towards Proust’s homosexuality. We learn that Proust was “an active, not a passive invert” (rather hard to reconcile with all of Proust’s affairs with straight trade such as Agostinelli and Rochat). At the end of chapter 4 Painter tells us that Proust never forgot the young girls he loved as an adolescent: “. . . When he migrated to the Cities of the Plain he took with him a prisoner crushed beneath the weight of Time and Habit, a buried heterosexual boy who continued to cry unappeased for a little girl lost.” I would suggest that Proust’s exclusively homosexual sexual experience might suggest that the only little girl he was crying over was inside him.
The best biography ever written of Proust is by Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust, published in 1996 by Gallimard and scheduled to be published in English by Penguin. When I first skimmed the 952-page text I seriously underestimated its worth, since it lacks narrative sweep and humor value and sometimes looks just like random notes (Tadié in fact did the notes for the Pléiade edition). But a careful reading reveals that this masterpiece is as thorough about the events of Proust’s life as it is perceptive and comprehensive about his intellectual influences. Tadié has no preconceived psychological notions and no ambition to decode the real from the invented. What interests him most is how Proust came to write In Search of Lost Time, and that is the trail he traces out with myriad details. He discusses Proust’s sexuality without having any Freudian biases, he deals with Proust’s snobbishness without striking a morally superior tone, he reconstructs Proust’s emotional and artistic evolution not from his letters (which are peculiarly impersonal) but from an intimate knowledge of what Proust was reading and of the preoccupations of the people he was meeting. Most important, Tadié has studied the manuscripts of Proust’s fiction with more thoroughness and understanding than anyone else alive. I’m not at all sure that he would approve of the homosexual bias of my little book, but I’m quick to acknowledge that it owes everything to his monumental work.
Ronald Hayman’s Proust, published in 1990, benefits from Kolb’s edition of the letters and is therefore more accurate and thorough than Painter, even if the style is much more lackluster. In France, every year brings a new Proust biography; among those I consulted are L’Impossible Marcel Proust by Roger Duchêne, published by Laffont in 1994, and Ghislain de Diesbach’s snobbish Proust, published by Perrin in 1991.
BOOKS ABOUT PROUST
Proust and the Art of Love: The Aesthetics of Sexuality in the Life, Times & Art of Marcel Proust, by J. E. Rivers, published by Columbia in 1980, helped me immensely in my discussions of Agostinelli and Plantevignes and Proust’s sexuality in general. Lionel Povert’s entry on Proust in his Dictionnaire Gay gave me a few invaluable details. I was taken by Walter Benjamin’s remarks about Proust in his letters, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1994.
There are countless memoirs by people who knew Proust. One of the silliest is Princess Marthe Bibesco’s book, Proust’s Oriane, in which she strives to prove that the duchesse de Guermantes is based on the comtesse de Chevigné and not on the Comtesse Greffulhe, whereas in fact the character owes something to both women and to Madame Straus as well.
I read Benoist-Méchin’s padded Avec Marcel Proust and the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche’s Mes Modèles, in which he has a stunning chapter on Proust. Ferdinand Bac has a ridiculous chapter on Proust in his 1935 memoir, La Fin des “temps délicieux,” in which he compares Proust unfavorably to the Comte Greffulhe. Bac pictures Proust as a cobra trying to charm a Gallic rooster—unsuccessfully, since Greffulhe maintains his noble impassivity and “Proust had only nibbled at the crumbs of this