A Room of His Own

The life of Marcel Proust is a supreme example of what distinguishes a vocation from a career. Who could have predicted that this pampered and chronically self-indulgent social sycophant would one day affirm himself, after years of self-punishing labor, as one of the greatest novelists of all time, the creator of a unique poetic universe? Certainly not his overprotective parents, whose worries one easily sympathizes with, as they almost lost hope of ever seeing him amount to anything. Marcel’s father, a distinguished professor of medicine and a world authority on epidemiology, must have been particularly pained to watch his gifted but increasingly neurotic son refuse to choose any profession while proving himself to be totally impractical, irresponsible in money matters, emotionally dependent on his mother and sexually attracted to his male fellow students.

Even his school friends at the Lycee Condorcet in Paris were put off by his emotional vulnerability, his cloying possessiveness, his undisguised advances, his affectations, his “Proustifications,” as his ways of expressing himself came to be called. They later made fun of his maneuvers to be introduced into high society, aware that he often behaved like a flattering courtier. Some of his letters are painful to read. Studded with hyperbole, they reveal an almost morbid need for affection. But the very celebrities whose salons and dinner parties he was so eager to attend might well have been on their guard. He was soon to use them for his social satire and his insights into the varieties of human desire and cruelty.

What most worried his parents were the various disorders that afflicted Marcel early on: asthma, anxiety, chronic insomnia. They watched him become increasingly reliant on fumigations and drugs to alleviate his respiratory problems. More hypochondriacal than the unforgettable Aunt Leonie in his “Swann’s Way,” he observed and exacerbated his every mood and physical reaction. He provided his mother with reports of the powders he took, the enemas he ceased taking, the frequency and nature of his bowel movements. He often exaggerated his physical miseries; they became justifications for procrastinating and served to protect him in periods of intense creative activity. He came to lead a topsy-turvy life, sleeping until late afternoon, eating and writing at night, tyrannically demanding complete silence from his family and domestics during daylight hours.

William C. Carter, author of “The Proustian Quest,” director and co-producer of the well-received documentary film “Marcel Proust: A Writer’s Life,” is especially well-prepared to give us this detailed new biography, “Marcel Proust: A Life.” To write a biography of Proust is not an easy matter. There are rules and problematic conventions to any literary biography. The reader expects that everything contributes to a total effect, that every minor fact somehow foreshadows the great masterpiece, as though daily existence came loaded with preparatory rehearsals and secret omens.

The temptation to view life from a posthumous vantage point seems particularly strong in the case of Proust, partly because of the themes of time lost and time regained but also because of the lure of identifying various friends, lovers or acquaintances as specific models for the gallery of snobs, decadent aesthetes, bigoted chauvinists, social climbers and tragicomic victims of passions and vices that people “In Search of Lost Time.” The game of identifications has often been played without regard to the artist’s ability to amalgamate and transmute. Carter resists the facile sport of one-to-one identification.

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It took courage to undertake a full-scale biography after the celebrated two-volume biography in English (1959 and 1964) by George D. Painter and the masterful, indispensable French biography of 1996 by Jean-Yves Tadie. Carter’s book will inevitably be compared to those of his predecessors, including Roger Duche^ne’s “L’Impossible Marcel Proust” in 1994 and the incisive biographical study in English by Edmund White in 1999. Carter’s “Marcel Proust” stands its ground. It is serious, thoughtful, well-balanced, well-informed. Carter does not seek to be brilliant, nor does he lay claim to being original. Guided by common sense and intellectual honesty, he weighs his sources, some of which were not available until recently. If anything, Carter’s study is too abundantly documented. The impatient reader may at times long for a swifter narrative flow. But the profusion of details does provide a sense of the density of life in its various phases, twists and repetitions.

Carter does not disguise Proust’s flaws as a human being, but he also highlights his fecund inner contradictions. Hypersensitive, quick to take umbrage, given to tantrums, Proust was at the same time loving, wondrously considerate of others, extravagantly generous and monstrously selfish. Taking full advantage of his asthmatic condition, he frequently subjected his mother to sentimental blackmail. He was a charming conversationalist, whose brilliant talk was full of unpredictable turns. But this socialite, so attentive to gossip, was also capable of heroic perseverance and energy as he filled more than 100 notebooks with his feverish handwriting, struggling against debilitating asthma and fear of premature death. Art and morality played out contrapuntal tunes in his mind. He flirted with women (either as a screen for his never open homosexuality or in the secret hope that he might be “normal” after all), but it is well known that his great passions were for men: Jacques Bizet, Raynaldo Hahn, Bertrand de Fenelon and, above all, his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli, who died flying a plane. Proust’s grief, pathological possessiveness and retroactive jealousy were to find their fictional transpositions in the obsessive love of Swann for Odette and of the narrator for Albertine.

His mother’s death in 1905, coming soon after the death of his father, was a trauma for Marcel but also a form of liberation. He could now see more clearly the nature and shape of his daring work. The sense of liberation was, however, tinged with guilt. Even though Proust might not have dared, while his mother was still alive, to write at such length about some of the perversities he described in the “Search,” Carter is no doubt right in suggesting that his great novel can also be seen as a magnificent apology to his parents--in other words a sustained act of pietas.

The real challenge to a Proust biographer is how to account for the lived experience’s transmutation into the stuff of literature. Objection to the method of the great 19th century critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who believed that biography was the key to understanding the work of a writer, led Proust to undertake a study to be entitled “Contre Sainte-Beuve.” Proust held that a writer’s social being was necessarily superficial and altogether inferior to his true vision and message. Many of Proust’s friends were unable to recognize his genius, and Andre Gide rejected the novel when he was a reader for a prestigious publishing house because, without even reading it, he thought that Proust, whom he had met, was nothing but a snobbish aesthete. The truth is that no matter how weak and frivolous Proust may have appeared, he was animated by a relentless sense of vocation that no rejection could squelch. Even his occasional sense of failure was translated into strength when finally, from the chaos of competing motives and themes, Proust had the revelation that the unifying subject of his extraordinary literary project was precisely the difficulty of becoming a writer.

This central quest is rarely left out of sight in Carter’s narrative. He is sensitive to Proust’s gifts of parody and verbal mimicry, aware of the formative value of the pastiche, the importance of the 17th century French moralistes like Jean de La Bruyere and Francois La Rochefoucauld, and the role played by John Ruskin (whose “Bible of Amiens” Proust translated) in the process of self-discovery. Carter makes good use of, but also questions, the work of other biographers (Painter’s assertions are occasionally challenged), and he tastefully avoids prejudiced or anachronistic observations about Proust’s homoerotic tendencies and practices, including voyeuristic visits to male bordellos. The enumeration of elegant parties and their well-known guests, the comings and goings of friends, the list of resorts, indispositions, invitations, misunderstandings, quarrels, reconciliations may tire some readers. Here and there, the study might have been streamlined. Fortunately, Carter keeps the background in focus.

Adrien Proust, whose family in a small town near Chartres can be traced as far back as the 16th century, had married Jeanne Weil, a daughter of a wealthy and cultivated Jewish family. Marcel’s parents stood for solid bourgeois values; they were, in Jeanne’s own words, “intelligent liberal conservative.” Marcel never denied his maternal Jewish lineage, though he and his brother Robert were brought up as Catholics. The Dreyfus case awakened him to the realities of anti-Semitism. He became an active Dreyfusard, collected signatures and attended Emile Zola’s trial in 1898, but it was outrage at injustice and intolerance, not racial status, that was the determining factor, as it was for many others, Jews and non-Jews alike, who strove to see Dreyfus vindicated. Any life of Proust, if only in order to account for his mother’s and grandmother’s refined culture, must deal with the social status of haute bourgeoisie French Jews and their sophisticated milieu. Some of them intermarried with distinguished Catholic families, and many played a prominent part in the intellectual, artistic and financial world of the Third Republic. One of Jeanne Weil’s older relatives was Adolphe Cremieux, a famous liberal statesman and onetime minister of justice. The philosopher Henri Bergson was another relative by marriage.

Carter’s assessments of Proust’s aims and achievements are often to the point, as when he discusses his versatility, his polyphonous effects, his inward journey, the orchestration of his themes. He quotes a beautiful passage from a letter Proust wrote to his friend Antoine Bibesco about a thousand characters for novels that urge him to give them body “like the shades in the Odyssey who plead with Ulysses to give them a little blood to drink to bring them back to life.” Carter himself can be moving as when, referring to Proust’s preface to his translation of “The Bible of Amiens,” he claims to hear “the timbre of the full and unique Proustian voice,” a voice that Proust’s former history professor, Albert Sorel, described as flexible, floating, enveloping and translucent.

While following the episodes of Proust’s life, Carter also provides along the way insights into aspects of his literary achievement: his fascination with androgyny, his broad range of interests, his uncanny ear for the speech of common people, the separation he came to see between eros and art, the increasing awareness of a double I, to the point where “he lived more and more in the world he invented.” Carter is the kind of reader Proust hoped for, one who understands that a great work compels us to become better readers of ourselves. For Proust, the mark of a genuine literary work--whether a delicate text by Gerard de Nerval or a massive novel by Dostoevski--is its revelatory impact. We are not the same after having read it. Art reveals, and it reveals by disquieting.

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Ultimately, despite his hostility to Sainte-Beuve, Proust illustrates through his own practice the link between biography and art. Only it is a link that imposes a hierarchy and brings about a transubstantiation that bonds comedy and poetry, snobbishness and jealousy, in an apotheosis of the imagination. Suffering in any form must not become a pretext for self-pity. It has a more exalted function. Happiness is no doubt good hygiene for the body, but it is pain that develops the spiritual resources. God does not figure anywhere in Proust’s vast fictional world, where churches and religious architecture play such an important role. The novel itself is a vast cathedral built on the ruins of a lived life. “In Search of Lost Time” may not be a religious novel in the usual sense of the word. Its subject, however, beyond survival through memory, is salvation and redemption. Writing and reading are, for Proust, the threshold of spiritual experience. That is why those who choose to read Proust as the poet of evanescence and impermanence have, at best, glimpsed only his motivation for setting out on the difficult journey, not its end. *