Revisiting Proust twice more

MORE than 80 years after his death, Marcel Proust remains one of the most written-about writers of the 20th century. Seemingly every aspect of his life and work has been examined in detail. The more arcane volumes include two cookbooks that enable readers to re-create the boeuf mode Francoise serves Ambassador Norpois when he dines with the Narrator’s family in “A la recherche du temps perdu” (originally translated as “Remembrance of Things Past,” but more accurately as “In Search of Lost Time”), and a French graphic novel of the same work.

Although commentaries and analyses may deepen their understanding, fans read these books to be reminded of the pleasures of reading Proust. “In Search of Lost Time” offers unmatched stylistic beauties, astute observations, vivid characters and, ultimately, the feeling of being carried to a vertiginous height -- a sensation matched only by Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Mishima’s “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy. After so many Proustian dissections and discussions, is there anything left to say? Two new biographical works suggest the answer is a qualified yes.

In May of 1922, Violet and Sydney Schiff gave a dinner party at the Hotel Majestic in Paris to celebrate the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “Le Renard.” In addition to Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev, the guest list included Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. “Sodome et gomorrhe” (also known to some as “Cities of the Plain”), the fourth book of “In Search,” had just been published and Proust was at the height of his fame. As Richard Davenport-Hines shows in “Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris,” numerous accounts -- none of them entirely reliable -- have been given of the conversation between the drunken, shabbily dressed Joyce and the sepulchrally elegant Proust, who arrived in a fur coat and gloves.

The Schiffs’ party was more memorable as a landmark grouping of four of the century’s greatest geniuses than as an amicable get-together. Davenport-Hines uses the dinner as a jumping-off point for a lively examination of the writer’s life and the growth of his reputation as a novelist, especially among English-speaking readers, who took up his books as soon as they were translated.

Early in that year, Proust knew he was dying and devoted all his time to finishing his vast novel. Yet Davenport-Hines shows the Schiffs attaching themselves to the author like remoras to a shark, deluging him with letters, invitations and requests to visit. Proust was apparently fond of them, but their incessant attention distracted their hero from the work they so passionately admired. When C.K. Scott Moncrieff died in 1930 before translating the final volume of “In Search,” Davenport-Hines comments with cutting accuracy: “Schiff finally obtained his perceived rights as Proust’s chief English friend and interpreter; but his rendering of ‘Temps retrouve’ into ‘Time Regained’ -- published under his alias of ‘Stephen Hudson’ -- was inferior to Scott Moncrieff’s: unadorned, even unpolished, and sometimes clumsily obscure.”

Inevitably, the contents of “Proust at the Majestic” overlap William C. Carter’s “Proust in Love.” Carter takes the unusual position that Proust’s most significant love affair was with the composer Reynaldo Hahn, rather than Alfred Agostinelli, the chauffeur who became the object of a shorter but more intense obsession -- an obsession that influenced the Narrator’s relationship with the misty Albertine in “In Search.” The best evidence suggests that Proust and Hahn became lovers as young men. Although the romance soon foundered because of Proust’s incessant demands and fits of jealousy, they remained devoted friends until the author’s death.

But the stolidity of Carter’s prose keeps his account from coming to life, even when he reports the little-known fact that Proust was caught in a police raid on the homosexual brothel Albert Le Cuziat ran on the Rue de l’Arcade in 1918. The police report listed him as “Proust, Marcel, 45 years old, private income, 102, bd Haussmann.” The acts Proust may have witnessed and/or participated in at Le Cuziat’s establishment -- and his transformation of them in his fiction -- have been widely discussed before, notably in J.E. Rivers’ “Proust and the Art of Love.”

“Proust at the Majestic” and “Proust in Love” add some details to the vast edifice of Proustian scholarship, but neither ranks as a major addition to the canon. Although both men write with respect and affection for their fascinating and often infuriating subject, neither matches the eloquence of Janet Flanner’s epitaph in the New Yorker. In a 1927 “Letter From Paris” column, she noted the publication of “Le temps retrouve,” the final volume of the opus, and concluded “Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous printed works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his internment, Proust seems dead for the first time.”

Charles Solomon is the author of many books, including “Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation.”