Marcel Proust: A Biography (Penguin Literary Biographies) [Paperback]

Marcel Proust's classic work, was first translated into English by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, with a title, "Remembrance of Things Past," which is somewhat askew, from the literal translation of In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's: The Way by Swann's Vol 1 (In Search of Lost Time 1) particularly from the passive in English to the active verb in French. It is one of the most praised and least read literary masterpieces. Least read for a reason: it is one of the longest works, at 3,000 plus pages, and furthermore, much of the book concerns the arcane machinations of social climbers in the Parisian literary salons; a scene that has largely changed, at least by dropping the royalty monikers from today's "power brokers." So, if you are not reading and commenting on the book to promote your academic career, what is the point?

As the current only other reviewer says, you have to be interested. And fortunately for me, there were those aspects of Proust's work that provided the hook. The other reviewer also said it is essential to have read some of Proust before tackling this biography, and I hardily agree. I've read "Swann's Way," only roughly a sixth of the overall work, but it provided sufficient motivation to read all of Painter's 700 pages on Proust, even enough to struggle through the machinations in those Parisian salons. There is no question that Painter has conducted meticulous research, and has combined that with fluid prose to present what will almost certainly be the most authoritative biography of Proust. He had sufficient distance from his subject, completing it in 1959, almost 40 years after Proust's death, and has provided one more preface to this edition, 30 years later. He says of Proust's magnum opus that it is: "... the allegory of Proust's life, a work not of fiction but of imagination interpreting reality."

Painter's own erudition repeatedly shines through in this work. Proust, though he did not have the English language skills, undertook to translate Ruskin's Our Fathers Have Told Us. Part I. The Bible of Amiens. into French. In this section Painter reminds us of a Ruskin doctrine: "reading is valuable because it is a conversation with men far wiser and more interesting than those we have the opportunity to meet in everyday life." Later, Painter quotes from a letter that Proust wrote, quoting Pascal, saying: "that all the misfortunes of man spring from his inability to live in a room alone!" Painter found an article written by a mathematician, Camille Vettard, entitled "Proust et Einstein." When Cremiux pointed out some anachronisms in Le Cote De Guermantes 1 (Garnier-Flammarion) Proust wryly replied: "that they were due to the flattened form my characters take owing to their rotation in time." Proust was homosexual, one of the first novelist to openly proclaim this, and Painter says that the longest sentence he ever wrote, some 1500 words, was his confession of his homosexuality. Proust's father was a famous physician, one that promoted the idea of a "cordon sanitaire" that would effectively stop the spread of cholera. However, as Painter reports: "But the mingled admiration and contempt with which Proust treats the medical profession in "A la Recherche" is doubtless in part a reflection of his own feelings towards his father." The above are only just a small sampling of the rich observations and takeaways that this book provides.

And the indispensable hook? As for many others, it is the remembrance of the tea and the madeleine, triggered by the tingling of the bell, a metaphor for any event that might suddenly bring back an essential childhood memory. Furthermore, it is the walks taken after supper, in the long evenings of a northern French summer, which denote a simpler era, of more basic past times (in both senses). We would periodically rent a gite near Illiers-Combray (Illiers, the real town, assumed the hyphenated name, appending the fictional Combray from Proust's novel), and drive the 12 km to the town. It is still possible to take the tour, see the bedroom where he was a boy, and called to his mother for a goodnight kiss, and hear the bell's tingle. But mainly, I enjoyed the after-dinner walk, the Swann's way one, pass the public laundry tubs, to the Pre-Catalan garden, with its pond. Each time we undertook this walk, we were the only ones in the garden, one that infused the spirit with feelings of serenity. It was as if we too were able to recover a lost time.

(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on December 23, 2009)