Marcel Proust: A Penguin Lives Biography

Although there is no shortage of books on Proust in English, and no shortage of enormously long biographies, there is a surprising lack of short biographies. Luckily, this excellent little volume by Edmund White fills a major need. While we have major long biographies like those of Painter, Tadie, and Carter, these may not be appropriate for someone wanting a brief overview. The trick with any biography of Proust is striking a balance between writing about Proust's life and Proust's art, not an easy task given the degree with which Proust based his work on events in his own life. It is virtually impossible to disentangle the two.This is a short book (around 150 pages), but in that brief span, White is able to touch on all the major events of Proust's life, the key relationships of his life, the major themes of his work as an author, and the ways in which Proust's life became the basis for his work. If one is unfamiliar with Proust before picking up this book, one will gain a first rate overview of him before setting it down. One thing that tremendously enhances the value of the book is an excellent annotated biography that gives a great overview of work on Proust both in English and French.White, who is a well known gay author, does a superb job writing about the myriad of contradictions in Proust's own work as a lightly closeted gay author. Although Proust's being gay is the worst kept secret of the century, Proust fought many duels over accusations that he was homosexual (or, an invert, as Proust would have put it). Proust was the first writer to write extensively about homosexuality, both male and female, but maintained a façade of heterosexuality to those who did not know him well. All in all, this is an excellent brief biography of the man many regard as the great novelist of the 20th century. I heartily recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about Proust.

When the dust settled after the Millennium lists of Best Books of the 20th Century, there was Marcel Proust's magnum opus Recherche le temps perdu at the head of the line. Though many of us struggled through all the volumes as a college assignment, fewer of us returned to the masterpiece, much less explored the ambiguitites of the author's life and times that afforded such a work. Well, here in easily digestible prose is a succinct history of a phenomenal writer (written by an equally phenomenal writer) that opens the door to more ventursome readers to explore the "Best of the 20th Century" writing. Edmund White distills all the facets of Proust's persona and what results is a fastidiously correct picture of a fertile imagination and man. How better to understand the turn of the century in all its multifaceted changes than to simply read this fine biography? Another work of seeming staggering proportions reduced to a gentle and absorbing read by one of our better authers writing today. Hats off!

Someone at Penguin (James Atlas?) had a stroke of genius. The Penguin Lives series seems to takes its inspiration from seventeenth century writers like Izaak Walton and John Aubrey who churned out brief, engaging prose portraits of their contemporaries and other worthies. Readers know from the moment they pick up one of the Penguin Lives that they are not going to get a thorough-going, heavily annotated exploration of the person under scrutiny. They also know, when they check the page count, that they will not stall out midway and that they can easily finish it on a long weekend at the beach. The choice of "celebrity authors" to do the story-telling is also intriguing. Edmund White, for instance, may not have the final say on all things Proustian, but as a gay novelist and biographer of Jean Genet, we can be pretty confident that he will be forthright and honest when discussing Proust's sexuality and careful, appreciative, and insightful when discussing In Search of Lost Time. In fact, the balance White strikes in his discussion of the man and the novel is quite impressive. In contrast to many modern biographies that wallow in unflattering detail and leave the reader wondering how the subject ever managed to become a person worthy of being written about, White gives us a sense of what Proust was up against (personally and emotionally) without diminishing what he achieved. One piece of advice, if you do decide to buy this great little volume: Don't skip the bibliography. It's only nine pages long and White's descriptions of the books listed will point you toward some good reading (and away from some duds).

Edmund White's Proust is a superb model of stripped down biography. In a succinct and constantly illuminating appraisal of the writer as homosexual, White succeeds in making public what Proust was outwardly at such pains to conceal. Proust's outsidership--he was part Jewish, gay, a semi-invalid by way of chronic asthma, and an unctuously ingratiating social climber--were all necessary facets of his person, developed in the slow evolution of his genius. White's elegant and incisive prose evident here in his evocation of Proust's characteristically neurotic obsessions allows us that rare opportunity of perceiving how one distinguished novelist writes about another. This is White's Proust, and so the conception is of value to literature. White succeeds in getting under Proust's skin, and by virtue of uncanny empathy reads his subject with the familiarity of one profoundly psychological writer resonating with another. White understands that 'Every autobiographical novel inevitably mixes harsh truths about its first-person hero with a bit of wish fulfilment.' If Proust's forté was to apprehend the psychological building blocks out of which the twentieth-century was to be constructed, then he achieved this through what he called 'involuntary memory', or the unconscious. White is good on this crucial aspect of Proust, for it was the writer's facility to establish an interface between buried associations and their reappearance in the light of memory which was to prove the basis on which A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu was created. That Proust delayed entry to his work, and assumed initially a secretive and avocational approach to writing, Jean Santeuil being the blueprint for the open-ended masterpiece to follow, was due in part to his fear that once he showed commitment to his work, his life would irretrievably change. White apprehends the problem with intuitive insightfulness, discerning that 'Like the man who supersititously refuses to write a will out of an acknowledged fear that by doing so he will soon be signing his death warrent, in the same way Proust fancied that so long as he failed to begin his life's work, his life would go on.' White is fascinating on Proust's series of clandestine male lovers. If Marcel was adept at gender-bending for the sake of propriety in his novel - White points out that most of Marcel's female characters are 'boys in drag' - then his private life was equally complex. Proust conducted an intense affair with the musician Reynaldo Hahn in the years between 1894-96, and was to make Hahn the lifelong recipient of his gay confidences. White quotes Proust as writing to Hahn after the death of his secretary Alfred Agostinelli, to confide: 'I truly loved Alfred. It's not enough to say I loved him. I adored him.' And when Proust was to fall in love with a young man named Albert Nahmias, he was to go so far as to write: 'If I could only change my sex, face and age and take on the looks of a y

Edmund White, fresh from the success of his exhaustive yet never exhausting GENET, shows off his ability to condense and select in this brilliant first book in Penguin's Short Lives series. White's strength is his democratic hand, which seeks not to intimidate and mystify but to make clear. The action of his prose takes place only afterward, when whole sentences come back to the reader--only White can make a philosophical concept so vivid, so familiar that readers will find themselves offering up his explanations intact, as if from involuntary memory. White has his faults: a joy in authoritative overstatements, an inability to resist a juicy if unreliable anecdote, and a gay liberationist agenda; but this is the personality of a great writer of our time examining a great writer of another. As scholarly as it is frivolous, as unforgettable as it is trivial, as universal as it is subjective. This is White at his best: far from the glittering abstruseness of Forgetting Elena, more approachable than his fascinating and grotesque autobiographical trilogy, focused on a great man with a fascinating life.