Product Description

This literary biography of Marcel Proust provides readers with an insight into the recluse who lay all night long in his cork-lined room, obsessively rewriting his one massive work. It also shows the yearning lonely boy, the brilliant wit - and the miserably closeted homosexual.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #441105 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Marcel Proust documented his existence so lavishly--albeit in fictional form--that many of his biographers have functioned as little more than code-breakers, doggedly translating art back into life. It's a great pleasure, then, to welcome Edmund White's slender, superbly artful account. A novelist himself, White beautifully evokes "the France of heavy, tasteless furniture, of engraved portraits of Prince Eugène, of clocks kept under a glass bell on the mantelpiece, of overstuffed chairs covered with antimacassars and of brass beds warmed by hot-water bottles." And he's no less canny at summoning up Proust's personality, in all its neurotic, contradictory glory. Of course, Proust's life can't truly be separated from his art. Every biography of him is bound to operate in the shadow of Remembrance of Things Past, and White has some shrewd things to say about that mammoth work, whose style he describes as "an ether in which all the characters revolve like well-regulated heavenly bodies". Yet the focus remains on Proust and on his unlikely transformation from mummy's boy to social climber to world-class genius. Like his subject, White often proceeds by anecdote. His book is packed with telling hilarious little nuggets, which find Proust being snubbed by that "powdered, perfumed, puffy Irish giant" Oscar Wilde or luring back his lover Alfred Agostinelli by buying him an aeroplane.

At the same time, White conveys the considerable pain that Proust endured as an invalid, an artist and (more to the point) a closeted homosexual. No doubt these factors shaped his rather hopeless take on human affections, which impoverished his life even as they enriched his writing. "Proust maybe telling us that love is a chimera", White writes, "a projection of rich fantasies onto an indifferent, certainly mysterious surface but nevertheless these fantasies are undeniably beautiful, intimations of paradise--the artificial paradise of art." In White's view, this recognition makes his subject not only a supreme poet of impermanence but the greatest novelist of the 20th century. Here, of course, it's possible to quibble. But the world would be an emptier place indeed without Proust's mighty masterpiece--and readers curious about its brilliant, bedridden creator should start with White's witty and exquisite portrait. --James Marcus

About the Author
Edmund White, the author of 13 books, was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. In the US he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Genet:A Biography.

Customer Reviews

A Succinct and Constantly Illuminating Appraisal
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 young and pretty woman so that I could kiss you with all of my heart.'

Proust was a neurotic obsessive who lived largely with the expectation of an early death. Even before Proust began work on Rememberance of Things Past, he was as White draws to our attention spending about £ 12,000 a year for medicines. By 1909 he had withdrawn from society in order to devote himself entirely to work and for the next thirteen years he immersed himself in the solitary labour of reinventing his life through supremely imaginative fiction.

White's streamlined life of Proust is a blueprint for good biography. Serious, vivacious, racy, its publication is a literary event.

JEREMY REED

Making the Enormous Manageable
This is not a deep study on the great French writer's work, nor is it meant to be. However, it is a slim, fascinating and surprisingly penetrating insight into the life and writing of Proust. This tale is consciously told from White's perspective touching on issues and aspects about Proust's life he is interested in. This includes the way the world perceives Proust & interprets his work, how his homosexual status effected his work and public persona, the interaction between his writing & life and citing the most interesting work that has been done preceding Proust's life. It follows the basic time line of Proust's life and is related in a gossipy though highly intelligent fashion. The most interesting aspect of the book is the way it examines the way he is able to historically place the opinion of homosexuality at the time with other writers and the politics of the time and explain how it effected Proust's life. It relates how his life was really guided by a need for love and approval and how this was reflected in his relationships with his mother & lovers and filtered into his writing. The border between fictionalization and wishful thinking is finely tread in Proust's work because of this. White also gives an interesting insight into the way Proust worked as a craftsman playing with and mixing the genres of novel and the essay. Though this book touches on many interesting academic issues such as this, it is a very entertaining read and can be read easily by anyone who is a large fan of Proust's work or a complete novice. It is admirable White is able to touch on aspects of the writer's life that have not be ever deeply explored before.