[.ca] Marcel Proust: A Life (ISBN 0300081456)

Remembrance of Ellmann's James Joyce:
Carter's Proust is as solid, readable, and absorbing as Ellmann's Joyce. While devouring Carter's text and endnotes too, I refer to maps and travel guides and continue to reread Proust's Proust. What a joy! I'm especially pleased with Carter's decision to lightly reference life to work (something I understand Tadie avoids in his biography, forthcoming in English). How could Proust's life be separated from his work or vice versa? I wish Yale had encouraged inclusion of a few reference maps and period photographs. Perhaps in a second, expanded edition, which would be an excuse to regain Proust's time once again, even at some loss to my own.

Life of a Brilliant Novelist:
Having read George Painter's two-volume biography of Proust many years ago, I might be unfair in comparing it to Carter's new biography, but my impression is that Carter has vastly outdone Painter. He has managed to write a very detailed, yet quite readable and engrossing biography of Proust. I think that conflating Proust and the narrator of "A la recherche..." has tended to diminish the author's genius, as if he had merely written a fascinating autobiography. Carter confirms Proust as a novelist, not a memoirist. Certainly, he helps the reader understand who may have inspired Proust's characters, but makes clear that Proust's imagination was the main engine behind the world he created. Some readers might be disappointed that there isn't more literary analysis of "La Recherche" in this biography, but Carter is adept at presenting passages from the novel that are representative of its genius and beauty. I'd also like to mention that the book is physically attractive, with a handsome typeface, and that there are very few typos and grammatical errors.

In Search of Proust:
Proust was not exactly the enigmatic person that some would make him out to be, and William C. Carter in this excellent biography shows just that. True, Proust did have his peculiarities; Marcel was asthmatic and wealthy, and his wealth allowed him a lifestyle that suited his needs. These needs certainly would have been unusual for healthy persons at the time or for unhealthy persons without means; and if Proust had not been wealthy it seems likely that his life would have been much shorter and uneventful. Proust was a remarkably social creature and had more friends than can be imagined by everyday standards. His life was a well-documented open book, much of which was, unfortunately, confined to a bed. Yet, in order to complete his novel, this man, oft characterized as a recluse, practically had to bar his doors to his innumerable illustrious friends who would not give him a moment's solitude. He may have been impractical with money and over-dependent on his mother, but I find that charming and hardly singular. So why all the talk about the cork-lined room? One word: jealousy. Few birds have flown so high and so recently. Those commentators only want to tear down the great man. Carter writes for those who, like me, have read In Search of Lost Time and wants to know the aspects of Proust's life that inspired his great novel. I am generally not interested in biography and I despise hagiography. Carter relates the important facts and covers all the relevant details about Proust, in splendid fashion.

A Proustification:
Carter captures the essence of Proust. This is a "must" read for anyone who is truly serious about "little Marcel." Fascinating! Will actually stimulate me to go back and charge through Remembrance of Things Past once again.

A Complex Life Simply Told:
William Carter claims in the preface to this biography that his goal is "to understand, as well as one reasonably can, how Marcel Proust, generally considered by his peers a talented but frivolous dilettante, came to produce what is arguably the most brilliant sustained prose narrative in the history of literature." Fortunately, this is not his goal at all. Professor Carter knows better than to attempt any such thing. About four months before his death, we read, a letter from one of his first English fans infuriated Proust. Sydney Schiff had endorsed the anti-Proustian idea that when one knows someone, there is no need to read a book by that person. Nonsense, Proust replied: "Between what a person says and what he extracts through meditation from the depths of where the integral spirit lies covered with veils, there is a world." (p. 784) Some superficial spirit must in a weak moment have seized Professor Carter's pen when he came to write his preface, for his fascinating and enjoyable volume implicitly disavows the ambition to explain how Proust achieved his masterpiece. What Carter does instead is to recount, based on what records remain and in a simple and unornamented narrative style, the facts of Proust's life from month to month. Though we do not really feel that we come close to the heart of Proust's mystery as an artist, we do now and then get an idea of what it must have been like to know Proust, and be known by him.