Books: Advanced Proustmanship

PROUST: THE EARLY YEARS (435 pp.) —George D. Painfer—Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6.50).

Life is the novelist’s first draft. This elementary fact periodically brings out the detective in some critics and biographers. Treating a book as a case to be solved, the literary sleuth scours the author’s life for telltale clues. With the instincts of Scotland Yard’s finest, George D. Painter, a curator of the British Museum, has now tackled the massive Proust case. His findings may strike some readers as anticlimactic. It appears that Marcel Proust based Remembrance of Things Past on his remembrance of things past.

The first of two projected volumes, Proust: The Early Years is an amazing performance, though few except cultists will regard it as readable. Author Painter has picked up every aristocratic name that the snobbish Proust dropped, and whole pages read like excerpts from the Almanack de Gotha. Relatively free of footnotes, the book is really one gigantic footnote to Proust’s masterpiece. When he is not playing the elaborate chess game of fact v. fiction, Author Painter does communicate his passionate curiosity about Proust, and he draws a lively portrait of the sick, sick, sick French society that molded the Proustian sensibility.

Bucolic Charm. Mama Proust called little Marcel “mon petit loup,” but far from being wolflike, he was a Little Lord Fauntleroy who threw temper tantrums and suffered from asthma. Much of Proust’s boyhood had bucolic charm. At Illiers (Combray in the novel), Dr. Proust’s home town, the family romped along the hawthorn hedges of the Méréglise Way (later Swann’s Way) or ambled along a winding river (later the Guermantes Way). On the lawns of the Champs Elysées, the 14-year-old played at prisoner’s base and puppy love with perky Marie de Benardaky (a model of Gilberte in Remembrance). When the affair ended, Proust thought of suicide by jumping from his family’s second-floor apartment.

At school he was already writing the page-long sentences that make even non-asthmatics gasp for breath. A schoolfellow took him to a brothel, but Proust was appalled; the madam looked like a murderess. At any rate, he was destined for darker vices.

Society preceded sodomy. While Proust pursued halfhearted studies for the law and the diplomatic service, he put his passion into social climbing. The life of the salons provides Author Painter with the most fascinating and amusing section of his book. The Parisian wits skewered each other like shish kebab. At Mme. Aubernon’s (a fat, lively little woman and the chief model for Mme. Verdurin in Remembrance), the subject for conversation was announced days in advance. “What is your opinion of adultery?” she asked Mme. Straus (a Duchesse de Guermantes model) when that was the theme. Mme. Straus replied, “I’m so sorry; I prepared incest by mistake.”

Diabolic Ties. It was in this setting that Proust met the original of Swann, Charles Haas, who referred to himself as “the only Jew ever to be accepted by Parisian society without being immensely rich.” Perhaps the most decadent and diabolical habitue of the salons was Comte Robert de Montesquieu, the original of Proust’s depraved but magnificently Lear-like Baron de Charlus. Montesquiou was tall and thin, with a Kaiser mustache.

He was a homosexual, and rouged and powdered his cheeks. One room of his house was decorated as a snow scene, with a polar bear rug. a sleigh, and mica hoarfrost. He sometimes wore a white velvet suit and a bunch of violets in the neck of his shirt instead of a cravat. But he did have cravats. 100 of them in “tender pastel shades” that hung in a glass cupboard in his bathroom.

The two homosexual affairs of Proust that Author Painter chronicles were with Reynaldo Hahn. a talented pianist and composer, and Lucien Daudet. foppish son of the famed novelist Alphonse. From each, Proust tried to extract the unconditional love his mother had given him as a child; in each he was disillusioned. But it was the Dreyfus affair that deglamorized high society for Proust. Jewish on his mother’s side, he courageously declared himself a Dreyfusard and helped to circulate the first petition for Dreyfus’ release. Ironically, when Dreyfus was finally released, Proust found him as unappealing an ex-martyr as the other socialites did. Mme. Straus said, “What a pity we can’t choose someone else for our innocent,” a line of the Duchesse de Guermantes in Remembrance. The laconic Dreyfus was credited with two apocryphal lines, “I’ve never had a moment’s peace since I left Devil’s Island,” and “Shut up, all of you, or I’ll confess.”

Marcel Proust was all but ready to retreat to his cork-lined room himself. His father died of a stroke in 1930s, and his mother had less than two years to live. Proust had been dismissed by the critics as “one of those pretty little society boys who’ve managed to get themselves pregnant with literature.” In the next 17 years, puffing at antiasthma cigarettes and doping himself with Trional and morphine, he would salvage 34 years of wasted time with a masterpiece.