Books: A Concordance to Proust

PROUST: THE LATER YEARS by George D. Painter. 424 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown. $7.50.

It was 1922. In a hermetically sealed bedroom at 44 rue Hamelin in Paris, the brilliant, untidy life of Valentin Marcel Proust, now 51, was drawing to a close For 17 years he had prophesied this event to his friends, who were amused. He had diagnosed the instrument pneumonia—before the doctors, even before it struck. Now he would have nothing to do with his foolish, fluttering rescuers. Weakly, vainly, he ordered his own brother, Dr. Robert Proust, from the room. After he died, those malevolent enemies of his life, sunlight and flowers, were admitted at last to his presence, along with a steady tide of mourners. One of these, Jean Cocteau, the poet, noting the neat pile of manuscripts on the mantel, ventured the thought that their composer was “continuing to live, like the ticking watch on the wrist of a dead soldier.”

Unequivocal Love. With this melodramatic scene, Biographer George Painter concludes the second and final volume of his reconstruction of the novelist’s life. In the first volume Painter, 51, a curator at London’s British Museum, grandly dismissed everything else written about Proust in the past—”the subject has never yet been treated with anything approaching scholarly method.” This handsome piece of scholarship certainly makes all other Proust biographers look like dropouts. And if love is the vital ingredient of definitive biographies, then this is the definitive biography of Proust.

Biographers can do worse than revere their subjects. Painter demands nothing less than total familiarity with Remembrance; no one who has not gone the distance with Proust should set foot here. But if the reader accepts Biographer Painter’s somewhat heroic requirements, this book, together with its predecessor, surely qualifies as a permanent concordance to the enormous, agonized deposition that Marcel Proust gave to the world.

Painter’s approach to Proust is Proustian. He has set himself the surgical task of opening the novelist’s oeuvre to its core. Each character, every place name, is methodically traced to its source or sources in Proust’s environment. To most biographers, Albertine, with whom the novel’s narrator Marcel dallies on the Normandy coast and in Paris, is a collage of the young men in Proust’s homosexual life. Painter restores Albertine’s sex by suggesting that she also embodies at least three women.

Slightly Unfashionable. Proust’s anguished genius gets the same policeman-like inquisition, but by a wholly sympathetic cop. The novelist’s homosexuality, his experiments in degradation, weigh no more and no less than his unfailing kindness to inferiors, his fabulous powers of observation, his unequaled ability to transmute the stuff of his own aberrant life into a work of art that no thinking human can ignore.

Proust is slightly out of fashion now. Biographer Painter’s purpose is to insist that his unfashionableness is our fault, not Proust’s.