Marcel Proust: A Life. By William C. Carter. Yale University Press. 946pp, £22.50 in UK
Marcel Proust: A Biography. By Jean-Yves Tadie. Viking. 986pp, £30 in UK
Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. By Roger Shattuck. Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. 290pp, £20 in UK
In the summer of 1928, less than six years after the death of Proust, Marthe Bibesco published Au bal avec Marcel Proust in which she described her snubbing of the late author at a party some two decades earlier. "He wanted to talk to me," she wrote, "and I did not want to listen. He pursued me. He sat down beside me without my permission. He started the conversation and I interrupted." And so, interspersed with extensive quotations from correspondence between Proust and her husband's cousins, she managed to spin out a single incident into a book of more than 100 pages. Princess Bibesco, a francophile Romanian who exercised her slight literary talent as though it were a muscle in need of constant use, managed to produce two further books about Proust, even though after that first encounter at a Paris ball she encountered him again only a handful of times. But such has been his posthumous fascination that for many authors an association with Proust even more tangential than that of Marthe Bibesco seems enough to ensure publication.
Like Joyce or Yeats in this country, he has metamorphosed into a global literary industry, aspects of which can be hilarious. Consider, for example, Proust: La Cuisine Retrouvee, which appeared a decade ago. This gorgeously illustrated book contains not just every reference to food from the novelist's work but also recipes which allow the reader to recreate "Dinner with Robert de Saint-Loup" perhaps or "Tea-time with Albertine". The American edition carries the helpful information: "If you cannot find creme fraiche, a good substitute is two parts heavy cream mixed with one part sour cream." Then there is Phyllis Rose's 1997 The Year of Reading Proust, which tells us as much about caring for her elderly mother as about the ostensible subject of the book, and Alain de Botton's conveniently self-explanatory How Proust can change your Life, published the same year and replete with instruction on suffering successfully or learning how to be happy in love (the last of these certainly a lesson from which Proust himself could have benefitted).
The industry goes on and on, interpreting, analysing, revising and, far too often, self-indulging. As a young man, Proust longed for public attention but by his early thirties he had come to understand the advantage of caution. In the summer of 1903, he wrote to the Baronne de Pierrebourg that "Everything, even what we desire, comes to us in the end, but only after we have ceased to desire it," which might be considered a refinement on St Teresa of Avila's maxim: "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." Proust's prayers were answered, but not in the way he would have wished. As Roger Shattuck observes, it is probable that "more readers have read through George D. Painter's biography of Proust than have reached the end of Search." Painter still deserves to be read; his two-volume life, the first part of which appeared in the late 1950s, remains one of the most elegantly composed biographies to be published in the last century. And, just like Leon Edel with Henry James, Painter hovers like a spectral presence over every writer who has since approached Proust as a subject. His ghost is invoked in the first page of William Carter's biography, but only so that it can be dismissed as no longer of relevance.
Carter justifies his own book by listing the wealth of new material that has become available to scholars since Painter completed his labours: more than 5,000 letters in a 21-volume edition of Proust's correspondence; 75 notebooks containing Proust's manuscripts as well as sketches and poems written during his adolescence; and still more memoirs written by people who could claim acquaintance with the author. What follows over the next 900 pages is proof that even the most fascinating story can be made dull if told without flair. Carter's style alternates between the bland and the pedestrian. His description of one of the great setpieces of Proust's youth, for example, the reception given at Versailles by Comte Robert de Montesquiou in May 1894 reads as though composed by an amateur historical novelist: "Many of the ladies carried parasols to shield their delicate, ivory skin from the sun, while the gentlemen wore their best top hats. There were titled ladies and gentlemen galore." Later, when writing of Proust's eating habits, he inquires "For a Frenchman, what could be more real and at the same time more heavenly than a choice dish cooked to perfection?", a rhetorical question which begs innumerable retorts, not least the query why anyone should want to perpetuate such silly national stereotypes.
Carter proves himself to be a chronicler but not a biographer, a difference Proust understood well, since his novel grew from an essay intended to discredit the great literary critic of the 19th century, Charles Sainte-Beuve. The latter had damned himself, Proust believed, by refusing to regard "literature as a thing apart, or, at least detachable, from the rest of the man and his nature." Every aspect of the subject's character was therefore relevant when examining his work. But, Proust argued, Sainte-Beuve's approach to literary biography "ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is a product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices." Faced with this challenge, Painter included an eloquent, if not altogether convincing, justification of his biography, insisting that Proust's novel "of all great works of art, cannot be fully understood until the life in time of which it is a symbolic reconstruction in eternity is known."
Carter, on the other hand, chooses simply to ignore the metaphorical gauntlet, as does Jean-Yves Tadie who, once more, is more concerned with taking on the challenge of Painter than that proposed by Proust. Originally published in France four years ago, his biography is magisterial but unintimidating, obviously authoritative and still intensely readable. Among its particular delights are a series of word portraits of Proust's contemporaries reminiscent of those composed by one of his literary idols, the Duc de Saint-Simon. Illan de Casa-Fuerte, for example, is summarised as a man of extraordinary good looks (Montesquiou is said to have shrieked at him "I forbid you to be so handsome"), whose other attractions included "his international and aristocratic breeding, his artistic and aesthetic temperament, his resemblance to his mother." Another quality Tadie shares with Saint-Simon is a presumption that his readers do not always need to have circumstances clearly explained to them. A typical instance of this is his handling of the Lemoine affair, a financial scandal in 1908 which inspired Proust to write a series of literary pastiches for Le Figaro. Tadie chooses to quote Proust's own summary of the affair rather than place it within the broader context of the time.
Perhaps this is because he is too steeped in his subject, having been editor not just of Etudes proustiennes I a VI but also the four-volume Pleiade edition of Proust's novel which appeared when it came out of copyright in the late 1980s. Roger Shattuck calls Tadie "the dean of Proust studies" before going on to launch an attack on his approach, here given the title of "genetic criticism". Shattuck's principal objection to the Pleiade edition supervised by Tadie is that it has buried Proust's book beneath a mountain of associated material, such as the writer's working drafts and multitudinous footnotes.
The effect, he proposes, is to make a novel already insufficiently appreciated, even less attractive to the majority of readers. Shattuck's new work, however, is intended to offer reassurance that Proust's novel is no more challenging than that of any other major writer. To this end, he provides an early chapter called "How to read a Roman-Fleuve" in which all practical matters (in which language is the book best read, how much of it need be read, are there ways to facilitate that reading) are addressed, along with a synopsis of the main storylines and characters. The life is summarised in 12 pages (as opposed to the 900-plus demanded by the other two books), presumably because Shattuck wants to devote plenty of space to his arguments in favour of the concept that Proust can be not only life-enhancing but even fun (as explored in his chapter on "The Comic Vision").
Is there a sense of special pleading and trying just a little too hard? Perhaps so, because not even Shattuck at his most persuasive can ignore the fact that Proust's novel remains a 3,000-page marathon. It is quantity rather than quality that continues to deter the majority of readers; Shattuck's exploration of Proust is immediately more alluring than those written by Carter and Tadie, being only a third their length. Proust seems to induce verbosity in everyone who approaches him. Perhaps this is in emulation of his own book's inordinate scale, perhaps because the work leaves readers feeling they have so much still to say. But as all three of these additions to Proustian studies show, by now what is said rarely has the advantage of novelty.
Robert O Byrne is an author and an Irish Times journalist