long Proustian shelf, The

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2001 by Bawer, Bruce

He is France's great modern writer. Ubiquitous on the shelves of educated readers around the world-and serving for many of them, indeed, as an intentionally conspicuous warranty of their cultural sophistication (a role Proust would have hated) -his multiple-volume masterpiece is nonetheless far more often mentioned than read, and is ventured into by countless adventuresome souls whose spirits fail them, alas, long before the novel's end. This is less the fault of the book, or (perhaps) of the would-be readers themselves, than it is of the pace and pressures of the times we live in, whose comforts, conveniences, and "timesaving" gadgetry increasingly conspire to alienate us from the natural rhythms of life-and to make a book like Proust's (though there is, of course, no other book that is anything like Proust's) seem unbearably slow and uneventful.

In this age of sound bites and music videos, then, A la recherche du temps perdu-a book that reminds us on every page how much there is in everyday existence to notice, relish, and learn from, and that will simply not yield up its rewards to those who speed through life, barely noticing the names on the station platforms as they pass-would seem to be the ultimate back number and the quintessential cultural casualty. And yet somehow, nearly eight decades after his death in 1922, Proust is (by some measures, anyway) a hotter commodity than ever. The last few years have witnessed a tidal wave of new biographies, critical studies, and barely categorizable odds and ends with his name in the title; the year 2000 alone saw the publication of two 900-page biographies, both entitled Marcel Proust: A Life-one of them written by William Carter, the other a translation by Euan Cameron of Jean-Yves Tadie's authoritative life (which appeared in French in 1997).

Both books are very fine, though with different strengths. Tadie-a professor at the Sorbonne, an editor at Gallimard, and the author of several earlier books on Proust-has obviously made use of the research he did in connection with his controversial Pleiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu: his Marcel Proust swarms with details, dates, and both footnotes and endnotes (often several of each on a single page).'

To be sure, as with Proust's novel (which first entered English, thanks to the translator C. K Scott Moncrieff, as Remembrance of Things Past but is now increasingly referred to by the more accurate if rather less poetic title In Search of Lost Time), it can take a while to orient oneself to the style and structure of Tadie's book. The proliferation of sentence fragments can be off-putting at first; so, too, can the frequent blizzards of commas ("Robert [Proust], imitating his father, kept an accredited mistress, Mme. Fournier, for whom, it is said, he provided accommodation not far from where he worked, using Marcel, especially during the war years, as a messenger"). The prose is such that one feels at times as if one is reading Tadie's notes. Yet one soon comes to see the hasty style as a function of authorial enthusiasm-an eagerness to get all these goodies down on paper; and eventually one finds oneself not only understanding but also sharing Tadie's sense of urgency and excitement.

And one had better, for Tadie's book is every bit as obsessively inclusive as A la recherche. The narrative constantly breaks off so that we can read, for example, several hundred words on the life of Georges Bizet's wife (whose son was a friend of Proust). Yet one never tires of these detours: they add up to a fascinating portrait of a time and place in which human civilization may arguably be said, in some respects at least, to have reached a zenith. And Tadie (who is patently Proust's Leon Edel) writes with a sense of absolute authority about every last bit of it-not just about Proust's work, family, friends, and acquaintances, but also about his era's manners and morals, scientific and technological advances, and political and cultural developments.

Everybody knows about Proust's intense attachment to his doting mother, with whom he lived until her death, but Tadie also recognizes the extensive influence of Proust's physician father, Adrien (whose epidemiological studies helped inform Camus's novel The Plague). "Proust's view of the world, of life and its passions," Tadie points out, "was also medical: everything is a matter of pathology, of symptoms, and every description becomes a diagnosis; nowhere more so than where love is concerned." Tadie examines at length the part played by figures like Carlyle, Emerson, and Henri Bergson (a cousin by marriage) in the formation of Proust's mature art, as well as the crucial role of Ruskin, whose Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies Proust translated-a key step in the development of both the sensibility and the prose style of A la recherche. (As Tadie writes: "The structure of Ruskin's sentences, which were long, rich in incident and imagery, supple and musical, and had been influenced by the Authorized Version of the King James Bible, which British men and women of that period knew by heart, impregnated [Proust's] own style.")