long Proustian shelf, The

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2001 by Bawer, Bruce

This biography is a rare example of total imaginative sympathy. Tadie has immersed himself so fully in Proust's life and work that you sometimes have the feeling he knows and understands the man as well as Proust himself ever did. The book abounds in confident and authoritative-if often exceedingly reconditeassertions, none of which seem to overreach. For example: "Very often, when Proust mentions poems of secondary quality in A la recherche, such as `Ici-bas' by Sully-Prudhomme, or poems by Leconte de Lisle or Armand Silvestre, it is because they have been set to music by Faure." Or: "It would be incorrect to claim, as does one of Proust's biographers, that [Reynaldo] Hahn was Saint-Sail-ris' 'lover'; the manner in which he wrote about the composer in Notes at this period does not for a moment allow us to suppose this." Tadie's discussions of the ways in which Anatole France, say, is and is not a model for the novelist character Bergotte, or Faure a prototype for the composer Vinteuil, are entirely convincing. And his comment that "hardly any figures or prices (nor dates, time's own price) [are] mentioned in A la recherche" is also significant: this omission, one realizes, is part of what can give readers of the novel the odd, almost otherworldly feeling that its events are floating in time, in and yet somehow outside of it.

Tadie entirely undermines the image many of us have of Proust as a social climber who spent the first half of his adult life exclusively hobnobbing with titled dimwits and the second half of his life neurotically isolated in his bedroom, writing it all down. First, one is reminded at every turn that Proust numbered among his friends and acquaintances not only now forgotten aristocrats but most of the distinguished French writers, artists, and thinkers of his period. Second, Tadie makes it clear that the illness that kept Proust bedridden for so long was quite real, and that he struggled mightily against it. Third, Tadie's tireless comparison of the novel's dramatic personae and story line with the real people and events of Proust's life reminds us that it is wrong to read even so much as a sentence of A la recherche as autobiography-that Proust, in other words, was not a mere diarist but an artist who transformed everything utterly.

One turns to William Carter convinced that no one can easily top Tadie.2 Yet Carter has his own distinctive strengths. If Tadie serves up a data-heavy portrait of Proust's world-indeed, a veritable Proustian biographical encyclopedia-Carter, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has written an earlier book on Proust and co-produced a documentary about him, gives us a fluid narrative that seeks to get at the truth of Proust's inner life, to capture the texture of his experience. The two books make for a continually absorbing contrast in perspective and emphasis: while Tadie looks back at the boy for premonitory signs of the great artist, Carter shows us the boy growing into the man (whom one of his editors, by the way, called "the most complicated man in Paris"); while Tadie inspects the pieces of the puzzle under a microscope, Carter fits them together; while Tadie is impressive, Carter is moving. Reading Carter, one feels genuine empathy for the boy who, in his mid teens, wrote to Bizet's son confessing his crush on the addressee and describing his father's dismay at having caught him masturbating. (Another friend, Daniel Halevy, who saw the letter, copied it into his diary and wrote: "This deranged creature is extremely talented, and I know NOTHING that is sadder and more marvelously written than these two pages.") Many readers of A la recherche find that the novel, which they may at first find offputting, even repellent, gradually grows on them, eventually securing their fast affection; the same is true of the Proust that one meets in Carter's biography.