long Proustian shelf, The

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2001 by Bawer, Bruce

Another difference between Tadie and Carter: if you ever thought of Proust as-well-a trifle odd, Tadie seems (for the most part) determined to disabuse you of that notion, while Carter's attention to some of the quirky specifics of Proust's life serves to bring out his weirdness in all its splendor. For example, while Tadie doesn't even deign to mention the name of Albert Le Cuziat, the proprietor of a male brothel in Paris, Carter devotes several pages to Proust's patronage of this establishment, where the author's special kink was, reportedly, watching famished caged rats attack each other. What's more, writes Carter, "Proust allegedly showed photographs of his distinguished lady friends to male prostitutes, who had been instructed to spit on them. ... Other accounts claim Marcel subjected photographs of his mother to such defilement." These stories, far from being improbable, make perfect psychological sense, given Proust's desperately conflicted attachment to his adoring but relentlessly smothering and world-class guilt-tripping mother (who, as her deathbed nurse told Proust, always viewed him as a four-year-old). Such anecdotes also help explain the bizarre scene in The Guermantes Wa.y7--arguably the single most dissonant episode in the whole of A la recherche-in which the Baron de Charlus proposes to the narrator that the latter's Jewish friend Bloch, for Charlus's entertainment, "give his [Bloch's] hag ... of a mother a good thrashing." Tadie's deep-sixing of such material makes one wonder whether, like the French Army generals who covered up Esterhazy's guilt and Dreyfus's innocence, Tadie is interested less in setting forth the whole truth about Proust than in serving the greater glory of France.

White, in his own slim 1999 biography of Proust, says of these brothel anecdotes that they "conspire to suggest that Proust's sexuality depended on defiling sacred objects, at least as a way of kick-starting it."3 This is one of many sharp insights in a book that is well suited to readers who, overwhelmed by the scale of Proust's novel, may be disinclined to take on the additional tonnage of a Tadie or Carter. Of course, some Proust admirers might choose to eschew the reading of literary lives altogether, on the grounds that Proust himself (for reasons spelled out in his book Contre Sainte-Beuve) abhorred biographical criticism. Fine; but it should be kept in mind that dismissing biographical criticism is not the same thing as disapproving tout court of literary biography. Certainly there must be some textual illumination to be found, after all, in the life story of a writer who, in his final hours-knowing very well that he would shortly be deaddictated a passage about the death of Bergotte, the distinguished author who serves as a mentor for the Narrator of A la recherche.

One thing, in any case, seems certain: while Proust might well have winced at Carter's retailing of his private peccadilloes, he would, one suspects, have been outraged by the efforts of some contemporary critics to convince readers that his chef d'oeuvre is such a. daunting piece of work that they must be protected at all costs from the fearful prospect of actually encountering it on their own. Case in point: Roger Shattuck's Proust's Way, published last year, which modestly offers itself up as (to quote the subtitle) "a field guide to In Search of Lost Time.114 Or take Malcolm Bowie's Proust among the Stars (1998), whose jacket copy promises that it "brings readers back to the pleasures of the text rather than to the caprices of biography."5 Yet "the pleasures of the text" are, of course, already there in the text. Why, then, shouldn't the text be enough? Do intelligent readers really need Bowie at their side to explain to them how much they're enjoying it?