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Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
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 Marcel
Proust: A Life by William C. CarterThis
is the first comprehensive biography of Marcel Proust since George
Painter's biography was published in 1959. Like Proust's
masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, the biography is
structured as the story of the writer's slow and at times
excruciatingly painful search for a vocation. Proust emerges from
Carter's narrative as an extremely complicated, difficult and
brilliant man. Carter goes into some detail to elucidate Proust's
curious sexual identity - from his intense and often histrionic
relationships with his male friends to his quasi-pathological
attachment to his mother to the bizarre sexual fetishes that
emerged in his visits to Parisian brothels. But the biography
focuses firmly on Proust's development as an artist - the
distracted years as a dilettantish member of Parisian
high-society, the dabbling in journalism and translation and,
finally, his emergence as one of the great literary voices of the
twentieth century. This is a full, rich, deep, and all
encompassing biography of one of the great writers in the world.
It is also an elucidating cultural history of the times in which
he lived.
 Sodom
and Gomorrah (In Search of Lost Time , Vol 4) by
Marcel Proust, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, D.
Enright
"The thing about
Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the
utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the
last grain... And he will I suppose both influence me and
make me out of temper with every sentence of my
own."--Virginia Woolf
Sodom and Gomorrah opens a new phase of In
Search of Lost Time. While waiting in the courtyard of the
Duchesse de Guermantes to observe the pollination of her orchid,
the narrator secretly observes a sexual encounter between two men,
the Baron de Charlus and Jupien, that is played out "as
though in obedience to the laws of an occult art." This
begins a meditation on sexuality and desire, and is fueled, in
turn, by the narrator's own erotic attachment to the beautiful
Albertine. Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust's representation of
sexuality: "Flower and plant have no conscious will. They are
shameless, exposing their genitals. And so in a sense are Proust's
men and women...shameless. There is no question of right and
wrong."
The final volume of a new, definitive text of la
recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition,
D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed
reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into
account the new French editions. la recherche du temps perdu is
available from the Modern Library in six volumes in both hardcover
and paperback.
MARCEL PROUST was born in Auteuil in 1871. The
other volumes of la recherche du temps perdu are Swann's Way
(1913), Within a Budding Grove (1919), The Guermantes Way
(1920-21), The Captive (1923), The Fugitive (1925), and Time
Regained (1928). Proust died in 1922, and the final volumes were
published posthumously.
Also in the Series:
 Marcel
Proust by Edmund
White
Marcel Proust documented
his existence so lavishly--albeit in fictional form--that many of
his biographers have functioned as little more than code-breakers,
doggedly translating art back into life. It's a great pleasure,
then, to welcome Edmund White's slender, superbly artful account.
A novelist himself (as well as a biographer of Jean
Genet), White beautifully evokes "the France of heavy,
tasteless furniture, of engraved portraits of Prince Eugene, of
clocks kept under a glass bell on the mantelpiece, of overstuffed
chairs covered with antimacassars and of brass beds warmed by
hot-water bottles." And he's no less canny at summoning up
Proust's personality, in all its neurotic, contradictory glory.
Of course, Proust's life can't truly be
separated from his art. Every biography of him is bound to operate
in the shadow of Remembrance
of Things Past, and White has some shrewd things to say
about that mammoth work, whose style he describes as "an
ether in which all the characters revolve like well-regulated
heavenly bodies." Yet the focus remains on Proust and on his
unlikely transformation from momma's boy to social climber to
world-class genius. Like his subject, White often proceeds by
anecdote. His book is packed with telling, hilarious little
nuggets, which find Proust being snubbed by that "powdered,
perfumed, puffy Irish giant" Oscar Wilde or luring back his
lover Alfred Agostinelli by buying him an airplane.
At the same time, White conveys the considerable
pain that Proust endured as an invalid, an artist, and (more to
the point) a closeted homosexual. No doubt these factors shaped
his rather hopeless take on human affections, which impoverished
his life even as they enriched his writing. "Proust may be
telling us that love is a chimera," White writes, "a
projection of rich fantasies onto an indifferent, certainly
mysterious surface, but nevertheless these fantasies are
undeniably beautiful, intimations of paradise--the artificial
paradise of art." In White's view, this recognition makes his
subject not only a supreme poet of impermanence but the
greatest novelist of the century. Here, of course, it's possible
to quibble. But the world would be an emptier place indeed without
Proust's mighty masterpiece--and readers curious about its
brilliant, bedridden creator should start with White's witty and
exquisite portrait. --James Marcus
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From the University of Illinois, this project is
devoted to the study of the French author Marcel Proust and his
time.
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By V. Greene, The
Kolb-Proust Archive for Research, University of Illinois
Excerpt:
Marcel Proust was born to bourgeois parents
living in Paris. His father was a doctor and his mother came from
a rich and cultured Jewish family. Beginning in his childhood and
continuing throughout his life, Proust suffered from chronic
asthma attacks.
His literary talent became evident during his
high school (lycée) years. He began to frequent salons
such as that of Mme Arman, a friend of Anatole France. Under the
patronage of the latter, Proust published in 1896 his first book, Les
Plaisirs et les Jours, a collection of short stories, essays
and poems. It was not very successful...
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By Chris Taylor
This is an informal site dedicated to publishing
English translations of Marcel Proust's lesser known writings.
Pieces and letters which...are not available in translation
elsewhere.
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From The Knitting Circle
Excerpt:
His monumental work, "A la recherche du
temps perdu", (usually translated to "Remembrance of
Things Past", but more literally "In Search of Lost
Time"), was not completed, but was published in 16 volumes
between 1913 and 1927. The second volume "A l'ombre des
jeunes filles en fleurs" ("Within a Budding Grove")
won the Goncourt Prize for 1919.
The translation into English by Scott Moncrieff
was severely bowdlerised to protect sensibilities. In the later
translation by Terence Kilmartin, Proust's homosexual themes are
more apparent...
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©1974 by Roger Shattuck, Chapter I of Marcel
Proust
Excerpt:
Among the handful of genuine classics produced
in this century, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is
the most oceanic -- and the least read. Publishers' sales figures
in all countries confirm the latter observation. Let us begin on
this bleak terrain and work back gradually to what is cornpelling
and often entertaining in Proust. To ignore what impedes easy
access to his work would be foolish. Proust's substantial
reputation as an extreme case of something - longwindedness,
psychological vivisection, the snobbery of letters, salvation by
memory - rests not on wide readership but on a myth of uniqueness
defended by a dedicated few. In an era when the significance and
the privileged status of the work of art are being cast into
doubt, this ultimate monument to the artistic vocation, banked
high on all sides by interpretation and biography, refuses to sink
back into the sands of time...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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