I wish Yale had encouraged inclusion of a few reference maps and period photographs. Perhaps in a second, expanded edition, which would be an excuse to regain Proust's time once again, even at some loss to my own.
About four months before his death, we read, a letter from one of his first English fans infuriated Proust. Sydney Schiff had endorsed the anti-Proustian idea that when one knows someone, there is no need to read a book by that person. Nonsense, Proust replied: "Between what a person says and what he extracts through meditation from the depths of where the integral spirit lies covered with veils, there is a world." (p. 784)
Some superficial spirit must in a weak moment have seized Professor Carter's pen when he came to write his preface, for his fascinating and enjoyable volume implicitly disavows the ambition to explain how Proust achieved his masterpiece. What Carter does instead is to recount, based on what records remain and in a simple and unornamented narrative style, the facts of Proust's life from month to month. Though we do not really feel that we come close to the heart of Proust's mystery as an artist, we do now and then get an idea of what it must have been like to know Proust, and be known by him.
Carter's biography is the first comprehensive one in 40 years and is based on much new information not available in the Painter volumes of the late 50's and early 60's. I ordered this biography and it immediately got me hooked. Proust, in all his eccentricity (sometimes hilarious) comes off as a real and likeable person. He is certainly a different person than the one living in his corked lined room writing page after page describing the wallpaper in his room that Dr. Kaufman taught us about in my 1958 high school World Literature class.
At 800 pages, it at first appears to be a daunting read. What could be more boring than the life of an aristocratic French mama's boy never to earn more than a few Francs on his own until way past 30 years. It is hardly boring. Proust was an exceedingly complex person. (Aren't we all?) Proust was plagued by asthma that his doctors kept assuring him was psychosomatic in origin, and in some wisdom, he knew to be otherwise. Living at home totally supported by his mother and father, he lead an extravagant lifestyle, often leaving what amounted to $200.00 tips to the carriage driver. It was a salon society and Proust was a member of perhaps dozens. We tour the various salons and their status climbing members and hosts. In Carter's thorough biography we get to see the society of Proust in much the same way as he saw it.
Letters and more letters! This was the time and place of letter writers but, whew! Proust would write as many as three letters a day to his mother while living in the same house. Letters to friends, lovers, enemies. Gads, it hardly seems like there was time for anything else.
Some times the story of Proust becomes surreal. It appears that being a critic in this time in France was almost a death defying act. Trash a play or book and you were likely to be challenged to a duel. Well a sort of a duel, as by this time the duel was important but nobody was aiming to kill. Proust had his manhood challenged by a critic. Proust challenged the critic to a duel and it was accepted. The time and place was 9:00 am in a woods outside of Paris. Proust instructed his seconds to rearrange the time to 3:00 pm in the afternoon as 9:00 am was not a time when decent persons were up and about. Proust's bullet strucked the ground inches from his opponent indicating he was shooting to kill. Quite a dangerous mama's boy.
Carter handles Proust's sexuality in a refreshing and matter of fact way. Neither making him into a homosexual hero as some have done with Wilde -- though Wilde can take the blame for much of that himself -- nor treating him as some sort of sexual misfit. Sexuality permeated Proust's life and it often had no gender associated with it, he was often smitten with the women surrounding him as much as the men. Carter can be commended for his sensitive portrayal of this essential part of Proust's life.
If Proust is your interest, or if fin de siecle France is, this is a not to miss book. At 800 pages it is quite and investment in time -- it's a bargain in dollar per word! -- but if this era is your interest, it is well worth the investment.