The Artist Who Becomes His Art

William Carter’s “Proust in Love” (Yale University Press, 280 pages, $26) is what Mary Ann Caws, author of an innovative biography of Marcel Proust, says it is: the product of extensive knowledge that is “at once so detailed and fascinating.” Mr. Carter, also the author of a recent full-fledged life of Proust, writes well, if not with George Painter’s panache or Jean-Yves Tadie’s profundity – to mention Mr. Carter’s most illustrious predecessors.Mr. Carter’s book arrives with two other lives of Proust. “The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgreen: Proust’s Swedish Valet” (Yale University Press, 192 pages, $50), edited and introduced by Mr. Carter, need not detain you unless you are a Proust adept and wish to engage with his life down to the last detail. Forssgren was a self-important nobody angered by Painter’s classic Proust biography. It comes as news to Forssgren that Proust was a homosexual. The great author never propositioned him, Forssgren, a handsome blond, bellows, although Mr. Carter seems to think Proust’s valet doth protest too much.To connoisseurs of innovative biography, Richard Davenport-Hines’s “Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris” (Bloomsbury, 400 pages, $24.95) is the best of the bunch. Let’s coin a new term for a new genre: the party biography. In May 1922, Violet and Sydney Schiff, famous for befriending the cognoscenti in England and on the Continent, hosted a sumptuous dinner at the Majestic Hotel in Paris. Feting Igor Stravinsky after the premiere of his ballet “Le Renard,” performed by Serge Diaghilev’s renowned company, the Ballets Russes, the Schiffs invited, among other artists and literati, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and Proust, arranging the first and only meeting between these two titanic writers.Organizing a biography around an event proves to be a delightfully perceptive way to approach not only Proust but also the very idea of modernism and its practitioners. In effect, the biographer places us at the table with these colorful personalities and then regales us with speculation about what brought them, so to speak, to the party. Like many parties, the long-anticipated encounter of famous figures is not in itself so scintillating. Mr. Davenport-Hines reports many versions of what Proust and Joyce said to each other, and in none of these accounts does the dialogue amount to much. Joyce claimed not to have read Proust at all, and Proust’s efforts to engage Joyce in conversation proved futile.Nevertheless, this party biography succeeds because the narrator-host is so good at showing that what Proust looked like was of a piece with what he accomplished:At first glance he seemed outstanding, and more intimate knowledge of him intensified this impression. There is no mystery about the effect he had on his contemporaries after 1918. His life was so exceptional, his manners and his work so distinctive, because of his sense of vocation. Proust’s ardent, self-punitive commitment to his art – requiring also a masochistic renunciation of life – was both ferocious and overwhelming.All artists have their eccentricities, but the image of Proust, sequestered in his cork-lined room, working in bed – and, always, those dark Sumerian eyes, as old as civilization itself – trained on the page, epitomizes the figure of the artist who becomes his art. How could Joyce compete, or want to compete, with that?Proust made the art of being an artist into a singular accomplishment, as Mr. Davenport-Hines reports:Society friends coined a word to describe the shrill emotional intensity, the effusive affection, the elaborate, over-sensitive social manner and aestheticism of their friend: to Proustify. There was a zest, lyricism, and even high spirits in his early Proustifying, eagerness and optimism about future experiences, a sense that life might prove enchanting.Although Proust had his effete side and never had a robust constitution, he managed a year in the army and formed many gratifying friendships that show why his art – for all its seeming preciousness – is far more demotic than is generally supposed.As one of Proust’s friends observed:Young men remote from literary culture or artistic tastes loved him as a delightful comrade, a bit unusual, someone whom they had to protect, who evoked a finer and more vibrant life than that to which they were accustomed.This is not an isolated report. Another friend noted how the novelist loved speaking with valets, footman, waiters, cabbies, and secretaries – anyone getting on with the business of living.Proust practiced “l’envers du decor, burrowing into the underside of a household until its secrets were revealed. How fortunate for the novel that Proust made it his metier, delving into what Mr. Davenport-Hines calls “insignificant routines [that] hold immense inherent importance in Proust’s universe: they provide the context that makes sense of morality, memory, and time.”But the novel’s gain is biography’s loss. What Proust could have contributed to biography, with his penchant for turning detail into drama! Proust’s novel is, in fact, an assimilation of innumerable biographies, the result of his painstaking observations of many personalities in order to create characters that no biographer is likely to find in a single subject. Or, to put it another way, Proust’s great novel is biography amalgamated.The Proustian novel, which in many ways is actually an epic,has more alloys than even the greatest biographies,and yet without those biographies there is no Proust. Richard Davenport-Hines comes as close as can be imagined to a Proustian biography, in that his book arrays so many of the intriguing personalities that proliferate in a Proustian universe.crollyson@nysun.com

The Artist Who Becomes His Art

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