The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Marcel Proust by William Carter
Alexander Theroux

William Carter. Marcel Proust. Yale Univ. Press, 2000. 1,024 pp. $35.00.

The first new biography in English of Proust in thirty-six years, updating Geroge D. Painter’s masterful two-volume effort and taking critical advantage of Philip Kolb’s recent twenty-two-volume edition of Proust’s correspondence (5,000 letters), along with seventy-five extant notebooks at the Biobliotheque Nationale, newly discovered poems and sketches, and the journal of his legendary housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, Carter’s is a thorough, workmanlike, entirely pedestrian effort, covering the ground, but without anything like Painter’s wonderfully poetic language and flair for phrase. There are many great photographs. A professor of French at the University of Alabama, Carter gives no great revelations, but fully documents the strangeness of the manner and the man, a 5’ 6" tennis-playing, well-educated (degrees in law and philosophy) hothouse plant, who never liked women except platonically and never managed to find the one man to love. He was only fifty-one when he died. We read that none of his friends considered him a Jew, as his mother was, and he fought a duel against a charge of being gay, or a “Saturnian,” as it was called back then. The young “Marcel,” narrator of In Search of Lost Time (long known in English as Remembance of Things Past) is curiously neither Jewish nor a homosexual. He isn’t even a writer to speak of. Much of the novelist’s pretension was the result of his trying, needing, to belong, in Painter’s words “to palliate the guilt of his Jewish blood.” Proust equated Judaism with pedantry and Jerusalem with Sodom. Snobs are joiners. Social acceptance “was a symbol—though he was to discover an illusory one,” Painter noted of a man who with generosity and pandering care was everybody’s dearest friend. I found Carter generally weak on the poetry of the masks Proust wore and too indifferent to the ongoing psychological need Proust had in using literature to revise his life. [Alexander Theroux]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Marcel Proust by William Carter Alexander Theroux William Carter. Marcel Proust. Yale Univ. Press, 2000. 1,024 pp. $35.00. The first new biography in English of Proust in thirty-six years, updating Geroge D. Painter’s masterful two-volume effort and taking critical advantage of Philip Kolb’s recent twenty-two-volume edition of Proust’s correspondence (5,000 letters), along with seventy-five extant notebooks at the Biobliotheque Nationale, newly discovered poems and sketches, and the journal of his legendary housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, Carter’s is a thorough, workmanlike, entirely pedestrian effort, covering the ground, but without anything like Painter’s wonderfully poetic language and flair for phrase. There are many great photographs. A professor of French at the University of Alabama, Carter gives no great revelations, but fully documents the strangeness of the manner and the man, a 5’ 6" tennis-playing, well-educated (degrees in law and philosophy) hothouse plant, who never liked women except platonically and never managed to find the one man to love. He was only fifty-one when he died. We read that none of his friends considered him a Jew, as his mother was, and he fought a duel against a charge of being gay, or a “Saturnian,” as it was called back then. The young “Marcel,” narrator of In Search of Lost Time (long known in English as Remembance of Things Past) is curiously neither Jewish nor a homosexual. He isn’t even a writer to speak of. Much of the novelist’s pretension was the result of his trying, needing, to belong, in Painter’s words “to palliate the guilt of his Jewish blood.” Proust equated Judaism with pedantry and Jerusalem with Sodom. Snobs are joiners. Social acceptance “was a symbol—though he was to discover an illusory one,” Painter noted of a man who with generosity and pandering care was everybody’s dearest friend. I found Carter generally weak on the poetry of the masks Proust wore and too indifferent to the ongoing psychological need Proust had in using literature to revise his life. [Alexander Theroux]

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