Edmund White: Marcel Proust

Edmund White: Marcel Proust (Groot-Brittannië, 1999): 156 blz: Uitgeverij Penguin

 

 

Volgens veel mensen (waaronder ikzelf) is Proust één van de grootste, zo niet de grootste romanschrijver van de 20e eeuw. Hij heeft deze reputatie te danken aan één werk: "Op zoek naar de verloren tijd" dat in totaal bestaat uit 7 delen en een kleine 3.400 bladzijden.
 

Ik heb eerder al de zeer gedetailleerde biografie van William Carter gelezen en heb nog een aantal uitgebreide biografieën over Proust in de kast staan. Nu heb ik deze korte biografie van Edmund White herlezen.

Wat maakt Proust zo bijzonder? Edmund White doet een aardige poging om deze vraag te beantwoorden. Hij geeft een korte schets van het leven van Marcel Proust en laat zien hoe zijn levenservaringen doorwerken in zijn meesterwerk. De biografie is erg kort en leest lekker weg. Wat mij betreft het beste startpunt voor liefhebbers van het werk van Marcel Proust om meer over hem en over de relatie tussen zijn leven en zijn werk te weten te komen.
 

Citaten:

- Certainly the madeleine moistened by herbal tea has become the most famous symbol in French literature; everyone refers to  sudden gusts of memory as "Proustian experiences."

 

- Proust applied his attention to flowers and people and paintings, but not to theories about botany nor to psychology nor aesthetics.

 

- His idea of happiness: "To live near all those whom I love with the charms of nature, a quantity of books and musical scores, and not far from a French theater." "To be seperated from Mama" was his idea of unhappiness.

- Simultaneously he began to pay court to Laure Hayman, his uncle's (and, as it turned out, his father's) mistress, who would become the model of his most convincing female character, Odette, the "grande cocotte" whom Charles Swann loves and eventually marries.

- Again and again Proust would suffer from his reputation as a socialite, a mondain. It was certainly true that most of his friends as a young adult (and there were dozens of them) were rich or titled or talented or all three, and that very few of them belonged to the social milieu into which he had been born.

- When he was twenty-one ... he identified as his principal trait "the need to be loved or, more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled rather than the need to be admired." He sought in a man "feminine charms" and in a woman "masculine virtues."

- The present princesse de Caraman-Chimay once told me that when Proust died, het great-uncle Comte Henri Greffulhe (the main model for the duc de Guermantes), found his butler sobbing. "But why are you grieving? Did you know Monsieur Proust?" "Oh, yes," the butler replied, "every time there would be a ball here, Monsieur Proust would come by the next day and quiz me about who had come, what they said, how they were related to one another and so on. Such a nice man - and he always left such a generous tip!"

- Just as Flaubert had protected his time to write by working up medical reasons that kept him from practising law ... in the same way Proust, while pretending to humor his father's determination that he find a job, even an unremunerated one, managed in his passive-aggresive way to avoid doing anything he disliked for even so much as a day.

- To be sure, Proust himself made a distinction between normal memory - fallible, lifeless, virtually useless to the artist - and involuntary memory - perfect, vital, and timeless.

- Proust challenged other men to duels over the years; none of them, fortunately, had tragic consequences.

- Between 1900 and 1906, Proust was entirely (if never uncritically) consumed by Ruskin and translated The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies. Since Marcel could not read English, he relied on a word-by-word trot provided by ...

- The style Proust worked out in French and retained for his later fiction, with its complex syntax and long sentences (so unusual in French literature), sounds very much like Ruskin.

 

- ... Proust would write: "The artist who renounces one hour of work for an hour of chatting with a friend knows that he has sacrificed a reality for something that doesn't exist ..."

 

- Three and a half months after his mother's death Proust discovered that he had inherited the equivalent of about $6 million of our money today, including a monthly revenue of some $15,000 ...

 

- Yet Proust was attracted to the six-room appartment because he had often come to dine there with his mother, and he could not accept to live somewhere that his mother had never known.

 

- For Proust the most important sign of a critic's skill was his or her evaluation of contemporaries, given that everyone agreed about the relative importance of the writers of the past.

- ... Proust, whose entire method consisted of adding details here and there and of working on all parts of his book at once, like one of those painters who like to keep a whole canvas "in motion" rather than patiently perfecting it section by section, one after another.

- No one would take the time to see that he'd written the consumate Bildungsroman, the apprenticeship novel in which the hero learns about painting, music, and literature from, respectively, the characters Elstir (based partially on Whistler), Vinteuil, and Bergotte.

- When Céleste Albaret complained to Proust that he never let her go to mass on Sunday, he replied very sweetly, "Céleste, do you know that you are doing something far more noble and far greater than going to mass? You're giving your time to care for a sick man. That's infinitely finer."

 

- Only an involuntary memory, triggered by a taste or smell or other sensation, could erase the passage of time and restore a past experience in its first, full effulgence.

 

- ... Proust said that he had transposed to the female characters all his homosexual memories that were tender and charming and so had been left with nothing but grotesque details for his homosexual characters.

 

   

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