Marcel Proust by Adam Watt (review)

The author has three aims in this book: to present a concise, chronological account of Proust’s life, including his writerly occupations; to suggest connections between Proust’s life and his work; and to encourage readers of this biography to turn their attentions back to Proust’s work. This last aim is achieved through frequent quotation from Proust’s writings, giving readers a taste of his prose style (albeit in English translation) and — refreshingly — with hardly a madeleine in sight. Adam Watt is at his best when he punctuates his prose with Proustian language and imagery, in a Barthesian continuation of the work’s own metaphors. A wide range of documentary evidence is drawn upon, including school reports, the famous questionnaires, contemporary reviews of Proust’s work, Proust’s own writings (fictional and otherwise), and, most frequently, Proust’s correspondence, of which the reader is presented with a pertinent and often fascinating selection. Watt declares his debt to the magisterial biographies of Jean-Yves Tadié and William C. Carter, but gently distances himself from the somewhat outdated interpretations found in one of Proust’s first English-language biographers, George Painter. Watt’s biography deftly covers, as one would expect, Proust’s friendships, schooling, travels, and loves and losses. Special attention is paid at the start to Proust’s father’s own successful career as a writer, albeit of medical rather than literary works, and to Proust’s perusal of such texts. Particularly useful and impressive, subsequently, is Watt’s delineation of the whole of Proust’s œuvre, not merely À la recherche du temps perdu, although the complex compositional, editorial, and publishing processes of the latter are most clearly and instructively laid out in the second half of the text. In seeking to instruct as well as to entertain readers, this book spends more time on Proust’s work (the product of his ‘moi profond’) than on his ‘moi social’ (to borrow Proust’s own terms from Contre Sainte-Beuve). The biography inevitably dances around the vexed question of the relationship between Proust’s life and work, variously describing aspects of Proust’s life as having ‘served as raw material for’, ‘lent shape and substance to’ (p. 22), ‘informed’ (p. 35), or merely having ‘contributed in some measure to’ (p. 38) his work. Such statements are set against the declaration, at the outset, that the narrator is not Proust, and seem to seek to qualify or temper this prefatory warning (hence the second perceived aim outlined above). The book is generously illustrated with well-known images of Proust, including the famous portrait by Jacques-Émile Blanche, but also, more surprisingly and innovatively, with photographs of Proust’s manuscript pages, carnets, cahiers, and corrected proofs, which give the reader an unparalleled insight into the materiality of Proust’s work and idiosyncratic writing habits. Apt, restrained footnotes are complemented by a useful Select Bibliography. This book is valuable and enjoyable reading for students of Proust, but will no doubt grace the bookshelves of a much wider audience thanks to Watt’s succinct, elegant style and the unabated widespread cultural preoccupation with Proust.