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Marcel Proust

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Jean-Yves Tadie probably knows more about Proust than anyone in the world. His work is also controversial. Roger Shattuck actually called for a boycott of the Tadie-edited Pleiade edition of In Search of Lost Time because of the amount of detail and alternative material included (Shattuck's reasons can be found in his Proust's Way). There are currently three large scale biographies of Proust available in English, all titled Marcel Proust: George Painter's (1959 and 1965, still available in a one volume 446 page paperback 2nd edition from Amazon in the UK, and having a reputation for being one of the greatest biographies of the 20th century), William Carter's (2000, 946 pages), and Tadie's (1996, 986 pages). I mention the pages to emphasize the scale of these works.

Two years ago I started reading Proust again. This time I made the breakthrough and was hooked. I am now about two-thirds of the way back to the beginning, somewhere in the middle of Sodom and Gomorrah (volume 4 of 7 in the Modern Library edition). One of the things to know about reading Proust is that once you have been acclimated to the Narrator and his style, resuming the novel is like receiving a telephone call from an old friend. In a page or two it's just like old times.

Shortly, thereafter I read Edmund White's Penguin Life (1999). In his excellent bibliography, he calls Tadie's book the "best biography ever written of Proust". He also notes that at first he "seriously underestimated its worth, since it lacks narrative sweep and humor value and sometimes looks like random notes". I eagerly awaited the English translation.

Meanwhile I began reading Painter and when the Carter book came out started that too. Painter's book reads like a novel. It is beautifully written and funny, like Proust's novel itself. Tadie seems to hold it in disdain, but I intend to go back to it when I finish the rest of Proust. I read about 250 pages of Carter's book. It wasn't that bad but continually consulting the notes I noticed that a large number were references to Tadie. I stopped and decided to wait for the real thing.

I made the right decision. Tadie's book is the real thing. C'est magnifique! The amount of information is staggering, not only about Proust but also about France and the French. If you are going to read a large scale biography of Proust, this is the one. However, the question remains: Is it for everyone?

If you have begun reading Proust and have made your own breakthrough ( i.e. you have finished Swann's Way, a good part of Within A Budding Grove, and intend to keep going) then the answer is a resounding Yes. You have already shown that you can cope with massive detail. You are not intimidated by descriptions of things that you know nothing about (say Hawthorne bushes) but instead look forward to learning about them. This is the book for you, another universe to explore. Not the Narrator's but Proust's and also Tadie's. In the case of Proust , a biography written by a Frenchman seems to have additional advantages.

What if you are new to Proust and want to find out what all the excitement is about? This is not the place to start. First it assumes that you know a lot more than you probably do, both about Proust and his novel. It is true that Tadie's not strong on the narrative. There are also lots of names mentioned: from the novel, from Proust's life, from French culture. It can be hard to follow. Second is the translation. I think Tadie is generally a clear writer. The translation is often confusing. Third, Tadie assumes a certain amount of insider knowledge about French life that a non-native might not possess. Though there are occasional notes, there still remain gaps. Though I view this as an opportunity to learn, it does put some extra stress on a reader unfamiliar with the basics.

My advice? For an overview, if you want one, read Edmund White's short Penguin Life. This will orient you to Proust and his world. But above all begin reading Proust himself. One reviewer dismissed this biography by recommending the novel in place of the biography. Of course. Who would recommend reading a book about Shakespeare before Hamlet, or Joyce before Ulysses? And when you are hooked, which you will become with a little perseverance (trust me, Proust is unbelievably funny as well as profound), then return to Tadie's Marcel Proust and new doors will open for you. And you will find finally that In Search of Lost Time has become a companion for your lifetime.

Having heard much about Marcel Proust and his role in 20th century literature, several years ago I began the odyssey of reading a standard English translation of "A la recherche". There is something unsettling about reading Proust for the first time: the extravagantly-long sentences, the concentration on emotion and aesthetic experience, the depth of perception he invests in his characters, and the extended attention he pays to their everyday conversations and experiences. He can frustrate easily, but if you are able to abandon your habits from reading typical American best sellers, and allow Proust's unique approach to literature to grab hold, the rewards are enormous. There are few if any novelists like him, and you wonder as you are enveloped more and more into his world, how much of Proust's real life intruded into the life of his characters.

Jean-Yves Tadie's biography "Marcel Proust - a Life" provides the answer. So much of Proust's personal experience, and that of his acquaintances in French high society, are to be found in "A la recherche" that you cannot fully understand Proust's work without understanding Proust's life. And an everyday biography chronicling where Proust went, what he did, and who he met, would not be sufficient. What is required is a biography which explains how Proust developed his philosophy; why the aesethic experience was so vital, and sometimes so overwhelming for him; what is was that drew him to associate with the French nobility; and most importantly, what role love played in his life. Proust, after all, is the 20th century's pre-eminent chronicler of love's passion, and its destruction through jealousy.

Tadie's biography satisfies these requirements, in a way that perhaps only a French author could do. The biography traces Proust's academic career and the philosophical influences which found their way into his novels. It is well-laced with selections from Proust's letters to his mother and father, as well as to those he loved and to his friends. It provides considerable information, and occasional speculation, on the connection to the people in Proust's life with the characters in his novels. So thoroughly immersed is Tadie in Proust's life and his writings, that his biography has occasional passages which read as if Proust wrote them himself.

It is surprising to learn how well-placed Proust was in the intellectual and artistic developments of turn-of-the-century France. He knew well, or at least met, most of the famous French authors, composers, actors, and critics, and certainly did not spend his time exclusively at high-society functions. Tadie's biography illuminates these links between Proust and such famous figures as Robert de Montesquiou, Gustave Moreau, James Whistler, Camille Saint-Saens, Stephane Mallarme, Daniel Halevy, Sarah Bernhardt, Jean Cocteau, and Gabriel Faure. Yet the biography is also filled with references to hundreds of individuals unfamiliar to American readers. Some reviewers have suggested that this is a weakness; that Tadie's biography is too detailed and Franco-centric to be of value to those who don't speak French or have a solid grounding in the France of Proust's time. But if this is true of Tadie's book, it is certainly true of Proust's novels. Proust's world is so all-encompassing, and his style is so poetic and distinctive, that he creates a desire in the reader to learn French just to savor his creativity in its original power, and to visit France to see first-hand the places which excited his extraordinary descriptions.

Tadie's biography satisfyingly entwines Proust's imaginary world with Proust's real existence. He understands Proust in a way few other biographers have. His biography will be the indispensible source for anyone wishing to travel behind the characters and experiences in "A la recherche", to the life of Proust himself.

I concur with the reviewer who suggested that the newbie proceed as follows:

1) Read Edmund White's little Penguin biography so as to orient yourself. This will lessen the culture shock when you are first confronted with Swann's Way (or The Way by Swann's, as the English prefer).

2) Read Proust. This is actually my third perambulation, so I'm a bit unsure how much of the novel to recommend. Whatever you do, get a good start on it, sufficient that you know you will persevere.

3) Read Tadie. Much of what has mystified you in In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past, whatever) will suddenly become clear. For example, how is it that young Marcel (most writers call him the Narrator) with his wheezing and his mother complex and his odd ideas about sexuality is welcomed in the highest reaches of Paris society? Well, why not, since Proust was! People loved him, men and women, rich and poor, nobility and servants. Knowing about Proust's life makes Marcel/Narrator a lot more credible. The same is true of other characters, such as Charles Swann. (Some of Proust's characters, including the Baron Charlus and the awful Madame Verdurin, are so good that their real-life equivalents are but pale imitations. They need no biography to limn them.)

Tadie is a vast undertaking--as of course is In Search of Lost Time. I became so interested in the biography that I have put aside the final volume, Finding Time Again, so as to concentrate on the biography.

A suggestion: skip the footnotes. I began doing so at about the halfway point of the biography, and I'm enjoying it more and following it better. Those constant interruptions (it's not unusual for the footnotes to occupy a quarter or a third of the page) made it difficult for me to follow the text. Maybe Tadie has to be read three times, like the novel itself!

It's a splendid work. I've read three Proust biographies, the third one (apart from Tadie's and White's) being Marcel Proust: A Biography, by Roger Hayman (out of print). It's a better read, but it pales as a biography and as an introduction to the novel.

-- Dan Ford at readingproust dot com

I read the original French edition of Tadie's book a few years ago. I had started reading La Recherche and after a few hundred pages I really wanted to know more about the author before continuing reading. I found in Tadie's book exactly what I was looking for. An excellent biography describing with enough details Proust's family, lifestyle, friends, places where he visited and so on. I can only recommend to all Proust's enthusiasts to read this book. La Recherche cannot be understood and fully appreciated without basic knowlegde about Paris social life at the beginning of the century and without knowing what Proust was doing at that time. It is often said that he was always sick and was spending all his days in his bedroom. Readers will discover that it is not exactly true and that it is thanks to the places that he visited and people he met that he could write one of the greatest books ever written.

I fell in love with Proust's work as a senior in college during a winter study break where we read 100s of pages a day. Later on, I satisfied part of the foreign language requirements for my Ph. D. (in English literature) by spending one day a week for an entire semester in a three person Proust seminar where we read Proust in French, but thankfully, got to hold our discussions in English. I also read Painter's 2 volume biography of Proust back then. In fact, somewhere in my garage, I have a first edition of Shattuck's "Proust's Binoculars." And, over the years, I've happily read and re-read Proust in the Moncrieff, Kilmartin/Enright, and now the new Penguin transations.

But, having read 318 pages into Tadie, I have decided to give up. Tadie is packed full of information, but he doesn't seem to have any real story to tell. It is just one potentially fascinating fact after another. But the reader has to supply all the fascination. Tadie just piles one sentence after another in an exhausting display of joyless erudition.

I recently read the Proust biography by Jean-Yves Tadie in French, and have several comments to make.

I was expecting to read a real biography of one of the 20th century's greatest authors, but it turned out to be a long book of little more than intellectual masturbation.

I find some of the pre-publication comments on the Amazon.com site quite perplexing - "critically acclaimed, best-seller in France..." Critically acclaimed, for this sort of book, means only that the authors friends, and his publisher's hirelings, wrote excellent reviews of the book - in France, it is all too common to see reviews written by writers who publish or act as "series editors" for the same publisher as the book they are reviewing. Unlike in the US, where, at least is some periodicals, reviewers are independent, these reviews are obviously nothing more than advertisements. And best-selling, well, that is naturally relative. Having worked in a French bookstore for 3 years, and being involved in publishing in this country, I know that this means nothing more than that the book sold better than expected. When you read the term "best-seller" in English, you tend to think of such books as Tom Clancy or John Grisham, and I can imagine that this biography sold nowhere near one tenth of what those books sell in France.

But I wonder exactly what the critics acclaimed in this book? Was it the overlong lists of people Proust knew, the thousands of footnotes, the neverending quotes that the author peppered his text with? This is a fine example of a biography that was written for scholars and is, as is often the case, poorly written, inspiring me when reading it with nothing more than the desire to get to the end. The author writes like a scholar, which is fine if you like that style (although I feel sorry for the translator who has to put this work into English). But this is a minor problem compared to the total lack of character that he develops.

For me, the benchmark for literary biographies is the Richard Ellman biography of James Joyce. Not only does he examine the author's life, and work, but ties the two of them together. At the end of the book, the reader has the feeling that he "know's" Joyce, that he understands his personality. In this book, the personal aspect is totally missing - if I hadn't read other biographies of Proust before, I would undoubtedly not understand his life. While Tadie mentions often enough Proust's illnesses and anxiety, and mentions his homosexuality more than enough, the reader learns very little about Proust other than the people he met and added to his novel. For while La Recherche is a roman a cle, and it is useful to know who the characters represent, it is also a highly introspective novel where a better knowledge of the author is far more valuable to its understanding. I found little in this book that was interesting. For a biography (in French) that truly depicts Proust as the person he was, and gives insight into his life and feelings, the book written by Ghislain de Diesbach in the early 1990s is far more interesting. The Tadie book is useful perhaps if you want to look up who was the source for a given character, but other than that, read Proust's work - you will learn far more about his life in La Recherche du Temps Perdu...

This biography offers incredible insight into not only the life but the work of this astonishing author. Reading is a chore but it is as it were a vast biographical footnote to Remembrance. I think it will stand as a definitive classic for years to come, bringing an exceptional new dimension to a major literary work. Like Proust's work itself, this biography requires a concerted effort of memory and imagination to appreciate its thoughtful nuance.

What is the nature of biography? Is it the work of the subject? Is it separatable? What is fair? What is accurate? Does a biography of one such as Proust, the 20th century's most famous, best author, have to be a recitation of the work itself melded with events in his life? Or can the work come simply from being an artist: the culmination of the mind that is under study?

Tadie takes Proust as the person: and what he becomes is in essence what the judgment of the biographer says he becomes using his best judgment. And there appears to be no person alive with more knowledge of Proust and his work than Tadie. It is big. It is full. Almost too much. But then we are not dealing with a minor novelist, are we? This book is a classic and a model for all biography in terms of its approach and philosophy: Proust is never to be forgotten from this rendering, which is art in and of itself. For Proust, and Tadie's treatment here, is that of the nature of art itself.

I picked up a copy of this book when I saw it marked down in price. I did not have to read very far before I discovered why the bookstore was unable to unload the large stock they still have on hand. The writing is simply atrocious.

On every page there are non-sequiturs or convoluted sentence that are impossible to understand, even after reading them two or three times. The fault is not in the translation, which seems to be faithful to the original, but in the publisher who clearly made no attempt to edit the text properly.

How ironic that a work about one of the greatest writers of modern literature should be presented in such a careless, clumsy way.

A Big Disappointment

I second the comments of another reviewer of this book, Kirk McElhearn. Tadié is the editor general of the "definitive" French edition, published over a decade ago, of Proust's great novel. This edition has been cogently criticized for needlessly increasing the size of the previous authoritative edition of the novel by over a third. Tadié chose to include an extensive collection of Proust's notes, manuscript versions and drafts of episodes found in the novel, as well as references to (if not citations from) Proust's earlier writings which prefigure the Recherche. (An excellent critique of Tadié's editorship can be found in Roger Shattuck's "Proust's Way").

What this biography is, then, is Tadié's collection of editorial notes forced into another genre, namely, the form of an biographical narrative. And it just doesn't work...not unless you enjoy reading hundreds of pages scholarly notes poorly strung together with coordinating conjunctions, punctuated with statements that aim at being insightful, but are nothing but drivel. Here are two examples. In the first, Tadié is commenting on Proust's review of a performace by Réjane (an actress) at the Variétés theater in Paris.

First:

"It was with Réjane's 'comb made of tortoise shell' at the Variétés that 'Shooting Star' [Proust's pseudonym] made his first appearance, in November 1890, in 'Le Mensuel': and, since Proust made use of everything, the Narrator gives Albertine 'a tortoiseshell comb' which she wears in her hair" (117).

Read it again. It makes no sense. Who has the comb? Proust? or Réjane? Appearing both AT the Variétés and IN 'Le Mensuel'? Conflicting prepositional phrases, and an incorrect use of a colon. And are tortoiseshell combs so uncommon to suggest that SINCE Réjane (?) had such a comb, this is the very, one and only, comb that shows up in Proust's fiction?!? A translator friend of mine assures me that the translation, while not award-winning, is still trying to do its best with a messy French text.

Second:

"It was through fashion that the young man discovered the passage of time" (117)

Although it might be interesting or amusing to consider, in a Pythonesque kind of way, the proposition that changes in fashion are responsible for one of the core philosophical problems of the novel, if not its very theme, as a statement in a text that takes itself seriously, it is gratuitous and nonsensical.