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In Remembrance of Genius Past
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19754 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
2,479 Words |
| Author
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Lionel Abel
Lionel Abel is professor emeritus at the State University of
New York at Buffalo and the author of Metatheatre and The
Intellectual Follies. |
PROUST
Ronald Hayman
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990
564 pp., $29.95
"And did you once see Marcel plain?" Suppose that you were asked that question after having read Ronald Hayman's Proust. You might indeed feel entitled to say, "Yes." But let us be clear about the meaning of the word plain. In the relevant line from Browning's poem "Memorabilia I," "And did you once see Shelly plain?" the word means unobstructedly, clearly, perhaps undimmed by what had been said of him. Plain, in Browning's use of it, means plainly there, right in from of one; it was certainly not intended to suggest that there was anything "plain" about Shelly.
But now, if you insist that you see Proust "plain" in reading Hayman's biography of him, all you are entitled to mean is that you see Proust with his tics and medicines, his bouts with asthma, his sighs, groans, and tears--Proust the neurotic but not Proust the great individual, as revealed by George Painter in an earlier biography. If you say you can see Marcel Proust "plain" in reading Hayman on the novelist, all you are entitled to mean is that you see Proust shorn of many of the characteristics that made him great; it must be like seeing Samson "plain," that is, after his haircut by Delilah.
Let me give an instance of the belittling effect of Hayman's biography. Hayman tells us that out of embarrassment Proust overpaid his male prostitutes. Now how does Hayman know the "right" sum for Proust to have paid for such pleasure? Similarly, Hayman tells us that Proust overtipped his waiters. Here is how this very matter is treated in the more probing appreciation of Proust by Painter:
At the moment of tipping Proust summoned a distant waiter and rewarded him regally. "But he didn't do anything for us," protested Brach, and Proust replied: "Oh, but I saw such a sad look in his eyes when he thought he wasn't going to get anything."
In this newest biography of Proust we have all the well-known facts about him: his manipulation of his mother, his struggle with his father (who had a low estimate of Proust's character), his early writings, his interest in John Ruskin's art criticism, his homosexual proclivities, and his effort to keep this secret from his friends. Now what did Proust think of sexual inversion? I did hear gossip in Paris which may be apocryphal but is
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