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Proust's Paris World Revealed in Biography

Reviewed by Don A. Keister

PROUST: THE EARLY YEARS By George D. Painter. (Little, Brown & Co. $6.50. 435 pp.)

even many, different individuals and circumstances in order to create a single character in his novel.

Mr. Painter also shows convincingly that the famous love affairs with 'Gilberte and Al-

positions of homosexual experiences, as has sometimes been argued, but are derived from early passions of a heterosexual nature experienced before Proust turned into the path that led to Sodom and the horrors of the "Cities of the Plain."

Ever since the first volume of "Remembrance of Things bertine are not simply transPast," appeared in 1913, there has been speculation about its autobiographical significance. It was obvious to Marcel Proust's acquaintances that many of the events, places and personages were based on personal experience, but the usual tendency was to try to find a single key to say that the writer Bergotte was Anatole France, the painter Elstir, Monet, the Baron de Charlus, the fabulous Comte Robert de Montesquioux, poet and essayist, and Proust's close

friend.

This first of a projected two volumes ends with the death of Proust's father in 1903, before Proust discovered that salvation for him lay in recapturing the past he had lost, lifting it out of its bed of shifting and ambiguous circustance, and transforming it into an enduring work of art.

After Proust's death in 1922, however, the materials necessary for a definitive account The second volume, if it conof the relation of the novel to tinues the precedent of the its author's life began to acfirst, should tell us much that cumulate: great numbers of is new about the actual writletters turned up; unpublished ing of that "creative autobiogmanuscripts were discovered, raphy" we call a great novel. most notably the one of the

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abortive early novel, "Jean Reviewer Don Keister is Santeuil;" his growing fame professor of English literature caused those who had known at the University of Akron. him to search their memories

and record their findings.

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Now comes a man who has mastered this great heap of evidence, George Painter, a curator of the British Museum, author of a biography of Andre Gide and translator of some of Proust's letters, to demonstrate how much real experi1 ence went into the great novel which he calls not so much a work of fiction as a "creative autobiography."

In rich detail that supplements and illuminates the novel at many points, Mr. Painter brings to life French society of the early Third Republic, animating it with lively anecdote and re-creating many of the personalities of the upper middle class world into which Proust was born and the aristocratic world he aspired to and contrived to enter and observe. Repeatedly he is able to show how Proust drew upon his memory of several,