The 'Secret Life' of Marcel Proust

By Don A. Keister

A man who spent most of his life in his room, corklined to keep out all noise, who slept mostly by day and worked mostly by night, doesn't sound like a very promising subject for biography.

his he explored beyond the

be afraid to go too far," he wrote, "for truth lies beyond." Some of it he found.

Yet George D. Painterpoet, biographer, a curator of the British Museum-has frontiers: "We must never made two fascinating volumes about Marcel Proust, author of just about the longest and perhaps the greatest of novels, "Remembrance of Things Past." The first volume (1959)

took Proust down almost to the death of his mother in 1905; the second, Marcel Proust: The Later Years (Little, Brown, $7.50) tells of the writing of the novel, still being revised and expanded when Proust died in 1922.

PROUST is one of the great examples of the mir acle of artistic creation. Here was a man crippled by a curious love-hate relationship with his mother (towards the end he identified her with Death); a snob, though he learned to see through snobbery; a homosexual with a sadistic streak who "rejected his own inversion" and "used homosexuality as a symbol of universal original sin;” an invalid suffering from asthma, apparently psychic in origin, but refusing to be cured.

After several false starts, he found the theme for his novel and the way to write it. The rest of his life, more and more isolated, he struggled to get into it his past, all he knew and had experienced, to create the beauty that would be eternally present. In that little room of

PAINTER'S concluding volume has the virtues of his

first. He has soaked himself in Proust's writings, stuffed his head with the memoirs of the period, walked the streets of Paris and the French towns Proust

knew.

Thus he is able to show us the "secret life" from which the novel grew and trace its growth almost leaf by leaf. He has, in his own words, shown how, "in the apparently sterile persons and places of that external life, he found the hidden, universal meanings which are the themes of his book,'

"

and revealed "the drama of the contrast and interaction between his daily existence and his incommensurably deeper life as a curator.”

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