Proust to a Proustolator Like Me

Joseph Epstein writes a review of a book called M. Proust's Library by Ms. Anka Muhlstein, whose authorship includes other books.

With "Monsieur Proust's Library," Anka Muhlstein has added another volume to the collection of splendid books about Proust. A woman of intellectual refinement, subtle understanding and deep literary culture, Ms. Muhlstein has written an excellent biography of Astolphe de Custine, the 19th-century French aristocrat who did for Russia what Alexis de Tocqueville did for the United States. Her previous book, "Balzac's Omelette," was a study of the place of food in that novelist's life and in his work. With "Monsieur Proust's Library," Anka Muhlstein has added another volume to the collection of splendid books about Proust. A woman of intellectual refinement, subtle understanding and deep literary culture, Ms. Muhlstein has written an excellent biography of Astolphe de Custine, the 19th-century French aristocrat who did for Russia what Alexis de Tocqueville did for the United States. Her previous book, "Balzac's Omelette," was a study of the place of food in that novelist's life and in his work.

I have about twenty [20] books about Proust in my personal library and have read about half of them, but I have the Pleiade edition of In Search of Lost Time, of which I have read all three volumes in French, though I admit to skipping about 50 pages of the one of "jeunes filles en flours" which I found too precious. I have also read several chapters of Custine's amazing book on Russia circa 1839. The brutish Czar Nicholas I didn't sound far off from the brutish Socialist Czar Stalin a century later. And Balzac is my favorite French writer aside from Proust---his splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes is at my bedside.

Indeed, Epstein's entire review is also a philosophical excursion about great writers. Here's a paragraph:

Masterworks also engender writing about them by superior people. Small books have been written about Proust's novel by François Mauriac, Samuel Beckett and Jean-François Revel. Other studies of the book have been done by the poets Howard Moss and Howard Nemerov and the critic Roger Shattuck. Full-length biographies of Proust have been written by George Painter, André Maurois, William C. Carter and Jean-Yves Tadié. Others have written books about photography and Proust; about painting and Proust; about his May 1922 dinner meeting with James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky and other of the great figures of Modernism; about his interest in but limited knowledge of English. There is even an excellent biography of Proust's mother, who played so important a role in his life. Proustolators, of whom I count myself one, do not want for excellent reading about their idol.

I've read the George Painter pair of biographies and tried to buy the Jean-Yves Tadié, which was gigantic, the last time I was in Paris.

Here's more of Epstein's philosophical musings on Proust's writings and Muhlstein's notes on little Marcel's reading lists:

As an asthmatic child, Proust read more than most children. Ms. Muhlstein recounts that, by the age of 15, he was already immersed in contemporary literature, having read the essays and novels of Anatole France and Pierre Loti, the poetry of Mallarmé and Leconte de Lisle, and a number of the novels of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens and George Eliot. Unlike Henry James, who referred to their works as "baggy monsters," Proust fully appreciated the great Russian novelists. He thought Tolstoy "a serene god," valuing especially his ability to generalize in the form of setting down laws about human nature. Ms. Muhlstein informs us that, for Proust, Dostoyevsky surpassed all other writers, and that he found "The Idiot" the most beautiful novel he had ever read. He admired Dostoyesky's skill with sudden twists in plot, providing the plausible surprises that propelled his novels.

In his 1905 essay "On Reading," a key document, Ms. Muhlstein notes, in Proust's freeing himself to write his great novel, he quoted Descartes: "The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most cultivated of men of past centuries who have been their authors." Proust's examination of "the original psychological act called reading," that "noblest of distractions," holds that books are superior to conversation, which "dissipates immediately."

For me, The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina are the two great poles between which all writers must gravitate towards---the Fox and the Hedgehog, if you will. The Fox knows a little about everything and the hedgehog knows one thing well. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, if you will. But Marcel knew that one thing.

The one sentence in "Monsieur Proust's Library" with which I find myself in disagreement comes late, when Ms. Muhlstein, considering Proust's condemnation of the Goncourt brothers for their attacks on the morality of their contemporaries, writes: "For Proust literature had nothing to do with morality." Perhaps Ms. Muhlstein meant to write "conventional morality," because a reversal of that sentence—"For Proust literature had everything to do with morality"—is closer to the truth. No other modern author was more alive than he to the toll taken by snobbery, cruelty, brutishness; none so exalted kindness, loftiness of spirit, sweetness of character, the kind and generous heart. No great novelist has ever written oblivious to morality, and Marcel Proust is among the novelists in that small and blessed circle of the very greatest of the great.

I love reading the Goncourt brothers' arch and nasty stories about French writers, especially about the louche critics like Sainte-Beuve. But Marcel was a true gentleman, whose incredible stores of apercus are only exceeded by his kindness and gentility to all around him. Marcel didn't have a mean bone in his body.