Editorial ReviewsReview
Subtle, introverted, rarely visible, Marcel Proust is a challenging biographical subject. The son of a Catholic doctor and a Jewish mother, he was an emotional and physiological invalid, spending most of his life in bed, writing nights, sleeping days, the shutters and drapes closed against light, air, dust, Paris; suffocating himself in clothes, overheated rooms, medicinal fumes, insulating himself from the very sensations he explored along with themes of memory, consciousness, and time in the largely autobiographical A la recherche du temps perdu. Secluded, self-absorbed, preoccupied With petty and self-protecting rituals, his life was an accumulation of coffee cups, symptoms, servants, soirees when he was able, gossip, homosexual encounters, and words, most of them in letters, heaps of them. Ingratiating, quarrelsome, simultaneously obsequious, tyrannical, genial, and compulsively analytical, the letters served to control, and substitute for, the human contact Proust both craved and feared. Hayman, who has a gift for interpreting tormented European intellectuals - Nietzsche (1980), Sartre (1987), Kafka (1981), Brecht (1985), etc. - uses these letters to reconstruct Proust's life in his own terms: his mother-dominated childhood, neurasthenic youth, education, sexual experimentation, extended financial dependence, infatuation with aristocracy and affairs with servants, insecurities, compensatory generosities, and the discovery of his prodigious memory, both the conscious, passionately observed memories and the involuntary ones. Hayman shows how Proust recycled memories into fiction, translated homosexual romances into heterosexual ones, and brutally parodied those who offended him. A good reporter, relating the life, fiction, and philosophy with clarity and detail, Hayman avoids the inexplicable, the mystery of genius, of which Proust is such a rare example. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Both George Painter's and Andre Maurois's biographies were written too early to take advantage of the first reliable edition of Proust's correspondence, or of the manuscripts and corrected proofs which Suzy Mante-Proust sold to the Bibliotheque Nationale. Hayman argues that Painter was wrong to say Proust invented nothing, that "Remembrance of Things Past" is not, properly speaking, a fiction but a creative autobiography, and that Proust invented a lot, not only in his fictions but in his letters, which are full of distortions and exaggerations. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
CONTENTS
I 1871-88 Fragile Boyhood
II 1889-96 Pleasure and Daylight
III 1896-1905 Breakfast at Night
IV 1905-9 Freedom to Write
V 1910-14 Reclusion
VI 1914-22 Rehearsals for Dying
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