About my reading George Painter’s MARCEL PROUST

Shadow
Born of the smoke of your fumigations
Face and voice
Eroded by the wear and tear of night
Céleste
With gentle rigour soaks me in the dark juice
Of your room that smells of warm cork and dead hearth…
Proust, to what revels do you go by night
——Paul Morand, Ode to Marcel Proust

http://www.amazon.com/Marcel-Proust-Biography-George-Painter/dp/0712674799/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374463266&sr=1-5
Marcel Proust: A Biography [Import] [Paperback]
George D. Painter (Author)
Paperback: 784 pages
Publisher: Pimlico; New Ed edition (March 7, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0712674799
ISBN-13: 978-0712674799

’His research has been monumental. His judgement is penetrating, and his style exemplary... No biography has ever before thrown so much light on the making of a masterpiece.’ Sunday Times

’Unquestionably a masterpiece... One of the great English biographies in its scale, its style, its mastery of the material, its human understanding.’ Guardian

’Surely the finest and most complete literary biography written in this century... Triumphant…worthy of the master himself.’ Financial Times


生命中究竟可以用多少的時間來等待一顆種子開花結果？而最終是否能夠結實累累憑藉的又是什麼樣的努力或機緣巧合？
一把生鏽的口琴、一雙棄置的直排輪鞋、一盒早已乾硬的壓克力顏料，或許都曾經是一顆種子，如果說這些半途而廢的種種，終究未能發芽都只是一種宿命，那似乎能夠讀完一本 15 年前購買的傳記，不啻是一個小小的奇蹟，儘管書櫃裡頭還有諸多不見天日的失落之書。

雖然這次讀完 George Painter 的《普魯斯特傳》的感動已不若先前其他普魯斯特的傳記，畢竟其身世遭遇早已多次聽聞，但最後又再一次經歷普魯斯特死亡的哀傷卻是難以廻避：
...the dead writer lay on his white bed, with a bunch of violets in his clasped hands, holy water and a sprig of box at his side. Daylight and fresh air flooded his bedroom for the first time, and funereal flowers which did not rouse his asthma surrounded him. The look of peace and returned youth, the faint smile left his face, replaced by the hollow checks and stark grin of dissolution. But the great circle commenced by his birth, which the spiritual triumph of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu bad left still imperfect, was now at last entire. His novel, by leaving his deepest guilt unatoned, had led to his most terrible sin; but salvation is completed only in the material world, at the moment of forgiveness and being forgiven, which for Proust was the moment of death. Now not only his work but his life was eternally alive. As he predicted, the Two Ways had met. The Méséglise and Guermantes Ways, the self we are born with and the self which we acquire, always join at last, for the rarest and greatest in a work of art, in death for everyone; but to find their point of unity we must first travel them, in the world of people, places and things, in Time.

這本知名傳記最初分為兩冊，分別於 1959 年及 1965 年出版，一直在 1988 年再版時合為一大冊，George Painter 在〈新版序〉特別提到對於自己的傳記還能出版感到訝異：
I am surprised and grateful that my book has remained during three decades alive and well.
......
However, my work has not as yet been replaced or superseded as the only large-scale and detailed biography of Proust. It still retains, as I believe, much of the relative adequacy and validity of the already abundant but hitherto unexplored primary sources on which it was based.

這段期間有關普魯斯特的書信或手稿的研究資料陸續出爐，但他也相信縱然將來會有更聰明、更年輕的傳記作家會完成一個終極版本，但在敘事及結論的本質上與他的傳記並無不同：
The ultimate biography of Proust must await completion of the current publications of Proust’s correspondence and manuscripts, and the long labours of a wiser and younger biographer than myself. Even so, his materials, though vastly increased, will perhaps lead my successor to a narrative and to conclusions not fundamentally different from my own.

這樣的自信源自於 George Painter 忠實於「第一手資料」(primary sources) 的寫作原則，如果回頭看到最初第一版的〈序言〉可以發現，這正是他個人一種相當驕傲的堅持：
...I have endeavoured to write a definitive biography of Proust: a complete, exact and detailed narrative of his life, that is, based on every known or discoverable primary source, and on primary sources only.

在這篇〈序言〉還提到一個議題，那就是普魯斯特的生活和他的作品究竟有著什麼樣的關聯性？
雖然我企圖服膺於普魯斯特在《駁聖伯夫》裡頭的揭示：「一本書是另一個自我的產物，不是我們在習慣中在社會中在癖習中表現的那個我。」；
但事實上，我卻背道而馳不斷搜尋普魯斯特相關的傳記資料；所幸在 George Painter 的〈序言〉裡可以找到支持性的認同看法：
This is not intended as a controversial work my purpose is to discover facts and elicit their meaning, and the larger part of this book is devoted to the plain narrative of Proust’s life. But I must explain that my uncustomary approach to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, my belief that Proust’s novel cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of his life, is necessitated by the facts, and is not due to mere ignorance of the accepted cliches.

George Painter 甚至引用了詩人濟慈的一段話來評價普魯斯特及其作品：
In my belief the facts demonstrated in the present biography compel us to take an entirely new view of Proust’s novel. “A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory,” said Keats: A la Recherche is the allegory of Proust’s life, a work not of fiction but of imagination interpreting reality.

我相信，一部作品的偉大之處絕對不在於作者是否曾經擁有顯赫的身家背景或顛沛流離的人生經歷，但藉由普魯斯特的傳記，或許我們可以探索一個時代如何變遷？生活方式如何改變？一位被大家視為上流社會的 dandy是如何蛻變並成為一個偉大的作家？而《追憶似水年華》這部小說又是如何從最初創作的靈光乍現歷經10多年的滄桑而醞釀完成 3000 多頁的曠世鉅作？