Jean-Yves Tadié
Marcel Proust
Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Pp. 952+. CAN $49.95
Reviewed by Anthony R. Pugh

Painter’s biography of Proust has served us well for thirty-five years, despite its overly Freudian readings, and its sometimes imprudent use of the novel as a primary source. But so much has been uncovered since then that it is not surprising that new biographies have begun to appear. Nobody is better equipped to draw on the fruits of Proust scholarship than Jean-Yves Tadié, and he has faced the challenge manfully. The result is a narrative of 900 pages, which is both dense (not a word is wasted) and readable. Tadié naturally makes much use of the twenty-one volumes of Proust’s Correspondence (not neglecting stray letters from other sources, nor some comments by previous editors), but this is controlled by an exceptional awareness of the social, literary, and political world in which Proust lived; moreover, Tadié’s apparently total command of every word Proust wrote enables him to make illuminating connections on every page. Tadié scrupulously avoids Painter’s confusion: we always know exactly when we are dealing with l’homme and when with l’oeuvre.

Tadié’s book brims over with insightful remarks: on the way Proust’s life somehow prepared for the masterpiece (555); on the give and take between unstructured life and the structured reforging of it (652); on Proust’s anticipation of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues in his pastiche of Bouvard et Pécuchet (213); on Anatole France (302sq, 848sq; capitalissime, Proust would say). Tadié has a shrewd comment on how Proust, for all his politeness, always got his way (265), and he writes a moving homage to Proust’s fight against all forms of sectarianism (826). His remarks on the shortened version of Albertine disparue seem to me to be sensible (702, 781, 871, 903), as do his comments on the burning of thirty-two exercise-books, reported by Céleste (782). One could add many more observations of this kind. Tadié never falls into rhetoric, but he unfailingly catches the right tone, not least for the moments of the greatest seriousness.

I have spotted only eight typographical errors, and have even fewer quibbles over details. Some disagreements are perhaps more important, though they affect only the occasional moment. The treatment of the crucial years 1909-1911 is less clear than it could have been, as we weave from 1909 to 1910 and back (631sq), whereas the work of those two years was quite distinct, and it is worthwhile saying so. There is surely no reason to doubt that the first “bal des têtes” was written in 1910 (671). The statement that Proust had parts of his text typed, as far as two-thirds of the way through “Un Amour de Swann” (637) is unhelpful; all that happened there was that Proust returned to Paris from Cabourg (in 1911); the typing continued. Female homosexuality did not have to await the invention of Albertine (715); it is broached in “Un Amour de Swann” in the 1911 version. Tadié’s transcription on the last page of the novel, while it avoids the absurd remark in the Pléiade edition (IV, 1320 n.5), does oversimplify a little (894).

It is sad to find a man of Tadié’s stature indulging in his own form of sectarianism, as is evidenced by the extraordinary last entry in the Bibliography, which implies that the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes ceased publication in 1987. Even if that were true, we would still have Françoise Leriche’s 1986 article on the dating of the typescript. She, along with Wada, deserves credit for showing that the first part of the typescript was written in 1909 (635). Incidentally, both Leriche and Wada avowed that it was not the exercise-books, but a copy of the typescript that Proust lent to Lauris at that time (636). Moreover, Leriche’s argument that a letter dated by Kolb January 1912 was in fact written several months later has important consequences for the history of “Nom de pays: le pays.” See page 667, note 2, where it is attributed to January 1911 (probably a typo), and page 676, where another typo (in a note which says that Kolb is wrong, as indeed he was) mentions Cahier 65 instead of 35.

It is characteristic of Tadié’s alertness that he has spotted in a novel by Camille Mauclair the name of a painter Ellstiern (487, apropos Elstir/Whistler). He could have added that on Proust’s manuscript, Elstir starts off as Elstorn, which would seem to clinch the connection. There are some excellent remarks on Elstir on page 632 also. Possibly the only thing that Tadié has not exploited fully is Proust’s review of Le Prince des Cravates (653), which I quoted with delight at the conclusion of my own monograph on Proust in the period 1908/1909. And there are one or two enigmas which Tadié does not face, such as the identity of the person who copied virtually all of Proust’s corrections from one copy of the typescript to another.

None of this detracts from Jean-Yves Tadié remarkable achievement. He has given us a work which will be pillaged by Proustians and others for many decades to come.