Word: authored
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Life is the novelist's first draft. This elementary fact periodically brings out the detective in some critics and biographers. Treating a book as a case to be solved, the literary sleuth scours the author's life for telltale clues. With the instincts of Scotland Yard's finest, George D. Painter, a curator of the British Museum, has now tackled the massive Proust case. His findings may strike some readers as anticlimactic. It appears that Marcel Proust based Remembrance of Things Past on his remembrance of things past...
...first of two projected volumes, Proust: The Early Years is an amazing performance, though few except cultists will regard it as readable. Author Painter has picked up every aristocratic name that the snobbish Proust dropped, and whole pages read like excerpts from the Almanack de Gotha. Relatively free of footnotes, the book is really one gigantic footnote to Proust's masterpiece. When he is not playing the elaborate chess game of fact v. fiction, Author Painter does communicate his passionate curiosity about Proust, and he draws a lively portrait of the sick, sick, sick French society that molded...
Society preceded sodomy. While Proust pursued halfhearted studies for the law and the diplomatic service, he put his passion into social climbing. The life of the salons provides Author Painter with the most fascinating and amusing section of his book. The Parisian wits skewered each other like shish kebab. At Mme. Aubernon's (a fat, lively little woman and the chief model for Mme. Verdurin in Remembrance), the subject for conversation was announced days in advance. "What is your opinion of adultery?" she asked Mme. Straus (a Duchesse de Guermantes model) when that was the theme. Mme. Straus replied...
...homosexual affairs of Proust that Author Painter chronicles were with Reynaldo Hahn. a talented pianist and composer, and Lucien Daudet. foppish son of the famed novelist Alphonse. From each, Proust tried to extract the unconditional love his mother had given him as a child; in each he was disillusioned. But it was the Dreyfus affair that deglamorized high society for Proust. Jewish on his mother's side, he courageously declared himself a Dreyfusard and helped to circulate the first petition for Dreyfus' release. Ironically, when Dreyfus was finally released, Proust found him as unappealing an ex-martyr...
...Novelist (The Poor house Fair) John Updike likes to give his characters barium breakfasts. As they swallow life's little ironies or surprises, he puts his literary X-ray machine to work photographing the newly revealed conformations and deformations of man. In this collection of 16 short stories, Author Updike's plots vary-they may turn on a boy's whistle, a bachelor girl's bed, a bottle of wine-but the personality changes that result share the kinship of human nature well-observed...