Proust was published by Viking as part of the Penguin Lives series in 1999. The series commissioned established writers to produce brief biographies of major figures, and White — an American expatriate living in Paris, a gay novelist, a Francophile — was the obvious choice for Proust.
The book’s brevity is its strength. White cannot provide the comprehensive detail of George Painter’s standard biography or the critical exhaustiveness of academic studies. What he provides instead is a novelist’s understanding of another novelist: an account of how Proust’s life became his art, written by someone who has performed a similar (if less epochal) transformation in his own work.
White traces the essential arc: the privileged childhood, the mother-obsession, the society years, the Dreyfus affair, the homosexual underworld, the retreat into the cork-lined room, and the twenty-year labor of In Search of Lost Time. He is particularly good on Proust’s homosexuality — the coded relationships, the transposition of male lovers into female characters, the guilt and self-hatred that coexisted with profound erotic intensity.
As a working novelist writing about the supreme novelist, White offers insights that purely academic biographers cannot. He understands the practical mechanics of writing a very long book: the problems of structure, continuity, revision, and stamina. He understands the relationship between lived experience and literary transformation — how much of life goes directly into art, how much is altered, how much invented.
Collecting Proust
First edition (Viking/Penguin Lives, New York, 1999): Hardcover, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good/very good: $5–$15