Proust By Edmund White, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 149pp, £12.99 in UK
`After 712 pages of this manuscript," declared a reader at the French publishing house of Fasquelle, responding to Marcel Proust's Du cot e de chez Swann, "one has no notion, no notion at all of what it's all about . . . What does all this mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it! Impossible to say anything about it!" Au contraire, one might respond, a great many people have found an inordinate amount to say not just about the first but also all subsequent volumes of Proust's roman fleuve.
Among the most charming of recent efforts are Alain de Botton's How Proust can Change your Life and Phyllis Rose's A Year of Reading Proust. The latest addition to an already voluminous library of work comes from Edmund White, who attempts to summarise the man and his novel in a mere 140 pages - a length Proust would have found barely sufficient to describe a single moment and certainly not an entire life.
As so often before with Proustian devotees, White adopts a strongly proselytising tone. But anyone who has ever attempted to convert the non-believer to Proust can attest that he is an author who must be taken on faith alone. White makes analogies between A la Recherche du temps perdu and Wagner's operas, especially Parsifal, with its tale of a young man's quest.
Proust was a committed Wagnerian - rather wonderfully, in 1911 he became a subscriber to a service which allowed people to listen to opera performances live through their telephones - and commented that he esteemed the composer's manner of "spitting out everything he knew about a subject, everything close or distant, easy or difficult". That sounds very like Proust himself, as does Wagner's habit of introducing themes, or leitmotifs, which initially seem to have no place but gradually explain themselves as the work unfolds. And the sheer grandiose, megalomaniac scale of Wagner finds its literary equivalent in Proust too.
For many readers, at least until the last volume was published, A la Recherche appeared rambling, incoherent and stylistically anachronistic. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Gide, Proust's prose is notoriously long-winded and prone to the inclusion of elaborate metaphors. Far from being a representative of modernism, he actually seems to have more in common with writers of the 17th and 18th centuries.
This impression is strengthened by Proust's preoccupation with the past, not simply that of his narrator but also that of France herself. Because he was renowned as a snob and an admirer of the aristocracy - he used to pester the head waiter at the Ritz restaurant for information about recent diners - and because these concerns inevitably featured in his novel, the work itself was often harshly judged at the time of its first appearance.
But, as White remarks, the further-removed Proust's world becomes from that of his readers, the more he will find his audience, since readers will increasingly find fin de siecle Paris fantastically remote. Whether they will also find it engaging seems unlikely, not least because any effort to explain succinctly what the book is "about" must be doomed to failure. White is no more successful at this task than any of his predecessors, but he further hinders himself by not offering a pithy summary of A la Recherche's principal narrative threads. Instead, like so many others before his, this book is best judged as one intelligent reader's response to Proust.
In White's case, the response is highly - if not excessively - coloured with his own preoccupations with sexuality. That Proust was homosexual is no longer open to question, but White then starts to make certain assumptions which cannot be absolutely proven. There is, for example, no irrefutable evidence that Proust and the closest friend of his early adulthood, Reynaldo Hahn, were ever lovers - but White chooses to dwell on this and subsequent relationships from the understanding that they had a physical consummation.
No matter how passionate the tone of letters Proust wrote to successive men (and indeed to a great many women), they prove nothing other than his tendency to employ particularly florid language. White constantly describes his subject as "gay", a term Proust - who throughout his life was horrified at the notion of being publicly identified as homosexual - would have found unacceptable. So should every reader who regards White's fondness for imposing his own set of cultural values on someone from another era as bad practice in a biographer. On the other hand, considering just how short a book this is, he provides invaluable summaries on many aspects of Proust's intellectual development and how this may be reflected in his novel.
In addition to pithy analyses of the main Proustian themes and how these evolved, he also explores the nature of Proust's fictional characterisation by comparison with Charles Dickens and Henry James (to the detriment of both) and his imperishable idealism, even in the face of repeated disappointments from those he loved best.
White's book offers a satisfyingly succinct alternative to George Painter's entertaining but extremely long - indeed, it is almost Proustian in length - biography. It may not be without fault (there is one very obvious error when White suggests the Prince de Polignac was still socialising with Proust more than 15 years after the former's death) but for many readers unable to face A la Recherche, this book will have the merit of brevity.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist