Word: painterly
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PROUST: THE LATER YEARS, by George D. Painter. British Museum Curator George D. Painter concludes his rich biography of Marcel Proust in a second volume. Remembrance of Things Past is virtually required prior reading, but once that hurdle is out of the way, the reader is treated to a detailed and near-reverent account of Proust's agonizing labors over Remembrance, his homosexuality, and his pathetic transformation from social climber to neurotic recluse...
...natural as two lumps in his cup of tea. The year was 1782, and there was Elkanah Watson, 24, a Massachusetts-born merchant visiting London with 100 guineas to burn. As he dined with the famous expatriate painter John Singleton Copley, Watson resolved to spend the money on a portrait of himself. Together they decided to include in the painting, as Watson wrote, "a ship, bearing to America the intelligence of the acknowledgment of Independence, with a sun just rising upon the stripes of the union, streaming from her gaff...
Biographers can do worse than revere their subjects. Painter demands nothing less than total familiarity with Remembrance; no one who has not gone the distance with Proust should set foot here. But if the reader accepts Biographer Painter's somewhat heroic requirements, this book, together with its predecessor, surely qualifies as a permanent concordance to the enormous, agonized deposition that Marcel Proust gave to the world...
...Painter's approach to Proust is Proustian. He has set himself the surgical task of opening the novelist's oeuvre to its core. Each character, every place name, is methodically traced to its source or sources in Proust's environment. To most biographers, Albertine, with whom the novel's narrator Marcel dallies on the Normandy coast and in Paris, is a collage of the young men in Proust's homosexual life. Painter restores Albertine's sex by suggesting that she also embodies at least three women...
Proust is slightly out of fashion now. Biographer Painter's purpose is to insist that his unfashionableness is our fault, not Proust...