Appreciation: Sansom on Proust

"Of course!" I said. "I'd be happy to crawl under the bed and retrieve your cellphone converter!"

Or words to that effect. Anyway, serendipity kicked in: I came up with a copy of Proust by William Samson, first published by Thames & Hudson in London in 1973 (my copy is an American reprint from 1986). I have no idea who Samson is: apparently some kind of British belle-lettrist of a previous generation. So this is exactly the kind of book which, in my recent slaughter of the innocents, I would almost certainly have thrown out, had it not escaped its down by hunkering down among the dust bunnies.

But about 4 a.m., fumbling around for something that might put me back to sleep (I do that sometimes), I picked up Samson and discovered--what a wonderful little book this is! Not a "biography" exactly, but a "biographical essay"--some 128 pages, including (it says here) 145 illustrations that do as much as anything you could possibly want to capture the context of the man who surely counts as the 20th Century's greatest novelist.

It's customary (at least among people who have only heard of him) to think of Proust as an "interior"novelist--one who spends all his time attending to the nuances of his own feelings. This is an error. Proust does pay attention to his own feelings. But he is also a superb "social" novelist--much moreso, I'd say, than Joyce or Woolf (perhaps you could compare Musil or, in his own way, Chekhov). And he freely rewards the attention of someone who can put him in context with the arts, the music, the politics, of his day.

This is exacctly what Sansom does so well. He is, first of all, a great and knowing of Proust's own sensibility. But he has a distinctive knack for relating that sensibility to its sources in the larger world:

[A] taste of the salons and hostesses of the Parisian nineties--a salon, of course, meaning a drawing-roomful of regularly invited guests, and occuring at various times of the day, as afternoon or evening receptions, or dinners. It is notable here that still as late as 1917-18 Proust was checking up with a Society footman on various procedures of seating and invitation: although he had been through it all, he was not a natural aristocrat, and well knew that in these circles, while few eyes batted at a change of liaison, the misplacement of a stitch of clothing, an accentuation, a gesture could send the arriviste back down a few rungs of the ladder.

Id., at 55-6.

Moral of the story: never, ever, throw a book away. Or at least hide a few under the bed. Oh, and I did find the cellphone converter.