MARCEL PROUST.By Adam Watt. Reaktion Books. 208pp. $28.99. Here is an excellent brief life of Proust, the latest in Reaktion Books' ''Critical Lives'' series. Two years ago, its author, Adam Watt, published a useful study of Proust in the Cambridge series of ''Introductions to Literature''. The first chapter of that earlier book was ''Life'', in which Watt told the life story of the great novelist in 11 pages. This latest work expands the biography to more than 200 pages, while going much more deeply into relations between that life and the huge novel it engendered. Every biographer of Proust must, at some point, contend with an anti-biographical theory put forward by Proust himself. It is the idea that, to understand and appreciate a writer's work, biographical knowledge is of little interest or assistance. Behind this lies one of Proust's most acute insights into the nature of personality: that the self one is when writing a creative work is not who one is when dining out, or as Proust puts it, ''a book is produced by a self who is someone different from the one we show in our habits, in company and in our vices''. It would seem to follow from this that no amount of biography can enlighten our reading of the masterpiece. Yet it, the masterpiece, is the sole justification for the biography. Had Proust not devoted much of his life to writing A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, his life would never have been written about. And why write about his life, if not to shed light on his book? Watt, like his predecessors, genuflects towards this Proustian paradox; but, prudently, he expresses no view on it, either for or against. To endorse it would invalidate much of his endeavour; to dispute it would cast doubt on the sensibility and insight of his author. Implicitly, though, much of this biography of Proust gives the lie to Proust's own idea. No reading of the Recherche need take account of the life that produced it; but a reading of a good biography can enhance the appreciation of the novelist's achievement. Even though we all now agree that none of Proust's cast of comic monsters has a single original, we can also learn something worth learning from an awareness of how the futile dross of ephemeral human experience was transmuted by sorrow, imagination and ageing into the durable gem of art. Even if not directly transposed from real event into text, there is a sense in which much of what Proust had lived became the subject of his great book. More than the last quarter of his short life (to anyone aged at least 40, to die at just over 50 is to die young) was spent conceiving the work, then drafting it, expanding it, correcting, rewriting, enriching it with episodes taken at times from his daily life. One could say of him what Watt says of Proust's Narrator at the end of the novel: ''The life he has lived will be the raw material for the book he must now write.'' Watt is succinct without being perfunctory, scholarly without pedantry, authoritative without being exhaustive. He acknowledges his debts to prior biographers, mainly Carter and Tadié´, whose publishers afforded them much greater length. And he manages, within the tight constraints imposed by Reaktion Books, to cover all the ground: the gifted, sensitive child struck down at the age of eight by a first and almost fatal attack of asthma; the interrupted schooling; the relationships with a rather distant father and a mother who mollycoddled him into his 30s; the homosexuality of the social butterfly; the eventual retreat into bed in the cork-lined room where, amid obsessions, illness, regret, idiosyncrasy, insomnia and the joy of creation, he would spend years redeeming a life of trivia by transforming it into one of the most profound meditations on life itself ever put to paper. It is a pity that the book has no index. And there is a sprinkle of textual oddities that a former editorial practice once known as proofreading, now presumably forgone or technologised, could have detected. At one point, we have an inadvertently Joycean pun, ''making head or tale'' of something; at another, we are told, ''André Gide stole himself to read the book'', where the past tense of one verb, ''to steal'', has bizarrely become that of its homophone, ''to steel''. These defects are, however, nugatory compared with the achievement of turning a wealth of erudition and a welter of paperwork into a readable and reliable account of one of the 20th century's most telling writers.

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