Madame Proust: A Biography By Evelyne Bloch-Dano Translated by Alice Kaplan University of Chicago Press 2007, $27.50, pp. 291

Mother May I?

Had Jeanne Weil not been the mother of Marcel Proust, no one would ever have been interested in her uneventful life, especially as it is a difficult life to recapture: There are no diaries or letters to and from her husband or her large family that would allow a portrait of any psychological depth. Her only surviving letters are those she exchanged with her son, letters mainly concerning his problems. Any biography of Madame Proust must therefore be essentially a mother-son story. Evelyne Bloch-Dano, the author of a very well-received biography of Emile Zola’s wife, conscious of the inevitable limits on what she could discover about Madame Proust, has given equal billing to her background, and starts out with a careful depiction of the milieu of assimilated Jewish families into which she was born.

Jeanne’s family, originally from Germany, moved to France during Napoleon’s reign. Her grandfather, Baruch Weil, settled in Paris, where he established a highly successful porcelain factory and opened several elegant shops to sell his wares. He quickly amassed a respectable fortune. French Jews had enjoyed full civic rights since the French Revolution, and alone among European Jews were free to enter any profession and to make their way in society. And they certainly took advantage of this freedom. In the 1840s, in the generation of Jeanne’s father, the men in the family were architects, stockbrokers, industrialists and bankers. Some of their relatives went into politics; others became professors.

Gradually, they abandoned the old Orthodox ways and adapted their religion to the society they lived in. Not many Jewish bourgeois families kept kosher tables, and Jewish children went to school on Saturdays. But how far should assimilation go? The tests were marriage out of the faith and conversion. Sons rarely married Gentile girls, but daughters sometimes married Christians and had church weddings. The break with Jewish tradition, while inevitable in such mixed marriages, was always painful. The girl had to adopt new ways, her husband did not always take well to the noisy gatherings of her large extended family, and she soon became a stranger to her own clan.

Nathé Weil, Jeanne’s father, found the perfect solution. He believed in complete assimilation and his daughter would indeed marry a Catholic, but she would not have to convert nor enter another family. He chose for her a brilliant self-made man, Dr. Adrien Proust, a specialist in public hygiene. Dr. Proust was an atheist, opposed to all things clerical; he did not want to be married by a priest and, best of all, all he had for family were a widowed mother, and a sister and a brother-in-law who lived in Normandy and never once came to Paris. Dr. Proust got along extremely well with all the Weils, and everyone agreed that while the children would be baptized in the Catholic faith, weekly attendance at mass was quite unnecessary.

The marriage was a success: Madame Proust knew what was expected of her and arranged a comfortable life for her husband. In due course, she gave him two sons, Marcel and Robert. Bloch-Dano, with an excellent eye for the telling detail, describes their comfortable life in Paris, the joys of the summer days spent in Auteuil, then a village just outside Paris, where Uncle Louis, who had a flourishing business of buttons and, of all things, religious medals, invited the whole family for two months in his property. The easy familiarity Marcel enjoyed with his maternal family explains why he never denied his Jewish side, though he could be cruelly critical of the Chosen People. “Every aging Jew turns into either a prophet or a boor,” he declared to a cousin, the historian Emmanuel Berl. However, during the Dreyfus Affair, which would become a subject of huge importance in his novel, Marcel, like his mother and his brother, was an ardent and active Dreyfusard. Dr. Proust initially sided with the nationalists, but he soon reached the conclusion that Dreyfus was an innocent victim of a gross denial of justice.

Jeanne would have been perfectly happy had Marcel been in better health. He was subject to horrible attacks of asthma and she reacted by overprotecting her hypersensitive, clinging child. He had grown into a young man averse to any discipline, did not enter a profession—contrary to his brother, who was to become a great oncologist—and led what seemed a frivolous life. As we see through her letters, the mother scolded, cajoled, interfered constantly and demanded detailed answers to her questions. (“Her little one” at the age of 24 was to tell her the exact time of his getting up and going to bed.) She gives the impression of having been the most controlling, nosy and heavy-handed mother imaginable. Quarrels about money sprang up constantly. She was also very literary minded, and often funny and sharp. It is also true that Marcel seemed unnaturally dependent and infantile when dealing with her. At 31, he still discussed with her such questions as whether he should buy a sponge.

She was obviously worried about him, as was his father, although he never meddled with the bizarre regimen Marcel followed to relieve his asthma. Curiously, we are spared no detail in the letters about Marcel’s “bad habit,” that is his vigorous masturbation, but we are left in the dark as to what the parents knew about Marcel’s homosexuality. Bloch-Dano supposes that the mother realized the true sexual orientation of her older son but never talked about it. It is worth noting that Marcel never ceased assuring her he was put off by effeminate men.

Confronted with these mysteries, Bloch-Dano falls back on Proust’s fiction to build her interpretation of Madame Proust. Drawing on fiction to depict reality is a dangerous exercise when the author is as subtle and deft at turning things upside down as Proust. In the novel, the Narrator, often taken as Marcel’s self-portrait, is not a homosexual, and the mother is an idealized portrait that would have no doubt pleased Madame Proust immensely but is very far from the mother she reveals herself to be in her letters. So I believe it is wrong to quote directly from In Search of Lost Time and Proust’s unfinished first novel, Jean Santeuil, to describe her. In doing so, Bloch-Dano ignores the dark undercurrent that courses through Proust’s masterpiece and concerns the tragic relationship between a homosexual child and a parent, as illustrated by the composer, M. Vinteuil, and his lesbian daughter.

She also leaves dangling the question of Marcel’s overpowering feelings of guilt toward his mother that reappear so obsessively in his writings: guilt that was not incompatible with rage at her standing in the way of his pleasures. Hence his need for secrecy, for continuous lies and, I venture to add, a form of writer’s block. Proust wrote freely only after Jeanne’s death. She was never to know that she had given birth to the greatest French novelist of the 20th century. Madame Proust, remarkably well translated by Alice Kaplan, is an excellent book about the time of Marcel Proust and the milieu of his family but inevitably cannot do justice to the complexity of the relationship between this mother and her son.

Anka Muhlstein is a French historian and biographer living in New York City. She has written eight books, including Baron James, the Rise of the French Rothschilds and A Taste for Freedom: the Life of Astolphe de Custine. Her latest book is on the burning of Moscow (Napoléon à Moscou). She has also edited a book of quotations of Marcel Proust, Par les Yeux de Marcel Proust, and has lectured extensively on his work.