Despite the promise of the subtitle, Davenport-Hines has a problem in that Marcel Proust's last days don't lend themselves to a dramatic narrative: the writer spent his final months mostly secluded in his famous cork-lined sickroom, working furiously to finish In Search of Lost Time
before his death in 1922. Further, as the author himself makes clear, Proust's groundbreaking novel didn't change Paris: WWI did. So what Davenport-Hines (Auden
) gives us is long disquisitions on the frenzied postwar Paris scene (in which he strains to make references to Proust) and on the modernism that flourished there, along with pointless lengthy excerpts from Wyndham Lewis's bilious attacks on Paris, modernism and Proust. And we get an interminable chapter on Sydney and Violet Schiff, British art patrons who idolized Proust and tried to monopolize him in his last months. Davenport-Hines does offer a good primer on Proust's great work, and focuses on the novelist's fears over how Sodome et Gomorrhe
, with its graphic explorations of homosexuality, would be received. But despite Davenport-Hines's occasional nice insights, William Carter, in his new Proust in Love
, touches on many of the same points and tells many of the same anecdotes with more grace, human sympathy and a greater command of the sources. (June)
