PREFACE TO NEW EDITIONT
HIS biography of Marcel Proust was first published in English and
American editions in two separate volumes, the first in 1959, the
second in 1965-It has remained in print ever since, in Great Britain with
Chatto and Windus or Penguin Books, in the United States successively
with Atlantic Little Brown and Random House. French, German and
Italian translations (published by Mercure de France, Suhrkamp, and
F eltrinelli respectively) have likewise continued in print and reprint, to-
gether with versions in Spanish, Polish, and Japanese. The original text
is here reprinted for the first time in one-volume hardback, giving the
opportunity to add new updating material, including this preface, a
supplementary select annotated bibliography, and a few minor typo-
graphical corrections.
I am surprised and grateful that my book has remained during three
decades alive and well. I am conscious how much this survival is due to
its publishers-in particular the angel Norah Smallwood, and now John
Charlton-and above all to the fascination of its subject, Marcel Proust,
who is incommensurably more interesting in himself than any book
written about him. However, my work has not as yet been replaced or
superseded as the only large-scale and detailed biography of Proust.
It still retains, as I believe, much of the relative adequacy and validity of
the already abundant but hitherto unexplored primary sources on which
it was based. The ultimate biography of Proust must await completion
of the current publications of Proust's correspondence and manuscripts,
and the long labours of a wiser and younger biographer than myself.
Even so, his materials, though vastly increased, will perhaps lead my
suc.cessor to a narrative and to conclusions not fundamentally different
from my own.
The chief advance in biographical source material during the last two
decades is, of course, Philip Kolb's magisterial and magnificent edition
of Proust's Correspondance, produced almost annually since 1970, and
now (in '988), having reached its sixteenth volume and the end of '9'7,
only a further six volumes and six years of Proust's life from completion.
The letters here published (already 34,8 by my count) nearly double
the number previously available. Earlier editors of Proust's habitually