Marcel Proust
Crazy Horse

-----C R A Z Y  H O R S E
LARRY McMURTRY | VIKING | NONFICTION | 142 PAGES

M A R C E L   P R O U S T-------------
EDMUND WHITE | VIKING | NONFICTION | 153 PAGES--------

BY PETER KURTH | There's something inherently engaging in the effort it takes to condense the life of a major figure into roughly 150 pages. And so it's a pleasure to welcome these first two volumes of the new "Penguin Lives" series of short biographies. The series editor, James Atlas, promises six volumes a year from "celebrated writers on famous individuals who have shaped our thinking." The list includes the Buddha, St. Augustine, Dante, Mozart, Dickens and Chekhov but, lamentably, only two women, Joan of Arc and Jane Austen. (Marlon Brando strikes the only false note.)

It's a weird experience to read about Crazy Horse and Proust back to back, the first subject completely mysterious and elusive, the second documented and analyzed to within an inch of his life. Edmund White's "Marcel Proust" is the more structured and elegant volume, as befits Proust, the author of "Remembrance of Things Past" and a man known above all for his style and his richness of expression. The Chicago-born White was an expatriate in Paris for many years, and like Proust he is best known for a series of autobiographical novels ("A Boy's Own Story," "The Beautiful Room Is Empty," "The Farewell Symphony"). Several years ago he produced a massive biography of Jean Genêt, to which his "Proust" can be seen as a kind of counterpoint. The book is a jewel, witty, anecdotal and beautifully written. One distinction is its analysis of Proust as a gay man; open it to any page and you will find both erudition and a fearlessly gay sensibility.

White begins by reminding us that, among writers, Proust is the most admired and influential novelist of this century, and that almost all the literature that came after him stands on his fragile shoulders. "Certainly the madeleine moistened by herbal tea has become the most famous symbol in French literature," White says. "Snobs like to point out that if the Prousts had been better-mannered and not given to dunking, world literature would have been the poorer for it." Proust was a snob himself, albeit one who kept as sharp an eye on his own nature as he did on the objects of his fascination -- namely, the French aristocracy and the exquisitely ordered world of late-19th century Paris.

McMurtry's "Crazy Horse" is, both substantively and stylistically, the opposite. As a narrator, McMurtry is all over the place, but in the right way; his style and approach directly echo the scattered, nomadic, raiding and retreating existence of his subject. The book is at best an "attempt," McMurtry confesses at the start, and with good reason. Almost nothing is known for sure about Crazy Horse; he was not even nationally famous until the last few days of his life. McMurtry is obliged to make biography out of legend, and he does so admirably, trusting the ways and the particular vision of the Plains Indians to get the story right.

"One of the glories of being a Plains Indian in [Crazy Horse's] time was that one didn't have to stay put," McMurtry writes. Accordingly, he leaps and careens from fact to fact and viewpoint to viewpoint, sometimes writing straight historical narrative and sometimes the kind of personal rumination that affords the keenest insight. Just as the Indian nations had an experiential view of the world, so McMurtry builds his tale in images, snippets and portraits of parallel cultures in other parts of the globe. He tells the tragic story well and with deep respect. Commenting on the still unfinished monument to Crazy Horse carved on the face of a peak in the Black Hills of South Dakota, McMurtry concludes: "It may be true, as Black Elk says, that Crazy Horse during his life never owned a very good horse; but he has a powerful horse now: a horse as strong as a mountain."
SALON | Jan. 28, 1999

Peter Kurth, a regular contributor to Salon, is completing a biography of Isadora Duncan. He lives in Burlington, Vt.