George D. Painter; biographer of Proust & incunabulist
Hyfler/Rosner
George D. Painter
Biographer of Proust whose principal career was as a
distinguished incunabulist at the British Museum
21 December 2005
Marcel Proust, the subtle and detached observer of the human
mind and heart against a French landscape, and William
Caxton, the genial merchant with literary tastes who brought
printing to England - two very different subjects, one might
have thought. But they came together in the work of George
D. Painter, a writer who was accurate, sympathetic and
capable of wild flashes of magical insight that illuminated
not merely the matter in hand but a whole range of human
experience.
His two-volume biography of Proust, published in 1959-65,
not only enjoyed great critical success, but also (what is
less common) has been in print ever since. It is one of the
great masterpieces of literary biography of our time.
George Duncan Painter was born in Birmingham in 1914, and
his lifelong love of music came from his father, a
schoolmaster with a fine voice (he took part in Rutland
Boughton's Glastonbury festivals and sang in The Immortal
Hour). His mother was an artist, from whom he inherited a
strong sense of the visual. He was educated at King Edward's
School, Birmingham, whence he went on to Trinity College,
Cambridge, as Bell Exhibitioner. Further scholarships
supported him, and he got first class honours in the
Classical Tripos; he was Craven Student and was 2nd
Chancellor's Classical Medallist in 1936.
Painter was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Latin at
Liverpool University in 1937, but left the next year to join
the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum. It
was here that the cast of his professional life set. The
Arched Room, the once magnificent enfilade of shelves
designed by Robert Smirke, became his habitation, surrounded
by the museum's collection of 15th-century books, the
greatest in the world. They had been arranged there by
Robert Proctor between 1893 and 1903, and there too his
successor, Victor Scholderer, worked until his retirement in
1945. The core of the work that he then handed over to
Painter was The Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth
Century now in the British Museum, begun by Alfred Pollard
in 1908.
Scholderer had been responsible for most of the volumes
dealing with Italy and France; Painter now undertook Spain
and Portugal, followed later by the volumes on the Low
Countries (divided, anachronistically, into Holland and
Belgium). All these benefited from Painter's very acute eye
for typographic detail; he also contributed the general
introductions, analysing the book production of each area, a
task less suited to his talents.
But his appreciation of the historical background was sound
and broadly based, and he had an excellent grasp of the
documentary sources. All these characteristics showed in his
work on British books printed in the period, notably in the
acquisitions that he made. These included the copy of the St
Albans Book of Hawking, Hunting and Blasing of Arms (1486)
marked up for Wynkyn de Worde's edition (1496), an
astonishing survival, the unique 1488 Legenda ad usum Sarum
from Warwick, and Caxton's second edition of The Mirror of
the World in its original binding, in which Painter's sharp
eye descried a dim ink offset which, seen in a mirror,
proved to be the only trace of another book printed by
Caxton, The Fifteen Oes.
He wrote up this last discovery, in his usual clear style,
as "Caxton through the Looking-Glass" in the 1963 Gutenberg
Jahrbuch. In 1974 he retired from the British Museum as
Assistant Keeper of 15th-century Printed Books; two years
later his last and greatest contribution to this subject was
William Caxton: a quincentenary biography (1976), in which,
overcoming the technical complexities of texts and type, he
drew a convincing picture of Caxton, by now his "dear little
man", in the context of his time.
Bibliographical scholarship was only one strand of many in
Painter's life. Moving to London had brought excitements and
strains that needed other releases. Music was now available
in abundance; he could play the violin well, and delighted
in singing Schubert's songs, although he shared his father's
taste for Wagner and Liszt as well. But the well of music
became a trickle with war, which brought too the agonies of
destruction without and conscientious objection within.
The trials of this time are reflected in the poetry of The
Road to Sinodun, published in 1951 but inscribed "London,
King's Langley, September 1940-October 1941". Sinodun "is a
curious domed hill, with a beechwood on its summit, rising
from the south bank of the Thames opposite Dorchester"; the
way there was tortuous, like Müller's "Winterreise". It
involved a "doppelgänger", too:
In the dark land's empty space
Two friends stand, nor need embrace.
Pressed too far, past tears or sleep,
I and I our vigil keep.
This sense of division enabled Painter to enter into the
double task of unravelling the complexities of Proust's
life, while seeking the roots of A la recherche du temps
perdu. With his wife Joan (their long marriage started in
1942) at the piano, he and his violin explored the
ever-memorable fictional sonata of Vinteuil (he would have
been amused to know that the rival claims of Saint-Saëns,
Fauré and Franck are in debate on the internet today). The
transformation of personal experience into creative form,
common to Heine and Hoffmann as to Shelley and Wordsworth,
lay at the centre of his own explorations.
These led first to André Gide: a critical biography (1951),
and then to translations of Gide (Marshlands and Prometheus
Misbound, 1953) and Proust's Letters to his Mother (1956).
Marcel Proust: a biography came out slowly, the first volume
in 1959, the second in 1965, when the whole work won the
Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. As Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote,
"a kind of infra-red intelligence, invisible but powerful,
glows from [the author]".
Fortified by the appreciation, Painter embarked on the still
greater task of Chateaubriand's life and work, and a first
volume, Chateaubriand, a Biography: the longed-for tempests,
came out to equal acclaim in 1977, winning the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize.
Meantime Painter had become involved in a quest that took
him far away from France and the 19th century. The same year
that Proust appeared also saw the triumphant announcement by
Yale University of their acquisition of the "Vinland Map", a
vellum double-leaf with a world map dating from the mid-15th
century (well before Columbus) that showed Greenland in
unexpected detail and beyond it the unmistakable outline of
the east coast of North America. Could it be genuine? Had
the Norsemen really got there first?
Painter was brought into the debate by his colleague, R.A.
Skelton, Superintendent of the British Museum Map Room, both
working in embarrassing secrecy until the news broke on
Columbus Day, 10 October 1965. Academic debate became
fierce, and fiercer when the "Tartar Relation", a manuscript
also acquired, quite fortuitously, by Yale was discovered
(they had wormholes in common) to be the source from which
the map had been detached.
Skelton and Painter came to believe that it was genuine, but
were assailed by most other experts, who questioned
everything from the bad Latinity of the "Relation" to the
chemical composition of the ink (at least on the American
bits of the map). The map was a forgery, they said, and so
was the "Relation" (the latter no light task, in view of its
length), the astounding coincidence of the two pieces at
Yale was a deep-laid conspiracy, and the wormholes had been
made with red-hot knitting needles.
At the conference held to debate all this, Walter McCrone's
evidence that the ink contained anachronistic titanium
seemed to have carried the day until Painter, with a
wonderful sense of theatre, revealed that under the
microscope you could see the tiny tooth-marks left by the
worms round the matching holes. The knitting-needle
theorists were aghast, and the case was left open in The
Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (1965).
Open it still remains. McCrone performed yet more elaborate
tests in 1972, which seemed to confirm his original
findings, but in 1987 proton-induced X-ray analysis showed
the titanium content of the ink to be far less than
McCrone's findings indicated, and negligible as a
constituent. Painter never lost interest in the problem. He
had no axe to grind. His work was based on a thorough
knowledge of all the written sources, which he then
interpreted against their historical and social backgrounds.
He had a wonderful memory well into old age, and could quote
from sources as disparate as Widsith, Joyce (he thought
Finnegans Wake vastly better than Ulysses) and Lear. But he
could also draw on threads of reasoning from yet wider
reading, classical, medieval, historical and modern. His
introduction to the 1995 second edition of The Vinland Map
shows his fundamental common sense, as well as his
wide-ranging scholarship.
It is impossible to imagine Painter apart from his wife
Joan, his companion in everything for far more than the 63
years of their marriage. Their families were related, and
they first saw each other through a railway-carriage window
at Bristol, where the Painter family paused en route for a
seaside holiday. First sight brought no initial spark. Joan
was a painter, and pursued art until 1935, when she decided
to train as a nurse. When they met again after the
tribulations of 1940-41, they were never parted; painting
for her and for him gardening (while listening to music
through headphones) and writing. He once said:
I write with torture, it's probably a self-punishment.
Somebody has got to do it. Trying to see things as
Chateaubriand saw them takes the time.
Work on Caxton diverted him from that task, and after that
the Vinland Map. But what he has left is a unique
achievement.
The Road to Sinodun ends:
I wrote a verse, I chose a rhyme,
My words spoke all my thought.
"Come death, for I have conquered time,
'Tis all I sought."
My former voice seems out of chime,
My future words all dumb,
Yet I have conquered death and time,
Let what may come.
Nicolas Barker
George Duncan Painter, biographer and incunabulist: born
Birmingham 5 June 1914; Assistant Lecturer in Latin,
Liverpool University 1937; staff, Department of Printed
Books, British Museum 1938-74, Assistant Keeper of
15th-century Printed Books 1954-74; FRSL 1965; OBE 1974;
married 1942 Joan Britton (two daughters); died Hove, East
Sussex 8 December 2005.