Triumph Over Nonsense

I have been reading an account of Proust’s sexuality by J. E. Rivers called Proust and the Art of Love. One is thankful that today, unlike the period Rivers writes in, we can think about such matters without the oppressive weight of Freudianism, which, like Marxism, had ready answers for any and every human problem. I am no more interested in a theory of the nature of homosexuality than I am in a theory on the nature of heterosexuality. Not that I am immune from visceral reactions to strangeness of sex in others. Why, I ask, are so many characters in Search homosexual? But then I have to ask myself, why are so many characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace heterosexual? Over a hundred talking characters and they’re ALL straight? And this is supposed to be a realist novel?

But if we no longer embrace homosexuality as a vice or disease, we have to acknowledge that it was so regarded when Proust wrote and that he himself seems to have agreed. I was reminded of this when reading now a piece on E. M. Forster. Proust differed from Forster (and virtually everyone else) in finding a way to create art from this tension. Although Forster was more clear-sighted than Proust on the healthiness of homosexuality, he ultimately failed to turn this insight into art.

The reason for E. M. Forster’s apparent abandonment of fiction after the publication of A Passage to India in 1924 is now well known: “Weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women & vice versa”. Forster had written down this explanation in June 1910 in what became known as “the Locked Diary”. This notebook, which could indeed be locked by a clasp and key (occasionally mislaid), was used by Forster between September 1909 and June 1967 to record those thoughts and observations he wanted to keep private. It now forms the “central column”, as he puts it, of Philip Gardner’s very welcome but problematic three-volume edition of Forster’s journals and diaries….

The days when a chance encounter could lead to fiction, as when meeting the lame shepherd at Figsbury Rings in September 1904 gave birth to The Longest Journey, are soon over. Recording a visit in 1935 by two West Hackhurst neighbours, a tenant farmer called Hughie Waterson and a Mrs Morgan, Forster writes: “Now if I could end with a note on the physical appearance of H. & Mrs M, and their clothes, they might begin to live in ink and become germs of fictitious characters. But except that I shouldn’t mind going to bed with the first and couldn’t with the second little occurs to me”. He adds that Somerset Maugham, whose stories he was reading, “could have got down the necessary for both”, and some years later, describing a slatternly woman on a train, he admits: “She might be someone’s material for a novel, and the greater novelists, amongst whom I have never been, would certainly include such a woman, instead of recoiling from her and being critical”. Even as a mere diarist of such encounters, Forster feels he does not measure up. After dwelling at some length on “an enormous young foreigner in the tube”, he concludes: “I stared at him for ¼ hour, and have put down every prosy scrap I could remember. Denton Welsh [sic] would have done him in a couple of lines”….

For men of Forster’s era and class, homosexuality often defied social as well as sexual conventions. In Forster’s case it also challenged imposed racial boundaries: several of his lovers were not only of a different (which is to say “lower”) class but also of a different (and, by the Imperial standards of the time, “inferior”) race. Forster’s Indian and Egyptian lovers are well documented, but Moffat additionally reveals that the married bus driver whom Forster picked up in Weybridge in 1924, and was still intermittently sleeping with in the late 1960s, was of mixed race. Gardner mysteriously states that “the friendship fairly soon evaporated”, whereas what is so interesting about it is that it persisted, as Forster himself notes in the Locked Diary in May 1966: “I can think of nothing which has lasted so long, and borne such odd fruit. Although so limited, he lies in the direction of my hopes”. These hopes Forster had outlined almost fifty years before when describing his affair with the Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el Adl: “to be trusted across the barriers of income race and class”. The affair represented “such a triumph over nonsense and artificial difficulties”, Forster felt. “I see beyond my own happiness and intimacy, occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and I know that there is a great unrecorded history”. Forster regarded himself as part of that history, and in “What I Believe” insisted that such relationships provided “something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty”.

Character

Nemerov opens his discussion of the Proustian character, who is often an outlandish exaggeration, with these words of Paul Valéry on Proust:

1. “The group which calls itself society is composed only of symbolic figures. Each of its members represents some abstraction.”
2. “Just as a banknote is only a slip of paper, so the member of Society is a sort of fiduciary money made of living flesh.”
3. Great art “is the art of simplified figures and the most pure types; of essences which permit the symmetrical and almost musical development of the consequences arising from a carefully isolated situation.”

And from J.V. Cunningham’s “Ideal Fiction”:

In ideal fiction the characters are flat. But it is a fiction of our fiction that people are really round. The truth is we are not usually real life characters in real life. We are flat, and so are those we know. We are only round occasionally to others in a sympathetic moment, to ourselves in introspection, and now and again as a demand on others in the grim game of interpersonal relations: “I want to be treated as a person.” We usually see others as truck drivers or neighbors, bore or blonde. And we are flat to ourselves when working efficiently, when we are most ourselves. When I write a poem I am a poet; I am narrowed to relevance. (78-79)

But how does Proust turn essence into character? One answer is that he has found a powerful, dual point of view, one that can powerfully engages the reader.

But ever so many people in Proust don’t, in the conventional novelist’s sense, do anything. They appear for a moment only, under the form of an anecdote, and vanish: like Swann’s father, or like the wonderful lady who whenever she goes out in society and is bidden by her hostess to a chair sees a man already sitting it it, and has all her life to decide which is the hallucination, the hostess’ gesture or the man in the chair. Such people are anecdotes. And it is very often by the means of anecdote that Proust makes his foreground characters emerge as well; by anecdote, and by a degree of comic exaggeration along a scale running from plain extravagance–as with the hotel manager at Balbec, characterized by malapropisms that he commits at the rate of at least one per sentence over a couple of pages–to a subtlety that will fill us with doubts as to our own view of what is real, for in the novelistic equation you have not simply the character observed and depicted as he is; no, you have always, and of greatest import, the eye that observes and the mind that depicts, its metaphors and divagations. About this I observe once again that the mind in Proust is double, it contains at the same time and not always distinguishably the experience of the young Marcel and the knowledge of the old narrator; under cover of the latter, too, it slips in as knowledge a good many things belonging necessarily to imaginative inference, such as for example the analyses of the state of mind of persons who never say anything about their state of mind. (80-81)

To illustrate, take the young Marcel’s first encounter with Charlus, where the reader is put on edge by the dissonance between the narrator’s and Marcel’s understanding of what is unfolding.

I suppose his reputation has spread sufficiently beyond the confines of the novel that it comes as no surprise to you, even if you are on your first reading, that he is a homosexual. But it does come as a surprise to Marcel the young man, who is in some respects perhaps exceedingly naive, and does not even think of this explanation  of the presented facts until about halfway through the novel, when he sees it with the seeing of the eye; whereupon much that had puzzled him about the Baron becomes clear. So that the introduction of the Baron to Marcel and to the world of the novel is as it were an exercise in Proustian vision, comparable in some ways with the  problem of vision in Elstir’s paintings, where what the eye sees does not a first harmonize with what the mind thinks it know, so that the mind helplessly and more or less vainly formulates hypotheses to explain the facts as they appear. (81)

His eyes were “dilated with observation”; “every now and then those eyes were shot through by a look of intense activity such as the sight of a person whom they do not know excites only in men to whom…it suggests thought that would not occur to anyone else–madmen, for instance, or spies.” The look he flashes at Marcel suggests a last shot fired at an enemy before one turns to flee. He seems to be on stage, making a couple of gestures that people make when they mean to show their annoyance at being kept waiting, “although they never make it when they are really waiting,” and breathing hard as people do “who are not feeling too hot but would like to be thought they were.” Marcel suspects him of being a hotel crook planning to rob his grandmother and himself, and hesitates between thinking of him as a thief and as a lunatic. He glances at Marcel again, and the glance suggests “the steeped look that we see on the faces of certain hypocrites, the smug look on those of certain fools.” A few moments later after he is compared to a detective on special duty, and some pages later we have this: “his eyes, which were never fixed on the person to whom he was speaking, strayed perpetually in all directions, like those of certain animals when they are frightened, or those of street hawkers who, while they are bawling out their patter and displaying their illicit merchandise, keep a sharp look-out” for the police. (83)

If you will consider again the introduction of M. de Charlus in the light of this claim, I think you will see that it is not fidelity to appearance that counts, that is the value of artistic composition, but, far rather, the intensity and serenity of vision that can compass so much and work in several ways at once. This is another of Proust’s ways of showing the oak in the acorn. For although young Marcel has not hit on the one explanation that would fit together and resolve in a single motion the traits displayed by the Baron, neither is he wrong in the comparisons he resorts to, which musically prophesy a large part of the action of the novel: as inversion is the secret center that relates the aristocracy to the proletariat and the underworld, so M. de Charlus and the world he increasingly comes to inhabit are characterized by what Marcel sees in his eyes at their first meeting: madness, criminality, violence, spying, detectives, thieves. All these ideas, which enter thus as hypotheses, do presently become realities in the action. (86)

Noxious Memory

Proust associates unforced memory with a visceral feeling of joy or enchantment, which may precede the conscious awareness of the actual memory. But the association is not always so pleasant. In two passages unforced memories evoke the deepest, sharpest feelings of pain found anywhere in the novel. As is often the case, the first such event is a rehearsal by Swann for that of Marcel: the discovery that their lovers are (horror alert!) female homosexuals. In Swann’s case, he suddenly realizes what he had unconsciously known all along, that Odette had been (another horror alert) Mme Verdurin’s lover.

One day, during the longest period of calm through which he had yet been able to exist without being overtaken by an access of jealousy, he had accepted an invitation to spend the evening at the theatre with the Princesse des Laumes. Having opened his newspaper to find out what was being played, the sight of the title–Les Filles de Marbre, by Théodore Barrière–struck him so cruel a blow that he recoiled instinctively and turned his head away. Lit up as though by a row of footlights, in the new surroundings in which it now appeared, the  word “marble,” which he had lost the power to  distinguish, so accustomed was he to see it passing in print beneath his eyes, had suddenly become visible again, and had at once brought back to his mind the story which Odette had told him long ago of a visit which she had paid to the Salon at the Palais de l’Industrie with Mme Verdurin, who had said to her, “Take care, now! I know how to melt you, all right. You’re not made of marble.”  Odette had assured him that it was only a joke, and he had attached no importance to it at the time. But he had had more confidence in her then than he had now. And the anonymous letter referred explicitly to relations of that sort.

…But now, by one of those inspirations of jealousy analogous to the inspiration  which reveals to a poet or a philosopher, who has nothing, so far, to go on but an odd pair of rhymes or a detached observation, the idea or the natural law which will give him the power he needs, Swann recalled for the first time an observation which Odette had made to him at least two years before: “Oh, Mme Verdurin, she won’t hear of anyone just now but me. I’m a ‘love,’ if you please, and she kisses me, and wants me to go with her everywhere, and call her tu.” So far from seeing at the time in this observation any connexion with the absurd remarks intended to simulate vice which Odette had reported to him, he had welcomed them as a proof of Mme Verdurin’s warm-hearted and generous friendship. But now this memory of her affection for Odette had coalesced suddenly with the memory of her unseemly conversation. He could no longer separate them in his mind, and he saw them assimilated in reality, the  affection imparting a certain seriousness and importance to the pleasantries which, in return robbed the affection of its innocence. He went to see Odette. He sat down at a distance from her. He did not dare to embrace her, not knowing whether it would be affection or anger that a kiss would provoke, either in her or in himself. He sat there silent, watching their love expire. (I,512-514)

As with Swann, a seemingly innocent remark sets off a nearly identical reaction in Marcel.

“…Well, this friend (oh! not at all the type of woman you might suppose!), isn’t this extraordinary, is the best friend of your Vinteuil’s daughter, and I know Vinteuil’s daughter almost as well as I know her. I always call them my two big sisters. I’m not sorry to show you that your little Albertine, can be of use to you in this question of music, about which you say, and quite rightly, that I know nothing at all.”

At the sound of these words, uttered as we were entering the station of Parville, so far from Combray and Montjouvain, so long after the death of Vinteuil, an image stirred in my heart, an image which I had kept in reserve for so many years that even if I had been able to guess, when I stored it up long ago, that it had a noxious power, I should have supposed that in the course of time it had entirely lost it; preserved alive in the depths of my being–like Orestes whose death the gods had prevented in order that, on the appointed day, he might return to his native land to avenge the murder of Agamemnon–as a punishment, as a retribution (who knows?) for my having allowed my grandmother to die; perhaps rising up suddenly from the dark depths in which it seemed for ever buried, and striking like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new and terrible and only too well-merited existence, perhaps also to make dazzlingly clear to my eyes the fatal consequences which evil actions eternally engender, not only for those who have committed them but for those who have done no more, or thought that they were doing no more, than look on at a curious and entertaining spectacle, as I, alas, had done on that afternoon long ago at Monjouvain, concealed behind a bush where (as I had complacently listened to the account of Swann’s love affairs) I had perilously allowed to open up within me the fatal and inevitably painful road of Knowledge. And at the same time, from my bitterest grief I derived a feeling almost of pride, almost of joy, that of a man whom the shock he has just received has carried at a bound to a point to which no voluntary effort could have brought him….It was a terrible terra incognita on which I had just landed, a new phase of undreamed of sufferings that was opening before me. (IV,702-703)

A Certain Penetration

Brichot is the picture of the academic historian, a professor of immense learning who is, nevertheless, at least according to Charlus, appallingly ignorant of history and society. Charlus is thus compelled to give Brichot a lecture of his own, from an admittedly specialized view of history.

The insistence with which M. de Charlus kept reverting to this topic–into which his mind, constantly exercised in the same direction, had indeed acquired a certain penetration–was in a rather complex way distinctly trying. He was as boring as a specialist who can see nothing outside his own subject, as irritating as an initiate who prides himself on the secrets which he possesses and is burning to divulge, as repellent as those people who, whenever their own weaknesses are in question, blossom and expatiate without noticing that they are giving offence, as obsessed as a maniac and as uncontrollably imprudent as a criminal. (V,408)

 For reasons of brevity, I will summarize some of this hidden history.

• Only three men out of ten is innocent of homosexuality.
• Swann, for instance, played around a bit with Charlus back in their school days: “In those days he was he had a peaches-and-cream complexion, and, ” he added, finding a fresh note on each syllable,” he was as pretty as a cherub…” (V,400)
• It was he who introduced Odette to Swann and provided other services to her: She used to force me to get up the most dreadful orgies for her, with five or six men. (V,400)
• Odette had innumerable lovers, unknown to Swann and she once fired a gun at Swann, nearly hitting him. The enraged Swann then had an affair with Odette’s sister. Who knew?
• He explains how Marcel’s impecunious friend in Balbec, M. de Crecy, became that way.

O Tempora o mores!  Back in the day, homosexuals were the very bedrock of civilization.

Good heavens, in my day, leaving aside the men who loathed women, and those who, caring only for women, did the other thing merely with an eye to profit, homosexuals were sound family men and never kept mistresses except as a cover. Had I had a daughter to give away, it’s among them that I should have looked for my son-in-law if I’d wanted to be certain that she wouldn’t be unhappy. Alas! things have changed. (V,409-410)

Fear and Loathing in Paris

Charlus, confident of his superior position in society,  is immune to fear. He takes only minimal precautions to protect his secret life as a homosexual. Not so with those less endowed with wealth and position. The Duc de Châtellerault spends an agreeable afternoon, albeit with an assumed identity as an Englishman, with a man who it turns out is a butler for the Princesse de Guermantes.

But M. de Châtellearault was as cowardly as he was rash; he was all the more determined not to unveil his incognito since he did not know with whom he was dealing; his fear would have been far greater, although ill-founded, if had known. (IV,46)

…from the  first moment the usher had recognised him. In another instant he would know the identity of this stranger, which he had so ardently desired to learn. When he asked his “Englishman” of the other evening what name he was to announce, the usher was not merely stirred, he considered that he was being indiscreet, indelicate. He felt that he was about to reveal to the whole world (which would, however, suspect nothing) a secret which it was criminal of him to ferret out like this and to proclaim in public. Upon hearing the guest’s reply: “le Duc de Châtellerault,” he was overcome with such pride that he remained for a moment speechless. The Duke looked at him, recognised him, saw himself ruined, while the servant, who had recovered his composure and was sufficiently versed in heraldry to complete for himself an appellation that was too modest, roared with a professional vehemence softened with intimate tenderness: “Son Altesse Monseigneur le Duc de Châtellerault!” (IV, 49-50)

Then we have the Marquis de Vaugoubert, who as a youth was intimate with Charlus.

The proportions of this work do not permit me to explain here in consequence of what incidents in his youth M. de Vaugoubert was one of the few men (possibly the only man) in society who happened to be in what is called in Sodom the “confidence” of M. de Charlus. (IV, 57)

His response to my greeting had nothing in common with that which I should have received from M. de Charlus. He imparted to it, in addition to countless mannerisms which he supposed to be typical of the social and diplomatic worlds, a brisk, cavalier, smiling air calculated to make him seem on the one hand delighted with his existence–at a time when he was inwardly brooding over the mortifications of a career with no prospect of advancement and threatened with enforced retirement–and on the other hand young, virile and charming, when he could see and no longer dared to go and examine in the glass the wrinkles gathering on a face which he would have wished to remain infinitely seductive. Not that he hoped for real conquests, the mere thought of which filled him with terror on account of gossip, scandal, blackmail. Having gone from an almost infantile corruption to an absolute continence dating from the day on which his thoughts had turned to  the Quai d’Orsay and he had begun to plan a great career for himself, he had the air of caged animal, casting in every direction glances expressive of fear, craving and stupidity. This last was so dense that it did not occur to him that the street-arabs of his adolescence were boys no longer, and when a newsvendor bawled in his face: “La Presse!” he shuddered with terror even more than with longing, imagining himself recognised and denounced. (IV, 58-59)

Face Names

Pity the poor immigrant. However long he has lived in his adopted home, whatever his good qualities, he will never be French.

They repelled–the Jews among them principally, the unassimilated Jews, that is to say, for with the other kind we are not concerned–those who could not endure any oddity or eccentricity of appearance (as Bloch repelled Albertine). Generally speaking, one realised afterwards that , if it could be held against them that their hair was too long, their noses and eyes were too big, their gestures abrupt and theatrical, it was puerile to judge them by this, that they had plenty of wit and good-heartedness, and were men to whom, in the long run, one could become closely attached. (III,559)

But in Saint-Loup, when all was said, however the faults of his parents had combined to create a new blend of qualities, there reigned the most charming openness of mind and heart. And whenever (it must be allowed to the undying glory of France) these qualities are found in a man who is purely French, whether he belongs to the aristocracy or the people, they flower–flourish would be too strong a word, for moderation persists in this field, as well as restriction–with a grace which the foreigner, however estimable he may be,does not present to us. Of these intellectual and moral qualities others undoubtedly have their share, and, if we have first to overcome what repels us and what makes us smile, they remain no less precious. But it is all the same a pleasant thing, and one which is perhaps exclusively French, that what is fine in all equity of judgment, what is admirable to the mind and the heart, should be first of all attractive to the eyes, pleasingly coloured, consummately chiselled, should express as well in substance as in form an inner perfection. I looked at Saint-Loup….the curves of the nostrils are as delicate and as perfectly designed as the wings of the little butterflies that hover over the field-flowers round Combray….(III,560) 

Yet we have learned that certain personal traits can mar even this near-perfect visage. Saint-Loup tells Marcel that he informed Bloch that Marcel “didn’t like him all that much.”

Whatever it was, his face was seared, while he uttered these vulgar words, by a frightful sinuosity which I saw on it once or twice only in all the time I knew him, and which, beginning by runing more or less down the middle of his face, when it came to his lips twisted them, gave them a hideous expression of baseness, almost of bestiality, quite transitory and no doubt inherited. (III,547)

Is there something we don’t know about Robert?

But the Prince de Foix, who was himself rich, belonged not only to this fashionable set of fifteen or so young men, but to a more exclusive and inseparable group of four, which included Saint-Loup. These were never asked anywhere separately, they were known as the four gigolos, they were always to be seen riding together, and in country houses their hostesses gave them communicating bedrooms, with the result that, especially as they were all four extremely good-looking, rumours were current as to the extent of their intimacy. (III,55)

Little wonder that Gide complained that Proust, for all his giving prominence to homosexuals in his novel, never portrayed their experience in a positive light. (Give me a moment and I will find examples of heterosexuals portrayed positively.)