Rats
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In Proust In Love, we learn that Proust’s attempt to persuade his favored classmates to have sex with him using brilliant arguments summoned from ancient Greece was just the start. Although Carter mentions Proust’s androgyny and childhood crushes on female playmates, Proust’s father worried so much about his son that he sent the young Marcel to a prostitute—a customary initiation for sons of the French bourgeoisie around age sixteen. During Proust’s visit, however, he seems to have experienced a sort of homosexual panic, and all he did was break a chamber pot.

It was not till he was a young man out in society that Proust acquired a lover in the form of a man his own age: the Venezuelan composer Reynaldo Hahn. But he ruined this relationship by his demands for total devotion, and then fell himself for the young Lucien Daudet. This did not last long. By the time Proust’s first book, Pleasures and Days, came out, and a homosexual journalist named Jean Lorrain implied that Proust and Daudet were lovers, this was no longer the case. Proust still fought a duel with Lorrain to deny the charge. Being homosexual was something Proust always denied his entire life.

But that’s what he was, and in Proust in Love we follow a string of crushes from schoolmates to society figures like Bertrand de Fenelon, an aristocrat whose bisexuality Proust did not learn of, alas, until after Fenelon was killed in World War I. The great passion of Proust’s life was a chauffeur he hired after his parents died: Alfred Agostinelli, a confirmed heterosexual who, Proust said, “with my mother, my father, is the person I loved most.” (“I really loved Alfred,” he wrote to Reynaldo after Agostinelli’s death in an airplane accident. “It isn’t enough to say I loved him, I adored him. And I don’t know why I write that in the past tense, for I love him still…”) Eventually, Proust turned to waiters at the Ritz, including Henri Rochat, who moved in with Proust but so bored him (and his housekeeper Celeste) that Proust spent two years trying to get him a job, which, when one finally came through, was in a bank in Buenos Aires. Then there were bellhops: Henri Bardac, a friend of Proust’s, said the novelist would be washing his hands when the bellhop was summoned to his room, whereupon Proust would say, “My friend, I have a tip for you, but I can’t give it to you because my hands are wet; please get it out of my pants pocket.”

Finally, there was the male brothel Proust helped furnish with pieces he’d inherited from his parents. In the novel, Charlus goes there during a World War I blackout to be whipped by a young butcher boy. Proust’s own tastes were somewhat different. According to the testimony of an employee, Proust would first gaze through a glass pane into a room of young men playing cards, make his selection, and then go upstairs to a room. “A quarter of an hour later, I knocked on the door, went in, and found Marcel already in bed with the sheet drawn up to his chin. He smiled at me. My instructions were to take off all my clothes and remain standing by the closed door while I satisfied myself under the anxious gaze of Marcel, who was doing the same. If he reached the desired conclusion, I left after having smiled at him and without having seen anything other than his face and without having touched him.” If Proust did not climax, “he would make a gesture for me to leave and Albert would bring two cages,” each one with a starving rat, and as the two rodents fought each other to the death, Proust would finally achieve release.

The rat story has been part of Proust’s legend for years, although—in the recent biography by Jean Yves Tadie, and here, in Proust in Love—there is no proof that it is true. While there is evidence that Proust was caught at the brothel in a police raid, Proust’s housekeeper Celeste denied the rat story. (“Richard Gere and the gerbils!” said a friend to whom I told the tale, which made me think, Maybe that’s all it is. People who wish to believe strange things about celebrities for some reason turn to rodents.) At any rate, it’s no longer shocking—not nearly so shocking, say, as learning that Albert Nahmias, one of Proust’s friends, killed a child while racing in his motorcar to keep an appointment with Proust, because he knew how upset Proust got when someone did not show up.

Cocteau, however, favored the rat story—and added a photograph of Proust’s mother, which had to be profaned before orgasm was achieved. Profanation of the mother, Cocteau felt, was key to Proust. In Swann’s Way, the composer Vinteuil’s daughter makes her female lover spit on a photograph of her doting father before they make love. In real life, if we are to believe Maurice Sachs, a protégé of Cocteau, Proust had the boys at the brothel spit on photographs of society women whose salons Proust frequented while yelling, “Who’s that whore?” Well, we’re all conflicted.

Carter, on the other hand, argues that In Search of Lost Time is really a love letter to Madame Proust. There is certainly plenty of evidence for this in the novel. Some of the most tender, most moving moments in it deal with the decline and death of the grandmother (the novel’s stand-in for Proust’s mother). The moment when the Narrator hears his grandmother speak on the telephone and realizes suddenly how sick and weak she has become is infinitely more touching than any of the cerebral observations about losing Albertine, the woman with whom the Narrator becomes obsessed (a woman, said Cocteau, who was obviously a man). The passages dealing with the Narrator’s remorse over having been unkind to his grandmother so cut to the heart that a gay reader might suspect that In Search of Lost Time is an apology to his mother for being homosexual. That she was dead seemed to be the chief fact of his life by the time he wrote his novel. “If I were sure to meet my mother again,” Proust told Celeste, “in the Valley of Jehosaphat or anywhere else, I would want to die at once.”

Indeed, in the novel, maternal love seems to be the only valid kind. Love between adults is ruined by jealousy, possessiveness, and the impossibility of “the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing).” The trouble for Proust was that in life he was not only the detached artist producing brilliant aphorisms, he was also the possessive, obsessive, jealous lover. It was his own failures that enabled him to describe Swann searching for Odette, the Narrator spying on Albertine, Charlus going to the brothel. When the incredibly intelligent Proust pursued someone, he seems to have acted in the stupidest possible way, alienating Hahn with his demands for intimacy, hiring a detective to spy on Agostinelli, admitting that his passion for someone never lasted more than a year and a half. With Proust, we seem to have a case of someone so hungry for Love that he drove people off. Lucien Daudet told Cocteau that Proust was “a gigantic insect.” Proust accused himself of an “incapacity for happiness.” The great love of Proust’s life, Agostinelli, was a straight man from the working class whose family, when Proust sent flowers to the funeral, was disappointed that they were not plastic.

“Looking back over his love life,” writes Carter, “it seems fair to say that Proust never had a sexually fulfilling relationship with a companion whom he loved. If he did, one finds no definite trace of such affection in his letters and writings. It seems unlikely that he could have found a partner capable of satisfying his great longings or with sufficient patience to endure his endless and unreasonable demands. In the end, he became disillusioned about erotic love.” Reading Carter’s engrossing book, one has to wonder: who could have met Proust’s needs for exclusive submission, when anyone who did agree to that (Henri Rochat, for instance) bored him silly? There seems to be a contradiction here. But contradiction is the essence of Proust’s view. One of Proust’s ideas that Carter relies on in his book is the theory of multiple selves. We change so constantly, Proust felt, that when a dear friend announced he was being assigned to a diplomatic post in Istanbul, Proust wrote that he was not sad, because the self that loved this friend was already ceasing to exist. (A nice theory, one suspects, but no help for Proust’s sense of abandonment.) Even when someone we love dies, Proust wrote, it’s not their cessation but our own that brings oblivion. “It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying.” This mercurial quality of human nature nearly induced Proust to call his novel by a title that now belongs to just one section: “The Intermittences of the Heart.”

The last chapter of Carter’s book takes as its epigraph this quote from Proust: “Only love is divine.” But a more famous sentence of Proust’s compares falling in love to succumbing to a bacillus. Love in Swann’s Way is a disease triggered by the germ called Jealousy. It comes into being only when we lose someone. When we have the person, we don’t want them. (Proust felt this about longing in general: Life grants us everything we want, he said, on one condition—that we no longer desire it.) We are, in other words, hopelessly fickle. But so is the universe: how, in a world in which everything is constantly changing, including our selves, can anything last, including Love?

THE MULTIPLE SELVES Proust speaks of are psychological; but reading The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren, Proust’s Swedish Valet, one is reminded that this applies to social selves too. Proust, like all of us, showed different sides of himself to different people. Forssgren was a tall and handsome blond Proust hired as his valet to escort him to a seaside resort when the Germans were marching on Paris in 1914. Alas, he seems to have made most of his book up. A good quarter of the memoir consists of footnotes in which Carter contradicts almost everything Forssgren says. (Footnote 91 begins gently: “Forssgren’s memory is playing tricks on him here.” Footnote 80 begins, “This is nonsense, of course.” Footnote 86, “This is simply laughable.”) One is never sure the humor in his memoir is intentional, and at times this book reads a lot like Patrick Dennis’ Little Me. Forssgren’s monumental self-regard even includes a claim that Forssgren killed Proust, because Proust, sick with a cold, nevertheless went out to visit his former valet at his hotel the last time Forssgren visited Paris. One isn’t sure why a memoir whose chief value is the footnotes that painstakingly disprove most of its text was published. Still, to people interested in Proust, these footnotes make reading it worthwhile.

Of course, this raises the question: why? Proust began In Search of Lost Time as an essay designed to refute Sainte-Beuve’s dictum that a writer’s life and work are related. (The person who writes the book, Proust said, is not the person we meet at the party.) But here we are, in Proust In Love and in Forssgren’s memoir, making just such connections. What, we want to know, did Proust do in private? Yet in his novel Proust spends almost no time whatsoever—aside from the stray comparison of a lover’s tongue to the Communion wafer—on descriptions of sexual acts.

Proust died not only of a common bacillus, in a reverse of his metaphor, but one he seemed not to resist. Granted, there were no antibiotics for pneumonia when Proust caught it (from a cold, he believed, given him by his housekeeper); the body had either to throw it off or succumb. But Proust resisted attempts to move him to a clinic and to get him to take something besides café au lait. Proust treated his medical crisis (pneumonia) with the same craziness that drove his lovers off, ignoring all the advice given him by doctors (a profession both his father and brother practiced, but which the Narrator never passes up a chance to denigrate). It may have been nothing more than overwork—and Proust’s low opinion of medicine—that made his death inevitable, but one wants a more emotionally satisfying reason. Celeste told a famous story of Proust calling her into the bedroom in 1922 to say, with a strangely radiant face, that something momentous had happened during the night: he had written The End. The expression “in love” pertains to infatuation, desire, romance. Proust, one is tempted to say, was in love with his novel, and when that was done, he kicked the bucket—although, as Carter points out in a footnote in Forssgren’s memoir, Proust had probably finished the first draft six years earlier.

Indeed, one of the things we learn in Proust at the Majestic is the time line of Proust’s publication of his novel. Reviewers have faulted Davenport-Hines’ book for not really being about the dinner party given at the Hotel Majestic by Violet and Sidney Schiff, two English fans (to put it mildly) of Proust who cultivated artists and geniuses, and actually got Proust, Stravinsky, Picasso, and James Joyce into the same room following the premiere of Le Renard by Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes. Apparently, Proust and Joyce merely made small talk, and when Proust tried to interest Stravinsky in Beethoven’s late quartets (“Doubtless you admire Beethoven”), Stravinsky would have none of it (“I detest Beethoven”). But the real subject of the book is in the subtitle: “The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris.” If the party seems not to have been significant, the details with which Davenport-Hines recounts Proust’s last six months are. We are reminded, for starters, that Proust did not die before he could savor his greatness; he fully enjoyed the considerable success that the first volumes of his book brought. If sales were not huge (though Proust said he wanted “to reach a wider audience, the sort of people who buy a badly printed book before getting into a train”), the people who read him made up in quality for what they lacked in quantity. It was the elite of London and Paris and New York, as exemplified by Violet and Sidney Schiff, who became obsessed. Given this success, Davenport-Hines says, it took courage to publish Sodom and Gomorrah. Some people (both homo- and heterosexual) were offended by it—but even Sidney Schiff, the rich amateur who saw himself in the character of Charles Swann, admitted that Charlus, not Swann, was Proust’s greatest creation. While In Search of Lost Time is never called a “gay novel,” the subject of homosexuality is central to it; and in Davenport-Hines’ view, the nerve it took to write about inversion was the same courage Proust showed in fighting his duel with Jean Lorrain to deny the imputation that Proust and Daudet were lovers. There’s a paradox for you!

We imagine we are beyond Proust’s closet now, but read the great, sonorous, majestic essay on the “accursed race” in the opening pages of Sodom and Gomorrah—read any scene in which Charlus appears—and see if it doesn’t still ring uncannily true. Proust’s brilliance (on homosexuality and everything else) was such that when he died people could scarcely believe this consciousness could be extinguished. Davenport-Hines describes the funeral that wound through a shocked Paris so solemnly and slowly that Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet had time to slip away to eat pancakes at Le Boeuf sur le Toit before rejoining the hearse at the cemetery. Reading about people’s reaction to Proust’s demise, we have a weird feeling that we’re witnessing the founding of some new religion. (The religion of art. Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Infanta was played at the funeral—not liturgical music—at Proust’s request, and Catholic critics lamented the absence of God in his novel.)

In the end, after reading these books, we are left with contradictions. Proust wrote the most brilliant observations of homosexuality ever, while challenging every imputation that he was homosexual himself; he claimed love was merely a disease, and the beloved merely a delusion—a creation of our own egos—while obviously loving certain people so passionately that he made sure they would endure forever in a work of art (though he believed art would last no longer than grief). He heaped nothing but contempt on the idea of friendship, while saying of his first lover and lifelong confidant Reynaldo Hahn: “he’s the dearest friend to me, the best, a brother. If he murdered someone I’d hide the corpse in my bedroom so that people thought that I had done the deed.” Proust wrote a book that is filled with the most mordant and hilarious depictions of human selfishness, and yet, as Carter points out, its final effect is one of joy. As for the rest—the sifting through everything we know about the author—when someone asked Proust, “For what fault have you the greatest toleration?” he responded: “For the private life of geniuses.”

Andrew Holleran’s latest novel, Grief (Hyperion), was published in June (reviewed in this issue).