Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [10]
Apparently Marcel believed that sex between boys was innocent and became a “vice” only with age. He tried to clarify this argument in a letter to Bizet’s friend Halévy (whom he was also pursuing), in which he wrote that there are young men (he intimated he might be one) who love one another, cannot bear to be apart, seat their partner on their knees, who love each other for their flesh and call each other “darling,” who write each other passionate love letters—“and yet for nothing in the world would perform pederasty. However, love generally carries them away and they masturbate each other. In short, they are lovers. And I don’t know why their love is more unclean than the usual sort of love.” One wonders what Proust thought the word pédérastie might mean (it’s the usual French word for “homosexuality,” although Proust later came to prefer inversion). In writing a self-portrait for Robert Dreyfus, yet another school friend in the same tight little circle, Proust described himself as someone who “under the pretext of loving a friend as a father, might actually love him as a woman would.” A tragic coincidence would have it that the little Bizet, Proust’s first love, would become a drug addict and, later, would commit suicide just ten days before Proust himself would die.
After being disappointed in love with Bizet, Proust transferred all his attentions to Bizet’s mother, Geneviève, who was born Halévy. Her father, Fromental Halévy, had composed the opera La Juive, which Proust refers to more than once in Remembrance of Things Past. Her uncle and cousin wrote the libretto for many operas and operettas, including Carmen. Her first husband was Bizet; ten years after his death at thirty-eight, she married a rich man named Emile Straus, the Rothschilds’ lawyer and a major collector of Monet’s paintings. Madame Straus became Proust’s model for wit. It was she who, when she accompanied her former music teacher, Gounod, to an opera and he remarked that they’d just heard a passage that was “perfectly octagonal,” exclaimed, “Oh, I was just about to say the same myself!” And it was she who, while attending an “intellectual” dinner where everyone was supposed to give an opinion on adultery, said airily—and impertinently—“I’m so sorry, I prepared incest by mistake.” After Dreyfus was at last liberated, following years of national controversy, he was introduced to Madame Straus, who said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.” When Proust would later come to create one of his most memorable characters, the duchesse de Guermantes, he would base her wit on Madame Straus’s.
Although at first Proust pretended to be in love with her (which her vanity required of all her male admirers), he soon enough settled into a friendship with her that was perhaps the most enduring and nourishing of his life. His correspondence with her is one of the most sustained—and the one in which he divulges the most information about his all-important artistic plans, even his love life. If he was seldom disinterested in his pursuit of men (who were all too often heterosexual and incapable of returning his affection in the form he longed for), in an older woman of Madame Straus’s intelligence and loyalty he found a kindred spirit. Proust himself was aware of this phenomenon; in speaking of one of his characters, Robert de Saint-Loup, who has just “come out” and turned gay, the Narrator writes that he had also turned cold to his male companions, “since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship.”
III
BUT NOT ALL of Proust’s energies as an adolescent went into seduction. The curriculum at the Lycée Condorcet was thorough and challenging, and Proust received an excellent introduction there to Greek, Latin, French, the natural sciences, and philosophy.