Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [14]
I had just perceived, in my memory, stooping over with fatigue, the tender, preoccupied, disappointed face of my grandmother, as she had been on that first evening of our arrival, the face not of that grandmother whom I had been astonished and remorseful at having so little missed, and who had nothing in common with her save her name, but of my real grandmother, of whom, for the first time since the afternoon of her stroke in the Champs Elysées, I now recaptured the living reality in a complete and involuntary memory.
Proust develops here the idea that our memory is not like a vase in which all the contents—all the things that we have felt in the past—are available simultaneously. No, the heart has its intermittencies, and memories come flooding back to us in their full, sensuous force only when triggered involuntarily by tastes or smells or other sensations over which we have no control. This idea of involuntary memory would become one of the touchstones of Remembrance of Things Past and one of his chief principles of literary architecture.
Proust’s three years as a law student and especially at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques gave him an access not only to the realities covered by these subjects but, more important for a writer, to their vocabularies, including their sophisticated strategies of evasiveness. It is tempting to reduce Proust to an invalid and a snob who is fascinated only by his own health and his ascent up the social ladder, but such a caricature leaves out the immensity of his social canvas. Proust’s chief inspiration as a novelist was the omnivorous Balzac, and like his great predecessor, Proust could enter the world of the army or the diplomatic corps as easily as he could render an aristocratic salon or a male bordello or the confines of his own cork-lined bedroom.
At Sciences-Po he took a course in diplomacy from the famous Albert Sorel, who became the main model for Monsieur de Norpois, the ultimate slippery statesman, the sort of character that writers who themselves were diplomats and who knew the milieu better than Proust (Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Gobineau, among others) never succeeded in depicting with equal verve. In a celebrated scene in The Guermantes Way Bloch, a Jew and Dreyfusard, tries to corner the ex-ambassador Norpois about where he (and the government) stand with respect to the Dreyfus case. For a dozen pages Norpois skillfully dodges the question by secreting a cloud of murky verbiage. In a passing remark, the Narrator speculates that Norpois may be so indirect because “the maxims of his political wisdom being applicable only to questions of form, of procedure, of expediency, they were as powerless to solve questions of fact as, in philosophy, pure logic is powerless to tackle the problems of existence. . . .”
While he was at Sciences-Po Proust began his extraordinary conquest of aristocratic and artistic Paris. In 1891 he met Oscar Wilde, who at the time was at the height of his fame, witty, the sensation of Mallarmé’s salon, voluble in French, even capable of writing a play in the language (Salomé, which later became the text of Richard Strauss’s opera). Apparently Proust, just twenty, invited the powdered, perfumed, puffy Irish giant to his family’s apartment for dinner but Wilde, after taking a single glance at the heavy, dark furniture, said, “How ugly everything is here,” and left. Even if the encounter was brief (or even apocryphal), Wilde’s subsequent trial and condemnation for homosexuality marked Proust, who, when he came to write about “the race of queens” in Sodom and Gomorrah, alluded to Wilde’s tragic fall with little sympathy yet with full cognizance of its historic significance.
Almost equally definitive for gay men of Proust’s epoch was the case of Prince Philip von Eulenburg (1847–1921), a former ambassador