Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [21]
In 1894, when Proust was twenty-three, he met the composer Reynaldo Hahn, with whom he would have a passionate and (given the period) surprisingly open affair for the next two years. Hahn was just eighteen years old. Thanks to Hahn, Proust plunged into the world of music; his writing soon betrayed a new interest in contemporary composers.
Hahn was the son of a Catholic woman from Venezuela and a German-Jewish father; like Proust, he was half-Jewish, gay, and artistic. The family had emigrated from Venezuela to Paris in 1877 for political reasons. When he was five Reynaldo was already playing the piano; at age eight he was composing; and at ten he was studying at the Paris Conservatory. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen he wrote his most celebrated songs, for which he is still known today to a small public.
When Marcel met him he had the velvety eyes and little mustache that Proust himself affected and so admired in other men (Flers and Daudet were two others who met these requirements). Very quickly Hahn and Proust became inseparable. The two young men traveled together and were put up in châteaus together by tolerant hostesses—extraordinary sophistication if one thinks that just across the Channel Oscar Wilde was being condemned to hard labor for practicing the same “vice.” Robert de Montesquiou invited them as a couple to meet one of his titled relatives and the writer Maurice Barrès. Montesquiou took to referring to Hahn as Proust’s “little brother,” and Madame Lemaire received them in her château of Réveillon and begged them not to abandon her for a trip to Brittany, where they would be eating in hotels at irregular hours and ruining their health. (She would inspire Proust later when he would invent his character Madame Verdurin, similarly tyrannical in her attentions to her guests.) When they did leave, Hahn sent a letter to Madame Lemaire, saying, “How indulgent you have been toward us, we who are so crazy and so ill-mannered. What woman and what great artist would consent, as you have, to tolerate the caprices and the company of two old-fashioned young people?”
Hahn, in deference to Proust’s admiration for the English aesthetic philosopher John Ruskin, would later compose, in 1902, The Muses Lamenting the Death of Ruskin, just as Proust would dedicate a new story, “The Death of Baldassare Silvande,” to “Reynaldo Hahn, poet, singer, and musician.” Perhaps a sign of the inevitable decline of their affair is that both works include in the title the word “death”—or perhaps that coincidence is merely due to the decadence of the period. Just a year after they met Hahn was already giving musical settings to Proust’s portraits of painters and the two young men were planning to write a life of Chopin—a project that came to nothing. Very quickly Hahn was writing Proust letters in which the salutations varied in the space of three days from “My dear friend” to “Cher maître” to “My dear little one.” From his end Proust was begging and bullying Hahn to rush to his side, and the tone is the same one Proust used when imploring his mother to give him another goodnight kiss.
Indeed, at this time Proust wrote another story, “The Confession of a Young Girl,” in which the fourteen-year-old character says of her mother: “She came to