Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [23]
Since Proust had just emerged from years of school, classroom incidents play a large role in the text. Aristocrats already figure large in Proust’s writing, but they are either grotesque caricatures or are unbelievably eager to entertain the timid, inconsequential Jean. Many of the characters whom Proust would later develop are already present in a germinating form. Similarly the Dreyfus Affair is already omnipresent, but it is studied more as political double-dealing than as an offstage event with lasting repercussions throughout the French social structure. Village life in Combray and military routine in a garrison town are already foreshadowed, as is the theme of involuntary memory. Male homosexuality, which would be a major subject in the later book, here is scarcely mentioned, although already Proust is disguising his boyfriends as girls, which leads to literary lesbianism. For example, in real life Hahn had known (and perhaps slept with) Lucien Daudet before Proust met either of them; this affair torments the jealous Jean, who suffers over thoughts of a “lesbian” dalliance between “Françoise” (Hahn) and “Charlotte” (Daudet). “Should I call this book a novel?” Proust asks. “It is something less, perhaps, and yet much more, the very essence of my life, with nothing extraneous added, as it developed through a long period of wretchedness. This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.” This idea, that life presents us with but one book to write, the story of our own existence which we must merely “translate,” was one to which Proust would remain faithful.
In Jean Santeuil Hahn plays a role not only as the woman Françoise but also as the exquisite aristocrat Henri de Réveillon (named after Madame Lemaire’s château); but in Remembrance of Things Past Hahn would be only faintly present. Already in Jean Santeuil Proust was ridding himself of Hahn by writing about him, since for Proust to paint the verbal portrait of a friend was to give him the kiss-off. If Proust never finished Jean Santeuil, it was partly because his love for Hahn was broken off before he got to the end of the book; and of course there were other, purely writerly reasons, such as his inability as yet to impose on his material any sort of form.
The affair with Hahn—one of the few equal and reciprocated and sustained sexual and romantic relationships of Proust’s life—had begun in the spring of 1894 and had burned itself out two years later, although eventually the two became friends for life. At the height of their love Proust was able to declare, “I’d like to be master of all you might desire on earth so that I could bring it to you—author of everything that you admire in art so that I could dedicate it to you.” Later, when they were just friends, it was to Hahn that Proust first read Swann’s Way. Long after Proust’s death, in 1945, Hahn became the director of the Paris Opéra. If the two young men shared a taste for music and literature, for travel and friendship, even for social climbing, at the same time their affair displayed the chief characteristics of love in a Proust story or novel: wild attacks of jealousy, recriminations and disputes, brooding and hurt feelings, and ecstatic reconciliations, all endured under the sign of love-as-war and courtship-as-strategy. Certainly Proust’s most detailed and convincing portrait of love, that of Swann and Odette in Swann’s Way, is based on the