Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [26]
Proust was not influenced only by French authors. His reading tastes were international and included Shakespeare, Goethe, and George Eliot, though he read no language easily but French. He was especially frightened by George Eliot’s portrait in Middlemarch of Casaubon, “who labored all his life on an insignificant and absurd work,” as Proust put it (Proust was certainly haunted by the thought of this scholar who keeps promising to write and publish a Key to All Mythologies but finally sinks into confusion and sterility, unable to marshal his notes into coherence). In these years Proust also traveled to Holland to see a Rembrandt exhibition and wrote an article on the great Dutch painter. Even if his exasperated parents and relatives thought Marcel was nothing but a dilettante and a ne’er-do-well (he himself concurred most of the time), nevertheless he was slowly acquiring the cultural references and the life experiences—the knowledge of how society works and how love wounds—that he would need for his great book.
One of those experiences was challenging someone to a duel—and fighting it with pistols in the forest of Meudon, the traditional dueling ground southwest of Paris in the direction of Versailles. Jean Lorrain, a decadent novelist (and like Marcel a homosexual and inveterate partygoer), had a standing feud with Robert de Montesquiou. As a result he negatively reviewed Montesquiou’s protégé’s book Pleasures and Days, saying that Proust was “one of those pretty little society boys who’ve managed to get themselves pregnant with literature”; seven months later, on February 3, 1897, Lorrain returned to the attack with a newspaper article in which he wrote (under a pseudonym) that Alphonse Daudet was bound to write the preface of Marcel’s next book, “since he cannot refuse anything to his son Lucien.”
This suggestion that Proust was a homosexual having an affair with the young Daudet could not be allowed to pass by unchallenged. Three days later the two men, standing at a distance of twenty-five yards, fired in the air above each other’s head: Proust reported that his bullet fell just next to Lorrain’s foot. Proust showed a surprising coolness under fire. Perhaps he was proudest of the cachet of his seconds, the painter Jean Béraud and a celebrated he-man duelist, Gustave de Borda. No one remarked on the absurdity of one homosexual “accusing” another of being homosexual, which led to a duel to clear the “reputation” of the “injured” party. After the duel Lorrain left Proust alone, though he continued to attack Montesquiou (when the baron had his portrait painted by the society artist Boldini, Lorrain remarked in print that he had put himself in the hands of a painter of “little women,” an artist known as “the Paganini of the Peignoir”). Proust challenged other men to duels over the years; none of them, fortunately, had tragic consequences. Although duels were considered anachronistic, most people still thought of a duelist as courageous and manly. It was this hypervirile image that Proust was eager to cultivate, as a way of offsetting his spreading reputation as a homosexual. To be labeled a homosexual in print (as opposed to living a homosexual life in private or discreetly among friends) was social anathema, even in Paris, until the very recent past.
VI
AFTER THE RELATIVE failure of Pleasures and Days and the eventual abandonment in 1899 of Jean Santeuil (which few of his friends even knew he was writing), Proust turned to translating the English aesthete and moralist John Ruskin. As Proust quickly discovered, there were two Ruskins—the art critic who was fascinated by French cathedrals and by Venice, and the social reformer, whose writings influenced Gandhi and the nascent Labour Party in England. Like other Victorians, including Dickens and Matthew Arnold, Ruskin was appalled by the effects of unbridled capitalism on the proletariat. Against the horrors of the machine age, Ruskin championed a utopian