Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [28]
What is important to point out is that Proust’s first genuine writing came in the form of a personal essay written in opposition to the theories of a major thinker. In a few years Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past would grow out of a similar essay, conceived as a more violent argument against another aesthetic theorist. In this way, too, Proust was a forebear of his century. So much of the literary art of our times has struck sparks by opposing one genre to another—novel and memoir, for instance, or fiction and essay. We live in the epoch of the “nonfiction novel,” of memoirs that take novelistic liberties with the truth, with biographies that stage discussions between the biographer and his long-dead subject (such as the fairly recent biography of Dickens by Peter Ackroyd, who “talks” to the nineteenth-century writer). Some critics have argued that creative energy is released when an inferior literary genre (the comic strip, for instance, or the mystery story) is elevated to the status of high art. One could just as easily contend that a similar heat is generated when two genres are rubbed against each other to form something entirely new. In Proust’s case, the fertile encounter took place between the essay and the novel.
While Proust was working on his Ruskin translations and essays, he was becoming friendly with three young noblemen of a rank higher than that of any of his previous friends. The first he befriended was the count Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld, a liberal intellectual and a Dreyfusard—one of the models for Proust’s character Robert de Saint-Loup, who has similarly advanced views. Just as Saint-Loup marries Gilberte Swann, who is half-Jewish, so Gabriel eventually married in 1905 Odile de Richelieu, a young heiress half-Jewish and half-ducal. The La Rochefoucaulds were one of the first three families of France, and accordingly Count Gabriel marked the pinnacle of French society—and of Proust’s social climbing. Gabriel was famous for his frivolity, for his womanizing and sophisticated debauchery; one ancestor of his, a courtier at the time of Louis XIV, had been celebrated for his pithy, disillusioned epigrams, the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, and now Count Gabriel was nicknamed “La Rochefoucauld of Maxim’s”—especially appropriate since Maxim’s in the Belle Epoque was known as a restaurant where no respectable woman would ever be seen.
Another handsome young aristocrat Proust became friendly with was the Romanian prince Antoine de Bibesco, who fended off Marcel’s excessive demands on his time with a coolness that amounted to cruelty. Bibesco remembered that at one of his mother’s salons he had first met Proust, whom he later characterized by saying he had eyes of “Japanese lacquer” and a hand that was “dangling and soft.” When he subsequently instructed Marcel on how to shake hands with a virile grip, Proust said, “If I followed your example, people would take me for an invert.” Which is just an indication of how devious the thinking of a homosexual of the period could become—a homosexual affects a limp handshake so that heterosexuals will not think he is a homosexual disguising himself as a hearty hetero—whereas in fact he is exactly what he appears to be: a homosexual with a limp handshake. . . .
Bibesco could be malicious, especially in the tricks he liked to play on his friends and the confidences he liked to betray. As Proust observed of him, he was serious