Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [46]
Nevertheless, Céleste Albaret did not hesitate to recount that during the war Proust visited (for the purposes of “research,” as she put it) a male brothel for homosexuals, run by Albert Le Cuziat, a former valet in princely households who not only catered to the most bizarre tastes of his rich clientele but also knew their lineages by heart. Proust consulted him often for anecdotes he could use in Sodom and Gomorrah. Proust helped Le Cuziat pay for the building where his establishment was housed and, more shockingly, even gave some of his parents’ furniture to be used in this hotbed of homosexual prostitution—perhaps his most extreme act of profanation, given the cult he had established around the memory of his mother and father. One might point out that at about the same time Proust gave his father’s clothes to the deceased Alfred Agostinelli’s brother, Emile—again a profanation, considering how much Dr. Proust would have hated having his things worn by someone from the family of his son’s lover.
According to the German (and heterosexual) essayist Walter Benjamin—who went on a “field trip” to the brothel in 1930 with the weird writer Maurice Sachs (a Jewish homosexual who collaborated with the Nazis during the war)—the story was still circulating at the bordello that Proust had been known as “the rat man.” Sachs—a witness more flamboyant than reliable—wrote that Proust had a live rat brought to him in a cage and stabbed to death with hat pins as he watched with lust and fear. Proust was afraid of rats and mice—he even wrote a friend during the war that he was more afraid of rats than of bombs. The Narrator dreams that his parents have become white mice in a cage, covered with pustules.
Proust told Gide that in order to achieve an orgasm he needed to bring together many unusual elements. Voyeurism and masturbation seem to have been his two principal erotic modes, at least with casual partners. And in the memoirs of several writers who knew him the story is related that Proust profaned the photos of his mother during sex by spitting on them or insulting them (of course Proust himself never mentioned such a thing, if it occurred). Certainly this possibility takes on some credibility, however, through the dozens of strange references to photos in Proust’s work, including the insults hurled at Vinteuil’s portrait by his daughter’s lesbian girlfriend just before the two women collapse in a frenzy of lust. Proust’s insistence that friends send him signed photographic portraits acquires a lurid gleam given what we know about his use of these pictures, at least in his imagination. Proust was also extremely alert to every possibility of defilement in general, and in one letter he assures a correspondent that he had no evil thoughts, for instance, when he mentioned the “pleasure” of entering a church—a double meaning that would occur to no one else.
All of these bits of evidence conspire to suggest that Proust’s sexuality depended on defiling sacred objects, at least as a way of kick-starting it. For instance, the baron de Charlus (to whom Proust quite openly assigned many of his own characteristics) becomes strangely excited when he remarks to the Narrator about his Jewish friend Bloch:
“Perhaps you could ask your friend to allow me to attend some great festival in the Temple, a circumcision, or some Hebrew chants . . . You might perhaps arrange that, and even some comic exhibitions. For instance a contest between your friend and his father, in which he would smite him as David smote Goliath. That would make quite an amusing farce. He might even, while he was about it, give his hag . . . of a mother a good thrashing. That would be an excellent show, and would not be unpleasing to us, eh, my young friend, since we like exotic spectacles, and to thrash that non-European creature would be giving a well-earned punishment to an old cow. . . .”
In 1917 and 1918 Proust, as though tempted