Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [14]
In those years, Proust complained to Bizet:
I’ve got plenty of worries, my family and I aren’t getting along. I think they’re going to send me away to a college in the provinces. I don’t know anything about it. For how long? Maybe forever, maybe just for a couple of days. I just don’t know. Why? . . . Do you think maybe it’s because she finds our affection for each other a bit excessive? She’s afraid it might degenerate to sensual pleasure.
Then he declared, “I love you with all my heart.”
Like Proust, Guérin also had a younger brother. Their rapport was much less strained, thanks in part to the sympathetic affinities that sometimes flourish between brothers. Both were drawn to the arts. Jacques, though a successful businessman, chemist, and manufacturer of perfumes, was an introverted bibliophile well known in Parisian cultural circles. Jean, more extroverted, was a painter, who shared many of his brother’s interests. Both were sexually attracted to men. Neither hid anything from the other, but that is not to say that their relationship was uncomplicated or free of tension. Dumbfounding his older brother, Jean had let their mother know that both of her sons were homosexual. This was in 1924.
THE LETTER TO HIS GRANDFATHER.
At his house on rue Berton, Guérin was still in a reverie, surrounded by the salvaged items that had come out of the hatbox. He found most remarkable a letter dated May 1888, the same year Proust had written to Bizet proclaiming his love. Guérin smiled reading these lines, written in a young person’s steady hand. At the top right corner of a square yellow page he read:
Thursday night
My dear grandpapa, I must ask your indulgence for the sum of 13 francs. . . . This is why. In order to desist from my nasty habit of masturbation I was so desperate to see a woman that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But first, in my nervous state, I broke a chamber pot, 3 francs, and then, in this same agitation, I couldn’t bring myself to fuck. There I was, in for another 10 francs an hour, waiting until I could satisfy myself. . . . I wouldn’t dare ask Papa for more money so soon, and I was hoping that you would help me out in this circumstance which you know is not merely exceptional, but unique: it can’t happen twice in your life that you’re too distraught to fuck.
Proust scholar and biographer Jean-Yves Tadié remarked upon the extreme psychological pressure and deeply inculcated morality that prompted Marcel—sent by his father, as was the custom of the period, to a brothel in order to be initiated into the mysteries of sex, and there, due to his embarrassment, breaking a chamber pot—to persist so devotedly, to try so obediently to please.
Thirty years separated Guérin from Proust, but there was a social chasm that divided them even further. As an illegitimate child, Guérin had never known conventional family life. He and his brother grew up with an unusual amount of freedom, which, among other things, had allowed them to confront their issues of sexuality more freely. That had hardly been the case for Proust, who, as German critic Walter Benjamin observed, had always remained a mama’s boy. As he was to write in Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust believed that his sexual tastes made him a member of “a burdened, cursed race that must live by lying and perjury, all the while knowing one’s desires to be criminal, disgraceful, too shameful to speak of.”
Proust’s homosexuality surrounded him like an invisible and insurmountable wall. His family’s unwillingness to understand led to a history of silences that mutated into rancor. This in turn was transformed into acts of vandalism—papers destroyed, furniture abandoned. In the jumble of connections between son and parents, between brothers, between brother-in-law and sister-in-law, between uncle and niece, in the vicious turns of phrase referring to things said and things left unsaid, this invisible wall of Proust’s homosexuality was always there, intractable.
Among the papers and photographs in the hatbox, there were also a few