Reading Proust isn’t like reading anything else. It’s like having a roommate. And after reading the first three volumes of In Search of Lost Time last year, I was ready for a hiatus.
I wasn’t actually planning on reading the fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, just yet, but when I picked it up last month, I saw that Part 1 was just 45 pages long. (Part 2 was the remaining 700-odd pages.) So I thought I could commit to that much at least and then see how things were going. As it turns out, they were going fine and I read both parts straight through. So you could say that I’ve moved back in, if only provisionally.
I had come to expect Proust to be quite obscure on sexual matters, but in Part 1 we observe his narrator observing an interlude between Baron Palamède de Charlus, a member of the illustrious Guermantes family, and Jupien, a tailor who lives in the same building as the narrator. The narrator had been occupied with botanical matters, watching the courtyard through a staircase window, “peering through the shutters … at the Duchess’s little shrub and at the precious plant, exposed in the courtyard with that assertiveness with which mothers ‘bring out’ their marriageable offspring, and asking myself whether the unlikely insect would come, by a providential hazard, to visit the offered and neglected pistil. “ But his attention is diverted when he notices Charlus and Jupien retiring to the back of Jupien’s shop for their own variation on the mating act—“of course, here the word fertilisation must be understood in a moral sense, since in the physical sense the union of male with male is and must be sterile…”
We never do find out what became of the ‘precious plant,’ but Proust does a pretty amazing job of cross pollinating the notion of sex as a natural and spontaneous part of life in nature with the particular constraints and proclivities of homosexual love in early 20th century France. Without outing himself, he manages to make a very eloquent case for the rightness of gay love, which must have required more than a little courage 100 years ago.
It’s never easy to find concise quotes in Proust because his discussions tend to expand and ripen over several pages, but here’s a passage where he is discussing a marriage between a rather masculine woman and a rather feminine man:
It was said at the Ministry, without any suggestion of malice, that in their household it was the husband who wore the petticoats and the wife the trousers. Now there was more truth in this than was supposed. Mme de Vaugoubert really was a man. Whether she had always been one, or had grown to be as I now saw her, matters little, for in either case we are faced with one of the most touching miracles of nature which, in the latter alternative especially, makes the human kingdom resemble the kingdom of flowers. On the former hypothesis—if the future Mme de Vaugoubert had always been so heavily mannish—nature, by a fiendish and beneficent ruse, bestows on the girl the deceptive aspect of a man. And the youth who has no love for women and is seeking to be cured greets with joy this subterfuge of discovering a bride who reminds him of a market porter. In the alternative case, if the woman has not at first these masculine characteristics, she adopts them by degrees, to please her husband, and even unconsciously, by that sort of mimicry which makes certain flowers assume the appearance of the insects which they seek to attract. Her regret at not being loved, at not being a man, makes her mannish. Indeed, quite apart from the case that we are now considering, who has not remarked how often the most normal couples end by resembling each other, at times even exchanging qualities?
Proust, in his role as naturalist, goes on to provide examples of couples who have either exchanged their nominal gender characteristics, or merged their separate characteristics into a single exotic hybrid. I could almost hear David Attenborough.
Baron de Charlus is the presiding presence in Sodom and Gomorrah, and he is a remarkable creation. When we first met him in an earlier volume he seemed quite forbidding—he invited the narrator to his home after offering to be his guide to society but then, when he arrived, insulted and threatened him for no apparent reason. But by the present volume, the narrator has gained a better understanding of the baron’s changeable nature, and he has opportunities to observe him as he moves through society. For example, he observes the baron exchanging meaningful glances with other “inverts” at a society event, even as the gentleman maintains his ostentatious pretense of heterosexuality. When the Baron gets an eyeful of the attractive young sons of a certain Mme de Surgis, he engages her in conversation though she would not otherwise seem of sufficient social status to warrant his attention. The scene becomes comic as less perspicacious onlookers comment on the baron’s suave ability put the moves on an attractive woman, even as he maneuvers to keep the sons in his line of sight as he talks to Mme de Surgis. But nothing is ever quite so simple in Proust:
For if everyone was pleased to admire in her sons the regal bearing and the beautiful eyes of Mme de Surgis, the Baron could taste an inverse but no less keen pleasure in finding those charms combined in the mother, as in a portrait which does not in itself provoke desire, but feeds, with the aesthetic admiration that it does provoke, the desires that it awakens.
Later in the book, the Baron has made himself the sponsor of an attractive young musician, Morel. Here the humor works on multiple levels. On one level, we see the Baron strenuously maintaining his heterosexual pretense, even as by this point literally everyone around him knows exactly what he is about. One another level, we see him trying to convince himself, and everyone else, that he is master of the situation, even as we easily see that Morel is a completely unscrupulous character who has the mighty Baron wrapped around his finger. Proust is able to expose the ridiculousness of de Charlus even as he displays a great deal of sympathy and even affection for him. This is, of course, exactly what Shakespeare did for Falstaff, except that Shakespeare did not put himself into the story as an occasional confidante of Sir John.
Surprisingly, Sodom and Gomorrah is pretty funny throughout. The narrator returns to the coastal resort of Balbec for the second half of the book, where at first he is haunted by the ghost of his grandmother, who was his companion on his first sojourn there and has since died. Eventually, though, he begins to go out into society, where he visits the Verdurins, who have rented a house in the country, and the Cambremers, who, as it happens, are the Verdurins’ landlords. Nominally, the Cambremers rank higher in society than the Verdurins, though Mme Verdurin is so fanatically devoted to nurturing her “salon” of mostly preposterous and second- or third-rate artists and intellectuals that by sheer energy she manages to repeatedly outmaneuver and upstage the Cambremers.
Here, amid a maze of allusions and asides, is Proust’s description of M. de Cambremer’s face:
M. de Cambremer bore little resemblance to the old Marquise [his mother]. He was, as she used affectionately to put it, “altogether on his father’s side.” For anyone who had only heard speak of him, or even of letters from him, of a lively and apt turn of phrase, his physical appearance was a surprise. No doubt you would grow accustomed to it. But his nose, in order to come and take up its crooked position above his mouth, had chosen perhaps the one oblique line, out of so many, that you would never have thought of tracing on his face, one that denoted a common stupidity, made even worse by the proximity of an apple-red Norman complexion. It is possible that M. de Cambremer’s eyes had preserved in their lids something of that Le Cotentin sky, so soft on those beautiful sunny days when the stroller is amused to see, halted beside the road, and to count in their hundreds, the shadows of the poplar trees, but those heavy, rheumy, badly drooping eyelids would have prevented intelligence itself from passing through. And so, disconcerted by the thinness of that blue gaze, you turned back to the big, crooked nose. By a transposition of the senses, M. de Cambremer looked at you with his nose. This nose of M. de Cambremer’s was not ugly but, rather, a little too beautiful, too strong, too vain of its own importance. Hooked, polished, shiny, spanking new, it was quite prepared to make up for the spiritual insufficiency of his gaze; unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ in which intelligence is revealed, the nose (whatever their intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussions of one feature on the others), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity exhibits itself the most strongly.
This nose is almost a character in its own right, a distant relation of the schnozz in Gogol’s story titled “The Nose” (what else?) and of the nose of the great leader in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.
I don’t ever tire of Proust’s social observations; it’s when he’s discussing his own love life that I have trouble. Throughout Sodom and Gomorrah, he’s in a relationship with Albertine, the “seaside girl” he first met at Balbec in volume two. In some ways, their relationship has become cozy, and it gave me a certain satisfaction to see them snuggling together at one point in a railway car. But romance for Proust is always a matter of shadow boxing with himself, and he seems at times almost determined to find a reason to spurn Albertine. There is always a kind of void at the center of the narrator’s romantic obsessions: he sees his own emotions, and he sees the time and place of an encounter, but he does not or cannot even imagine the inner life of the other person. Here he is confronting Albertine after an acquaintance has suggested that she has been conducting a lesbian relationship with another of the seaside girls, Andrée:
Albertine, even before swearing to me that it was not true, expressed, like everyone upon learning that such things are being said about them, anger, concern, and, with regard to the unknown slanderer, a fierce curiosity to know who he was and a desire to be confronted with him so as to be able to confound him. But she assured me that she bore me, at least, no resentment. “If it had been true, I would have told you. But Andrée and I both loathe that sort of thing. We haven’t reached our age without seeing women with cropped hair who behave like men and do the things you mean, and nothing revolts us more.” Albertine merely gave me her word, a categorical word unsupported by proof. But this was precisely what was best calculated to calm me, jealousy belonging to that family of morbid doubts which are eliminated by the vigour of an affirmation far more surely than by its probability. It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials. We must be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves, that some are. It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it.
This is about the extent of the “Gomorrah” side of things in Sodom and Gomorrah. There’s something quite profound in the way that Proust follows this convoluted psychological thread, but along the way Albertine is left in the dust. She is a necessary catalyst for his meditation, but a closed book to him nonetheless. The last line of the book gives us this declaration (spoken to the narrator’s mother): “I absolutely must marry Albertine.” This after he has been considering breaking off the affair altogether. To say that the factors contributing to this decision are obscure is an understatement. No telling how the matter will turn out, but I’m not anticipating that he’ll follow through on this intention.
* * * *
At times when reading the earlier volumes of In Search of Lost Time, I’ve found it difficult to understand why Proust should rank with Joyce, Woolf, and the other high modernists. But Sodom and Gomorrah has made me a believer. This book is unsurpassed in its own peculiar way, language and thought are melded together such than neither can be thought of as separate from the other. This is why quoting Proust is so difficult. No idea or thought is discrete, everything flows along like a wave that changes but never quite resolves. Proust’s writing is quantum in the sense that it is made out of discrete bits: words and ideas, yet it appears to the reader as something indivisible.
Amid such imaginative force, it was astonishing at a single moment in the book to discover the author undisguised, sitting in his dark room. The glimpse is uncharacteristically brief:
I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness.
