I first read Remembrance of Things Past (the title for 75 years before a new translator “improved” it to In Search of Lost Time) sometime shortly after the turn of the millennium. The whole thing, all 3,000 pages, of the gold-standard Moncrief translation. It is in the tippy-top rank of books that I have read. 

I remember certain things about it, the elliptical sentences hundreds of words long, the consequent microscopic detail, Marcel Proust almost certainly had a photographic memory (torturous thing that, Hemingway and LeBron James have similar), or what would be more extraordinary, an imaginative photographic memory; the obvious autobiographical nature of the work; the room at Combray, the description of which consumes the first chapter; his crush on Albertine. I remember the funny scene where the Proust character, refined and gentle, loses his fucking mind on the insufferable aristocrat M. de Charlus. 

What has stuck in my mind most over the past two decades however, was Proust’s account of gayness in men, homosexuality, the whole gay subculture in fin de siecle France, which has remained constant (to my knowledge) across time and culture to the present in America. When I first posted about this in these pages I termed it, unless I am very much mistaken, as the most “sensitive” (I think I used that word) treatment of male gayness that I had ever read. 

I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I was awestruck by the incomparable detail that I had never had before or since, the irrefutable verisimilitude (as it seemed then and now, to me). I remembered “invert”. I remembered there was a scene, a courtship scene, between M. de Charlus and a man which Proust described with luminous, subtle clarity, how Proust via the fly on the wall perspective, saw the subtle change in Baron de Charlus’ face as he exited a female relative’s sick room into the street, how the sudden relaxation of the facial muscles as de Charlus stepped into the sunlight gave him an “inverted” look that the Proust character had never seen before and which arrested his attention. (Proust was gay, the novel is autobiographical, Proust had seen this transformation personally, there is no doubt). I hadn’t remembered the book name of the object of de Charlus’s chance affection, it is Jupien, an “ex-tailor”, until I found Volume II and began reading again the dog-eared pages and post-it note tabbed, and underlined passages. 

It is not a pretty picture. Some other author, or perhaps an artist, said once that there is nothing more ridiculous in human behavior to the clandestine observer than a man and a woman “making love,” by which that person meant, flirting. It is true. Watching a couple in the initial stages of flirtation is an absurd spectacle, one that once implanted in the mind cannot be unseen and which to my misfortune cowed me from similar future behavior.

Proust describes this ridiculous cat-and-mouse in de Charlus, a well-set man of about 50 years, and the younger (I don’t know how much younger) ex-tailor Jupien. It is not exactly repulsive although there are repulsive aspects of the description; the fly-on-the-wall POV is taken to an unreasonable extreme (unmistakably pointing to personal familiarity rather than behavior merely observed or heard); it is not wholly humorous although there is that present also (the “sounds were so violent that, if they had not been always taken up an octave higher by a parallel pliant, I might have thought that one person was slitting another’s throat…and that subsequently the murderer and the resuscitated victim were taking a bath to wash away traces of the crime.”); there are brilliant sentences or clauses: “what repels us is the most touching thing of all: …, for it represents an…unconscious effort on the part of nature: the recognition of sex by itself…”. There are sentences or clauses that…invert analogous roles: “as a doctor seeks out cases of appendicitis”; “because I had not understood, I had not seen” (similar to my affinity for counters, “air conditioning makes you hot”; “cops cause crime”), in all of which there is much truth.

But it is Proust’s sickening self-loathing that now impresses on me foremost: “A race upon whom a curse is laid…” ; “the race of inverts, who readily link themselves with the ancient East or the golden age of Greece”;  “taking pleasure that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Jews claim that Jesus was one of them”,  Proust was also half Jewish “…M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one!”; “the woman is not only inwardly united to the man but hideously visible, convulsed as they are by a hysterical spasm, by a shrill laugh which sets their knees and hands trembling, looking no more like the common run of men than those apes…”

No, not a pretty picture at all, but one painted laboriously, through sickness and humor, over 36 pages.