It's almost impossible to overstate the influence Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, once translated as Remembrance of Things Past, but today known in English as In Search of Lost Time, has had on literature since the 1913 publication of the first part, Swann's Way . Ultimately consisting of seven volumes, the last of which appeared in 1927, it totaled in English over 4,000 pages. Begun in 1909, this epic roman a clef recaptures France during the anxious years of the Belle Epoque. Many of the characters are homosexual �" virtually unprecedented. Indeed, homosexuality takes center stage in the last parts.
Valentin Louis Georges Eugene Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was born in Paris. His father was a prominent pathologist, his mother a descendent from a wealthy Alsatian Jewish family. An only child, he suffered from severe asthma. A member of the haute bourgeoisie, Marcel attended prestigious schools and was regarded as a social climber. He was fascinated by the old nobility, whose influence was waning with the rise of his own class.
Swann's Way was rejected by several publishers, so Proust paid for it to be privately printed. In it, he evokes the power of memory �" of childhood experiences �" and how it shapes adult lives. Passages about how the narrator (eventually called Marcel) waited eagerly for his mother's good-night kiss, or the description of a tea-dipped madeleine, are justly celebrated.
The Jewish Charles Swann is an elegant, old friend of the family. He is contrasted with the noble Guermantes family, especially Baron Charlus, openly homosexual and often antisocial. The frail youth dreams of visiting Venice, but is too sickly to go. Instead, he focuses on the adult world around him, letting no detail escape his eye.
Each subsequent volume �" The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Prisoner, The Fugitive and Finding Time Again �" shifts the focus and perspective from one carefully drawn character to another. The nuances of behavior distinguishing each social class are memorably depicted. Although the many stories are interwoven and details are realistic, it isn't a plot-driven, action-oriented work. It is more contemplative and observant.
It is, nonetheless, compelling. To contemporaries who recognized many of the individuals upon whom Proust based characters, it was especially gripping. Charlus, for example, was modeled on the aristocratic Robert de Montesquiou, an intimate of gay artist John Singer Sargent. Proust based the Duchesse de Guermantes on Elisabeth, Countess Greffulhe. Initial readers recognized Madame de Caillavet, nee Leontine Lippmann, as the culture vulture, social-climbing fictionalized Madame Verdurin. It isn't important for modern readers to know these details, because the characters are vivid, complex, and fascinating in their own right.
Proust expounds at length about the nature of art and how it is manifested in literature, painting, and music. For him, art is autobiographical �" the artist takes his or her individual experiences and transforms them into a universal truth.
Lesbianism appears in Swann's Way, as both Swann and the narrator are concerned that their respective mistresses/lovers (Odette and Albertine) are also having affairs with women �" and fear they will never truly have their love or control them. The beginning of Cities of the Plain features a lengthy section on Charlus' sexual encounter with his tailor, Jupien, who would later manage a male bordello financed by the baron. Although Proust's ideas about the nature of male homosexuality are dated �" he believed homosexuals were women trapped in men's bodies �" they reflected the most progressive views of the era, first articulated in Germany by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-95) and Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935).
What was revolutionary and remains relevant about Proust's portrayals of homosexuality is that it is natural, innate, and found in every socio-economic class. Additionally, Charlus, perhaps because of his aristocratic background with its sense of entitlement, is unapologetic about his nature. The relative openness of many of the male characters reflected the reality of life in France, and specifically, Paris. Unlike the United Kingdom or Germany at the time, homosexual sex between consenting adults wasn't illegal in France. It faced social disapproval, but no one could be jailed for it.
Proust never "came out," but was understood to be homosexual by his contemporaries. He had intimate "friendships" with writer/artist Lucien Daudet and Venezuelan-born composer Reynaldo Hahn. After Proust's death, the openly gay Nobel Prize-winning writer Andre Gide (1869-1951) published their correspondence and confirmed that Proust had been homosexual.
Equally noteworthy is the sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish Swann. The notorious Dreyfus Affair, which began in 1894 with the false allegation of treason against Captain Alfred Dreyfus �" he was finally exonerated in 1906 �" revealed strong French anti-Semitism. His Jewish heritage and homosexuality made Proust a double outsider �" and he knew the pain that could cause.
Proust was rewriting the last volumes of In Search of Lost Time when he died. Clearly, the work would benefit from judicious editing. Nonetheless, authors as different as Virginia Woolf, Colette, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edmund White have lauded it. It had a profound impact on Truman Capote, who hoped his Answered Prayers would equal it. In Paul Bailey's superb 2014 novella The Prince's Boy, the beautiful teenage narrator, Dinu, is obsessed with Proust, and visits the male bordello run by M. Albert, whom he recognizes as the model for Jupien. There he meets and falls in love with the title character, the handsome Razvan. Harold Bloom wrote that In Search of Lost Time is "widely recognized as the major novel of the 20th century," a judgment many critics share.