THE RELEVANT QUEER: Marcel Proust, Novelist, Essayist and Critic

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.”

TRQ: Marcel Proust, Born July 10, 1871

Novelist, essayist, and critic Marcel Proust was born July 10, 1871. One of the 20th century’s most influential writers, Proust is most known for À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), the longest novel ever published. 

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was born near Paris, in Auteuil, France to wealthy parents. His father Adrien was a doctor and epidemiologist, and his mother Jeanne Clémence was well-educated. He was born during the violent suppression of the Paris Commune, and grew up during the Third Republic’s social upheaval associated with the aristocracy’s decline and the middle classes’ rise. 

Though his mother was Jewish, Proust was raised and confirmed in his father’s Catholic faith. Proust had a serious asthma attack at age 9 and developed a reputation for being a sickly child. 

Illness interfered with his education after he enrolled at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet at age 11, though he nevertheless excelled in literary arts and published his work in La Revue verte and La Revue lilas. He won an award in his final year. 

From 1889 to 90, Proust served in the French army and contributed a society column to Le Mensuel. His military experiences at Coligny Barracks in Orléans inspired his later work. His holidays in Illiers would as well. 

In 1892 Proust helped found and contributed writing to Le Banquet, a literary review named after Plato’s Symposium. He also published work in La Revue Blanche. A few years later, Proust would turn to the work of John Ruskin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Carlyle to develop his views on the social value of art. Proust’s mother and Marie Nordlinger helped him to translate Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906) into critically well-received translations. 

During these years, Proust had a close relationship with his mother and lived at his parents’ home. His brother Robert married and left the home in 1903. His father also died that year. In September 1905, Proust’s mother died and left a large inheritance. Proust’s own health suffered. 

“Love is space and time measured by the heart.” — Marcel Proust 

In 1908, Proust developed his writing by appropriating other writers’ styles in journal articles. He also worked on fragments of Contre Sainte-Beuve. In 1909 he started À la recherche du temps perdu at age 38. The novel would eventually total 3,2000 pages divided into seven volumes. 

Initially, Proust faced difficulties in getting his work published. He had a reputation for being both a social-climbing snob and an undisciplined amateur. Though he never admitted to being gay, his relationship with composter Reynaldo Hahn is well documented, as his interest in his secretary Alfred Agostinelli. A photograph of Proust relaxing with Robert de Flers and Lucien Daudt allegedly scandalised his mother. 

Poet Paul Morand described Proust and Nobel Prize winner André Gide as “eternal prowlers, tireless sexual adventurers” who were “constantly hunting, never satiated by their adventures.” On January 11, 1918, police raided Albert Le Cuziat’s male brothel and identified Proust. 

As Edmund White writes in his Proust biography “that at the same time that Proust was eager to make love to other young men, he was equally determined to avoid the label ‘homosexual’.” 

White also writes “years later he would tell André Gide that one could write about homosexuality even at great length, so long as one did not ascribe it to oneself.” 

To that point, Baron de Charlus, Robert de Saint-Loup, Odette de Crécy, and Albertine Simonet are gay and bisexual characters in Proust’s work. Homosexuality is also a theme in Les plaisirs et les jours and Jean Santeuill. 

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.”— Marcel Proust 

November 18, 1922, Proust died of pneumonia and pulmonary abscess. He spent the past three years in his bedroom, working on his novel. 

He could not complete the last volumes’ proofs. His brother Robert edited and published the last three posthumously. In its entirety, critics consider the novel to be of the greatest fiction published to date. Proust was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. 

Proust specialist Bernard de Fallois discovered nine lost stories that take on homosexual themes. “All of them remained secret, the writer never spoke of them,” said Éditions de Fallois. “Proust is in his 20s, and most of these texts evoke the awareness of his homosexuality, in a darkly tragic way, that of a curse… In different ways, the young writer transposes, sometimes barely, the intimate diary he could not write.” 

About the Authors

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore. 

 

Sources: 

Britannica

Legacy Project Chicago

Proust-Ink

RSM

The Guardian