278
PARTISAN REVIEW
Nevertheless he still had doubts about his own sex. He used to
discuss the problem with the others in the circle as elaborately and
dispassionately as
if
he were making an
explication de texte
in his
university seminar back home. "Arthur doesn't know yet whether he's
straight or not," one of the circle reported to me. "He's still a virgin,
you see. So how can he know? He won't know, he says, until he
has lost his virginity." My informant was grinning from ear to
ear. Nobody in the circle had any doubts which side of the fence
Arthur was on, but they were all immensely amused to watch the
debate go on until the fine day when Arthur woke up and found out.
But it was something of a torture for Dick. He had known the
family since Arthur was a boy, and Arthur's mother (the father was
long since dead) had written that she felt safe about her boy's be–
ing
in
Europe so long as he was with Dick, who was practically an
uncle to him. Back in Chicago she could never imagine those weird
nights that passed in the apartment where Arthur debated platonical–
ly the question of his sex and Dick, self-effacing in his gentleness,
hovered over the youth, waiting. I thought of two chaste Victorian
souls sleeping with a sword between them, devouring each other in
the spiritual purity of their union.
By this time I had strayed so far into the jungle of confused
identities that I began to have the nightmarish feeling that I was
really living
inside
Proust's novel-especially toward the end of it
where anything might happen and any character discover a secret
and unexpected sex. The last time I had read
him,
it had seemed to
me that Proust's human obsessions had violated the artist in him so
that he had loaded his dice too heavily, constructing a world too
distorted to be credible. Now, however, I was not so sure. It
l~oked
rather as if Proust had really got hold of an essential theme in
modern experience. The invert had been his
means
of portraying the
death at the heart of the modern world. In a world where the primi–
tive simplicities of life have been lost the search for love must take
the twisted and condemned shapes of the Proustian grotesques. At
any rate, this seemed to be Proust's world, the one in which I was
actually existing: a sexually unstable universe where anything might
happen. But had I myself perhaps constructed a distorted picture
out of a few accumulated accidents of experience? I decided, out of
