Louis Auchincloss
PROUST'S PICTURE OF SOCIETY
Gore Vidal once told me that in reading Proust he was
put off by a nagging sense that the narrator was a juggler with
three balls in the air, busily engaged in the triple misrepresenta–
tion that he was not a homosexual, not a social climber and not
a Jew. Of course, one can answer that Proust, as a novelist, was
under no obligation to endow any character, even the "I" who
tells
his
story, with his own characteristics, but he deliberately
invites the identification by giving the narrator his own first
name. And when we consider George Painter's exhaustive re–
searches
(Proust: The Early Years)
to prove that every char–
acter, every episode, even every landscape, has a corresponding
model or models drawn from the author's own experience, when
we consider further how little point there would be in writing
SO
many volumes to recapture a purely invented past, we must
conclude that the whole work, if not, strictly speaking, an auto–
biography, is at least bathed in a more intimately subjective light
than other novels. It seems to me a consequence that to read the
book against the background of the author's known predilections
and prejudices becomes something more than the usual
academic game of scholarship. It becomes a process that brings
the picture into clearer focus.
To take up the first of the misrepresentations, it is now, of
course, so notorious that Proust was homosexual that the number
of his readers who are ignorant of the fact must
be
relatively
small. Certainly, anyone trying to read the story of Marcel as
that of a sexually normal male will be faced with some baffling
