Proust's Cup of Tea

Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture

Emily Eells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351908054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Proust's Cup of Tea analyzes Proust's reading of various Victorian authors and shows how they contributed to A la recherche du temps perdu. This book proves that British literature and art played a fundamental role in Proust's writing process by citing from the manuscript versions of his novel, as well as from his correspondence, essays and the lengthy critical appartus accompanying his translations of Ruskin. Eells reflects here on why Proust was attracted to Victorian culture, and how he incorporated it into his novel. The works of the British novelists he was most interested in-Thomas Hardy and George Eliot-address questions of gender which Proust develops in his own work. He builds Sodome et Gomorrhe I, the section of his novel focusing on homosexuality, on a series of explicit citations and guarded allusions to Shakespeare, Darwin Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson. Eells explores how Proust followed in the pioneering footsteps of those British writers who had ventured beyond the boundaries of conventional sexuality, though he took pains to erase their traces in the definitive version of his work. This study also highlights how Proust made his fictitious painter Elstir into a master of ambiguity, by modeling his art on Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler. Eells shows that Proust drew on Victorian culture in his depiction of sexual ambiguity, arguing that he confounded eroticism and aestheticism in the way he inextricably linked the man-woman figure with British art and literature. As Proust aestheticized male and female homosexuality using references to British art and letters, Eells coins the term 'Anglosexuality' to refer to his characters of the third sex. She defines Anglosexuality as an intersexuality represented through intertextuality, as an artistic sensitivity, an aesthetic stance, and a new way of seeing. Proust's Cup of Tea thus demonstrates that Victorian culture and homoeroticism form one of the cornerstones of Proust's monumental work.

Chapter 1

A Gay English Tea Party

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) grew up during the reign of Anglophilia in Paris, and his avowed love of British art and letters reflects the taste and fashion of the time. He did not study English at school but was an assidous reader of English literature and aesthetic theory in translation. British artists were also well represented in France, and Proust saw a sampling of their works on display in the Louvre, and in various Parisian exhibitions. He gleaned some of his knowledge of English culture from La Revue des deux mondes, a periodical described as ‘Anglophile’ in the first recorded usage of the term.¹

As Proust never set foot in England, he became acquainted with Victorian and Edwardian culture thanks to the British people he met in Paris and from the reports of Britain made by French visitors. His close friend Robert d’Humières portrayed the English in his work L’île et l’empire de Grande-Bretagne: Angleterre, Egypte, Inde, which Proust reviewed, praising in particular a passage relating a visit to Kipling, which he describes as ‘un petit chef-d’œuvre’.² D’Humières’s interview with the author he translated begins on a resoundingly English note:

A classic parlour-maid shows me in. Some one is just scrambling off a sofa: Mr. Kipling stands before me. He welcomes me charmingly, eagerly:

‘Tea?’

Tea. A hostess of so perfect a distinction that one dare not insist upon it, for fear of displeasing her, presides over this rite of English life.

D’Humières’s reflections during his time with Kipling draw a tentative link between the English novel and English sexual mores:

As I listen to all this, I cannot help thinking that the chastity of the English novel proceeds from causes deeper than cant. The word hypocrisy supplies a somewhat curt explanation. As a matter of fact, this people is perhaps the least sensual of all. Love represents to it a distraction which can be dodged by means of work or sport.

A letter Kipling wrote to d’Humières serves as a preface to the English translation of his book on England and the Empire, and expounds on what he means by the ‘national coolness of temperament’:

No, our ‘chastity’ is not all cant. It is an administrative necessity forced upon us by the density of the population. Imagine a land with four hundred people to the square mile – if they were penetrated with a refined and enduring sensuality! It would be an orgy! It would impede traffic.³

Proust’s friend the diplomat Robert de Billy was another source of information about things English. The letters he sent from his post in Germany reported back on the homosexual scandal known as the Eulenburg Affair, and those he sent during his three years at the French embassy in London nourished Proust with titbits of English culture. He wrote to him of Oscar Wilde’s confession of his homosexual love – De Profundis (1905) – and of Walter Pater’s volume of Greek Studies (1895),⁴ which forms almost a treatise on the aesthetics of homoeroticism: in one chapter, Pater portrays the breastless, husbandless Amazons who embody ‘improved womanhood’, and disguises Pentheus, the King of Thebes, as a Bacchanal Queen.⁵

Proust also learned much about the English and their art from the fin-de-siècle painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, the neighbour of his grandparents in Autueil, who divided his time between the artistic Anglo-French communities of Dieppe and London. Blanche did Proust’s portrait – for which Wilde allegedly chose the dove-grey silk tie⁶ – portraying him as a wan aesthete with drowsy eyes. Jacques-Emile Blanche’s œuvre contains an expression of sexual ambiguity, particularly in his portrait of Mozart’s Cherubino from the opera The Marriage of Figaro, which depicts him as a sensuous young woman cross-dressed as a page to play the part (see Plate 2). Blanche’s paintings form a collection specializing in the portraiture of contemporary gay artists: in addition to Proust’s, Blanche’s gallery includes the portraits of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons, André Gide and Jean Cocteau. His depiction of Roy Kennard was so revealing of his true sexual nature that it has since become known as ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Jacques-Emile Blanche was also the author of a series of essays on art, so that his work fused the sister arts of literature and painting, as well as reflecting the rich cultural exchange between France and Britain, where he became a member of London’s artistic community.

Paris at the turn of the century was – like London – the haunt of the dandy, whose predilection for decadent clothing masked effeminate sexuality. It attracted British writers and painters who enlivened the Parisian cultural scene, and with whom Proust became acquainted, despite his antisocial habit of writing at night and sleeping during the day, sequestered in his cork-lined bedroom. It had been designed to protect him from the noises of the outside world and to keep away the pollen, smoke and dust which aggravated his asthma. Proust would sometimes venture out late to a social gathering and on one such occasion he met James Joyce and offered to have his driver take him home after the party. A mutual friend who was with them reports that when Joyce – oblivious to Proust’s health condition – opened a window and lit a cigarette, he hurriedly shut the one and asked Joyce to throw away the other.⁷ The two giants of twentieth-century literature parted, admitting that they had not read each other’s work. At another high society evening party, Proust met Oscar Wilde and was so taken with him that he invited him over for dinner. What might be an apocryphal account of that evening reads like a scene from one of Wilde’s comedies: Proust returned home a few minutes late, to find his guest locked in the bathroom. Wilde emerged, expressed his disappointment that Marcel’s parents were present and scorned the interior decoration of the family’s boulevard Malesherbes apartment with the peremptory exclamation: ‘Comme c’est laid vous’⁸‘Your home is so ugly!’ In his novel, Proust put the same phrase into the mouth of his monumental homosexual figure, the Baron de Charlus, who uses it in reference to the Parisian apartment where the narrator’s family lived.⁹ Proust’s relationship with Wilde went beyond this aborted literary dinner. Eight or nine years later, Wilde took refuge in Paris after his humiliating trial and imprisonment in Reading gaol. According to a speculative acccount made by one of his friends, Proust was wont to visit Wilde in his modest hotel:

Depuis deux ans je rencontrais souvent Marcel lorsque j’allais chez Prouté, mon marchand de dessins. Il me disait se rendre passage des Beaux-Arts où il écrivait un roman chez un ami obscur qui seul savait lui tenir les pieds chauds. Or c’est passage des Beaux-Arts qu’Oscar Wilde est mort sous un faux nom. Mystère et malpropreté.¹⁰

During the previous two years, I often met Marcel on my way to Prouté’s, my print dealer. He told me he was going to the Passage des Beaux-Arts where he was writing a novel at the place of an obscure friend who was the only one who knew how to keep his feet warm. Well, it was on the Passage des Beaux-Arts that Oscar Wilde – under cover of a false name – died. It’s mysterious and indecent.

Whether or not such suppositions had any basis in truth, it seems certain that Proust’s relationship with Wilde was a covert influence on the writing of A la recherche du temps perdu.

* * *

Both Proust’s love life and his career as a writer are rooted in English culture. His earliest romances were associated with the English and he was given to declaring his love using references from English art. As a young man, in 1892, Proust met and fell in love with Edgar Aubert, who died a premature death only a few months later, leaving Proust to cherish the memory of him speaking English.¹¹ Aubert also left Proust a photograph of himself, with lines of mournful English poetry in translation inscribed on the back.¹² George Painter tentatively identifies their source as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet ‘A Superscription’:

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;

I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell

though they may be from Rossetti’s sonnet with the appropriately premonitory title ‘Still-Born Love’:

The hour which might have been yet might not be,

Which man’s and woman’s heart conceived and bore

Yet whereof life was barren, – on what shore

Bides it the breaking of Time’s weary sea?¹³

In the spring following Aubert’s death, Proust met the equally unlucky Willie Heath, who died that autumn. Proust dedicated his first published work – Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896) – to his memory, comparing his gracefulness to that of Van Dyck’s noblemen:

C’est au Bois que je vous retrouvais souvent le matin, m’ayant aperçu et m’attendant sous les arbres, debout, mais reposé, semblable à un des ces seigneurs qu’a peints Van Dyck, et dont vous aviez l’élégance pensive. Leur élégance, en effet, comme la vôtre, réside moins dans les vêtements que dans le corps, et leur corps lui-même semble l’avoir reçue et continuer sans cesse à la recevoir de leur âme : c’est une élégance morale.¹⁴

I often met up with you in the Bois [de Boulogne]; you’d caught sight of me and were waiting under the canopy of trees, upright, but at rest, like one of those lords painted by Van Dyck, possessed of their pensive elegance. Indeed, their elegance, like yours, lies less in their clothes than in their bodies, and their bodies seem to have received it, and continue incessantly to receive it from their souls: it is a moral elegance.

Proust wrote a poem on Van Dyck’s portraits of King Charles I and aristocratic Englishmen which he had seen in the Louvre. It is an invocation with homoerotic overtones of the precious, bejewelled, feather-hatted figures posing with hands on hips. As Proust admits, they subjugate him with their charms: ‘Je rêve sans comprendre à ton geste et tes yeux’¹⁵/‘Without understanding I dream of your gesture and your eyes.’ The parallel he draws between the man he loves and Van Dyck’s portraits of effeminate English noblemen is a tribute to John Ruskin. Proust was one of his first translators into French, and claimed he knew several of his volumes by heart. Therefore, he might have had in mind the passage from Modern Painters in which Ruskin attributes the stature of Van Dyck’s men to the feminine aspect of their appearance and clothing: ‘Another thing noticeable as giving nobleness to the Vandyck is its feminineness; the rich, light silken scarf, the flowing hair, the delicate, sharp, though sunburnt features, and the lace collar, do not in the least diminish the manliness, but add feminineness.’¹⁶ Proust betrays his own sexual leaning by ascribing the graceful elegance of Van Dyck’s figures to their bodies rather than to their dress.

Like his first loves, Proust’s earliest writings are also associated with the English language. One of the first recorded examples of his handwriting is in a fashionable ‘Confession’ book, imported from Victorian England. Despite his very limited English, Proust managed to answer the questionnaire – albeit in French – about his inclinations and tastes. His telling response to: ‘Your idea of misery’ – ‘Etre séparé de maman’¹⁷/‘being separated from Mother’ – reveals his Oedipal dependence on maternal love and foreshadows his adult sexuality. Whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• List of Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introducing Anglosexuality
• 1 A Gay English Tea Party
• 2 Departures from Ruskin
• 3 A Closeted Reading of the Victorians
• 4 Writing Double
• 5 Elstir the ‘Modern Painter’
• 6 The Visual Revolution
• 7 Proust’s Phrase-Type
• Concluding Insights
• Select Bibliography
• Index