If I am to choose a character in Proust who I find the most captivating, the most charming and the most worthy of my ruminations, it has to be Le Baron de Charlus. Charlus is said to be based on the well-known, well-placed and well-connected aesthete Count de Montesquios-Fazensac, a man who claimed descent from the most exalted personages and who held the exalted position of the toast of Paris society of his day with much of his characteristic elegance and acerbity.
In Proust, all characters, at least all major characters, have such a ring of truth about them, such a facility and variability of passions, such vitality that they convince you against your better judgment that they are actual, historical personages and Proust instead of writing fiction is infact documenting history. I was so taken in, on first reading him, by this seeming veracity that I embarked on a futile research trying to find who the characters were. Imagine my consternation when I found that what I was reading was not an autobiography but rather fiction. The ability of Proust to convince his readers of the truth of his tales is probably his greatest success as a writer. It is not just that the characters are varied and alive; some, surely, are stock figures but even these do not stick to a stereotype and rather subvert all that is expected of them. Each character has the vibrancy and the uncertainty of life itself, making it well-nigh impossible to say how he would react under certain circumstances. This uncertainty, this subversion of those very stereotypes to which the character ostensibly owes its existence, this is what lends credence to Proust's work, makes all he says ring true.
But is all he writes but a figment of imagination? Not so. It has become quite apparent that all his major, most believable characters are pastiches of people he met in the years when he was a regular in Paris Salons. He takes the habits of speech of one, the wit of another, the beauty of one, the blemishes of the other, the sins and failings of diverse acquaintances and blending all together creates a character one comes to know better than a friend. Put the character through the rigmarole of the Proustian world, and see which way the Frankenstein of your creation goes. It’s almost a social science experiment and Proust the researcher. He is the demigod in this universe; here he creates men, puts them in varied situations and watches their reactions, carefully recording his observations, so that when I his reader see a whippet thin man, with waxed moustaches, possessed of a dazzling but biting wit, a mordant tongue, a colossal pride and a settled, unshakeable belief in his own importance, well read, with a conversation graced with old world charm and graces long out of fashion, it is then that I exclaim- “He is a veritable Charlus!” There is no room for doubt. I recognize a Charlus or a Cottard with as much precision as a celebrated doctor of long experience recognizes a disease by a mere glance at his patient. There can be no doubt, for Proust has created, defined and charted out the whole history of the type, like a progression of a disease is documented in medical journals.
So, as I was saying, Charlus has a large part of Count Montesquios-Fazensac in him, but he is not the Count Montesquios-Fazensac. Charlus' story does not parallel the Count's. They go their separate paths, but they share certain defining characteristics. They both conform to the stereotype of the aesthete or the dandy. Both are extraordinarily witty, often at the expense of others. Both are convinced beyond all doubt of their overweening importance as men and their central position in contemporary society. They are equally, the repository of lost social graces, mannerisms and qualities which are lost in their world, but which they have inherited from some dead forbearer and which they proudly but unconsciously still display as a badge that blazons forth their exalted birth and ancient lineage. Both are extremely offensive in speech, passing edicts which they expect to be followed without question and in the end both lose credibility because they used (abused) their hold on people too often. And both are homosexual. But there are aspects of Charlus that I cannot trace back to the Count, at least to the Count as I get to know him on the strength of sundry biographical articles. May be more biographical information is needed.
Charlus has a certain overtly sentimental, tender streak that I can not find in the Count. His love for Morel is deep and obsessive. He flies in the teeth of society trying to get Morel to stay with him, to the point of wanting to adopt Morel and even bestowing on him one of the many titles in his keep. He tries his best to keep Morel's affections, puts up with Morel's constant infidelities, lies and insults, makes for him concessions he would not make for anyone else. The depth of feeling, the all consuming passion he feels for the object of his affection is a mark of Charlus' character and in the end the most significant factor of his history too, as it is this affection of his that drags him to the depths of ignominy, the social redundancy and ill health that plague his last years as a pathetic old man, humbled by that cruel tyrant - Time. It is not a slackening or a loss of his faculties that plague him, no, it is a deep malaise of the heart, a wounded and spurned love that festers and turns poisonous, that drags him to the violent passions, the passions of blood and suffering. It seems that the particular appetite for sado-masochistic violence that the Baron starts evincing towards the end are, it seems to me, the perversions of a thwarted love, a love that is the source of indescribable pain and seeks its fulfillment in pain. Probably all sado-masochism is in itself but a perversion of love that cannot fulfill itself. At least for the Baron we can safely say that it is after his final rejection by Morel that he sinks to the depths.
I often wonder, how much of Charlus' degradation is voluntary. It seems as if he is not out of his senses. His mental faculties are as sharp as ever, even at the very end. He has a perfect memory, and shows a remarkably agile and reasoning mind as seen in the last meeting of the narrator with him. This leaves me with a disconcerting feeling that the last years are the Baron's long, protracted and premeditated suicide; it is as if he were preparing his funeral pyre for the final immolation. Love in the end is a disease, an infection. If not cured, but left to rankle and fester it grows poisonous and drives us to untold degradations. The disease breaks out as a rash, a vile excrescence on the face of a serene life. We are convinced that the Baron is beyond cure when we see him at Jupien's Brothel and find that the Baron has funded the house of ill-repute. It is as if the secret pestilential sores of his disease are laid bare to us and we can finally see the gangrene that has spread unseen beneath the pale, unblemished skin. Nothing more could be done. It is there that we stare aghast for a moment at the fall of a titan, a veritable Zeus armed with thunderbolts and see him decrepit and wallowing like a pig in filth and aghast we draw over the offensive scene a curtain of discretion. We leave, with Marcel, our hearts heavy and minds abuzz, with bowed head, through the shower of bombs. The German bombs dropped on Paris as Proust leaves the brothel parallels the shower of fire and brimstone that rained down on Sodom. Paris hence is the Sodom of the day and Proust is its sole survivor, walking through the hail of fire. With him we leave Sodom behind, and with it our friends, and walk forth into the dark streets of war-time Paris. We do not see the baron again till on the eve of the last party.
Homosexuality is in itself not degrading. It is not as if being homosexual means that one is destined to plumb deeper and deeper depths of misery and perversion, as Proust seems to think. It does not guarantee a life of sorrow, of lies, of fractured identities. What causes all this is secrecy. Secrecy is the bane of the homosexual through the ages. In certain societies, like in ancient Greece, where homosexuality was institutionalized and had its social function as a peer system for the training of the Greek youth, there was no malaise attached to it. There Sappho could sing of her love, the lovers Harmodius and Aristogyton could free Athens from the tyrants, the Theban band could sacrifice their lives to the last man in the Phillipic battles led on by the bonds of love. Venus and Mars are joined together, there is nothing effeminate, but it is a love that gives the strength for sacrifice, for struggle (See Carpenter, Symonds et al). If homosexual men and women today, cannot name their love or who they love and what they seek, if they have to constantly lie and act a part they know is false, if they have to constantly impersonate what they are not, there can be no healing for them. Love will turn into a curse, into a disease, as it did for Charlus, who inspite of everything had not the courage to name his vice (I do not think of it as vice, I merely follow the usage of Proust). If homosexuality is no more a cause for shame, and has no stigma attached to it, and men and women have the courage to say that they are gay, then will there be no heavy doom attached to being born a homosexual, then will there be no curse of Sodom and Gomorrah. And there will be healing and completeness for many fractured lives and many noble natures. And there will be more joy in the world, more happiness. I hope to live in such a world. Let us hope we get there.
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