28. The fourth volume is called 'Sodom and Gomorrah'...

The twenty-eighth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero waxes lyrical on the subject of sex (yet again).

The fourth volume is called Sodom and Gomorrah – named after the two ‘cities of the plain’ in the Old Testament, synonymous with impenitent sin and destroyed by God…

We might wonder where this Biblical reference fits into the story of a person’s journey through the aristocratic society of his day, but then reflect on the sexual nature of becoming, and on the forces of desire that shape who we are and how we respond to the world. And we recall the agonies and ecstasies of Swann, the juvenile fantasies of the Narrator, and his early efforts to reconcile the sacred and the profane, the ways in which the mind can transmute sexual desire into sinful self-reproach, and suddenly the title makes some sort of sense.  

Near the beginning, the Narrator chances upon a tryst between Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien at the Hotel de Guermantes. The two men proposition one another – a scene described in a wonderful train of botanical metaphors, in which one plays the bumble bee, the other the orchid, evoking the flowering of desire already described in earlier volumes of the novel. Together they enter Jupien’s empty shop and disappear from the Narrator’s view. Ever curious, he follows them, securing a vantage point for himself in an adjoining room, where he can easily hear the impassioned noises coming from next door.

The episode marks a sudden shift in how we perceive the Baron, who has hitherto been described as an inveterate womaniser, a self-proclaimed antagonist of ‘effeminate men’. This inversion begins a process of further inversions in which our understanding of almost all the main characters is confounded in some way. For instance, Saint-Loup, previously strung out by his desperate love for the actress-come-courtesan Rachel, is also ultimately revealed to have a predilection toward men.

It seems, as far as sexuality goes – as with much else in the novel – a Nietzschean perspectivism reigns over Proust’s gilded world. Our understanding of others tends to be based on a multitude of overlapping narratives, which in turn ensure that any so-called ‘truth’ of personality remains elusive, forever in motion, forever adapting to a universe in flux. This is something Samuel Beckett picks up in his own astucious study of Proust: ‘the individual is a succession of individuals,’ he says, who are compelled to conduct ‘countless treaties’ with one another. ‘The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddling-clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment, the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.’

What are we to take from the inference of sin to which Sodom and Gomorrah are connected? Proust’s own sexuality must be understood in the context of his time, which saw a great disparity in how gay people were treated in private with how they were treated in public. Almost everyone knew Proust was gay, but to publicly state it was another matter. In fact, when the hack journalist Jean Lorrain insinuated as much in print, Proust had no qualms in challenging him to a duel to ‘defend his honour’. Lorrain, as it turns out, was also gay. We can see this breed of social hypocrisy at work in the abysmal treatment of Oscar Wilde around the same time.

Given this climate, it’s perhaps easier to understand the portrayal of homosexuality in the Search, in which this sense of ‘sin’ is fostered in individuals subject to social persecution, while knowing they’ve done nothing wrong: a ‘race upon which a curse is laid and which must live in falsehood and perjury because it knows that its desire, that which constitutes life’s dearest pleasure, is held to be a punishable, shameful, and inadmissible thing; which must deny its God, since its members, even when Christians, when at the bar of justice they appear and are arraigned, must before Christ, and in his name refute as a calumny what is their very life; sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie even in the hour when they close her dying eyes; friends without friendships, despite all those which their frequently acknowledged charm inspires and their often generous hearts would gladly feel…’

Proust clearly transposed his feelings for men onto the Narrator’s love of women, but sexuality in the novel is never clear-cut. Numerous characters display a degree of fluidity regarding their sexual preferences; one exception being the impossibly heterosexual Narrator, which is funny when you think about it. André Gide famously took issue with Proust over this portrayal, especially the decision to conceal his true nature, but Proust dealt with the world as he found it, which meant dealing with being made to feel like a pariah, with rampant social hypocrisy, just as it meant a reckoning with the inscrutable nature of human psycho-sexuality and his own very complex attitudes to love, desire, and sex.

In the early days of getting to know the Travelling Companion, I soon became aware of various aspects of her sexual history. In one of those moments of conspicuous solidarity when newly coupled lovers feel the need to (over) share the details of their previous relationships, she told me about the time she’d been madly in love with a beautiful, raven-haired girl called Charlotte. I remember how much I wanted to give the impression that this didn’t bother me. But the truth was, it did. Back then, I was still reeling from my experience with Maria, which after unleashing that rough genie we call jealousy to wreak havoc on my young mind, had left me with deep feelings of grief and anger broiling away in my heart. Unsurprisingly, I was wary of having that bottle uncorked a second time, especially so soon after having shoved the spiteful bastard back in.

So, when it came to the Travelling Companion and Charlotte, my reasoning went something like this: ‘if you really like women more than men, then please just be honest about it… I don’t want to get into this if I’m not even your preferred sex’. I think that’s how I put it. Not a very sophisticated rationale and certainly symptomatic of my rather naïve understanding of sexuality at the time. She reassured me that she generally preferred men and that I had nothing to worry about, although, I’m not sure I ever truly believed her.

What she’d failed to mention was that she remained friends with Charlotte after their split. In fact, they would often meet whenever the Travelling Companion went back home to see her parents; and later, during that first year, Charlotte even came to Norwich, which was lubricant enough to edge said cork from said bottle and release all that toxic vestigial jealousy, besmirching the early days of our relationship, when I was trying to play it oh-so-cool in every other department.

All these simmering agonies were mostly to do with sex, and with the thought of her and Charlotte together in bed, secretly mining a passion that I could never induce, understand, or hope to share. For, a man in love with a woman is always having to reckon with an alien body; always stumbling his way towards it, fumbling his way around it, in the futile hope of offering something complementary or meaningful; and often failing, because he’s too caught up in his own animal pleasure, or simply bereft of the necessary mechanical insight.

This whole situation was made worse by the Travelling Companion’s seemingly endless carnal appetite. There was an urgency about her desires, all-consuming and elemental, as if she was grasping at something deep inside herself, something long forgotten and sacrosanct that required excavation, a bright jewel that the action of day-to-day living had dulled, but that unfettered passion might restore to its former luminous beauty. This led her to initiate sex anywhere and everywhere: on trains, in bars, in cemeteries (of course); a level of proactivity which could only ever render me the more passive partner.

After a while, I became convinced that I couldn’t possibly satisfy her needs alone; that she’d almost certainly seek out others to augment my meagre efforts. I have vague memories of seeing her and Charlotte embrace one night in a nightclub, two beautiful profiles which became one and were even more beautiful in their moment of illicit union, like that first kiss between Betty and Rita in Mulholland Drive. But when I challenged her about it the following day, she denied it. I was so drunk, of course, that I couldn’t be certain what I saw. Either way, I remember the grim ogre of suspicion prodding away at my insides for weeks afterwards. This led me to covertly checking her phone or, like Swann, trying to catch her out in a lie if she told me one thing and I suspected another. Had she really been seeing a friend for lunch or was it a liaison with another lover of indeterminate shape or origin? Much like the Narrator, I never got to the truth.

‘It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials,’ he says. ‘We must be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves, that some are. It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it.’

It was only while reading the Search that I began to understand just what a Proustian figure the Travelling Companion was, or at least how Proustian she’d become in my mind. I guess this may simply be a matter of dramatic convenience now that so many years have passed, but what I’m trying to get at is her profound inscrutability, which existed despite her affection and solicitude, despite the loving attention she lavished on me. It meant that I felt like I could never truly know her, nor decipher the multiple and often distinct personalities that comprised her character; that I could never really tell which one of these ‘individuals’ I’d meet from one day to the next.

And so, my response to her was always in some small way couched in circumspection, doubt, and a degree of insecurity, especially when it came to sex, which was doubtless the arena in which these contending sides of her character clashed most among themselves. And despite those times when I felt more like an unwilling witness than equal collaborator, there was always plenty to be fascinated and terrified by. So, if love was one thing, perhaps a slower bloom, then lust was something else entirely. Stoked by her ceaseless desire, lust eventually erupted from me too, like some uncontrollable lava flow, smouldering and shapeless, filling up my body and contorting my mind; but even then, still perhaps never enough to meet her expectations. Looking back, I’m not sure our individual libidos ever truly harmonised; and I think, for me, jealousy came to fill that fissure.  

Ever since the Travelling Companion, sex had felt like a relinquishing of mind to matter, marking my desire to yield entirely to a sort of spiritual oblivion. Or was it the opposite? A dissolution of the body, in which corporeal reality becomes irrelevant and the mind everything? I don’t know, but either way, I always found the idea of death creeping into the equation; the whole la petite mort thing, which incidentally, is apparently what Roland Barthes thought we should feel when reading great literature. For some reason, it reminded me of that line in Annie Hall where Shelley Duvall’s character describes sex as a ‘Kafkaesque experience’.

Similarly, my problem has always been reading too much into sex, which, like any good book, has usually meant finding my own mortality hiding somewhere in the middle of it, staring back at me, bug-eyed, mandibles gaping. But I also think that because the act of coitus contains this terminal essence, because it is cast with the shadow of a vague teleology, it has meant that I’ve always been prone to making narratives out of my experience of it. Every sexual encounter becomes a story, and the sum of sexual encounters with a lover becomes an epic, and the totality of a sexual life becomes a tragedy.

I’ve already mentioned the tale of the captain’s daughter, the conflagration of the land, being cast adrift in dark waters, the vision of the ship disappearing into the blackness; but there were many more – absurd mini-dramas signalling my imaginative commitment to the pursuit of the Travelling Companion, despite the risks. These were the strange adventures on which I found myself; nightly descents into the underworld, made ever more fascinating by the sensual yet sombre beings I’d discover there, each with their own demands and desires; their own preferences and passions; each concocting their own stories in response; sharing their own reasons for being part of the prurient purgatorial mass. A ‘Dantesque experience’, you might say.

Now I tend to think of our congress as a moment in time, a defining episode caught within the wider framework of the tragicomic arc of my intimate life. For me, sexual awareness came very early; it was a part of becoming conscious of the material world and was expressed initially as a corollary of the spiritual comprehension of space and place, before eventually extending out towards other people. This seemed an entirely natural thing. It was only later, when I’d subsequently imbibed those stultifying ideas we call ‘sin’ and ‘shame’, that I began to cast an accusing finger at myself and attempt to conceal the reality of my juvenile sexuality.

At some point – it’s difficult to remember precisely when – I invented a new story in which I played the innocent bystander. This tale was interrupted briefly by Maria but was again taking precedence in my imagination when I first met the Travelling Companion, taking the form of a somewhat ersatz chastity, which was itself a reaction to the pain I’d experienced after my first sexual rejection. My sham coolness was accompanied by an equally sham coyness. Unknown to me, this titillated her, or at least titillated one of those individuals who constituted the cadre that made up her sexual psyche. My false protestations of innocence were little more than a subconscious challenge; they served only to further assure my downfall as far as sex with her was concerned.

Over the years we were together, I was steadily drawn back into the improbable truths of my own sexual nature, a tunnelling back into past understandings, confrontations with death, and with loss; a realm where sex and the idea of the story, the dream, and mortality all washed up against one another. Sex since, has only really ever been an attempt to get back into this, sometimes terrifying, sometimes wonderful, always perplexing, place. And it has usually fallen short. After our relationship ended, I still dreamt about her regularly; all those stories still spun out of my unconscious mind, where death, delirium, and desire did their dance; and for a long time, she stood for the broader mysteries, both sacred and profane, that occupied my thoughts, refusing to give up her symbolic role in the recesses of my mind.

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Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.