In the past I’ve only written here when I’ve finished reading something, but Proust is such slow going, and there is so much I want to write about, and this volume is so different from one section to the next. So here goes.
Part One: Sodom and Gomorrah is, as you might guess, gay gay gay. At the start of this volume, our narrator eavesdrops from the building next door as M. de Charlus and Jupien, the tailor, get it on. “I concluded from this later on that there is another thing as noisy as pain, namely pleasure,” we learn (p 12), and the narrator also learns how to pick out the flirtations of gay men, even when they’re not obvious to outsiders. There follows a long digression on how gay men act/are, which of course to a 21st-century eye is full of so much ugliness—and apparently was to at least some earlier readers, too: the biographical sketch of Proust at the start of the volume says that André Gide “complained: ‘Will you never portray this form of Eros for us in the aspect of youth and beauty?’” (vi). But at the same time, the narrator does see beauty in Charlus and Jupien’s random hook-up, comparing their finding each other to a rare flower being pollinated by an insect: “But it was a miracle also that I had just witnessed, almost of the same order and no less marvellous. As soon as I considered the encounter from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me instinct with beauty” (38). There is beauty in the specific, but not in the general pages-long sentences describing how “inverts” are.
Part Two, Chapter One: Here’s the social world again, the humor in it, a long description of a party and then waiting for Albertine to visit afterwards. As always with Proust, I enjoyed his mile-long sentences, and gems like “But sometimes the future is latent within us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality” (53). Or this: “I was yielding to a purely sensual desire, although we were at that torrid period of the year when sensuality, released, is more readily inclined to visit the organs of taste, and seeks coolness above all. More than for the kiss of a girl, it thirsts for orangeade, for a bath, or even to gaze at that peeled and juicy moon that was quenching the thirst of heaven” (61). Or, my favorite, this, which goes in that wonderful Proustian way from now back to then, reminding us of the different selves, in ourselves and others, who can sometimes be summoned back from the past, however briefly:
Thus, from that nocturnal Paris out of whose depths the invisible message had already wafted into my very room, delimiting the field of action of a faraway person, what was now about to materialise, after this preliminary annunciation, was the Albertine whom I had known long ago beneath the sky of Balbec, when the waiters of the Grand Hotel, as they laid the tables, were blinded by the glow of the setting sun, when, the glass panels having been drawn wide open, the faintest evening breeze passed freely from the beach, where the last strolling couples still lingered, into the vast dining-room in which the first diners had not yet taken their places, and when, in the mirror placed behind the cashier’s desk, there passed the red reflexion of the hull and, lingering long, the grey reflexion of the smoke of the last steamer for Rivebelle. (pp 181-182)
(All page numbers are from the Modern Library paperback edition of Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright)
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