The just released translation of Marcel Proust’s collected poetry includes his first known attempt at verse, “Pederasty,” written when he was 17. Harold Augenbraum, the volume’s editor, notes that it reveals him to be “struggling with his homosexual urges”:
Proust’s sexuality was a matter of public discussion even during his lifetime, but this poem and letters between Proust and Jacques Bizet (the son of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen) and Daniel Halévy written at the same time certainly make his interest in homosexuality abundantly clear. In a letter to Bizet, probably written in the spring of 1888, he responds to Bizet’s letter (now lost) that seems to say that Bizet had refused Proust’s advances, Proust saying that he is “not fatuous enough to believe that my body is so precious a treasure that to renounce it required great strength of character… Still, I always find it sad not to pluck the delicious flower that we shall soon be unable to pluck. For then it would be fruit… and forbidden.”
Recent Dish on Proust here.
(Proust, seated, with two companions in 1894, via Wikimedia Commons. The photo is said to have scandalized Proust’s mother.)
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