I’m often asked: What are you reading? Well, at the moment, I’m reading Lorenza Foschini’s Proust’s Overcoat. I bought it used, more or less on a whim. Turns out, I love the style, the passion, and the content, which is, one would think, all you can ask for from a book. I am not a Proust scholar, but I did read In Search of Lost Time many years ago on a vacation in Kauai, during which time my wife hiked around to find the white Kauai hibiscus. We simply wanted to smell it. We found it at the end of our second week. The aroma was robust, a solid fusion of Plumeria, Gardenia, and Jasmine! By then I’d finished Sodom and Gomorrah and had begun The Prisoner.
The vacation ended and I never finished Proust’s great work. I had loved what I’d read, but I wasn’t smitten into Proustian adoration.
Now, imagine how I felt when I read in Proust’s Overcoat a note the young Marcel wrote to his grandfather.
“My dear grandpapa, I must ask your indulgence for the sum of 13 francs. . . . This is why. In to desist from my nasty habit of masturbation I was so desperate to see a woman that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But first, in my nervous state, I broke a chamber pot, 3 francs, and then, in this same agitation, I couldn’t bring myself to fuck. There I was, in for another 10 francs an hour, waiting until I could satisfy myself. . . I wouldn’t dare ask Papa for more money so soon, and I was hoping that you would help me out in this circumstance which you know is not merely exceptional, but unique: it can’t happen twice in your life that you’re too distraught to fuck.”
If you read my If Pain Could Make Music, you’d understand why such a statement would touch me so deeply. Though Marcel is so much more sophisticated than Lemeilleur—how sex made both characters suffer. As Proust was to write in Sodom and Gomorrah, he believed that his sexual tastes made him a member of “a burdened, cursed race that must live by lying (remember Proust’s main character is straight) and perjury, all the while knowing one’s desires to be criminal, disgraceful, too full of shame to speak of.” Until this very moment I’d never thought of myself in any way Proustian, but both our characters suffered a lifelong shame. Was this as rare as the scent of the White Kauai Hibiscus?