Many people have asked me, since the publication of my long review of new books on Proust, about what seemed a perhaps too-casual reference to Proust’s paraphilia—a fancy but fashionable word for a sexual fetish—somehow involving the use, or rather abuse, of caged rats. I had danced past this quickly in the essay, not out of delicacy but out of an unwillingness to linger too long on a controversial point in the Proust biographical literature, and also because to go into it in depth would have required not merely a parenthesis but something more like a relentless footnote, or what used to be called, in the heyday of glossy magazines, a sidebar. Herewith though, in response, is that sidebar, with an attempt to make sense of the anecdote, true or false.
The story of Proust and the sex rats comes in several distinct versions, in itself a marker either of multiple confirmation or of the processes of fable-making. It seems to have made its first public appearance, at least in the English-speaking world, in George Painter’s once “definitive” biography. It occurs in this form: “The wretched creatures were pierced with hatpins or beaten with sticks, while Proust looked on,” according to André Gide, because of his “desire to conjoin the most disparate sensations and emotions for the purposes of orgasm.” Painter sources the story to several different, though not necessarily independent, informants, including, in addition to Gide, the writer Maurice Sachs, who was said to have heard it from Albert Le Cuziat, the owner of a brothel Proust was known to frequent.
In the newer biography by William C. Carter, and then in greater detail in Carter’s 2006 book, “Proust in Love,” the story is repeated in more gruesome form, starting again with Proust in a brothel: “If Proust failed to achieve orgasm [from gazing at a male sex worker] ‘he would make a gesture for me to leave’ and Albert would bring in two cages,’ each of which contained a famished rat. Le Cuziat would set the cages together and open the door. The two starving beasts would attack each other, making piercing squeaks as they clawed and bit each other, a spectacle that allowed Proust to achieve orgasm.”
This version of the story is sourced to Henri Bonnet’s 1985 volume, “Les amours et la sexualité de Marcel Proust,” in which it is said to be reaffirmed by an anonymous prostitute—the quoted speaker in the passage—whose memories were recorded by the writer Marcel Jouhandeau. The, uh, tale, is further confirmed by Carter with an item in Jean Cocteau’s diaries—though Cocteau’s version, in turn, is complicated by an accompanying and not terribly clear account that Proust also somehow, within this ritual, profaned a photograph of his mother.
The story then seems to have entered the cultural mainstream when it was significantly amplified in two improbable places—stranger bedfellows in the dissemination of literary gossip are hard to imagine. The first is Nabokov’s immense, bizarre 1969 novel, “Ada, or Ardor,” in which, among much other material, there is a reference to Proust decapitating rats: “crusty Proust who liked to decapitate rats when he did not feel like sleeping”—the decapitation being a neat, Nabokovian twist not previously encountered in the literature.
Meanwhile, in Albert Goldman’s best-selling, and once notorious, 1981 biography of Elvis Presley, the story occurs again, as a thing widely known, in the course of Goldman’s discussion of Elvis’s paraphilia—reported presumably by Elvis’s own André Gide, his assistant Lamar Fike, who seems to have been Goldman’s informant on Elvis’s erotic life—which allegedly tended toward movies showing “cat fights,” i.e., half-dressed women wrestling. Goldman—a former professor at Columbia, whose descent into gossipy pop bios should not detract from the intelligence or the excellence of his biography of Lenny Bruce—used the Proust story to make the point that “mama’s boys,” as they were then known (a class that included both Proust and Elvis), might work out their ambivalent feelings about their beloved mothers in sexual play-acting. Proust’s rats were an oddly recherché literary reference for a mass-market pop biography—but that, of course, was rather the point.
From this spillover, the story can be found everywhere, with variants. So, to the core issue: Is it true? As with so many stories of the kind, it is hard to be certain. In doing the spadework a decade ago on the controversy about whether Edwin Stanton said, at Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed, “Now he belongs to the ages” or “Now he belongs to the angels,” I followed the trail of this widely circulated and poorly sourced story back to a single disseminating source—and a very dubious one, Otto Eisenschiml, a conspiracy theorist. (He believed that Stanton had conspired to have Lincoln killed.)
The source of the Proust story seems as specific, and to be primarily Gide, along with the prostitute whom Jouhandeau quotes (discounting Cocteau’s reference, perhaps unfairly but cautiously, as likely derivative of Gide). Gide certainly knew Proust, but he also had reasons to gossip maliciously about a writer whom he had, at first, patronized from a height and ignored—and then had to watch become more revered than he himself had been. And Gide presumably had a reason to bring Proust into his own orbit of ostentatious sexual experimentation, involving what we would now characterize as sex tourism and open pedophilia. (Cocteau’s diary, again, is thirty years after Proust’s death, and the anonymous prostitute’s recollection, secondhand, is not by itself definitive.)
And, then, though the fighting rats do not sound like the kind of thing one just makes up, Proust’s supposed paraphilia does seem suspiciously singular, inasmuch as it is not one that, at least to the perhaps too innocent-minded search of this writer, has any other participants. (The famous fetishes, even though odd, tend to be surprisingly widespread; Elvis had no trouble getting movies devoted to his predilection.) There are certainly sexual fetishes horribly associated with animal torture—Google, or rather, don’t, “crush videos.” But that such things exist now does not, of course, prove that they did then, and they tend now, apparently, to be associated with highly theatricalized bondage rituals.
It seems unlikely that the rat scene could quite have taken place as described. Who would keep starved rats on the premises in case a client so disposed came in? (Even a favored one, as Proust presumably would have been.) Who cared for the rats while waiting for Proust, or some other rat fetishist, to show up? Though finding rats in Paris then was no more difficult than it is now, the idea of caging fierce and starving rats for an indefinite period in anticipation of a client with this brutal taste seems improbable. The improbability of the enterprise does not make it impossible, of course—but it does remind one of how easily we suspend normal skepticism about events when they touch on venomous gossip about the well known. (And, as Benjamin Taylor suggests in his Proust book, one’s sympathies must extend first to the rats who would surely have wanted to be excluded from this narrative.)
One need hardly mention here—yet one will—the once famous and not entirely dissimilar rumor that had a movie star going to a Los Angeles hospital to have a gerbil removed from his anatomy, where it had been lodged for erotic pleasure. The inherent absurdity of this story did not keep it from becoming surprisingly widespread and, if not universally credited, then, at least, as the Web site Snopes tells us, leading “countless doctors and nurses [to] claim to have participated in, been on hand during, or heard from a reliable colleague about, the procedure.” Not only is the story false but the entire “practice” of gerbil stuffing seems wholly invented, a deliberate attempt to suggest the most improbable possible activity in order to shock and titillate readers. Indeed, the rodent-sex nexus is itself a telltale sign of fabrication: What’s the most shocking thing you can imagine someone doing? Make sure it includes a hamster.
Another giveaway in the case of the movie-star gerbil and of Proust’s rats is the elaboration of the story as it spreads. In his classic book on urban myths and the dissemination of rumor, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” the sociologist Jan Harold Brunvand makes the important point that wild rumors and false claims invariably become more detailed as they circulate, filled in with seemingly credible specifics as they find new mouths to propagate them. (He also repeats, in another context, the point lodged above—that rodents, agents of contamination, are a favorite locus of such tales. They are nearly a marker of myth.) Indeed, the movie-star gerbil story seems to have begun as a tale about an unnamed gay man and a mouse, gathering the Hollywood specifics as it rolled on. “But it’s so detailed!,” when said about any accusation, is no defense of its accuracy. The intricacy of a rumor or accusation is not proof of its credibility—rather, the reverse. A rumor of this kind is more like what Richard Dawkins meant by a meme than most of what we call memes: a virally self-replicating idea that passes from mind to mind more or less on its own energy than from some deeper source.
Nor need these legends be specifically sexual to be widely believed: there is, for instance, the Ellis Island renaming legend, in which arriving Jewish immigrants had their names altered or Americanized by force by immigration inspectors. The legend is just that: as Dara Horn reports at length in her forthcoming essay collection, “People Love Dead Jews,” so far as one can tell, renaming was never actually practiced by the immigration inspectors—who, as a moment of skeptical reflection would suggest, had other, more important things to do than adjusting Goldashevsky to Gold. The legend, Horn goes on to show, was popular enough to cover up the truth that immigrant Jews would often themselves go to court, after their arrival, to Americanize their names. That said, my own grandfather really did have his name changed at Ellis Island—not his last name, alas, with which he burdened us, but his first name—from Ania to Ellis. Strange things do happen.
So the Proust story—practically improbable, designed to shock, and self-propelling in detail as it goes on—does seem to have several of the tell-tale symptoms of a poisonous fabrication. But it is not impossible, and is also, at least on the surface, multiply attested. (Of course, the multiple attestations may just have been one attestation repeatedly echoed, as in a game of telephone.) As so often the case with these things, an intelligent suspension of disbelief necessary for reading fiction meets the intelligent suspension of belief necessary for reading biographies, with the truth suspended somewhere between.
There is no anecdote more famous from Proust’s period than the one that has Alfred Dreyfus, on his release and rehabilitation after being falsely accused of treason, attending a dinner party and hearing a rumor about some couple’s love affair. “Well,” said Dreyfus sapiently, “What I say is: where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” That the man whose life had very nearly been destroyed—had been destroyed, had he not been resurrected—by pure salvos of smoke with no fire at all beneath would repeat this bourgeois truth is depressing. Even those who themselves have been victims of malicious gossip are prepared to credit instantly, not to say insensibly, nasty stories about their fellow-creatures. As another American writer, J. D. Salinger—himself the object and victim of a malicious rumor or two—once wrote, where there’s smoke there is often merely strawberry Jell-O. Skepticism about scandalous stories and a broadened empathy for human strangeness—not to mention, of course, compassion for the dumb beasts drawn into both—are essential to extending humanism. It was that kind of humanism that rescued Dreyfus from injustice—a cause, and of this we can be sure, that Proust championed at some risk and with great integrity.
And, of course, the story about Colonel Dreyfus and the dinner party is almost certainly a complete fabrication, composed to illustrate exactly the above irony. Which may be the occasion for another spiralling sidebar.
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