Marcel Proust: The illustration on the jacket of this elegant little book depicts Diaghilev, Joyce, Proust, Picasso and Stravinsky, all in evening dress, seated at a small table sharing a bottle of champagne.
Do not be deceived, however: A Night at the Majestic is not about the "Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922", but about that great un-Modernist artist, Marcel Proust. True, Davenport-Hines's first chapter does give an account of the famous occasion in Paris on the night of May 18th, 1922, when Proust and James Joyce met for the first and only time, at the Hôtel Majestic, an occasion at which Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Picasso were indeed present - but so were some 40 or 50 other supper guests, including most of the members of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, whose first performance of Stravinsky's Le Renard, which took place that night at the Paris Opéra, the party was celebrating.
Not that there is anything much wrong with using a dubious bait to lure us into what is essentially a critical assessment of Proust's work and personality. Davenport-Hines, a historian and biographer who has written on Gothic, on the history of drugs and on WH Auden, has fashioned a fine - if at times tetchy and in places repetitive - study of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who in his day was compared to Einstein for his revolutionary treatment of time, and whom many of his contemporaries considered as fit a candidate for the Nobel Prize as his cousin the philosopher Henri Bergson, another time-lord, who was awarded the Swedish dynamiter's laurel-wreath in 1927. Proustians have a distressing tendency towards the precious, and Davenport-Hines does succumb here and there to the literary vapours, but his book nevertheless is shrewd, perceptive, informed and informative, and if it does not get new readers for À la recherche and spur to renewed efforts those who have not managed to get beyond Swann's Way, then nothing will.
The Majestic was on Avenue Kléber, hard by the Etoile; it is now called the Raphaël, but retains its tone of quiet majesty. The party for the Ballets Russes would more naturally have been held at the Ritz, the favourite haunt of le gratin at the time, but the Ritz would not allow music to be played after 12.30am, and the night of May 18th was going to be a long one. The party was hosted by Sydney and Violet Schiff, a pair of rich English socialites who doted on Proust. Schiff, described by Proust's latest biographer, Jean-Yves Tadié, as "one of the great casualties of English letters" - it is uncertain how much irony should be read into that word "great" - was himself a novelist of sorts, writing under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson, and made the first translation into English of Le Temps retrouvé, the final volume of Proust's gigantic roman fleuve.
The Schiffs were wealthy, cosmopolitan and slightly louche. Sydney's grandfather was named Leopold, like the hero of Joyce's masterpiece, and had been a banker in Trieste, where Joyce had lived and written a large part of Ulysses. In the 1860s Sydney's father, Alfred Schiff, became involved in an affair with a Mrs Caroline Cavell, who at the age of 19 had separated from her husband when she became pregnant by another man; later, in 1868, she became pregnant again, this time by Alfred Schiff, while the twice-cuckolded Mr Cavell was seeking a divorce, citing Alfred as co-respondent - where did we get the notion of the Victorians as puritanical? For legal reasons, the birth of Caroline's and Alfred's son, Sydney, was never registered, and he remained technically illegitimate.
Young Sydney in his turn had marital difficulties, the chief of them being Marion Fulton Canine (sic), daughter of a dentist (sic again!) from Louisville, Kentucky, whom he married in 1889 and who led him a distinctly unmerry dance for 20 years, until one evening in London at the opera he met Violet Beddington, with whom he immediately fell in love, admiring "her courage, her determination, her unusual maleness of character . . ." The former Miss Canine was induced to sue for divorce in return for a fat settlement, and Sydney and Violet married, and lived happily ever after, or not unhappily, anyway.
Of the two it was Violet who first discovered Proust, and in 1915 introduced her husband to the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu in the original French. Initially Sydney did not care for Du côté de chez Swann, but soon succumbed to the Proustian magic. "Once Proust got you," he wrote, "there was no escape from him and his interminable discourse." Together the pair headed for Paris where they set to wooing le grand maître, in which effort they were shameless, and sometimes gauche: the gift of a spray of red roses made the allergy-ridden Proust cough for days. As always when he was least enthusiastic Proust was most effusive towards his pursuers, describing Mrs Schiff as "the angel Violet . . . a retiring, fragrant and miraculous flower, whose peduncle and efflorescence Leonardo da Vinci, in the drawings that you may have seen in the Ambrosian Library in Venice [Milan, in fact], has sketched so minutely".
Davenport-Hines makes a delicate comedy of this amorous big-game hunt, of which the night at the Majestic was as near to a kill as the Schiffs ever came. How they must have fidgeted as the hours went by and their guest of honour had still not appeared - Proust was notoriously a creature of the night, and rarely ventured out of doors before the small hours. The Bloomsburyite Clive Bell, who was at the party, describes "little Marcel's" entrance:
Between two and three o'clock appeared, to most people's surprise I imagine, a small dapper figure, not "dressed" to be sure, but clad in exquisite black with white kid gloves . . . for all the world as though he had seen a light in a friend's window and had just come up on the chance of finding him awake.
Many other great beasts of the Paris jungle were already there, including a clutch of comtes and comtesses. Joyce, too, had arrived, well gone in drink, as so often, and suffering acutely from embarrassment, for he had, contra the book jacket illustration, no evening clothes, and cut a shabby figure among that glittering throng. Clive Bell again: "He seemed far from well. Certainly he was in no mood for supper. But a chair was set for him on his host's right, and there he remained speechless with his head in his hands and a glass of champagne in front of him". However, some hours later Joyce was alert enough to observe Proust arriving "like the hero of The Sorrows of Satan", as he wrote afterwards.
Accounts of the meeting that night between the two greatest literary artists of the age are many and various, but all agree that it was an occasion of bathos shading into farce. Joyce later said that "our talk consisted solely of the word 'No'". Proust, according to Joyce, "would only talk about duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids". Each was quick to assert that he had not read the other's work. The sole topic of mutual interest was their respective ailments. The poet William Carlos Williams recorded this exchange:
Joyce said, "I've headaches every day. My eyes are terrible." Proust replied, "My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It's killing me. In fact, I must leave at once." "I'm in the same situation," Joyce replied, "if I can find someone to take me by the arm. Goodbye." "Charmé," said Proust, "oh, my stomach."
The party broke up when Proust invited the Schiffs back to his apartment. Joyce climbed into the taxi with them and made the mistake of opening a window, to Proust's horror, for he lived in fear of fresh air and draughts. At Proust's door Joyce tried to hang on, and Schiff was left with the task of getting him to leave. Afterwards Joyce said regretfully: "If we hadbeen allowed to meet and have a talk somewhere . . .". It was not to be.
All this is peripheral to Davenport-Hines's main intent, which is to unpick the intricate and often secret ways in which the personality of an artist infuses his art. Proust was more than usually a psychological "case", especially in the matter of sexual identity. Although he was homosexual - he preferred the term "invert" - he made the homosexual underworld of the likes of Baron Charlus, Morel and Jupien stand as a symbol for the decadent inferno in which European civilisation was immolating itself; in this way his multi-volume novel is indeed a divine comedy. As Davenport-Hines writes, "À la recherche du temps perdu is a theological work for a secular world: it is a novel about the afterlife by someone who did not believe in Heaven or Hell." For Proust, that afterlife was soon to begin: six months after the party at the Majestic, he was dead.
A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 By Richard Davenport-Hines, Faber & Faber, 358pp. £14.99
John Banville's The Sea won last year's Man Booker Prize