A Night to Remember

• Share

You certainly can't tell this book by its cover — a portrait of five men, in formal smoking jackets and white ties, at the champagne-and-cigar end of a meal. They might be any well-heeled diners, friends, perhaps, or business colleagues. But these guests at a midnight supper in Paris' fashionable Majestic Hotel in May 1922 were the best-known artists of the age: impresario Serge Diaghilev, writers James Joyce and Marcel Proust, painter Pablo Picasso and composer Igor Stravinsky. Ostensibly they were there to celebrate the premier of Stravinsky's ballet Le Renard, performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The real reason: so a wealthy English arts patron, Sydney Schiff, could bring together the giants he worshipped.

In A Night at the Majestic, Richard Davenport-Hines brilliantly reimagines this unique-in-art-history event, setting the five-star diners in their Modernist context, between Picasso's first and shocking foray into Cubism, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1906-7, and Joyce's revolutionary novel, Ulysses, in 1922. The ambitious Schiff was pinning his hopes for the evening — and for his own reputation in the arts — on the first, and what would be the only meeting between Proust and Joyce, two novelists who, as Davenport-Hines writes, "were destroying 19th century literary certainties as surely as Einstein was revolutionizing physics." As it happened, the two barely spoke. "Of course the situation was impossible," Joyce recalled later: "Proust's day was just beginning. Mine was at an end."

And Davenport-Hine's real story is about to start. After sitting all these characters down to dinner in the first chapter, the author devotes the rest of the book to just one of them: Proust. When he arrived at the Majestic party, the French author was at his peak, having just published Sodom and Gomorrah, the startlingly explicit fourth volume of his Remembrance of Things Past. Six months later he would be dead.

Davenport-Hines credits Proust, and a discussion of Remembrance of Things Past with a flirtatious male don, for winning him a place at Cambridge. Here he repays the favor with a Proustian portrait of his hero, adding layer upon layer of sometimes miscellaneous information, in vaguely chronological order. Though Proust always insisted his masterwork was not a roman à clef, Davenport-Hines shows the parallels between Proust and his fictional narrator, real figures and the fabricated ones. Born in Paris to a rich Jewish mother and a Catholic physician father, Proust was a nervous, asthmatic child who grew up to be, in Davenport-Hines' phrase, "the most famous valetudinarian in literary history." His mother was his life's obsession. His father, ironically, made his reputation studying emotional disorders. Proust did military service before throwing himself into the Paris salon scene. There he painstakingly extracted every minute detail of his surroundings. As he observed, "The writer, long before he knew he was going to be one, habitually avoided looking at all sorts of things other people noticed … [while] ordering his eyes and ears to retain forever what to others seemed puerile." He studied people with unnerving curiosity. "Fashionable society mattered to him," a friend recorded, "but in the manner that flowers matter to a botanist, not in the way that flowers matter to a man who buys a bouquet."

Proust was equally interested in less fashionable society. He had an intense relationship with his married chauffeur and invested in a male brothel. In fact, the shock of Sodom and Gomorrah was not just its homosexuality, but also the classes, nationalities and genders of the participants. Davenport-Hines argues that Sodom and Gomorrah, "the first novel to present human sexuality as a continuum including bisexuality and the homosexual behavior of married men," opened the closet door for all subsequent literary references.

The biographer admires Proust's courage, particularly since the pale, sad-eyed Frenchman was almost constantly concerned that he would be publicly humiliated for his preference, as Oscar Wilde had been not long before. While accepting his subject's neediness, drug abuse and manipulation, Davenport-Hines recognizes Proust's "mastery of human characterization." And the biographer understands his subject's obsession not just to present the personalities and quirks of France's Third Republic, but to be "an historical personage in his own right." In the final chapter, Proust dies in his spare, cold bedroom, and all of France stops. His funeral is as grand as Victor Hugo's, and his legacy of artistic immortality is secure. So secure that the U.S. edition of this book, to be published in May, will be called Proust at the Majestic and will feature only his photograph on the front. By any cover, this book can be judged a feast for Proust fans.