Proust is rapidly becoming the Mozart of the novel, one of those artistic figures before whom, from time to time, we delight to abase ourselves in various not always dignified postures of idolatrous adoration. One acquaintance of mine, for example, currently devotes his leisure hours to marking up A la recherche du temps perdu in different-coloured inks to indicate successive references to food, carriages, clothing etc. A lady in America is busy compiling a Proustian peerage, scanning the small print of silver-fork gazetteers and almanacs for stray duchesses, barons and counts, with the idea of giving us the whole coroneted galaxy in a sumptuous album, complete with escutcheons and portraits. Thus Marcel, the adrenaline-swallower and mashed-potato fiend, can turn his addicts into something little better than literary trainspotters or egg-collectors.
Richard Davenport-Hines, one of the novelist’s more rational fans, chooses to tackle him with the sort of stealthy obliquity for which ‘Proustian’ seems an entirely appropriate label. A Night at the Majestic is never quite the book we expect. Starting as a straight- forward account of a stellar supper party at a Paris hotel in 1922, which included Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce and Diaghilev among the writer’s fellow guests, it soon turns into a lively portrait sketch of Proust as artist and man, before focusing on his host for the evening, the lion-hunting aesthete Sidney Schiff. The dinner, when at last we return to it, signposts the end of an epoch. Many of those present would appear a few months later as mourners at Proust’s funeral.
A spirit of omnium gatherum prevailed on both occasions. At the Majestic Schiff and his wife Violet Beddington had flung together a stunning cultural A-list, its five principal modernist stars set off by the art critic Clive Bell, the conductor Ernest Ansermet, the Princesse de Polignac and the entire cast of Stravinsky’s Renard, whose première the Ballet Russe had presented earlier that evening.
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