DINNER PARTIES SOMETIMES GO wrong. For some reason, the guests with similar interests you have seated together hate one another on sight, and a layer of permafrost settles over what should have been a warm and convivial occasion. The more elaborate the dinner party, the more elaborately they can go wrong; the larger your guests’ egos, the more likely they are to dislike each other, particularly if they happen to be writers.
But for sheer, toe-curling, napkin-chewing, electrocution-level embarrassment, nothing can come close to the first and only meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust: the dinner-party pairing from hell.
The date was May 18, 1922. The venue was the sumptuous Majestic Hotel in Paris. The hosts were a wealthy English couple called Violet and Sydney Schiff, cosmopolitan patrons of the arts. The occasion, delightfully retold by Richard Davenport-Hines in a new book A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 (Faber, £14.99) was a celebration of the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Renard, performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Some 40 people were invited, the cream of Parisian artistic society, but the guests of honour included the towering figures of early 20th-century Modernism: Diaghilev and Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Proust and Joyce. Each was at the peak of his powers.
T. S. Eliot once said that the Schiffs had a talent for “bringing very diverse people together and making them combine well”. That night they brought together Proust and Joyce, and watched them combine very badly indeed. For a start, both were late. The lobster à l’americaine (with tomatoes, cognac and white wine) had already been cleared away when an unsteady, dishevelled figure appeared among the elegant guests. “He seemed far from well, ” remarked Clive Bell, Bloomsbury art critic and the only English guest. It was Joyce, who was nervous, under-dressed and drunk. He sat with his head in his hands, staring into glass of champagne.
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At half-past two, Proust made his entrance, dapper in fur coat and white kid-skin gloves, He had just got up.
The first exchange between Proust and Stravinsky was a taste of what was to come. Perhaps a little maladroitly, Proust attempted to engage the composer on the subject of another composer.
Proust: “Doubtless you admire Beethoven?”
Stravinsky: “I detest Beethoven.”
Proust: “But, cher maître, surely the late sonatas and quartets . . .”
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Stravinsky: “Even worse than the rest.”
Joyce began to snore loudly. Possibly, he had fallen asleep.
The critics had already set up Proust and Joyce as rivals, so the late-night rendezvous was always fraught with peril. “M. Proust is more coherent than Mr Joyce,” Richard Aldiongton had written two years earlier. “More urbane, less preoccupied with slops and viscera.” Proust’s reputation was soaring, whereas Joyce felt insecure and misunderstood; his Ulysses had been acclaimed as a work of genius, but only by a few cognoscenti.
When Joyce woke up, Proust tried an opening gambit that is impossible not to love him for.
“Do you like truffles?”
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“Yes I do,” said Joyce. And there, for the time being, the conversation languished.
What happened now depends on which of the many, probably embellished, versions you choose to believe. According to one, Proust said: “I have never read your works, Mr Joyce,” to which came the inevitable rejoinder: “I have never read your works, Monsieur Proust.” Joyce would later claim that he tried to engage the Frenchman in conversation about chambermaids, but Proust wanted only to discuss duchesses.
Proust: “Ah, Monsieur Joyce, you know the Princess . . .”
Joyce: “No, Monsieur.”
Proust: “Ah, you know the countess . . .”
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Joyce: “No, Monsieur.”
Proust: “Then you know Madame . . .”
Joyce: “No, Monsieur.”
Having failed to find a point of social contact, the two great writers now competed in hypochondria, Joyce complaining of headaches, Proust lamenting the state of his stomach. The contrived nature of the meeting no doubt ensured its failure; Proust was fresh and fêted; Joyce was drunk and dour. “The situation was impossible,” Joyce declared later. “Proust’s day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.”
But when the agonising conversation did finally end, Joyce seemed unwilling to turn in. As Proust and the Schiffs climbed into a carriage to return to Proust’s home and continue their conversation, Joyce clambered in too, uninvited. He then lit up a cigarette and opened a window. Proust believed himself to be allergic to both smoke and fresh air. By this point he had also developed an allergy to Joyce. Proust talked non-stop, and addressed not a word to Joyce, who stared at him balefully throughout the short journey.
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Outside Proust’s apartment, Sydney Schiff turned to Joyce and said: “Let my taxi take you home.” It was not an offer, but an order.
So ended one of the greatest ever non-meetings of minds. Six months later Proust was dead. Years later Joyce was wistful, telling Samuel Beckett: “If we had been allowed to meet and have a talk somewhere . . .”
As Davenport-Hines writes: “People with great dignity are often pitchforked into absurd or fraught situations.” But even the most arctic dinner party can be thawed. Charlie Chaplin once hosted a dinner for Albert Einstein and William Randolph Hearst. This was heading for “slow freeze-up” when Hearst’s mistress, in a moment of inspiration, entwined her fingers in the physicist’s famous locks and cooed: “Why don’t you get your hair cut?”