A NIGHT AT THE MAJESTIC

According to the American novelist Willa Cather, "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts". It is not difficult to see what she had in mind. In that year of cultural ferment, the Paris edition of James Joyce's Ulysses appeared, while T S Eliot founded the Criterion and published "The Waste Land". Other significant new books included James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered by Howard Carter. The Ottoman empire was dissolved. In Italy, Mussolini's fascists took power. And Marcel Proust expired, having completed the manuscript of A la recherche du temps perdu.Richard Davenport-Hines begins A Night at the Majestic by recreating a sin-gle evening of that tumultuous year. On 18 May, in a private room at the Majestic hotel in Paris, a rich and cultivated English couple, Violet and Sydney Schiff, hosted a supper party to celebrate the first public performance of Stravinsky's short, playful ballet Le Renard. According to T S Eliot, the couple's great gift was their capacity for "bringing very diverse people together and making them combine well". That night the guests included Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes had performed Le Renard, along with an assortment of aristocratic Parisians and a few prominent artists and writers.Among the more observant guests was Clive Bell, the brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf. Bell gave an account of the evening, in which he described the late arrival of a confused and blundering Joyce, who "remained speechless with his head in his hands and a glass of champagne in front of him" before falling asleep, and of Proust, "a small dapper figure . . . clad in exquisite black with white kid gloves". A third intriguing presence was Pablo Picasso. "Intense and commanding", he was not quite as we now tend to picture him, for "in the 1920s his smooth dark hair, with a strand falling over his brow, added to his air of Napoleonic energy and ambition".When Joyce woke from his slumber, he and Proust had a chance to talk. It ought to have been a fertile exchange of ideas, but their dialogue proved "dislocated, muddled and absurd". Joyce later complained that "whereas he wanted to talk of chambermaids, Proust would speak only of duchesses". Their meeting was no success, and Joyce came to rue the missed opportunity, because six months later Proust was dead.The subtitle of A Night at the Majestic identifies the Schiffs' soiree as a high point of European modernism - a kind of modernist Last Supper - and its title suggests that the dinner will be the book's main subject. This is misleading, as the real focus is Proust. With a mixture of elegance and epicurean excitement, Davenport-Hines opens up Proust's different worlds - "social, creative, intellectual, historical" - and pays particular attention to his friendships, neurasthenia and sexuality.Like Proust, Davenport-Hines relishes the more lustrous kind of detail, and this is the key to a book that is at once entertaining, authoritative and gossipy. Here is Proust the prodigious leaver of tips (a frankly embarrassing 300 francs for a waiter) and lover of incidental detail (keen to know what kind of macaroons were served at the Paris Peace Conference). Here, too, is the eager duellist (twice shooting at the journalist Jean Lorrain, and missing with both bullets). Even his ill health allows for insiderish anecdote: after scorching his throat with an undiluted shot of adrenalin he survived for a month on a diet of ice cream and cold beer, which, instead of being bought from a local shop, had to be delivered from the Ritz.A Night at the Majestic is an enjoyable contribution to two burgeoning genres: like David Edmonds and John Eidi- now's Wittgenstein's Poker or Penelope Hughes-Hallett's The Immortal Dinner, it is a book inspired by a meeting; and it is a celebration of the pleasures of reading Proust. Readers of books about Proust - of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life especially - now outnumber readers of Proust's own oeuvre. The deterrents are obvious enough: A la recherche is a forbidding 3,000 pages, and its sentences often crawl along be-wilderingly. But Proust's masterwork is, as Davenport-Hines illustrates, bold and morally sensitive, ironic yet romantic, and perceptive about the strange geometry of social life. It is also funny. The most valuable achievement of this book is that it will send existing enthusiasts back to Proust while tempting newcomers to immerse themselves in his elaborately coiled prose.