The day Proust and Joyce met...

Marcel Proust Gets Rid of James Joyce

Hôtel Majestic, avenue Kléber, Paris May 19th 1922

Marcel Proust, once so social, is nowadays very picky about going out, preferring to stay in his bedroom. He has developed a particular distaste for exclusive, intimate parties. ‘Nothing amuses me less than what was called, twenty years ago, “select,” ’ he observes.

The British art patrons Sydney and Violet Schiff are obliged to employ stealth to attract him to the dinner party of their dreams, which they are holding in a private room at the Hôtel Majestic, in celebration of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

For some time, they have been plotting to gather the four men they consider the world’s greatest living artists – Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust – together in the same room. Proust is perhaps their greatest catch, being both the most lionised and the most elusive; since the publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe the week before last, he has been the talk of the town. Knowing his aversion to select gatherings, Sydney Schiff does not send him a formal invitation, but craftily slips a reference to it into a letter a few days before: might he perhaps drop by after dinner?

Picasso and Stravinsky arrive in good time. The less dependable James Joyce arrives after coffee, drunk and shabby, swaying from side to side. ‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond,’ he admits. He sits to the right of his host, places his head in his hands, and says nothing.

Their fellow guest Clive Bell remembers the entry at 2.30 a.m. of ‘a small, dapper figure clad in exquisite black with white kid gloves … looking 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. Physically he did not please me, being altogether too sleek and dank and plastered: his eyes were glorious however.’ This otherwise elegant entrance of Marcel Proust gets off to a bad start when another guest, Princesse Violette Murat, looks daggers at him and flounces out of the party, furious at being depicted as a skinflint in his recent volume.

Proust, flustered by this rebuff, is placed between Igor Stravinsky and Sydney Schiff. Stravinsky notes he is ‘as pale as a mid-afternoon moon’. Proust tries to pay Stravinsky a compliment by comparing him to Beethoven.

‘Doubtless you admire Beethoven,’ he adds. ‘I detest Beethoven.’ ‘But, cher maître, surely those late sonatas and quartets …?’ ‘Worse than the others.’

Around this time, James Joyce emits a loud snore (‘I hope it was a snore,’ adds Bell), then wakes with a jolt. Proust – looking ten years younger than he is, or so Joyce thinks – introduces himself.* The two are widely regarded as rivals; their works are often compared, generally to Joyce’s disadvantage.