Modernism On The Menu
The Age
Saturday June 24, 2006
BOOK REVIEW: A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 By Richard Davenport-Hines Faber & Faber, $39.95
It was a guest list to die for but the two giants of modernisim had little to say, laments John Armstrong. THE BOOK OPENS WITH A group portrait: at a dinner party in 1922 Marcel Proust met James Joyce in the company of a stellar cast. Stravinsky, Picasso and Diaghilev were there; art critic Clive Bell, the great dancer Nijinsky and a clutch of fashionable duchesses hovered in the background.It sounds like a publisher's dream but it was a damp squib. There is no precise record of what the two great writers said to one another but the varied reports have one theme in common: the conversation was dismal.Rupert Davenport-Hines is a master of research but knowledge of what they ate, who the lesser guests were, what the hotel was like does not help him ask - let alone answer - the critical question: how could it be that two men of such astonishing insight and fertility (when it comes to writing novels) wound up staring glumly at one another. There was no hostility, just a blank inability to find anything worth saying. The book quickly leaves the party and reveals its true character: it is a detailed study of Proust's social milieu.Proust would not have liked this book. He always stressed the gap between the writing and the writer. As a man, Proust was a snob but In Search of Lost Time - his one, vast and great work - is not in the least snobbish. Proust was often petty, morbid, indecisive and incompetent. His novel is always assured, generous, noble and wise.We should not be surprised. It is quite wrong to think that writers are mainly trying to convey their own experience. Often they are trying to escape their own characters and realise in their work the qualities that elude them in daily life.It is just this gap between the man and the work that has bemused literary historians with a political vision of the role of art. Proust was obsessed with high society, he inherited a lot of money, he was pampered, he didn't know how to boil a kettle or open a window. And yet, his writing is amazingly insightful. As one exasperated Marxist critic put it: why did modernity whisper its deepest secrets into his ear?Davenport-Hines mentions, admiringly, Proust's insistence that it is his novel, not his life, that is important but then spends most of the book telling us details about the life. He's rather like someone who says "I know gossip is irresponsible but here's a little story you must hear, and this other one too".The gossip about Proust is, admittedly, intriguing. He selected stocks for investment on the poetic resonance of their names; he lost a good part of his fortune. He was part owner of a brothel. We learn quite a lot about nightclubs, drug taking and other people's sex lives. Such micro-history, closing in on the details of a moment in time (upper-class, artistic Paris, 1922) is inherently absorbing but with all accumulations of knowledge, the question of quality arises: why do we want to know all this? The assumption is that the reader is an ardent Proustian who might yearn to know the private background. But for many people the real issue is how to get interested in Proust in the first place.There is a deeply strange persistence of misconceptions about certain writers. Jane Austen, for example, is thought to take us back to a more gracious age. But actually she explains precisely why most of her contemporaries are loathsome fools, incapable of being happy. Dickens, we imagine, shows the cruelty of rich towards the poor. But he always presents salvation in terms of social advancement: a prosperous, comfortable life is, in his eyes, the only proper reward for virtue.Proust, we keep on supposing, shows us the glamour and sweetness of an opulent aristocracy. Actually he is trying to show us an austere truth about intellectual beauty, which has nothing to do with money and titles.One of his central characters, Swann, rich, urbane, clever and welcome in every salon, realises - as he dies - that he has wasted his life. He knew everything, except what it is important to know.Proust was rich and fashionable but did not think this was what was important in life. He brilliantly evokes sensory reactions but he's not a sensualist. Proust argued that we need to find the secret order that lies behind our fleeting sensations; an order that is permanent, spiritual and universal. He sought to reveal the eternal in each passing moment. Davenport-Hines, while a charming guide to the byways of the past, does not aim so high.John Armstrong teaches in the philosophy department of the University of Melbourne. His new book, Love, Life. Goethe: How to be Happy in an Imperfect World, is published by Allen Lane next month. He will be a guest at the Melbourne Writers' Festival in August.
© 2006 The Age
