1922 It was modernism’s annus mirabilis – Ulysses, The Waste Land and Jacob’s Room published; À la recherche du temps perdu finally brought to its conclusion. Minor tremors included the first night of Stravinsky’s ballet Le Renard, performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, and the ambitious dinner party that followed.
It was the brainchild of Sydney and Violet Schiff, a wealthy British couple living in Paris at the time. The idea was to celebrate the ballet, but also to bring together the notables of modernist writing and painting who had yet to meet. This meant Stravinsky and Diaghilev, of course, but also Erik Satie, Picasso, the shy James Joyce and the (by now) extremely retiring Marcel Proust, together with a back-up cast of assorted aristocrats, writers, painters, musicians and Bloomsbury’s own Clive Bell.1
Anxious anticipation of the grand occasion seems to have prompted some over-preparation: Joyce arrived drunk and later slumped over the dinner table asleep. Proust had been so daunted at the thought of the dinner that he downed a dose of adrenalin that scorched his throat and kept him complaining about pain in his stomach for most of the evening.
Conversation between the greats didn’t go as planned. Proust told Stravinsky how much he admired Beethoven. Stravinsky, anxiously anticipating the first reviews of his ballet, retorted, ‘I detest Beethoven’, and turned away. Later in the evening Proust asked a now-revived Joyce, ‘Do you like truffles?’ Joyce answered, ‘Yes I do.’
But what else did the Schiffs expect? What do geniuses ‘say’ anyway, outside their work? Even now, literary festivals are premised on the belief that if you kidnap authors for an hour or two, you’ll capture some of the magic of their creativity. But the audience’s curiosity (and hence the author’s answers) is usually limited to issues of mechanics and scheduling, like ‘What time of day do you start writing, and for how long?’ When artists talk not to their public but to other artists, competitiveness makes them defensive, and talk strays even further from the works themselves.
1 Richard Davenport Hines, A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party, London: Faber & Faber, 2006.