A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922

Interior, Musee Jacquemart-Andree, Paris

By Richard Davenport-Hines, London, Faber and Faber, 2006, p. 358

This is a love letter written to Proust that's framed by a dinner party held at the Majestic, a chic Parisian hotel.  Organized by Violet and Sydney Schiff, cultured socialites from London, the party was attended by Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce, and Diaghilev.  Proust and Joyce didn't click: each had not read the other's work and their conversation didn't proceed beyond monosyllables.  A well-written, insightful text that is an excellent intellectual history to accompany anyone's reading of Proust.  Davenport-Hines persuasively argues that Baron de Charlus is the main protagonist of Remembrance of Things Past and he shows how unprecedented Proust's treatment of homosexuality was in literature. Davenport-Hines aptly summarized some of the major themes in Proust, and, for me, clarified some ideas that have been bumping around inside my head.  For example, he beautifully describes Proust's moral universe:

[According to Proust] we should never bear ill-will towards other people, should never judge them by the memory of some act of malice, for we do not know all the good that, at other moments, their hearts may have sincerely desired or realized.  Though evil is recurrent the heart is far richer than that.

I want to write a book about Proust and trauma.  Proust finds a heaven in spontaneously reliving moments from the past, yet trauma is currently defined as the unwanted intrusion of the past in the present.  Proust would seem, then, to to be the flip side of trauma.  Proust experiences so much pain (e.g., his mother not kissing him goodnight, Albertine's possible sexual treachery, and his wild yearning for Madam and Mademoiselle Swan).  Davenport-Hines writes, "Proust was a child of apprehension: he lived always at an unbearable pitch of anxiety and always saw the world with piercing, discomforting insight."  Not all pain is trauma, of course, but I wish I understood Proust's psychology better.