Historical Meet-Ups

James Joyce
Visionary Irish novelist/Vatican detractor

meets

Marcel Proust
Visionary French novelist/sponge cake aficionado

Sometimes a meeting between two literary legends doesn’t quite live up to our lofty expectations. Case in point was James Joyce’s 1922 encounter with his Gallic counterpart Marcel Proust. At the time, the two men were the most acclaimed novelists in the world. When both of them turned up at the same Paris dinner party, the entire room fell silent. People assumed the two geniuses would have a lot in common—and they were right. Like two alter cockers on a park bench in Brighton Beach, Joyce and Proust immediately started complaining to each other about their various ailments. “I’ve headaches every day. My eyes are terrible,” Joyce groused. “My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me!” countered Proust. After some more awkward small talk about how much they both enjoyed eating truffles, each man admitted that he had not read the other’s work. With nothing left to chat about, the notoriously shy Proust made a beeline for the door. Joyce accompanied him home in his taxi, hoping to continue their conversation, but it was not to be. The author of Remembrance of Things Past vanished into his Paris flat, without so much as offering his guest a madeleine for the ride home.