Joanna Kavenna reviews A Night at the Majestic by Richard Davenport-Hines.

Writers sometimes complain about the conflicting demands made of them, the requirement not merely to express themselves in deathless prose but also to tout their wares in person. Writers, some argue, are at their best when writing, so asking them to shuffle out of the shadows and sparkle at a dinner, a party, festival or signing is quite strange.

They might scintillate with the best of them, dropping bons mots and epigrams in the manner of Wilde, but there's nothing inevitable about it. It's worth noting that this is nothing new.

As Richard Davenport-Hines proposes in this urbane literary yarn, writers have long been subjected to such embarrassments, summoned in front of an audience and expected to be as charismatic in speech as they are in text.

The ostensible focus of Davenport-Hines's book is a "modernist" supper party, held in May 1922 at the Majestic Hotel in Paris. The hosts were a rich English couple, Violet and Sydney Schiff, who were well-connected patrons of the arts. To celebrate the first performance of Stravinsky's latest épater les bourgeois ballet, the Schiffs invited Stravinsky, Serge Diaghilev, the manager of the ballet company performing Stravinsky's work, Pablo Picasso, and the star turns - James Joyce and Marcel Proust - along with a host of ballerinas, painters, writers and a few duchesses and, incongruously enough, Clive Bell - for a sumptuous dinner, which they clearly hoped would be an "event".

It was expected that Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce and Proust would have much in common, Davenport-Hines explains. All four had set out to "bewilder, challenge and enhance", and each of them was, at the time of the dinner, enjoying significant recognition and success. Davenport-Hines recreates the evening using a montage of quotations from fellow guests: Stravinsky with "slender, stooping shoulders, egg-shaped head, big nose, straggling moustache and globular eyes"; Picasso wearing a Catalan scarf with his evening dress; Joyce looking shambolic, drunk on arrival; Proust "clad in exquisite black with white kid gloves… sleek and dank".

Despite the Schiffs' best efforts, however, this encounter of greats was an anti-climax. Proust managed to offend Stravinsky. Joyce fell asleep and snored volubly. When Joyce and Proust finally spoke to each other, their exchange consisted of such profundities as: "Do you like truffles?" (Proust) and "Yes I do" (Joyce). Others claimed that Proust informed Joyce that he had never read his works, and Joyce informed Proust that he had never read his.

A few months after the dinner, Proust was dead, having exhausted himself finishing À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust is the real subject of Davenport-Hines's book, despite the title and the claims of the jacket cover. The night at the Majestic fades away, Joyce stumbles drunkenly home, Picasso vanishes back to his studio, and Davenport-Hines turns to Proust's literary career.

Proust carefully courted useful journalists and literary figures, appearing a very modern figure in the way he worked the literary system for his own gain. Davenport-Hines also dwells on the critical silence that greeted the publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe, the determined refusal of critics even as rabble-rousing as Ezra Pound to acknowledge its clear homosexual content.

Davenport-Hines also struggles gamely with the problem that afflicts any writer on Proust: that he is one of the most revered and least read of the modern so-called greats. In Britain, few people read the whole of À la recherche du temps perdu in English, let alone French. This is a shame, in a sense. But one sometimes suspects that Proust would be less revered were he more thoroughly read.

Wyndham Lewis thought this, describing the novel as a "high-brow private newssheet, the big 'Gossip' book - the expansion of a Society newspaper-paragraph - of the Reigning Order". Pound talked of Proust's "beautiful boredom", and Nabokov found his portrayal of the narrator's affair with Albertine unconvincing, suggesting their scenes together only make sense "if the reader knows that the narrator is a pansy, and that the good fat cheeks of Albertine are the good fat buttocks of Albert".

Davenport-Hines offers some detailed discussions of the book, including Albertine's betrayal of the narrator and the unmasking of Baron de Charlus. Yet he also makes judicious use of the more anecdote-friendly elements of Proust's life: his self-dosing and over-dosing, his penchant for challenging people to duels, his social snobbery and fascination with duchesses.

He is ecumenical in his quotations, affording space to Proust's admirers and detractors alike. His own opinion of Proust is quite clear: "Proust was a modern Jewish prophet", a "sinuous and subtle social creature, with importunate human curiosity".

Carefully researched, and brimming with love of Proust, this book is a conspicuous, leisurely digression from the dinner at the Majestic - but perhaps that's all part of the homage to Proust, who, after all, put leisurely digression at the centre of his aesthetic.