That Marcel Proust managed to write anything memorable, let alone one of the longest and most extraordinary novels of the 20th century, is certainly remarkable. His first work of fiction, a collection of short stories, poems and miscellaneous prose pieces which appeared when he was 26, presented him as a socially-preoccupied dilettante, and wisp-like fragments of this image still linger today.
Proust will never shake off his reputation as a socialite. He spent almost 20 years ardently cultivating members of France's aristocracy, many of whom were happy to consider him a pushy arriviste until after his death when they proceeded to publish memoirs recalling their slender acquaintance with the man. Proust once wrote that only women on the fringes of society produced memoirs; truly fashionable hostesses had no time to write because they were always visiting or receiving guests. As someone who misspent a youth haunting those fringes, he could draw on personal experience. His good fortune was to recognise when the time had come to withdraw from society in person even if he continued to haunt it in spirit.
It was to the disadvantage of Proust's closest friend, Reynaldo Hahn, that he did not do the same. At the outset, Hahn certainly appeared to take the lead. Four years Proust's junior, he was something of a musical prodigy, writing many of his most popular and enduring melodies while still an adolescent; the exquisite Si Mes Vers Avaient Des Ailes, for example, he composed at the age of 14. He was still only 23 when his first opera was staged in Paris.
While Proust complained of ill-health and languished at home, Reynaldo Hahn - handsome, charming, well-mannered and lavishly gifted - passed speedily across Europe: touring with Sarah Bernhardt; composing work for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; performing his own songs in local dialect on the canals of Venice; playing the piano at a London soiree for the king and queen of England. He lived almost a quarter of a century after Proust's death, and now only a handful of his tunes continue to be performed.
Reynaldo Hahn's career of constant worldly success stands as a warning of what might have happened to Proust had he remained a professional socialite and amateur author. Of course, Hahn might not have become a finer composer by retiring from social engagements. His musical tastes were essentially conservative and he regarded even Debussy with suspicion, writing of the latter's opera Pelleas et Melisande to Proust: "It is an unusual and powerful work, but in essence it is a dangerous one and has upset a lot of people, me included." Still, at least Hahn's fate of lifelong attention and posthumous neglect was preferable to that of his English cousin, Marie Nord linger, whose only abiding entitlement to fame seems to be the assistance she provided for Proust when he translated two of Ruskin's books into French. Knowing that she would come to spend more than four decades in a suburb of Manchester after being deserted by her husband during the first World War (he, it transpires, "studied for a PhD and became a professor at Columbia University, New York") gives this history a particular poignancy.
When Nordlinger first arrived in Paris to study art, she was only 20, and the friendship between her cousin and Proust was at its most intense. While offering no new insights into Proust - but instead some truly spectacular examples of poor editing - this book provides two abiding impressions, the first being the remarkably cosmopolitan character of Europe before 1914, as extended families spread themselves from one country to the next. The other is the truth of Wilde's axiom that youth is wasted on the young.
With no knowledge of what was to come, Hahn and Nordlinger frittered away years, seemingly industrious although with little to show for their efforts. Only Proust was eventually to put that youthful self-indulgence to good use.
