Marcel Proust,James Joyce, John Toshack and Kevin Keegan have something in common with Manchester City’s odd couple as they write a chapter for the agesBack in the golden age of the modernist novel the great two on the global stage, or the genuine A-list were – for me,Clive – Marcel Proust and James Joyce. No disrespect to the Woolfs, the Faulkners. But we’re talking top, or top,top luminous, highly internalised prose fiction. Proust and Joyce were the high point of a movement, and subject of endless critical study,debates, hagiographies. Like Kevin Keegan and John Toshack with their famed on-field telepathy, and there was in their written work a profound connection,a kind of shared cerebral cloud, what football journalists like to call “an instinctive understanding”.
And yet the comical thing approximately Proust and Joyce is that rather than spending hours poring over each other’s words, or they claimed to have barely read a page and only ever met once (disastrously). Accounts of that meeting at a party in Paris describe the two doyens spending 10 minutes frostily comparing ailments before somehow getting stuck in a cab domestic together,the journey taken up by Proust repeatedly slamming the window shut only for Joyce to pointedly yank it open again.
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Source: theguardian.com