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Published: 5 April, 2012

A few years ago I was interviewing a group of Hasidic Jews, as research for my novel, The Enemy of the Good.

They were extremely hospitable and I was worried how they would respond to a book which, while I trusted it painted an honest portrait of their singular world, was far from sym­pa­thetic to their fundamentalist vision.  

Rather nervously, I broached the question of sending them a finished copy. “Please don’t bother,” one of them politely replied, “since we’ll never read it; we only ever read the Bible and commentaries on it.”

I’d experienced such a doctrinaire viewpoint before when, on a research trip to an extreme Baptist church in West London for my novel Easter, I’d watched the pastor hold up the Bible and declare that “this is the only book you ever need to read; it contains all the truth that ever was, is and will be.”

Indeed, he went still further, declaring that other books were not only a waste of time but a dangerous snare.

It will come as no surprise to learn that, as a novelist, I find such views anathema.

No lover of fiction could ever mimic that Baptist pastor and, holding up a single book, declare “This is the truth”.

Or so I thought, until I read a feature about the late couturier, Yves St Laurent, in which he declared himself to be a passionate reader who only ever read one book – Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu – because it contained everything that was beautiful, essential and true about human nature.

As soon as he’d finished one reading, he would start again.  

Although I have as little sympathy with this fictional fundamentalist as I do with his religious equivalents, there is no doubt that, if in the aftermath of some contemporary cataclysm, all world literature were to go up in smoke and I were given the choice of one book to rescue for posterity, it would be A La Recherche (indeed, so highly do I rate it that I wouldn’t even try to enhance my own literary standing by picking one of my novels instead).

Without going as far as St Laurent, it would be fair to claim, however platitudinously, that “All human life is here”.

Much as I deplore the current obsession with the minutiae of writers’ lives, I have to admit that my own introduction to Proust came via the backstairs – almost literally.

Part of my family is French and my great-uncle had a house outside Montfort L’Amaury, a small town near Versailles, which was the birthplace of Maurice Ravel.

In 1960, Celeste Albaret who had been Proust’s housekeeper, became the caretaker of the Musée Ravel and my great-uncle who entertained lavishly would take favoured guests to meet her. Celeste, of course, had been far more than a mere servant to Proust, having both nursed him through his increasing bouts of ill-health and typed his manuscript.  

Meanwhile, her peasant wit greatly illuminated the character of Francoise, the narrator’s devoted maid in A La Recherche.

To give a flavour of it, when Proust, who was fighting a losing battle against the lung disease that killed him, despaired of ever finishing his novel, she amused him greatly by asking why he didn’t simply write “The End” and leave it at that.

I fear that I’m embarking on my own version of a Proustian digression – a constant danger when talking about the writer – since the whole point of this story is that I never met Celeste.  

Although I knew nothing of Proust but his name and the reverence with which it was greeted, I was eager to be one of the party. But, when on one occasion I asked my great-uncle if I might accompany them, he bluntly told me: “No, you’ll only bore her.”

Although I was used to being put down by adults, it still hurt and, to spare myself further humiliation, I never asked again.

But it is one of the sharpest regrets of my childhood that, although she lived nearby, I never met Celeste and therefore lost the opportunity of a connection that would have meant far more to me than to my great-uncle’s guests for whom the visit was just another diversion of a country-house weekend.   

And there’s a further irony, of which I didn’t become aware until much later.

Although my great-uncle was an inveterate womaniser (he once took my grandmother to New York simply so that she could divert his wife, my great-aunt, on the six-day sea crossing, while he entertained his mistress on another deck), many of his weekend guests were gay.

It was not until much later that I understood the reason for my grandmother’s clear if unstated disapproval of her brother for introducing her impressionable young grandson to such unsuitable company.

And I trust that you won’t consider me presumptuous if I equate her alarm with that of the Marquise de Villeparisis in Le Coté des Guermantes when the narrator is befriended by her nephew, Proust’s infamous gay Baron de Charlus in A La Recherche.

• This is an extract from a talk by Michael Arditti at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival last weekend
• Michael Arditti’s latest novel is Jubilate, Arcadia Books