'Bruiser' Proust

From Slightly Foxed, No. 56 Winter 2017, in the essay, Brief Encounters by Horace Annesley. Annesley is reviewing Tea at Florian's by Spencer Somers, which was published in 1920. Somers was a British collector of autographs who lived in Venice and recounts his quiet adventures. Three excerpts for the odd culture that is Britain, producing so many charming mild eccentrics.

Somers was born in Tunbridge Wells in 1850, the son of Admiral the Honourable Aubrey Somers, KCMG. The Admiral was a singular figure in the Navy of his time. Like so many seamen, he was a prolific knitter and, as Somers records,

created something of a legend by sitting knitting Balaclavas with his First Lieutenant on the bridge of his warship HMS Respite during a skirmish arising in 1855 from the Anglo-French siege of Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky, and being heard at one point to cry: 'No purl two, knit three Hardy, you bloody fool. Now, hard a-port and fire at will.

Can't get much more eccentrically British than that.

On an encounter with Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.

He became an almost lethal collector of signed additions, but encounters with their authors were rarely smooth (he was once knocked down by Baron Corvo after unwisely asking him whether he was 'anyone in particular'). In 1881 he was delighted to see two of the most celebrated contemporary poets sitting together at Florian's. Browning and Tennyson were playing cribbage: on losing a point one had accurately to quote a line from the works of the other. Tennyson (wrote Somers)

was winning easily, quoting to Browning lines purporting to come from the latter's poem Sordello. Since he had largely forgotten this early and extravagantly obscure poem, Browning was unable to contest Tennyson's quotations, and as I approached finally lost his temper, and knocking over his glass of Burton's Pale Ale (especially imported for him by Florian's) he stumped off across the piazza, scowling. This put Tennyson in an excellent humour, and when I got home I found he had not merely signed his name to my copy of his complete poems, but had added the legend: 'Who's Browning, anyway? – A.T.'

Finally there is the vignette about Marcel Proust.

One of the most interesting encounters occurred in 1900 when, recognizing Marcel Proust taking tea with his friend the composer Rinaldo Hahn, he rushed back to his apartment to fetch his copy of Les Plaisirs et les jours:

Proust and his friend were beautifully dressed in matching suits of grey silk with identical cravats of heliotrope and with twin mauve mouschoirs tucked into their breast pockets. They were in deep conversation, so I stood silently beside them for some time before, lightly touching Proust on the shoulder, I remarked: 'Bonjour, M. Proust - Mais ous sont les neiges d'antan?' He immediately leapt to his feet with a cry of 'Foutre le camp!' (a remark I later found to have an obscene connotation). I retired. Later that week I read in La Nuova Venezia that Proust had been arrested for brawling in the street with two gondoliers and a poliziotto; the great author was subsequently known in Venice as Pugile or 'Bruiser' Proust.