Sydney and Violet Page 11

  The Schiffs had pampered Mansfield and were her favorite friends in 1920 and 1921, except when they weren’t, as a result of her frequent mood swings. By the time Lady Rothermere “danced with her” at Gurdjieff’s institute, however, her health was declining rapidly. Vivienne worried that Mansfield would turn Lady Rothermere against them and she would fire Eliot from the Criterion. To short-circuit any such possibility Vivienne offered to put up half her dowry—five hundred pounds—to try to buy the magazine. Eliot liked the idea and suggested collaborating with Pound, but Ezra thought it was a pipe dream and told Eliot so. He also told him that Mansfield was intelligent and she wasn’t a threat to him or the Criterion, which really got under Eliot’s skin. He responded to Pound that Mansfield was “simply one of the most persistent and thick-skinned toadies and one of the vulgarest women Lady R. has ever met and is also a sentimental crank.” There was, however, no obvious evidence that justified the Eliots’ concerns. In fact, in a letter to Violet on August 24, 1922, Mansfield had only praise for Eliot and the Criterion. “I see Eliot’s new magazine is about to appear,” she wrote. “It looks very full of rich plums. I think Prufrock by far, by far and away the most interesting and the best modern poem.”

  Although Mansfield’s preoccupations in the last six months of her life were mostly about her health, she hadn’t lost interest in literature, nor had she lost the wicked sense of humor so characteristic of the modernists that occasionally still resonates today. In at least one instance a few lines she wrote foreshadowed a politically incorrect but hilarious Mike Nichols and Elaine May routine. She wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell: “I can’t walk yet—absurd as it sounds—only a few puffing paces, a most humiliating and pug-like performance.… I have got Fat—Wyndham Lewis I hear is also fat, May Sinclair has waxed enormous, Anne Rice can’t be supported by her ankles alone.”

  Mansfield died January 9, 1923, of a pulmonary hemorrhage while running up a flight of stairs to show Murry how well she was doing. The Criterion published a brief tribute in its April 1923 issue, but any doubt about its insincerity can easily be removed by skimming Eliot’s letters. For example, on June 10, 1923, he wrote to Richard Aldington about Mansfield that “I think her inflated reputation ought to be dealt with.” And on December 21, 1924, he sent a correction to his printers asking them to change a sentence that referred to modern young intellectuals to include a distinction between really modern young intellectuals and those who thought Katherine Mansfield’s stories were required reading.

  A PORTRAIT OF VIOLET

  Despite the Wyndham Lewis episode’s destructive effect on the Schiffs’ relationship with Mansfield, it did not seem to have any detrimental effect on their relationship with Lewis, which by the slippery standards of the modernists could fairly be called close or even intimate. During 1921 and 1922 the Schiffs provided funding for Lewis’s new journal, the Tyro, which focused more on art than literature and lasted only two issues. Sydney published a short story in the second issue called “Bugs” about a schoolboy who was caned for asking a laborer if he had bugs in his hair. By the end of 1922 neither of the episodes that would permanently sour their friendship had yet occurred. Sydney and Violet continued to respect Lewis as a thinker, writer, painter, and designer. They praised his books, bought his work, invited him to dinner, and once asked him to design a room for them whose sole purpose would be to display the drawings they had bought from him. At one point Sydney even said Lewis was “the only definitely creative artist this country possesses.” Lewis’s opinion of them is more a matter of conjecture. At times he behaved as if he respected them intellectually, and at other times he seemed contemptuous and only interested in their money. He often complained to them about his poverty, which resulted in poor working and living conditions, evictions for nonpayment of rent, and escapes from creditors in the dead of night. They responded with intermittent financial support in varying amounts, sometimes in the form of gifts or loans and other times as advances on Violet’s portrait.

  The agreed price for the portrait was one hundred pounds and an additional thirty pounds for an oil study to be delivered before the painting. Lewis handed over the study in March 1922, but Sydney was not pleased with it. Nonetheless, he advanced Lewis another twenty pounds on the painting and the work went on. A few months later Lewis did a pencil sketch of Violet, which Sydney didn’t much like either, but he paid him twenty pounds for it. Lewis took the sketch back a while later and said he would find a better frame for it. Instead he sold it to a critic named O. R. Drey in whose house, to Sydney’s consternation, he eventually saw it hanging.

  Meanwhile, with some effort Sydney had managed to sufficiently interest the important Paris art dealer Léonce Rosenberg in Lewis’s work so that he considered giving him a show. As usual, however, Lewis was difficult and tried to set all sorts of conditions, which in the end scuttled the exhibition. Years later Lewis recounted the episode without mentioning Sydney at all. “That enlightened Parisian,” he wrote referring to Rosenberg, “had seen some picture of mine, and had said to me when I was in Paris: ‘Lewis, these things of yours are the only things being done in England today which would interest Paris’.… I might have set the Seine on fire. I should have been the only Anglo-saxon painter who ever set the Seine on fire.”

  As was usual with Lewis, he was running out of money so he wrote to Sydney from Paris asking for another thirty-pound advance on the portrait. Sydney sent him a check. He also suggested that Lewis visit Proust and make a drawing of him. Sydney had already written to Proust, who obviously liked the idea because he sent Céleste to find Lewis and bring him back. But Lewis was out. Proust caught cold that evening and explained in a letter to Sydney that his illness would likely last beyond the time Lewis would be in Paris. In any event, Lewis never did get to see Proust, who, in another radiant example of the excess typical of the modernists, wrote a note to Lewis saying, “to be drawn by you would have been my only chance of reaching posterity.” With Proust it is sometimes hard to know whether his flattery was sincere, but the irony in this case, intended or not, is unmistakable. Proust’s work, of course, is known to—if not read by—every literate person to this day, while Lewis’s is forgotten by all but a scattering of devotees.

  When Lewis returned to London Sydney sent him another thirty-pound advance on the painting, but this time he included an accounting of his payments. It added up to 130 pounds, the total amount agreed on for the painting and the oil sketch. Four years later Sydney, frustrated beyond the breaking point, asked Lewis for the still-unfinished portrait, which Lewis finally turned over. “Never again in my life,” Sydney wrote to him, “shall I enter into a business relationship with any artist, least of all with you.” By then he had given Lewis 712 pounds altogether, a considerable amount at the time.

  But no matter how exasperating Lewis was, and few people anytime or anywhere were more exasperating, neither Schiff—but especially Violet—ever completely gave up on him. Their respect for his intellect and creative output never waned and even after putting up with his inconstancy, unreasonable demands, and nasty temper they still seemed to like him and value what they deemed to be his friendship. For his part, he accepted their patronage, treating it as tribute money due him as a consequence of his creative genius. What he actually thought of them, setting aside the noxious prose portraits he drew in The Apes of God, remains hard to discern, except that he seemed to like Violet better than Sydney. But given his pathological hatred for the rich, especially those who supported him financially and those he thought had creative pretensions, it would be surprising if his resentment of both Schiffs didn’t come close to canceling out any positive feelings he might have had for them.

  THE ENIGMA OF WYNDHAM

  Although Lewis was widely regarded as an intellectual force by the cream of the modernists, history’s verdict on him has not been kind. As a writer he is remembered only by the modernist scholars who struggle to keep his name alive. Try asking anyone but a specialist on the period,
even if they have heard of him, to name anything he wrote and you are likely to draw a blank. He is a bit better known today as a painter—his works are owned by the Tate Collection and other museums. But he is generally considered a minor artist. He is said by his friends and admirers to have been a brilliant conversationalist, but alas no record survives to support their assessment.

  Nevertheless, no matter how unpleasant he was, and how often he was wrong, there is no question that he was a fascinating, erudite, complicated character who impressed and influenced many of the brightest and most talented artists and intellectuals of his time. For those of us who see much of Lewis’s work as seesawing between the obvious and the obscurantist—and frequently badly written—his stature among his contemporaries is hard to comprehend. But it cannot be denied. Yeats likened his satirical wit to that of Swift and there can be no higher praise than that. And it was the conventional wisdom, in Bayswater at least, that his intellect was unparalleled among the modernists.

  He was also antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, and a misogynist whose insecurities inflamed his feeling of victimization and fueled his anger toward anyone who was better off than he was. Yet even his outsized sense of entitlement, lack of gratitude, and roiling anger did not always drive away his benefactors. Despite their Jewishness and Violet’s gender, each of which was associated with a virulent prejudice of his, Lewis continued to see them and correspond with them. Mostly it was because they supported him financially by buying his work and with loans and gifts. But it was also because he ate well and met interesting people in their house. He also seemed to have liked Violet. He corresponded with her long after he and Sydney had written each other off. In the early twenties, though, the Schiffs very likely had no idea how much he resented them, or even that he resented them and stereotyped them. Lewis himself probably had no idea how deep his anger and resentment toward them ran.

  One must, of course, beware of the anachronistic flaw. Those were different times and people had different expectations. Lewis’s social and political sentiments, which today would be considered retrograde, were relatively widely held and did nothing to taint his reputation among his peers, some of whom, including Eliot, shared his general outlook. In England, continental Europe, and even the United States in the 1920s, especially among the ruling and intellectual classes, anti-Semitism and other varieties of racial prejudice were commonplace. And sympathy for the rising fascist regimes in Italy and Germany was unexceptional, especially in Britain, where it was fed by fear of a rising working class. Even in this environment, though, Lewis was an outlier in the extremity of his views and the unrepressed bitterness and anger with which he expressed them. In 1931 he published a volume titled Hitler in praise of the up-and-coming Nazi dictator. He made an unconvincing attempt to take it all back in 1939 with two books, The Hitler Cult and the infamously titled The Jews: Are They Human? But having given the matter further thought, in his 1950 autobiography Rude Assignment he found a way to equate the execution of Nazi war criminals with the mass murder of six million Jews. None of this, however, seemed to compromise his social acceptance, which, in the Schiffs’ case—especially Violet’s—at times appeared to have bordered on affection.

  Lewis was also a hard-core male supremacist. In an age and social set in which women, no matter how intelligent and talented—unless, of course, they were independently wealthy—were still treated first and foremost as sex toys, he was the objectifier-in-chief. He believed women were intellectually inferior and of value principally as receptacles for his sexual relief, although Violet appears to have been an exception in this respect. His long list of liaisons, punctuated by multiple bouts of venereal disease, was Casanovalike. And in the erotic arena, as in all others that interested him, he was fiercely combative and competitive. Examples abound, but in a particularly uneven match for the favors of Nancy Cunard, the shipping heiress, poet, and social activist who also held the record as mistress of modernist men, his brawny, dominating lovemaking easily bested the gentle, halting, and timid efforts of Aldous Huxley. Huxley, however, got even as best he could. In the modernist fashion he caricatured Lewis and Cunard as Casimir Lypiatt and Myra Viveash in his satirical novel Antic Hay.

  Lewis was beyond doubt a Lothario of epic proportions, but it was in the domestic arena that he truly distinguished himself as a monumentally self-centered misogynist. His secret wife, the beautiful, intelligent, and talented Gladys Anne Hoskyns, was relegated to the bedroom and the kitchen. She was never to show herself when guests were in the house. Lewis went even further, demanding that she tell no one of their marriage. And she had to agree there would be no children. (Lewis’s children from previous relationships were given away at birth.) She also tacitly consented to his ongoing series of affairs.

  CHAPTER 7

  A FRIENDSHIP IN LETTERS I

  Tom and Vivienne Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and to a lesser extent Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce can be described as Sydney and Violet’s everyday friends. When they met, at least as far as the Schiffs were concerned, it was as equals. This was never the case with Proust. The Schiffs’ friendship with Proust could not have been based on equality because they worshipped him. And it was not an everyday friendship because the total amount of time they spent in his physical presence over the three and a half years they knew each other added up to twenty-four hours or less. Their relationship consisted almost entirely of exchanging letters, which would not satisfy anyone’s criteria for a normal friendship. Yet the letters they exchanged document a closeness that is almost impossible to conceive of in an age in which Facebook posts, texting, and tweets pass for intimacy. There is no way to know most of what the Schiffs and Proust said to one another on the few occasions they met face-to-face, but it could hardly have been more open, more candid, or more intimate than their letters. The correspondence began in 1919, perhaps because the Schiffs waited for the war to end before writing.

  By the eighteenth century letter writing had been elevated to the status of art, at its best a form of literature that was private, relatively brief, sometimes wise, and reeking of style and wit. Among intellectuals and the leisured classes, time was set aside for it every day. And in the 1920s, despite the existence of the telephone, handwritten letters were still the principal means of non-face-to-face communication. Considering the time they took to compose they were exchanged remarkably often. In cities like London and Paris there was more than one mail delivery a day, and when a letter was deemed even moderately important it was sent by messenger. A reply might arrive within the hour. The denizens of Bloomsbury and Bayswater regularly used letters to trade gossip, lacerate social, political, and intellectual rivals, and, of course, burden their friends with extended accounts of minor discomforts and inadequate vacation housing. But whatever the self-regarding nature of many of these letters, the intimacy they frequently conveyed was unmistakable.

  Letters were also an acceptable way to make contact with a stranger. It was not unusual, for example, for a reader who admired a book, or even disliked it or was offended by it, to write to the author and say so. A flattering letter, especially an intelligent one, might even stimulate a response or begin a casual correspondence, or, in rare cases, a friendship. This was how Sydney and Violet got to know Proust, the man they admired most in the world. A letter from Sydney began a correspondence, conducted entirely in French because Proust’s ability to write English was minimal, that lasted until just a few weeks before Proust’s death.

  Sydney’s first letter has been lost, but Proust’s response, which appears to have been mailed a few days before April 14, 1919, provides a general sense of its contents. It was extremely flattering, which we know because Proust said so. Still, no matter how flattering it was, it is surprising that Proust, who was weakened by illness and was jealously husbanding his strength and time to complete his novel, answered at all. For one thing, he had no idea who the Schiffs were. The tone of his letter, the way he addressed Sydney—he wrote to “Monsieur”—and the fact th
at he referred to Stephen Hudson as Sydney’s “ami” all clearly indicate that he was writing to a complete stranger. Nevertheless it is evident that Sydney’s letter moved him. He wrote that he was extremely touched by it, admired the writer’s delicacy of spirit and heart, and that he was especially sensitive to Sydney’s thoughtfulness in “associating Mrs. Schiff” with the words he found so flattering. A good guess might be that he was reacting to Sydney’s honest declaration that Violet had recognized Proust’s genius before he had. Proust’s letter also made clear that Sydney was seeking an excerpt from the latest volume of In Search of Lost Time, known in English as Within a Budding Grove, for Art and Letters. Proust wrote that he would have been honored to have a fragment in the journal, but that it was not possible because it would conflict with the book’s upcoming publication. He also said he could not write anything new because of his poor health and overwhelming editorial responsibilities.

  In Sydney’s second letter, addressed to “Cher Monsieur,” he told Proust that it was “impossible to say how much pleasure” his letter had given him and Violet. He then launched directly into a rapturous account of how Charles Swann, the central character of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, had become more like a beloved soul mate to both Schiffs than a literary figure. “It seems to us that in your creation Swann,” Sydney wrote, “we have an intimate friend whom we love and whom we understand as one understands those one has loved for a long time. My wife feels tender toward him and we never stop regretting that we haven’t been able to find among our friends anyone who resembles him.” And Sydney would, of course, have noticed the congruence between Swann and himself. Both had rejected their fathers’ world of finance for a life of the mind. It is hard to imagine praise that would have pleased Proust, or perhaps any writer, more. Here were two people, English, not even French, who reacted to a character he had created as if he were a living, tactile person, a physical, emotional, and intellectual presence. But that wasn’t all. Sydney went on to say Swann “resembles my wife and only my wife of all the people I know.” His belief in Swann’s particularity, his identity as an individual different from all other individuals except one, the woman Sydney knew better than all others, would have pleased Proust even more. And Proust among all writers, perhaps, would have been especially gratified that the qualities to which Sydney responded in Swann were androgynous.