Sydney and Violet Read online

  In late February 1924 Eliot received Celeste, for which he thanked Sydney profusely, calling it “a brilliant piece of work.” Judging from Céleste’s own book called Monsieur Proust, which was written many years later, Sydney captured her voice with remarkable accuracy. A week or so later Eliot wrote again to thank Sydney for an inscribed copy of Tony. Sydney also must have enclosed a copy of an explanatory letter he had written to his publisher about the book because Eliot said he and Vivienne were “very much struck” by his “exposition of the fundamental idea of Tony” as expressed in the letter. Eliot then not too subtly commented that he wished the letter had appeared as a preface because “not many readers, no matter how much they appreciate the skill of the story,” would be able to draw the right conclusion. The implicit message would seem to have been that neither he nor Vivienne was able to figure it out on their own either. Unfortunately the explanatory letter is missing, so exactly what Sydney had to say about the “fundamental idea of Tony” is lost. But he did say years later that his goal in Tony was to introduce a character whose view of Richard, that is himself, was “antithetic” to his own view.

  As late as April 1924 the Schiffs and Eliots were still communicating mostly through letters, many of which were devoted to health and the tiresome business of daily life, but a few letters have been preserved that deal with weightier matters. Eliot wrote to Sydney, “As you know, I have read very little Proust, but I am so far as I am qualified to speak, of the opinion that he is not a ‘classical’ writer.… Reconstructions of a past period and investigations of the unconscious do not appear to me relevant: they might be attributes of either classic or romantic. Proust appears to me, from what little I know of him, to be far too much a sensationalist. It is I am sure a wonderful commentary on the world that exists and has existed, not the discovery of a new one.” Earlier, Eliot had written to Pound that Proust was “not to my taste, merely a necessary sensation … he is not part of the program.” Perhaps Proust’s novel did not fit neatly inside the Bayswater branch’s modernist box and therefore seemed irrelevant. As for Wyndham Lewis, as usual his taste for excess trumped his intellect. “In Proust,” he wrote in Time and Western Man, “we have in a sense a new type of historical practitioner. Proust embalmed himself alive. He died as a sensational creature in order that he should live as an historian of his dead sensational self.”

  The Schiffs, of course, were not limiting their social and intellectual life to correspondence with the Eliots. They continued to run a salon at 18 Cambridge Square and to buy contemporary art—Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Chirico, among others, including English artists such as John Nash and Jacob Epstein. And right about then they met the Scottish poet, critic, and translator Edwin Muir and his wife, Willa, who, as with Sydney and Violet, was a full partner in the Muirs’ intellectual enterprises.

  Edwin Muir was born into a tenant-farming family in the Orkney Islands. They moved to Glasgow to try to improve their economic situation, and at the age of fourteen he began a series of soul-killing jobs in offices and factories, including one that turned animal bones into charcoal. He was hired as a bookkeeper, but his white-collar job did not protect him from the stench. Years later he described in his autobiography how “the thick, oily smoke hung around in stagnant coils,” adding that “sometimes by mischance, a human bone, white and dry, an arm or a skull, would be found” in the mix, but “the animals’ bones were always juicy and soft, though the fat had gone sour on them, and the marrow inside was beginning to rot.” During these years in Glasgow there was nothing to suggest that his future would be anything but grim, yet by force of will, intellect, and good luck he overcame his circumstances and lack of formal education.

  He managed to find a group of sensitive, intelligent friends who helped put him on the path to an autodidact’s education. Over the next few years his circle of friends grew to include the Scottish songwriter Francis George Scott and Denis Saurat, who taught French at the University of Glasgow. Then, while working as a clerk in a shipbuilding firm in the winter of 1918, he met Willa Anderson, a teacher and linguist with a first-class honors degree in educational psychology from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland’s premier university. They were married the following summer and if by then he was still in need of salvation, he had found it.

  The friendship between the Muirs and the Schiffs began with a book review and a letter. Sydney read Edwin Muir’s review of Prince Hempseed in an American magazine called the Freeman, which was modeled on the Spectator, promoted the economics of Henry George, and was respected for its high literary standards. In a letter to Muir, whom he did not know, he expressed delight with the review overall and especially with Muir’s having detected a flaw in the novel and identified its cause. Sydney acknowledged that Muir was right to conclude he had trouble figuring out how to end the book. Without explaining why, he said he worried that if he carried Richard beyond the point to which he had brought him, the character “would become self-conscious.” The “voyage to America,” he added, “marked the end of that stage of Richard’s life. He was never the same afterwards, and the influence of his experience in America on his future was decisive.” It seems fair to say that this judgment reflected Sydney’s actual experience in America, which even apart from his marriage to Marion influenced his life in ways he never could have contemplated. At the end of his letter, which was filled with flattery, Sydney said he would send Muir copies of Elinor Colhouse and Tony, which he did.

  Less than two weeks later Sydney received a reply more satisfying than any he could have hoped for. “The most striking thing in both these novels,” Muir wrote, “seems to me the success with which you have imparted a sort of weight to narratives which are limpid and on the surface simple and ordinary … it makes the reader feel that in this way things happened, and only in this way could they have happened. It is a very rare and high gift and very few writers have had it, and I can think of nobody else who has it at present but yourself.” Such praise was obviously more than welcome, but what followed was even more so. Muir wrote that if Tony was published in the near future he would review it in the New York Literary Review, where he had a connection.

  While the Schiffs were in the process of forming a new and satisfying friendship with the Muirs, their relationship with the irascible Wyndham Lewis, which might have been irreparably damaged by his bad behavior toward Katherine Mansfield, seemed to be flourishing. Lewis must have been feeling unusually warm toward Sydney and Violet, who at the time were providing him with relatively modest but fairly regular financial support, because he took the rare step of reading to them some passages from a novel in progress. Judging from their effusive reaction, they considered it something of a masterpiece. The work was “astounding,” Violet wrote to Lewis afterwards, and Sydney scrawled “I quite agree” across the page. Violet also added that she wished “a bit of it could appear in the Criterion” and lo and behold six days later Eliot wrote to Sydney that indeed he had offered to publish excerpts in the magazine. Eliot seemed surprised that while Lewis had taken the Schiffs into his confidence by reading to them from the working manuscript, he had failed to tell them that he, Eliot, had offered to publish a selection. Lewis initially turned down the opportunity because he thought the book would do better if all of it first appeared between hard covers. But it didn’t take long for him to change his mind, perhaps because he realized the book would take years to finish and no doubt because as always he needed the money.

  The first excerpt appeared in February 1924 under the title “Mr. Zagreus and the Split Man” below a brief preface in which Lewis wrote that he hoped to complete the book “by next autumn.” The second selection appeared in the April issue and was titled “Extract from Encyclical Addressed to Daniel Boleyn by Mr. Zagreus.” The finished work was called The Apes of God, but it did not finally emerge in book form until 1930, one year before Lewis published Hitler, his most infamous book, arguing that the benighted Austrian painter of insipid landscapes,
the venomous anti-Semite who would become Germany’s fuehrer three years later, was that country’s incipient savior and should be lionized, not vilified.

  There is no record of what Lewis read to Sydney and Violet, but it probably wasn’t from Hitler or “Chez Lionel Kein,” the chapter in The Apes of God in which they would be wickedly and anti-Semitically skewered. Doubtless, though, it was from a chapter in The Apes that caricatured and metaphorically disemboweled one or more of their friends—the Sitwells, possibly—a fact that did not seem to enter into their resoundingly positive reaction to whatever selection Lewis read to them. When “Extract from Encyclical,” which contained a snide reference to Sydney, appeared in the Criterion, however, the Schiffs began to have second thoughts.

  Evidence of this appeared in early May when Eliot, who was feeling massively put upon by his editorial responsibilities and was under siege from the multiple targets of Lewis’s sulfurous excerpts in the Criterion, wrote a rather whiney and short-tempered letter to Virginia Woolf. He complained somewhat hyperbolically that he had already “been ‘warned’ … by our venerable and august friend Mr. Sydney Schiff, that I may be met on my return at Victoria Station by a mass meeting of protestants against my careless editing—in not having had time to read and expurgate Wyndham Lewis’s article before publication, there being only twenty-four hours in a day.” He went on to say, “This armed and menacing meeting of all those who feel that ‘the cap fits’ (I expect to recognize many friendly faces) will presumably be led by Mr. Sydney Schiff himself in the costume and headpiece of a pseudo-Proust.”

  Eliot was referring to a specific slur by Zagreus in the April Criterion excerpt—“In a little artificial world of carefully fostered self-esteem I will show you a pseudo-Proust”—which everyone in Bayswater recognized instantly as a reference to Sydney. But Bloomsbury was not as clued in about the Schiffs. Woolf wrote to Eliot a few days later that she and her husband, Leonard, thought the Proust reference was to Katherine Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry. She added with a trace of glee: “Everyone, Lytton [Strachey], Osbert Sitwell, Mary Hutchinson is claiming to be an Ape of God and identifying the rest of the pack.” Although “Apes ID” was the hottest parlor game in her set, the overall reception of the excerpts was not quite so benign. Eliot wrote to his friend Harold Monro that there had been “a torrent of abuse.”

  As typically happened, though, the Apes episode blew over and was only minimally damaging to the Schiffs’ relationships with Eliot and Lewis. Six months later, though, Sydney suffered one of his periodic lapses in tact, which compromised both relationships much more significantly. He made the egregious mistake of writing two agitated letters to Eliot complaining about Lewis badgering him for money. Sydney had lent Lewis money to tide him over during a particularly difficult time, but Lewis kept pressing him for more, and in ever greater amounts. Fed up and not knowing what else to do, he asked Eliot to intervene. Eliot found the request presumptuous but nevertheless agreed to meet Sydney, who to his dismay presented him with a typed list of all the money he had lent Lewis. The total was 120 pounds. Things had come to a head when Lewis asked for still more, no doubt in his usual self-deprecating, gracious, and undemanding way, and Sydney, exasperated and pushed to his emotional if not financial limit, told him, “I cannot go on giving you money at this rate.”

  Eliot, who was thoroughly incensed at Sydney’s clumsy attempt to entangle him in the matter, reacted by sending Lewis a detailed account of the meeting, which he said he attended absolutely against his will and which caused him “infinite annoyance.” He said he refused to interfere, in response to which Sydney lost his temper and “some disagreeable words” passed between them. Eliot then warned Lewis that Sydney might attempt “to make mischief” between Lewis and himself, but that Lewis should keep his letter confidential and do nothing. Soon thereafter, Sydney, eager to smooth things over with Lewis and unaware of Eliot’s letter to him, wrote to Lewis asking where their relationship stood. Lewis, who had spent Sydney’s money and had no interest in paying it back or making up, wrote cryptically to Sydney that he had “put him in a fix” and he was still dealing with its unpleasant consequences. It was not the first nor would it be the last breach in their relations. What Sydney might not have known, though, was that a patronage fund from which Lewis had been receiving sixteen pounds a month had also dried up, leaving him even more destitute than usual.

  There is no indication that Sydney and Violet saw, spoke to, or wrote to the Eliots again until mid-April 1925. The Schiffs’ letter resuming the correspondence is missing, but it is evident from Eliot’s response that Sydney and Violet had invited the Eliots to visit them. Eliot said they couldn’t come without explaining why and added that “it is hopeless to try to explain what things have been and what they are, until we meet,” suggesting that a lot of time had passed since they had been in touch and that there was a lot to talk about.

  During the five months since the fiasco over Lewis’s debts, Sydney and Violet had kept busy finishing still another volume of his ever-expanding fictional autobiography. This one was called Myrtle and was mostly about Violet, not Sydney, although Richard Kurt appears as a character. Each chapter portrays Violet in the context of her relationship with a person who was or might have been important in her life. Although the Eliot-Schiff relationship had cooled considerably, Sydney had sent Eliot a copy, probably hoping it would be reviewed in the Criterion. Eliot noted that he had received the book but had not had a chance to read it and then displayed his not inconsiderable capacity for disingenuousness: “I don’t know when I shall be able to read Myrtle—but Vivienne has told me something about it, and anything she says in praise of a book is worthwhile, because it is always definite—the only kind of praise worth having, in my opinion.”

  It is impossible to tell from the way Eliot constructed his sentence whether Vivienne had anything at all to say in praise of the book, but it would be unfair to Eliot to think the sentence had been haphazardly constructed. There is no doubt, however, that Eliot did not tell Sydney that Vivienne’s less-than-flattering review of Myrtle was about to appear in the April issue of the Criterion. The review, signed “F.M.,” the initials of Feiron Morris—one of several pseudonyms Vivienne used when writing for the journal so that Lady Rothermere would pay her for the reviews—began with praise for Sydney’s ability to saturate the reader in a particular atmosphere. But she quickly homed in and elaborated on what she saw as a glaring and, judging from her tone, fatal flaw in the book. The problem with Myrtle, she wrote in a gently mocking voice, “is that one cannot find Myrtle, and one is worried by looking for her all the time.… The result is a collection of character studies of somewhat uninteresting and unsavory persons. But, as one peers between the figures, hoping to catch sight of the supremely interesting figure of Myrtle, around which this odd assemblage is hung, one is perpetually baffled. Where is Myrtle?”

  There is no record of how Sydney felt about Vivienne’s review at the time, or whether he responded to it, but years later in his essay for Ten Contemporaries he explained that Myrtle was a failed effort to portray the woman Richard loved through the consciousness of nine different individuals. He said that as a result of his faulty technique Myrtle’s vitality failed to emerge. His ego having been reconstituted by Violet, Sydney was rarely if ever defensive about his writing. In the same essay he disparaged Tony, calling it an unsuccessful experiment in technique. He said he was without ambition (for literary recognition presumably) and wrote only to understand himself. And should there be any doubt that A True Story was autobiographical, he wrote, “I have for long been living that novel and I am still living it.” His work was narrowly conceived, he almost always knew when he had failed to meet his goals, and he had few if any inhibitions about acknowledging his shortcomings, so it seems unlikely he would have resented or perhaps even disagreed with Vivienne’s review.

  Eliot wrote again two days later, this time to Violet, making two things clear: that he was increasing
ly preoccupied with Vivienne’s health, which together with work at the bank and on the Criterion was exhausting him, and that he was eager to repair relations with the Schiffs. How much of the latter had to do with Vivienne’s health and her wishes to see them was unexpressed, but implicit—a lot. After another catalog of her most recent ailments, Eliot took note of a warm letter from Violet to Vivienne and said, “We must meet (tell S.) when you come back. I think of you often.” After signing off as “Yrs affectionately, Tom,” Eliot asked, more as a wish than a question, “Should we have more charades next winter?” This was still another indication that Vivienne, who enjoyed the games at the Schiffs’, and was better at them than her husband, was his current priority. He knew Sydney and Violet were favorites of Vivienne’s and probably believed that bringing her together with them could ease his life as well as hers.

  During much of the next two months the Schiffs appear to have been away from London, either at Lye Green in Buckinghamshire or at their house in Roquebrune. For whatever reason, they did not write to the Eliots during this period, which led to a terse letter, not to Sydney but to Violet, that could only have been designed to induce guilt. “My dear Violet,” Eliot wrote, “why do V and I never hear from either of you? How are you? V’s new treatment continues, but will be very hard and very long. She was just on the verge of paralysis of the intestine and some terrible functional liver trouble. The doctor said he had never seen so bad a liver on a woman, or an intestine so nearly dead. I am sure she would like to hear from you. Ever aff, Tom.” Given Eliot’s sensitivity to social forms, it is unlikely his failure to say that he too would like to hear from Violet or Sydney was an oversight.

  The Schiffs’ correspondence with the Eliots was now petering out, but the last letters exchanged during this period were poignant and revealing. Violet wrote to Eliot sometime between June 17 and September 8, 1925. The letter is lost, but it prompted a long, sensitive response from Eliot on Vivienne’s gifts and her grit. However difficult their marriage had been, she had qualities he admired and in his way he cared for her and about her. He also cared for and admired Violet and believed the two women were “professional,” that they had much more in common than their at times similar medical complaints. He wrote that Vivienne had three means of artistic expression, all of which came more naturally to her than writing—painting, music, and dance—and all of which were thwarted by physical disabilities. This was background to his main point, which was that by “pure force of character” she had made herself a writer. Then he addressed himself to Violet, whom he pronounced definitively was “essentially a singer.” She apparently was giving singing lessons at the time because Eliot asked her forgiveness for saying that training others was not enough for someone of her ability. “You will,” he wrote, “I hope and believe, find some other direct means of expressing yourself—like Vivienne—in some other art or profession.”