Sydney and Violet Read online

  Finally, perhaps feeling he might have come across as condescending, Eliot addressed his own career self-deprecatingly by saying, “I am not sure … that I have not been forced into poetry by my weakness in other directions—that there is not something else that I want.… The admission of this fact may help you to admit that I understand in part the tragedy of others.”

  During 1925 the Schiff-Eliot correspondence continued to dwindle, but the couples were still meeting socially at the Schiffs’, once again together with Lewis. “I was often with Mr. Eliot at the Schiffs” during that period, Lewis wrote in a rare unmannered, unaffected comment, “in … a household where we were very much spoiled by our hosts, for my part for the last time I saw Mr. Eliot in a mood that was very young. There he would read his latest work.” This was the only mention of the Schiffs by name in either of Lewis’s two autobiographies.

  Although they had heard nothing from Eliot for some time, on December 16 the Schiffs received a desperate-sounding letter from Vivienne from the Stansborough Park Sanitarium, a so-called “hydrotherapeutic health institution” in Watford, Hertfordshire, about twenty miles from central London. In late October Eliot, who said he had reached his outer limit in trying to cope with her illness, had deposited her there. He then went off for a little rest and recreation at La Turbie, not far from the Schiffs’ house in Roquebrune, but perhaps more relevantly near Monte Carlo, where his friends from the Ballets Russes were in summer residence. Before leaving he had made various efforts to find someone who could help Vivienne but apparently got nothing but bad advice. Leonard Woolf had recommended a doctor named Sir Henry Head but probably hadn’t told Eliot that Virginia had tried to commit suicide after a session with Head in 1913. Eliot rejected Head on grounds that his treatments were not up to date and he didn’t like his manner.

  Vivienne, who was obviously distraught, first wrote to Ezra Pound pleading for him to ask Eliot to “rescue” her, but Pound demurred. Eliot joined Pound in Rapallo soon thereafter and Vivienne remained incarcerated. Finally she wrote to Sydney and Violet: “I have always looked upon you as friends. Am I right? I am in very great difficulty, and in a most lonely and precarious situation. I do not know what to do, and I can think of no people who could advise me better than yourselves.” She begged them to come by car to visit her and to ask the matron “if you may take me out for a short drive and then return me.” She warned them not to be upset by her looks. “I look worse than I am,” she said. “This is chiefly worry and fear and torment.… I am going quite gray. Do help me. Do write and then do come.”

  Sydney and Violet responded promptly to Vivienne’s plea for help, and after seeing her they sent Eliot a copy of her letter and told him they found her less agitated than the letter indicated. By the end of their visit, they wrote, she “became perfectly reasonable.” The Schiffs said Vivienne attributed most of her troubles to years of taking chloral hydrate, a popular sedative and hypnotic drug that was overused and often misprescribed at the time. The exact nature of her illness, though, was never adequately diagnosed. Whatever the reasons for Vivienne’s state of mind, her stay at the Stansborough might accurately be called the beginning of the end of a marriage that was doomed from the start. Her life with Eliot was certainly no easier than his was with her. Very likely it was more difficult because of her mental fragility. Over the next seven years she had affairs, contemplated leaving Eliot, and was in and out of sanitariums, sometimes with him and sometimes without him, until finally, in 1933, he left her. In 1937, after being found wandering the streets at 5 a.m. in an incoherent state, she was committed to a mental institution. She died there on January 22, 1947.

  CHAPTER 10

  NEW FRIENDS

  Sometime in 1923—it might have been when the Schiffs moved from Eastbourne to Lye Green, disappointing the Eliots—a potentially unsettling transformation in their lives slowly began unfolding. There is no telling when they noticed it or how much they were discomfited by it. But by the end of 1925 the friends around whom their social life had revolved were gone, almost as if they’d never existed. Proust was dead and the Eliots and Lewis might as well have been. They neither saw nor talked nor wrote to one another. Eliot no longer asked Sydney to contribute to the Criterion, and the Criterion no longer reviewed his books. And Vivienne no longer sought Violet’s companionship or empathy.

  Exactly why this came to pass is unclear. Perhaps Sydney’s behavior in the episode of Lewis’s finances, or the way he acted over the publication of the second Apes of God excerpt, never stopped irritating Eliot. Irritation exacerbated by a debilitating combination of work and taking care of Vivienne easily could have turned to ire. Eliot had nothing to say about it, though, and what Sydney had to say was not illuminating. He told his friend Edwin Muir, “Of Eliot I have seen nothing. Our intercourse came abruptly to an end as a result of certain happenings about which I prefer not to write.” As for Lewis, the money incident almost certainly enraged him at first and grated on him afterwards. He might also have correctly concluded that Sydney was no longer a reliable and inexhaustible source of cash. Sydney, however, was no more enlightening about this breakup: “Of Lewis too I hear nothing,” he told Muir. “I see nobody who sees him and cannot imagine who his associates are.”

  As disconcerting as it might have been, though, this turn of events hardly left the Schiffs bereft of friends. In the years between 1925 and 1930 social life in Cambridge Square and Lye Green continued to flourish. Some old friends like the painter John Nash, whose work they collected, continued to come, formerly infrequent visitors came more often, and some new names were added to the guest list. Nash helped them when they were looking for a new house to buy in the country, and when they settled on the one in Lye Green he took charge of relandscaping the property, a well-intended gesture that led to a certain amount of acrimony. Sydney, it seems, nagged Nash and asked more of him than he thought proper, which annoyed him considerably, but not enough to sever the relationship. Nash was fully aware that Sydney was his benefactor as well as the beneficiary of his gardening services. He continued to visit the Schiffs often, kept up a correspondence when they were apart, and executed a series of wood engravings for Celeste and Other Sketches, a book published in 1930.

  Sydney and Violet’s intellectually satisfying friendship with Sydney Waterlow, a diplomat, university lecturer, and literary critic well known in Bayswater circles, also ripened toward the beginning of 1925. Waterlow was a counselor in the Foreign Office and later served as British ambassador to Thailand, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, and Greece. He reviewed books in respected journals and published articles under the name John Franklin, and if T. S. Eliot is to be believed, he subsisted entirely on fruit and omelets. He wrote to Sydney Schiff on October 3, 1924, to thank him for his favorable comments on an article he had written about D. H. Lawrence. He also asked him to please not disclose that he was John Franklin. Waterlow suggested that he and the Schiffs meet for dinner soon, which they did at the Schiffs’ four days later. And judging from a remarkably self-revelatory letter Sydney wrote to Waterlow the next day, they must have discussed A True Story ad nauseam that evening.

  Sydney was afraid that Waterlow might not have understood what he was trying to get across and offered an odd, but very Sydney-like explanation:

  In reviewing in my mind our talk of last night I told you that unless my novel (I include in the word novel all the six books, including the last one which is not yet published) is the most significant one known to me, published in England in the last 25 years, it has failed. But I omitted to tell you that I spoke with such boldness and confidence about it because I do not feel that I am myself entitled to any self-complacency on that account.… I feel, and have always felt in the course of writing these books, that I have been merely an instrument in the writing of them.… Repeatedly in the course of writing these six books I have had the experience that ideas present themselves to me without conscious volition on my part and even whole sentences came into my mind already formed an
d ready to be written down. You will therefore, understand that in assessing the book as highly as I do I am moved by no personal vanity whatever.

  It is hard to imagine that Sydney thought the creative success or failure of his book should rest solely on a comparison with other books published in England over the preceding twenty-five years. This would have been inconsistent with his conception of truth as his sole criterion for success. And he must have been aware that quite apart from the “spiritual” phenomenon called automatic writing, evocative sentences, stunning images, and rhapsodic phrases sometimes materialized fully formed in the imagination of creative artists. It also seems unlikely that he believed responsibility for the book belonged to a spectral third party. That would, of course, dispose of any doubts about his personal vanity, or rather his lack of it. But it might also make one wonder whether he was playing with a full deck.

  Waterlow wrote to Sydney again a month later and enclosed the copies of reviews and articles by Edwin Muir he had borrowed. These almost certainly included Muir’s very positive review of Prince Hempseed that ran in the Freeman. Around that time Sydney and Muir, who was destined to become one of the most respected critics of the era, began a regular correspondence and exchanged copies of their work. Sydney sent Muir copies of Tony, Elinor Colhouse, and Richard Kurt, and Muir sent Sydney copies of his poems and asked for his critical opinion. He also hinted that he would appreciate any help Sydney could give him in getting them published.

  Muir was always flattering in his letters. He wrote to Sydney that “in all your books you avoid exploiting every possibility of your subject matter, that you strive to select what is typical, and this is a virtue, for it gives your narrative its weight, its authority, and makes it organic as no other writing of the present day is.” But he could be critical as well. In May 1924 he wrote bluntly that as “pure writing” Prince Hempseed and Tony delighted him, but Richard Kurt “did not.” He did, however, take out the sting by adding that “by its truth and seriousness the book is a magnificent one.” The rest of the letter was devoted to complaints about health, finances, and other distractions. Like Eliot, Muir needed to work in an office to eat, which drained his energy and cut into his writing time.

  Muir wrote again on June 17, and that letter suggested the relationship Sydney was beginning to form with him would be satisfying in a totally different way from the ones he once had with Proust, Eliot, and Lewis. Muir noted that at thirty-seven he was about twenty years younger than Sydney, which, he said, made him feel better about his relatively small literary output and lack of success. In other words, for the first time, Sydney—who was also much older than the better-known Eliot and Lewis—was the recognized writer eagerly sought after by an admiring tyro. That would have further pumped up his ego, which apparently was already on steroids from Violet’s injections, and which might have been enough to sustain a relationship for a while. But eventually there would have to be more, and there was. Muir was intelligent, genuinely liked Sydney’s work, and was beginning to make a name for himself as a critic and poet, all of which indicated good prospects for an intellectually rewarding, relatively trouble-free, and mutually profitable friendship.

  In early July of 1924 the Muirs passed through London on their way to Scotland. They went to the French Institute to see their old friend Denis Saurat, who ran it, and found an invitation from the Schiffs waiting for them. Muir wrote to say he and Willa could visit the Schiffs at Lye Green for a couple of days beginning on July 15 or 16. He added that he was glad “there will be no ceremony because we are both rather shy people.” After accepting the Schiffs’ invitation Muir returned to the subject that dominated their correspondence, books. Perhaps in response to Sydney’s suggestion that the Muirs read the German novelist and playwright Fritz von Unruh, Muir recommended that the Schiffs read the great German Romantic poet Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, whose work the Muirs introduced to the English-speaking public through their translations, as they did the works of Franz Kafka.

  From the moment they arrived the Muirs were charmed by the older Schiffs, who received them warmly. And as the visit progressed they were dazzled by their sophistication and especially by talk of their circle of eminent literary friends and acquaintances past and present. Willa Muir thought she and Edwin must have seemed “very unfinished” to the Schiffs, but Sydney and Violet quickly made both Muirs feel comfortable. Willa was particularly pleased at the way Edwin and Sydney got along. They “lit each other up,” she said. “I marveled at the passion driving each of them as they discussed the making of works of art.… They were both agreed on the need to detach oneself from emotion, and here I could not follow them, for I could never detach myself from my emotions.… But I was exhilarated by the invisible fireworks they were setting off.”

  Willa found Violet a calming and steadying influence. She thought she was poised and beautiful, a woman with far-seeing eyes. She told Edwin that Sydney’s eyes “looked as if they feared to be hurt, so that I felt I had to be kind to him, but Violet’s eyes made me nurse the hope that she would be kind to me.” Willa, who admired Violet greatly, was also like her in important ways, a similarity exemplified by what she read in both their eyes. She instantly recognized Sydney’s vulnerability and defensiveness as Violet had and Violet’s toughness and unassertive self-confidence, which she shared.

  After the Muirs left Lye Green, Edwin had a plethora of ideas, which he attributed partly to his conversations with Sydney, about the volume of literary essays he was beginning to write. It would be a series of studies of contemporary writers in relation to the transitional age in which they were living.

  From mid-July through late September letters were exchanged frequently and most of the content was literary. In a letter from Scotland, for example, Muir discoursed on the importance of clarity in literature, noting dryly that he didn’t think Joyce had “succeeded perfectly” in achieving it. In another letter Muir suggested with neither noticeable resentment nor gratitude that Sydney had completely rewritten an article he had sent him on Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Viennese poet and playwright who also wrote librettos for several Richard Strauss operas, including Der Rosenkavalier.

  Muir’s letters until then, as well as Sydney’s, had grown progressively warmer and more open, but in Muir’s next one it became obvious that the relationship had attained real intimacy. He thanked the Schiffs for their efforts in trying to find a cottage for Willa and him somewhere near them. He also alluded to a book of criticism he was working on. This was a clear reference to the volume that would eventually be called Transition, a series of nine essays on living writers whose work Muir believed would still be read generations later. He told Sydney he would include Stephen Hudson in the book, which he did, along with Joyce, Eliot, Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, among others. The most interesting thing about this letter, however, was the way Muir ended it: “All good wishes for the novel from us both, as well as our love to its joint creators.” With very few exceptions only those who knew the Schiffs well knew that Sydney was Stephen Hudson, and only those few who knew them very well were aware that Violet was his collaborator. The Muirs and the Schiffs had become close friends by then, and as with the Schiffs’ relationship with the Eliots it was a true couples friendship.

  The link between Sydney and Edwin was close, but the one between Violet and Willa was even closer. They both were formidably intelligent women, but they also were temperamentally in tune with one another. Willa was described by those who knew her as “gay, caustic, brave, forthright, intellectual and fun to be with,” a description that in the main applied to Violet as well and that suggests their bond transcended the purely intellectual. Perhaps the most persuasive indication of how close Willa felt to Violet emerged early on from a prescient manuscript she sent her for criticism sometime late in 1924. It was a long essay scheduled to be issued the following year in a distinguished series published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Other authors in the series included
Eliot, Herbert Read, Robert Graves, Roger Fry, Edith Sitwell, and both Woolfs. The essay was titled Women: An Inquiry. It was a groundbreaking work and it was dedicated to Violet, who read it carefully and sent her comments to Willa.

  After absorbing Violet’s response, which she found positive and constructive except for her objection to Willa’s calling housewifery “relatively unimportant,” Willa wrote to express her appreciation. She characterized Violet as “a woman with a genius for womanhood” and then surprisingly asserted that the essay was not only dedicated to her but was largely modeled on her. Despite their relatively short acquaintance, Muir must have thought she knew Violet well enough to draw inferences from her about the essential nature of women in general. Alternatively, she might have found in Violet confirmation of her previously held views on the essential nature of women. In either case important parts of the forty-page essay seem consistent enough with what is known about Violet to make Muir’s claim credible. The deeper value of her essay, though, is that it is replete with insights on a lingering and conflicted issue, many of which are as relevant today as they were in her day.