Sydney and Violet Read online

  4 In her memoir, Lady Ottoline: Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1915–1918, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 129.

  5 But according to Miranda: Seymour, Ottoline Morrell, 2.

  CHAPTER 1: SYDNEY’S TRAVELS

  1 In any event, he packed up: By what means and over exactly what period of time he traveled is unknown.

  2 She had been diagnosed: Sydney’s sister Rose Morley said in a letter to Theophilus E. M. Boll that it was valve disease, but there is no other confirmation. All cited source material from Rose Morley is in the Theophilus E. M. Boll Papers (Collection 2088), Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles (hereafter cited as Boll Papers).

  3 Alfred and Carrie, as all who knew her: Ibid.

  4 They then lived in it: Since the only detailed accounts of their life on the lake are in Richard Kurt and Elinor Colhouse, two volumes of A True Story, silence might seem the prudent choice at this point. But precisely because the fictionalized but loosely autobiographical version of this sad stretch of Sydney’s life is almost all there is, drawing on it here, with corrections where the few known facts vary from the fictional text, seems to me a risk worth taking.

  5 Marion later became: Rose Morley provided this information in a letter to Boll. Boll Papers.

  CHAPTER 2: FAMILIES

  1 He also sensed: Stephen Hudson, Myrtle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), 189.

  2 Their son, Leopold: All of the biographical information on Leopold Schiff comes from the Boll Papers and Boll’s biographical note in Richard, Myrtle and I (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962).

  3 But Sydney and his brother: This was the story told to Boll by Rose Morley.

  4 Sydney’s childhood is vividly described: Mann to Schiff, February 11, 1926, Boll Papers. Mann wrote that Prince Hempseed “is without doubt one of the best, truest and freshest boy stories in all English literature, and that means a great deal because England is the classical land of the Boy, and has the best Boys’ stories of the World. The history of young Richard Kurt claims kinship with everything that has been achieved in this sphere by the masters of the past in England, and it renews what they have done with every modern means—a thoroughly progressive and understanding psychology.”

  5 It seems likely they left Spain: All of the information on Orobio de Castro comes from Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  6 Orobio’s biographer, Yosef Kaplan: Ibid., 105.

  7 John Locke attended the debate: John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  8 John Simon was born: Biographical information on John Simon comes from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and the Jewish Encyclopedia, www.​jewish​encyclopedia.​com, 1906/2002.

  9 He was also active in Reform Judaism: Information about Charles Salaman is from the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2008, available at www.​jewish​virtual​library.​org.

  10 In 1858, the same year: Simon served as an assistant to county court judges, sometimes filling in for them.

  11 At Paderewski’s request: Frederick Beddington, The Rest of the Family (private edition, 1963), 10.

  12 The only physical description: The details of life at 21 Hyde Park Square and the description of the house are taken from Beddington, Rest of the Family.

  13 For twenty years she was: Violet was the best source for Sybil’s relationship with Puccini.

  14 Her first marriage to a cousin: This at least is how Stephen Hudson says it ended on page 70 of Myrtle.

  CHAPTER 3: THE MODERNIST WORLD

  1 In a letter to Proust: Philip Kolb, Correspondance générale de Marcel Proust, Vol. 19 (Paris: Plon, 1930–1936), 613.

  2 Violet’s twenty-three-year-old cousin: Based on an account provided by Dr. Stephen Kane, written by his mother, Irene, many years after these events. It is the youthful memory of a mature woman, but it is sensitive and detailed and provides a general sense of what the Schiffs’ home and lifestyle must have been like. It also epitomizes Sydney’s rather quaint notion of “simple tastes” and “objects without value.”

  3 According to the Times: This account of Marinetti’s London tour is adapted from Lawrence Rainey’s excellent book Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 28.

  4 He used characteristics: Somerset Maugham to Sydney Schiff, February 24, 1937, Boll Papers.

  5 He told Edward: Edward Beddington-Behrens, Look Back Look Forward (London: Macmillan, 1963), 60.

  CHAPTER 4: THE WAR YEARS

  1 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: Eliot had been working on “Prufrock” since 1910. It became his best-known poem after The Waste Land. Pound persuaded Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine, to publish it.

  2 On the strength of “Prufrock”: Vorticism is a subdivision of modernism that glorified the dynamism of the machine age. In this it was similar to futurism, but it differed in its mode of expression, which foreshadowed abstract expressionism. It began at the Rebel Art Centre, of which Lewis was a founder. Pound gave it its name.

  3 “Yor old Uncle Ezz”: Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 76.

  4 Years later Lewis described: Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 282.

  5 Lewis thought democracy: Ibid., 27.

  6 Without them, he wrote: Ibid., 273.

  7 He also accused: Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1950), 195–96.

  8 Ernest Hemingway once dismissed: Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 242.

  9 And Lewis was the only: Others they knew, including Isaac Rosenberg, the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzska, and T. E. Hulme, who wrote about the aesthetics of modernism, were killed in the war.

  10 “the ‘Bloomsburies’ were all doing war work”: Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 184.

  11 Sydney—once characterized: Mina Curtiss, Other People’s Letters: In Search of Proust (New York: Helen Marx Books/Books and Co., 2005), 26–27.

  12 Bloomsbury princeling-by-marriage: David Garnett was the son of Constance Garnett, translator of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels and the husband of Angelica Bell, whose mother, Vanessa Bell—Virginia Woolf’s sister—was married to the art critic Clive Bell. Angelica’s biological father was the painter Duncan Grant.

  13 “It is the only way to get an idea”: Schiff to Beddington-Behrens, July 16, 1916, Beddington-Behrens Collection, Imperial War Museum.

  14 Although they both attended: All of the letters in the following account are found in the Schiff Collection, Additional MSS. 52916–23, Department of Manuscripts, British Library, London (hereafter cited as the Schiff Collection). All citations to the collection refer to these volumes.

  15 “He was enthusiastic about my poems”: Quoted by Valerie Eliot from “a private paper, written in the sixties,” in the introduction to The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), xvii.

  16 There is a sense of ease: Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 1988), 141. Gordon attributes this in large part to the fact that both had wives who suffered from chronic illness, which might or might not have been responsible for the closeness of the two couples.

  17 It is also likely that Sydney: Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who became Vivienne Eliot, liked friends to spell her name “Vivien.” I use the legal spelling of her given name throughout except in quoted text.

  18 Accounts vary from one night: Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1915–1918, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 96.

  19 And in a letter to his mother: Eliot, Letter
s, Vol. 1, 400.

  20 “One result is that everyone”: Ibid., 411.

  21 He wrote that the game: Philip Kolb, Correspondance générale de Marcel Proust, Vol. 19 (Paris: Plon, 1930–1936), 478.

  22 During one of those evenings: Frederick Beddington, The Rest of the Family (private edition, 1963), 21–22.

  23 His only criticism: Eliot, Letters, Vol. 1, 319.

  24 “I see in R.K. a process”: Eliot to Schiff, July 25, 1919, Schiff Collection, 52918.

  25 But by then Sydney and Violet: The first letters were exchanged in April 1919.

  26 “For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces”: Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), 46.

  27 In Eliot’s letter expressing his appreciation: Eliot to Schiff, July 25, 1919, Schiff Collection, 52918.

  28 “My house is a decayed house”: Estaminet is French for a bistro or small café.

  29 “Art and Letters,” Read wrote: Herbert Read, Annals of Innocence and Experience (London: Faber & Faber, 1946), 178, quoted in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 1, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 503.

  30 “A cultured aristocracy”: T. S. Eliot, “Notes: The Function of a Literary Review,” Criterion, July 1923 (1), 421. The quote appears in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 1.

  CHAPTER 5: A VOLATILE RELATIONSHIP

  1 She had written caustically: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 3: 1919–1920, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 268n.

  2 But just before being picked up: Ibid., 274.

  3 “The door opened softly”: Stephen Hudson, “First Meetings with Katherine Mansfield,” Cornhill, Autumn 1958, 202–4.

  4 To which Sydney responded: Hudson, “First Meetings with Katherine,” 208.

  5 As soon as Mansfield got home: Mansfield, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 278.

  6 About the Schiffs she said: Ibid., 281. In a letter to Murry on April 14, 1920, Mansfield wrote that Sydney had her disease “so he exaggerates the care one ought to take.” There is no indication elsewhere that he had tuberculosis.

  7 And finally, in a letter to her husband: Ibid., 291.

  8 She also wrote to Murry: Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murry, October 24, 1920, Katherine Mansfield Society website, www.​katherinemans​field​society.​org/​24-​october/.

  9 “I have an old servant”: The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Vol. 2, ed. John Middleton Murry (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1929), 355.

  10 In an entry in her scrapbook: The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield, ed. John Middleton Murry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 244.

  11 “It shocks me,” she wrote: Mansfield, Letters, Vol. 2, 432.

  12 Despite Mansfield’s reservations: letter from James Joyce to Wyndham Lewis, April 4, 1922, box 138, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University.

  13 Nevertheless, Mansfield never really: John Middleton Murry to Sydney Schiff, January 15, 1922, 434. The ellipses in this paragraph are Mansfield’s.

  14 In December 1921: Mansfield, Letters, Vol. 2, 424.

  15 Although Lewis’s respected biographer: Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 128.

  16 After the lunch at the Schiffs’: Mansfield’s note to Lewis and his response, if there was one, have been lost.

  17 “I don’t see how”: Lewis to Sydney Schiff, September 7, 1922, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Cornell University. (Copy transcribed from holograph; original in the Schiff Collection.)

  CHAPTER 6: ANNUS MIRABILIS

  1 During this period he wrote to Sydney: Eliot to Schiff, April 20, 1922, Schiff Collection, 52918. Also, Eliot, Letters, Vol. 1, 522.

  2 He then added rather obscurely: Pound to Eliot, March 14, 1922, in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 408.

  3 The template said in part: The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 514.

  4 It sought thirty contributors: Carpenter, Serious Character, 409.

  5 Two weeks later he wrote: Eliot, Letters, Vol. 1, 555.

  6 “If it is stated so positively”: Ibid., 553.

  7 Vivienne was so moved: Carole Seymour Jones, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 346.

  8 Eliot wrote the same day: Eliot, Letters, Vol. 1, 582–84.

  9 He also told him: Ibid., 590.

  10 He responded to Pound: Ibid., 592.

  11 In at least one instance: The sketch was about adultery as practiced in three different cultures, American, English, and French, a subject about which Mansfield and her crowd had intimate knowledge. The English version is characterized by absurd digressions, including one about Fat Peggy (pronounced Piggy) Trevelyan, “the fattest damn woman in London,” a description repeated over and over again in ever more extravagant language.

  12 Years later Lewis recounted: Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 237–38.

  13 Four years later Sydney: Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 237–67.

  14 But having given the matter further thought: Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1950), 163.

  CHAPTER 7: A FRIENDSHIP IN LETTERS I

  1 Here were two people: Excerpts from Proust’s letters in chapters 7 and 8 are all from Philip Kolb, Correspondance générale de Marcel Proust, Vols. 18–21 (Paris: Plon, 1930–1936); all translations are mine. I provide endnotes for individual letters only when I think it is useful.

  2 Sydney went on to say Swann: Proust based Swann mainly on his friend the elegant, Jewish, socially sought-after Charles Haas, son of a stockbroker, as was Swann, but added a touch of erudition from Charles Ephrussi, a wealthy son of Jewish grain traders from Odessa and founder of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.

  3 “The strange enchantments”: Violet Schiff, “A Night with Proust,” London Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 9, September 1956, 20–22.

  4 At daybreak Odilon: William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 725. Carter’s source is Paul Morand, Le Visiteur du soir (Geneva: La Palatine, 1949).

  5 Swann would become a “dreyfusard”: “Dreyfusard” was the name given to supporters of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who was falsely accused of passing secrets to the Germans and sentenced to life in prison in January 1895. He was released from prison in September 1899 but not fully exonerated until July 1906.

  6 And Joseph Conrad, a godfather: Author’s note, Under Western Eyes (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1925).

  7 He called Richard, Myrtle and I “unsatisfactory”: John Gawsworth, Ten Contemporaries: Notes Toward Their Definitive Bibliography (London: E. Benn, 1932), 99.

  8 “Looking for an explanation”: Kolb, Correspondance générale, Vol. 19, 423.

  9 Proust told him rather gently: Ibid., 435.

  10 And he added with exaggerated politeness: Ibid., 478.

  CHAPTER 8: A FRIENDSHIP IN LETTERS II

  1 When the boy came back: Mortimer Leo Schiff was a partner in the New York investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company.

  2 “Thursday evening we are going”: Only three of the four were Russian: Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty and Borodin’s Prince Igor. The other was Schumann’s Carnaval.

  3 “supper at the Hotel Majestic”: With a few minor exceptions, no details of the dinner are known by anyone today because no one who attended, including perhaps the two greatest prose writers of the twentieth century, thought it interesting enough to chronicle. This would have seemed especially odd in the case of Proust, whose novel contains several fictionalized accounts of glittering social occasions, if not for the fact that he was in a race wi
th death to finish In Search of Lost Time. As for Joyce, he provided different verbal accounts to different friends, in each case exercising novelistic license and Irish wit and possibly under the influence, but he wrote nothing down himself. As far as I can tell, no one else thought to re-create the Schiffs’ magnum opus in prose until 2006, when Richard Davenport-Hines did it charmingly in A Night at the Majestic. By then, though, there were just tantalizing tidbits of reliable information to go on, which led Davenport-Hines to make educated guesses based on what he knew about Sydney’s and Violet’s likes and dislikes and the tastes of the times to create what had to be an impressionistic picture. And all anyone can do now to re-create the scene and the mood of the soiree of the century, even with the benefit of Davenport-Hines’s valuable research, is to once again assemble the minimal facts and memory fragments, some of which are ambiguous and others contradictory, and to make judicious suppositions. But in an effort not to further blur the boundary between fact and fiction, I’ve tried to capture the spirit of that extraordinary gathering while pointing out some of the semi-apocryphal tales that have distorted its memory.

  4 He also remembered meeting Proust: Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 77.

  5 Stravinsky learned afterwards: Ibid., 77.

  6 Joyce actually had read: In a letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce wrote, “I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic.” Cited in William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 777. And in his notebook, he wrote, “Proust shows life as analytical and immobile. The reader finishes his sentences before he does.” Cited in Jean-Yves Tadie, Marcel Proust: A Life (New York: Viking, 2000), 765.

  7 In the absence of any written comments: Clive Bell, Proust (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), 13.