Sydney and Violet Read online

  8 secondhand accounts of the Joyce-Proust meeting: Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959), 151–52; Ford Madox Ford, It Was the Nightingale (New York: Octagon Books, 1975), 293–94.

  9 “Two stiff chairs were obtained”: In the original some of Proust’s remarks were in French. The translations are mine.

  10 apparently a guarded reference: Carter, Marcel Proust, 780.

  11 She said Proust was violently opposed: Claude Francis, Fernande Gontier, and Suzy Mante-Proust, Marcel Proust et les siens: Suivi des souvenirs de Suzy Mante Proust (Paris: Plon, 1981), 164.

  12 “My letter would no longer be”: The translation of the Proust paragraph and the explanation of why Proust cited the Mallarmé poem are the work of Christophe Wall-Romana, a poet and associate professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota.

  13 Here Proust misquotes: The poem, “Futile Petition” in English, has been set to music by both Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy.

  14 second line of Shakespeare’s sonnet number 30: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.”

  15 And if Beerbohm shared: Schiff to Beerbohm, letter no. 3, Beerbohm Collection.

  16 He told Sydney he was ill: Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 341.

  17 “Read the praise”: L’Action Française was the publication of the royalist, anti-Semitic organization of the same name. Charles Maurras, who was admired by Eliot and Lewis, among others in England, was its chief ideologist. Léon Daudet, son of the novelist Alphonse Daudet, was a writer/journalist who shared Maurras’s views on Jews and government.

  CHAPTER 9: A FALLING-OUT

  1 “Ever since I saw you last”: The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–25, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 68.

  2 “liked very much to meet Beerbohm”: Ibid., 98–99.

  3 Eliot then not too subtly: Ibid., 329.

  4 “As you know, I have read”: Ibid., 355.

  5 “In Proust,” he wrote: Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), 265.

  6 Years later he described: Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), 137.

  7 Without explaining why: Schiff to Muir, April 2, 1924, Schiff Collection, 52920.

  8 “The most striking thing”: Muir to Schiff, April 15, 1924, Schiff Collection, 52920.

  9 “This armed and menacing meeting”: Eliot, Letters, Vol. 2, 411.

  10 She added with a trace of glee: Ibid., 392.

  11 Although “Apes ID”: Ibid., 412n4.

  12 He made the egregious mistake: Ibid., 535.

  13 Things had come to a head: Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 255–57.

  14 Eliot noted that he had received: Eliot, Letters, Vol. 2, 619.

  15 less-than-flattering review of Myrtle: Criterion 3, no. 11 (April 1925): 475–76.

  16 Eliot asked, more as a wish: Eliot, Letters, Vol. 2, 633.

  17 “My dear Violet,” Eliot wrote: Ibid., 680.

  18 Violet wrote to Eliot sometime between: Ibid., 740–41.

  19 Eliot addressed his own career: Ibid.

  20 “I was often with Mr. Eliot”: Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 287.

  21 Finally she wrote to Sydney and Violet: Eliot, Letters, Vol. 2, 800.

  22 Sydney and Violet responded promptly: For this account of Vivienne Eliot’s stay at the Stansborough Park Sanitarium through her death, I have relied on various sources that sometimes were in conflict. These included the Schiff letters in the British Library, Lyndall Gordon’s biography of Eliot, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 1999), T. S. Eliot: A Life by Peter Ackroyd (London: Penguin, 1984), and Carole Seymour Jones’s Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot (New York: Anchor Books, 2003). Of the three books, Painted Shadow provided the most comprehensive and best-documented account.

  CHAPTER 10: NEW FRIENDS

  1 He told his friend: Schiff to Muir, November 2, 1926, Schiff Collection, 52920.

  2 Sydney, however, was no more enlightening: Ibid.

  3 Sydney was afraid: Schiff to Waterlow, October 8, 1925, Schiff Collection, 52922.

  4 “In reviewing in my mind”: The last book he referred to was Richard, Myrtle and I.

  5 Willa was particularly pleased: Willa Muir, Belonging: A Memoir (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), 112–13.

  6 After the Muirs left: Ibid.

  7 Willa was described: J. B. Pick in his introduction to Imagined Corners, a novel by Willa Muir (Edinburgh: Cannongate Classics, 1987), vii.

  8 “In a State where men are dominant”: She relies for this claim on The Dominant Sex by Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Geo. Allen & Unwin, 1923).

  9 Muir wrote to Sydney: Muir had read the 1918 version of Tarr, which Lewis later acknowledged was flawed. He revised the book in 1928.

  10 Sometime in mid-1925: Muir, Belonging, 120–21.

  11 “About Lewis I have never”: Muir to Schiff, May 8, 1925, Schiff Collection, 52920.

  12 He softened the blow: Muir to Schiff, June 23, 1926, Schiff Collection, 52920.

  13 hotel had a dancing instructor: Schiff to Muir, November 11, 1926, Schiff Collection, 52920.

  14 “a brilliant and decisive piece of work”: Muir to Schiff, April 19, 1927, Schiff Collection, 52920.

  15 Edith Sitwell, with whom the Schiffs: Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell (New York: Atheneum, 1965).

  16 “The cruelties,” he wrote: Ellipsis in original.

  17 Huxley had visited the Schiffs: Huxley to Schiff, May 6, 1930, in Aldous Huxley, Exhumations: Correspondance inédite avec Sydney Schiff (1925–1937), ed. Clémentine Robert (Paris: Didier, 1976), 64–67. The letters cited below are from the same source.

  18 Sydney and Violet studied: Ibid., June 19, 1930, 67–69.

  19 Huxley wrote again in December: Ibid., January 5, 1931, 71.

  20 a novel about the future: Ibid., May 7, 1931, 72.

  21 He said he hoped Sydney’s shingles: Ibid., June 21, 1931, 73.

  22 One interesting if minor: Ibid., November 3, 1932, 75.

  23 “Our voyage was pleasant”: Ibid., February 19, 1933, 36.

  24 The last letter from Huxley: Ibid., March 17, 1937, 78.

  CHAPTER 11: THE APES OF GOD AND MODERNIST SATIRE

  1 What’s more, Lewis, whose forte: Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1932), 450.

  2 The easy answer is: Edith and her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, all of whom were rich and all of whom wrote, were satirized in The Apes of God.

  3 Edith Sitwell responded: Edith Sitwell, I Live Under a Black Sun (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 183–4.

  4 After reading it Wilde wrote: Julie Speedie, Wonderful Sphinx (London: Virago Press, 1993), 66–7.

  5 Robbie Ross and Reggie Turner: There are many accounts of the Wilde trials, but the one to which I am most indebted was written by Douglas O. Linder and posted on the Web under the title “The Trials of Oscar Wilde: An Account,” papers.​ssrn.​com/​sol3/​papers.​cfm?​abstract_​id=​1023971.

  6 “America, Germany, all the Continent”: This account of Wilde’s stay with the Leversons and his relationship with Ada is taken from “Reminiscences” by Ada Leverson, which originally appeared in Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde, published in a limited edition by Duckworth. It was reprinted in Violet Wyndham, The Sphinx and Her Circle (New York: Vanguard Press, 1963), 115–18.

  7 These books have more in common: They often referred to Leverson as “a woman of the nineties,” indicating that they considered her more Victorian than modern.

  8 The Apes of God broke sharply: Others outside the Bloomsbury and Bayswater circles who indulged in skewering their friends included Hemingway, Sco
tt Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson.

  9 the transparently false claim: Richard Aldington to Sydney Schiff, June 8, 1931, Schiff Collection, 52916.

  10 A year later, however: Ibid.

  11 Lewis was so angered: Wyndham Lewis, Satire and Fiction: Enemy Pamphlets No. 1 (London: Arthur Press, 1930), 28–29. In an undated letter Wells wrote that “The Apes of God amused me greatly in places.” Yeats, in a letter that was also undated, appeared to compare Lewis favorably to Pirandello and Swift, but in each case on close reading it is not clear that he is really doing so. Here are the quotations: “Your work, like that of Pirandello, who alone of living dramatists has unexhausted, important material, portrays the transition from individualism to universal plasticity, though your theme is not, like his, plasticity itself, but the attempted substitution for it of ghastly homunculi in bottles”; “When I read [Edith Sitwell’s] Gold Coast Customs a year ago, I felt, as on the first reading of The Apes of God, that something absent from all literature for a generation was back again, and in a form rare in the literature of all generations, passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom. We had it in one man once. He lies in St. Patrick’s now under the greatest epitaph in history.” (The man referred to is Jonathan Swift.)

  12 Although the scholar Robert T. Chapman: “Satire and Aesthetics in Wyndham Lewis’ The Apes of God,” Contemporary Literature 12, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 133–45.

  13 The critic John Gawsworth: Apes, Japes and Hitlerism (London: Unicorn Press, 1932), 30.

  14 Most people when looking: Lewis objected to the overall conception of Proust’s novel but respected his gift for characterization.

  15 “Is it really”: Wyndham Lewis to Sydney Schiff, May 21, 1933, Schiff Collection, 52919.

  CHAPTER 12: VIOLET ALONE

  1 On a summer’s day: Edward Beddington-Behrens, Look Back Look Forward (London: Macmillan, 1963), 123.

  2 He added, rather too self-deprecatingly: Sydney Schiff to Beerbohm, August 8, 1939, letter no. 21, Beerbohm Collection.

  3 noted with just a soupçon of irony: Beerbohm to Sydney Schiff, March 13, 1939, letter no. 16, Beerbohm Collection.

  4 Sydney, who had no gift: Sydney Schiff to Beerbohm, May 15, 1939, letter no. 17, Beerbohm Collection.

  5 One written by Max: Beerbohm to Violet Schiff, Nov. 14, 1939, letter no. 10, Beerbohm Collection.

  6 There is no record: Beerbohm to Violet Schiff, undated, letter no. 56, Beerbohm Collection (probably written in 1951).

  7 “We do so hope Stella”: Beerbohm to Violet Schiff, June 22, 1945, letter no. 36, Beerbohm Collection.

  8 Although they were not in touch: Violet Schiff to Jack Isaacs, Schiff Collection, 52918.

  9 Beddington-Behrens quickly arranged: Hove is a coastal town administratively unified with Brighton.

  10 Violet wrote to Richard Aldington: Violet Schiff to Richard Aldington, February 1, 1949, Schiff Collection, 52916.

  11 Her last words: Violet Schiff to Max Beerbohm, Nov. 1, 1944, letter no. 30, Beerbohm Collection.

  12 In December, although they had been: T. S. Eliot to Violet Schiff, Dec. 10, 1944, Schiff Collection, 52918.

  13 Violet told Mosco Carner: Mosco Carner, Puccini: A Critical Biography (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1958), 140.

  14 Three days after his death: Julian Fane, Memoir in the Middle of the Journey (London: Hamish Hamilton & St. George’s Press, 1971), 52.

  15 a ten- or eleven-year period: Ibid., 53.

  16 She told him she really couldn’t: Frederick Beddington, The Rest of the Family (private edition, 1963), 20.

  17 In December 1953: Violet Schiff to Max Beerbohm, Dec. 23, 1953, letter no. 87, Beerbohm Collection.

  18 Young Fane saw himself: Fane, Memoir, 22.

  19 Violet was reclining: Ibid., 49.

  20 She always found her: Telephone interview with Evelyn Richardson, stepdaughter of Edward Beddington-Behrens, June 11, 2012.

  21 Fane, who couldn’t take his eyes: Fane, Memoir, 49.

  22 “a ghastly old heartless bag”: Serge Beddington-Behrens, e-mail to author, April 2012.

  23 Violet would have been: Stephen Kane shared this recollection with me in a telephone conversation.

  24 “The front door was fitted”: Fane, Memoir, 52–53.

  25 She missed Sydney terribly: Ibid.

  26 In his letter of thanks: Eliot to Violet, Jan. 14, 1948, Schiff Collection, 52918.

  27 Despite her bad back: The books were Marie Donadieu by Charles-Louis Philippe (with Esme Cook), Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel by Raymond Radiguet, and L’Échelle de soie by Jean-Louis Curtis (with Edward Beddington-Behrens).

  28 a not-unrelated summing up: Fane, Memoir, 57.

  29 “I found ‘Aunt Violet’ ”: Serge Beddington-Behrens, e-mail to author, March 8, 2012.

  30 Reflecting the not entirely: Serge Beddington-Behrens, e-mail to author, April 2012.

  31 The best remaining evidence: The Julian Fane Archive, East Sussex County Record Office, East Sussex.

  32 “she was impressed by erudition”: This first appeared in the Cornhill, Winter 1970, 255, and later in Fane’s Memoir in the Middle of the Journey, 50.

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TEXT CREDITS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for their permission to reprint previously published material:

  Harold Ober Associates Incorporated: Excerpt from It Was the Nightingale by Ford Madox Ford, copyright © 1933 by Ford Madox Ford, copyright renewed 1960, 1961. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

  Plon-Perrin: Excerpts of the Proust-Schiff correspondence from La Correspondance Generale de Marcel Proust edited by Philip Kolb and translated by Stephen Klaidman (Paris: Plon, 1930–1936). Reprinted by permission of Plon-Perrin.

  The Sussex Heart Charity: Excerpts from Memoir in the Middle of the Journey by Julian Fane (London: Hamish Hamilton and St. George’s Press, 1971). Reprinted by permission of the Sussex Heart Charity—www.​sussex​heart​charity.​org.

  Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust: Excerpt from The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1932). Reprinted by permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity).

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  1 Courtesy of Charles Beddington

  2 © Tate London, 2013. Courtesy of the Wyndham Lewis Estate/The Bridgeman Art Library

  3 1930s drawing of Sydney Schiff by Sir William Rothenstein, courtesy of Dr. Stephen Kane

  4 Hayward Bequest/Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge

  5 Hayward Bequest/Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge

  6 © National Portrait Gallery, London

  7 Baron Adolph de Meyer Archive. © 2013 G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA

  8 © National Portrait Gallery, London

  9 © National Portrait Gallery, London

  10 Marcel Proust, English school (20th century). Private Collection/© Look and Learn/The Bridgeman Art Library

  11 Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry at the Villa Isola Bella, Menton, France. Ida Baker: Photographs of Katherine Mansfield, ref:1/2-01 1908-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

  12 John Quinn Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

  13 Orkney Archive

  ALSO BY STEPHEN KLAIDMAN

  The Virtuous Journalist (with Tom L. Beauchamp)

  Health in the Headlines: The Stories Behind the Stories

  Saving the Heart: The Battle to Conquer Coronary Disease

  Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry

  A Note About the Author

  Stephen Klaidman was an editor and reporter for twenty-three years at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the International Herald Tribune. He has taught at Georgetown University’s Law Center and its School of Foreign Service, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health, and Pennsylvania State University. For ten years h
e also worked at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics and Institute for Health Policy Analysis.

  For more information, please visit www.nanatalese.com

  Violet Schiff’s mother, Zillah Beddington, was the daughter of Sir John Simon, a member of the British Parliament. She was a noted amateur pianist whose only public appearance was at the request of the great Polish pianist and composer Ignacy Paderewski, with whom she played a piece for four hands.

  As a girl and a young woman Violet went regularly with her parents for seaside vacations in Folkestone. In his novel Myrtle, Sydney wrote a fictional account of having spent a few days there with the Beddingtons at Violet’s invitation before he and she were married. (illustration credit 1)

  Sydney Schiff’s father, Alfred, arrived in London as a very young man and soon set up a brokerage house with his brother Ernest. He became a member of the stock exchange when he was twenty-six. He hoped Sydney would join him in the business one day, which, to his great regret, was not to be.

  Sydney’s mother, the former Mrs. John Scott Cavell, originally Caroline Mary Ann Eliza Scates, was still married to Mr. Cavell when Sydney was conceived. His relationship with his mother, unlike the one he had with his father, was very close, and he was devastated when she died of heart disease in 1896 at fifty-two.

  Sydney commissioned this portrait of Violet by Percy Wyndham Lewis, which was the source of considerable friction between him and the Schiffs. He worked on it for years, during which time Sydney kept advancing him money on the unfinished work and finally demanded that he turn it over, even though Lewis considered it unfinished. (illustration credit 2)

  This graphic rendering of Sydney was done by Sir William Rothenstein, a British artist best known for his portrait drawings of prominent persons. He was an acquaintance of the Schiffs and a friend of many of the young British artists in their circle. (illustration credit 3)