Sydney and Violet Read online

  Sydney had few friends if any in the city. He had been something of a loner as a boy and with the exception of two unpleasant years away at school he had been educated by tutors. As an adult he had lived in London only briefly and sporadically. For all practical purposes he had been away for twenty-two years. His parents were both dead. Sydney was staying with his sister Edith, who would one day become the Countess Gautier-Vignal. She enjoyed many of the same things he did, and she tried to keep him distracted by arranging evenings at the theater and opera during his visit. Mostly these outings were uneventful, but one evening, during a performance of La Bohème at Covent Garden, something unexpected happened.

  The Puccini opera was performed five times that season, all between June 15 and July 30, and the performance Sydney attended could have been any of the five. If Edith had her choice, though, it probably would have been the one in which Marcello was sung by one of the greatest baritones of the day, Antonio Scotti. And there is reason to at least speculate that she and Sydney saw the Scotti performance because Sybil Seligman was in her box in the Grand Tier that evening. Sybil, wife of the American banker David Seligman, was a daughter of Samuel and Zillah Beddington, whose house at 21 Hyde Park Square, was home to one of the most sought-after musical salons in London. Scotti, his good friend Enrico Caruso, and Nellie Melba, the greatest soprano of the era, came when they were in town. Paolo Tosti, singing master to the royal family—and the Beddington girls—and Sir Arthur Sullivan were regular attendees. Zillah, who was considered to be one of the best amateur pianists in London, played a Steinway grand chosen for her by Paderewski, and Samuel, a violinist, played a Guarneri del Gesù. Sybil’s special friend, who always visited when he was in London and often played the piano when one or another of the girls sang, sometimes in a duet with Caruso, was Giacomo Puccini. Had she been attending just one Bohème during the season chances are she would have chosen the June 25 performance featuring Scotti over the alternatives, the respected but second-tier Mario Sammarco and the comparatively undistinguished Angelo Scandiani.

  What made the evening unforgettable for Sydney, though, had nothing to do with who sang Marcello or the performance overall, however brilliant it might have been. Under the Royal Opera House’s grand cerulean blue dome that evening the music of Puccini and the tempestuous romance of La Bohème’s star-crossed lovers served as but a backdrop.

  Sydney’s sister Edith was acquainted with Sybil Seligman, and during intermission she took her brother to meet her and a guest in her box, Sybil’s sister Violet Beddington. Violet was thirty-four years old, never married, and therefore by the conventions of the time a spinster. Nonetheless, as the youngest of the four Beddington girls (there were five boys), she was known as “Baby” in the family. By several accounts she was the wisest of the children and her parents’ favorite, especially her father’s. She was said to sing with extraordinary musicality, although the quality of the one recording that exists is too poor to confirm that judgment. Tosti once said, however, that while her voice lacked the perfection of Sybil’s, she sang like an angel. Violet was also a discerning reader of contemporary literature (her passion was Henry James) and a keen analyst of human nature.

  Sydney fell in love with her, instantly and overwhelmingly in love for the first time in his life. And unlikely as it may seem, in those very few minutes they were together, Violet felt an attraction, perhaps for the first time in her life, as powerful as his. But falling in love with Violet and knowing that she shared his passion did not make it easier to divorce Marion. More likely it added to Sydney’s confusion. In any event, for reasons of propriety, potential legal exposure, and Violet’s self-respect, after two brief meetings during which they affirmed their desire for a life together, Violet told Sydney she would not see him again until he and Marion were divorced. Things would have moved much faster, but Sydney was still struggling with his conscience, which led to procrastination. Finally, however, after dithering for many months, he worked up the courage to ask Marion to initiate divorce proceedings. She agreed in a flash and probably would have done so a lot sooner had she been asked because her lover at the time, a rich man named Sadleir Jackson, wanted to marry her. Even though she was marrying money Sydney gave her the house on Lake Como, which he had inherited when his father died, and half his income for the rest of her life. Marion later became a Christian Scientist and eventually died of a stroke.

  As for Violet, she waited while almost two years passed between the night at the opera and the final decree. Fifteen years later, in his 1926 novel Myrtle, Sydney reimagined, or more precisely, reinvented the opening scene in that lonely and agonizing period in his life. He fictionalized his meeting with Violet, shifting the setting from Covent Garden to the Beddington mansion but precisely re-creating his misery and her empathy, which generated an instant connection between them. As he constructed the story, the fictional version of the Beddington family was about to set off for Folkestone, a resort and seaport on the English Channel where the real-life Beddingtons regularly vacationed and Zillah dined on chickens Samuel had brought in daily from their provisioner in London. Violet, recognizing Sydney’s desperate condition, urged him to join them in Folkestone, which he did.

  In the novel Sydney is portrayed as speaking freely to Violet about how unhappy his life on the lake with Marion had been and also about Virginia, and she listened without judging. She tried to convince him that there was life worth living ahead of him. But unsurprisingly she could not penetrate in a few minutes a penumbra of hopelessness that had been thickening around him for forty years.

  After they said good-bye and agreed to correspond surreptitiously, Sydney indulged in a kind of silent soliloquy of ambivalence that pitted his fresh love for Violet against his inhibiting sense of obligation toward Marion. He doubted his capacity to love and thought of himself as someone who had lost all hope, all sense of self-worth. Violet’s sympathy, her wisdom, her understanding, even her frank eyes and the way she walked, were restorative. But there was so much to restore. At first everything seemed so uncertain to him. He still had no answers, only questions. But then in a lightning bolt of insight he realized answers were not what he needed. What he needed was hope. Although it is fiction, in its psychobiographical context Myrtle has the texture of truth. Sydney knew Violet loved him and was waiting for him. Why wouldn’t that give him the strength to hope, to confront Marion and to survive during the two long years Violet and he were apart?

  CHAPTER 2

  FAMILIES

  Whatever it was in that brief interlude between acts of La Bohème that ignited Sydney and Violet’s passion, it must have been supremely powerful to keep the flame burning for two long years. Sydney felt reassured in Violet’s presence. He also sensed she might understand him, something he felt no one else—not his beloved mother, nor his sisters, and certainly neither his wife nor his father—had been able to do. Considering his contentious lifelong relationship with his father and his twenty bleak years with Marion, it is hard to overestimate how gratifying that feeling must have been. But it would not have been enough. The impenetrable mystery called love was the sine qua non.

  For Violet, who was also in love, it likely would have been her gifts of sympathy, equanimity, and patience, qualities she exhibited even as a child, that made her two-year wait for Sydney tolerable. Whatever the reasons, though, one has to admire the confidence and forbearance that enabled them both to endure such a long separation. In the age of texting and Twitter such constancy seems virtually inconceivable.

  Unlike Marion, with whom he had little in common, Sydney grew up in an environment quite similar to Violet’s. Both were reared in large, affluent, cultured homes governed by traditional Victorian fathers. They were nouveau riche by the standards of the British aristocracy, but in both families, wealth had been passed on for generations. They lived in nearby fashionable areas of London, were cared for by nannies, educated by tutors, and learned classical and modern languages. Each of these similarities helped s
hape their characters and interests, but so did a few significant differences.

  Violet, whose surname would have been Moses if her grandfather had not changed it to Beddington, was brought up Jewish. Her father, Samuel, often read from the Old Testament after dinner, and several Beddingtons, but not her father, were active in London’s Central Synagogue, where Rothschilds and Montefiores worshipped. Sydney’s father was Jewish, but his surname never changed. Sydney’s mother, however, was Anglican, and he was baptized and brought up in the church. Although religion played a relatively minor role in both their lives, even after marrying Violet Sydney remained a committed Anglican. Violet’s actual commitment to cultural Judaism is unknown, but it seems to have been marginal at best and with respect to religion it appears she was agnostic.

  There was one other important difference between the two families: Samuel Beddington believed his children, male as well as female, should be free to live lives of leisure if they chose, which most did. Alfred Schiff, on the other hand, despite, or perhaps because of, his Jewish heritage, subscribed to the Protestant Ethic. He believed his sons had an obligation to work hard and his daughters to marry well. His daughters did not disappoint him.

  The Schiff family history is something of a blur, but enough can be pieced together to provide a general sense of Sydney’s origins. His great-grandparents, Samuel and Gutel Schiff, came from Mannheim, Germany. Their son, Leopold, who was born in Frankfurt, moved to Trieste, a teeming Austro-Hungarian city of mixed races and cultures, multiple languages, and frequently changing political masters. A possession of the Hapsburg Empire with varying status from 1382 on, Trieste had as tumultuous a history as any city in the world before settling into its role as an important commercial hub in the mid-nineteenth century. Leopold decided to take his chances in Trieste in the early 1830s because of the commercial opportunities rapidly opening up there, but he also had every reason to believe the cosmopolitan seaport would provide a more promising environment for an enterprising Jew than any place in Germany. The Triestine attitude toward and treatment of Jews had not always been benign. But Jews had lived in Trieste for hundreds of years, and in the early eighteenth century, in recognition of their important economic role, the Hapsburg emperors removed many legal restrictions, including the requirement that they live in ghettos.

  Leopold’s judgment about Trieste proved correct. He arrived in a wave of immigration that increased the city’s Jewish population sixfold to about six thousand by the beginning of World War I. Many of these immigrant Jews, including the young Leopold, became successful merchant bankers. Not long after his arrival, on November 2, 1832, he married Johanna Wohlheim, who belonged to a well-established Jewish Triestine family. He and Johanna eventually had three sons, Alfred, Ernest, and Charles, all of whom would do as their father did and leave home while still young to make new lives abroad.

  Alfred settled in London in 1860 and at twenty-six was admitted to membership in the stock exchange. He was good-looking, vigorous, and intelligent and was as successful socially as he was in business. But his life as a carefree bachelor did not last long. In 1865, the year before he was admitted to the exchange, he met the woman who would become his wife. There was a hitch, though. She was already married and had a year-old daughter. Her name was Mrs. John Scott Cavell, formerly Caroline Mary Ann Eliza Scates. Based on two paintings and a photograph, she was dowdy as a girl, imperious looking as a young wife, and mean-spirited as an older woman. But she was English, from a respectable country family, an excellent horsewoman, French educated—a quality that would not have been lost on Alfred—and Anglican, a condition that did not deter him any more than her looks or married state.

  In 1867 Cavell filed for divorce on grounds that in 1865 Caroline had committed adultery with an unknown man, had a daughter from that relationship, and had cohabited with Alfred Schiff since some time in 1865. Alfred was named a corespondent in the suit, which dragged on for two years. Finally, on August 14, 1869, shortly after the divorce decree was granted, Alfred and Caroline were able to wed, which they did at the register office in Kensington. Alfred is identified on the marriage certificate as a merchant and Caroline as a spinster, which of course she was not. Their fathers, Leopold Schiff and John Scates, were listed as gentlemen. Sydney, whose actual birth date has proved untraceable—not an unusual circumstance in the case of Victorian children born out of wedlock—was perhaps eight or nine months old at the time of the marriage. His parents told him later that he was born December 12, 1868, and there is at least one piece of circumstantial evidence suggesting that this date might be approximately correct. A portrait of Sydney by Alessandro Ossani, dated 1874, depicts a boy with a sensitive mouth and light brown or dark blond hair who looks to be about six years old.

  After the wedding, Alfred, Caroline, and their two children, Carrie Louise, who was close to four years old by then, and her half brother Sydney, settled into a lavish house at 30 de Vere Gardens in Kensington. The Schiffs had four more children, a son, Ernest, and three daughters, Rose, Edith and Marie. With the exception of Carrie Louise, who was cool in the English manner, the other children were not lacking in temperament. As Sydney and his full sisters were growing up they had no idea of the circumstances of their parents’ marriage, nor did they know that Carrie Louise, whom they all called Sissy, was a half sister. But then one day a maid let it slip, and Alfred and Carrie elected to handle the situation by lying to the children. They said Carrie had been a widow with a young child when she married Alfred. That became the “official story.” But Sydney and his brother Ernest were never quite convinced because no one would ever tell them what their mother’s surname was when she married their father.

  Their comfortable life in Kensington consisted of Alfred spending most of his time at the bank while Carrie spent most of hers riding, shopping, socializing, and planning elaborate entertainments. These included a regular Sunday open house frequented by writers, publishers, painters, musicians, and financiers. Part of the household ethos was that birthdays and anniversaries were never celebrated and feelings had to be expressed and gifts given spontaneously, never out of a sense of obligation. Carrie did not have to concern herself too much about the children because their nannies looked after them except when their tutors were teaching them. They also had music lessons, which the sisters took seriously, and they were encouraged to read good books. A pattern of appreciation for literary fiction could be seen developing early in the girls that would enrich the rest of their lives. Sydney read avidly too, but his preferences were more eclectic than those of his sisters. He liked Dickens and Swift, but his favorite writer as a youth and even as a young man was Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, the much-maligned author of “It was a dark and stormy night …” This taste for over-the-top romanticism hardly suggested that one day he would idolize, befriend, and translate Marcel Proust and that T. S. Eliot, who like the modernists in general held romanticism in contempt, would value his critical comments on unpublished poems.

  Although private tutors were not uncommon in well-to-do English families, boys of Sydney’s social and economic class typically spent eleven or twelve years at boarding schools where sports were emphasized and academics were fairly rigorous, but discipline was more so. These severe academies typically provided the most important formative experience in their lives and a network of friendships that served them well over a lifetime. But Sydney, a highly sensitive and mildly effete boy who retained these characteristics as a grown man, was forced to endure only two years of boarding school. This probably limited the scars, but also the friendships and toughness acquired over a decade in the “public school” system. At twelve he attended G. T. Worsley’s, a preparatory school, and a year later Wellington College. He was sent to Wellington because it was a school for boys destined for military careers. Although it seems wildly inconsistent with his nature, to which his mother was not indifferent, Carrie Schiff apparently hoped her son would become an officer.

  Sydney’s childhood is vivi
dly described in Prince Hempseed, the first volume of A True Story, and a book warmly praised by Thomas Mann. It is full of sadness and loneliness. Sydney especially disliked his two nannies and his older half sister Carrie Louise. He mentions no friends at all. Most surprisingly, perhaps, he discloses that his beloved mother Carrie was less than a paragon of virtue. This is the kind of scandalous information Victorian families suppressed at all costs, which makes it very odd that he would allude to it in an autobiography only thinly disguised as a novel. Obviously, though, it would have been even odder for him to have invented it.

  But by the time he wrote Prince Hempseed, Sydney was a confirmed modernist and on his way to sharing Violet’s belief that art was transcendent. All of this entailed pursuing literary truth, precisely conveying feelings material to his literary purpose, which in this case was to reveal his inner life and all that influenced it. His mother’s extramarital relationships fit this criterion. Furthermore, his parents could not have been disgraced or embarrassed by the disclosure of his mother’s affairs because by the time he wrote Prince Hempseed they both were long dead. Sydney’s use of a pseudonym was designed to disguise the autobiographical nature of his novel, which would have worked for the general public but hardly would have been enough to prevent anyone who knew the Schiffs from recognizing the family.

  Sydney’s father also had many affairs, a documented fact never mentioned in Prince Hempseed. There is no hint in the book as to when, or if, Sydney knew of his father’s extramarital liaisons. Yet it seems unlikely that someone as intelligent, observant, and sensitive as he was could have remained completely unaware of Alfred Schiff’s multiple relationships. And if he was aware of them, why weren’t they as relevant to his literary purpose as his mother’s? Perhaps he left them out because in the Victorian era a father’s affairs were less scandalous and therefore less interesting than a mother’s. In any event it does seem possible that the rigorous concept of honor that kept Sydney tethered to Marion for twenty years developed at least in part in reaction to both parents’ numerous illicit sexual adventures.