Sydney and Violet Page 4

  Although it is absolutely clear that Sydney’s relationship with his father was conflicted by the time he was eighteen, it is less certain when the conflict began. In Prince Hempseed he suggests it might have been during a visit to Heidelberg with his father when he was about twelve. No record remains of such a trip, but as always the feelings expressed in the novel can be taken as genuine. Before describing the trip to the site of Germany’s premier university, where he unburdened himself of his bitter feelings toward his father, Sydney had already expressed his dislike for his German governess, the German language, and Germany itself. Though two generations and two countries removed from Germany, Alfred Schiff was still fundamentally Teutonic. Sydney said he was always frightened of his father, but while they were at Heidelberg he began to hate him, which reinforced his love for his mother. There is every reason to believe this acute dichotomy between love and hate, mother and father, represented Sydney’s true feelings—with rare moments of ambivalence about his father—even as an adult.

  The schools he attended briefly as a boy are known, but once again, apart from Prince Hempseed, almost nothing is known about his experiences while attending them. Judging from his account, though, his first semester was not particularly pleasant, but probably no worse than that of the average English boy—some hazing and bullying, two tolerable canings, and a bit of fun and companionship. But when he went back to school for the second semester, things got worse.

  It began when he was coerced into doing Latin homework for an older boy. Both were caught and caned and things spiraled downward from there. His mother visited him briefly and it was wonderful to see her, but when she left, the parting was so painful he couldn’t bear it anymore and ran away. His father, simmering with anger and contempt, subjected him to unremitting cold, punitive silence during their trip back to the school together. He expected to be expelled, which would have been a mixed blessing, but his father persuaded the headmaster to take him back, substituting caning for expulsion. His father then left, taking with him his son’s most treasured possession, a photograph of his mother in a ball gown.

  After Sydney returned to school this time, things brightened considerably and he was looking forward to staying on, at which point his father decided to take him out. At home they hired a good-looking young tutor who taught him classics in the original Latin and Greek, and French. Then, perhaps because the tutor turned out to be too fond of Carrie, Sydney’s father sent him off without consultation to a different tutor named Pellew in Bournemouth, where he lived in with five other boys. He found Pellew disagreeable and seemed to think he was gay and had made oblique advances, which made him uncomfortable. Another boy arrived who was more compliant, but when the two boys became close friends Pellew dismissed Sydney from his class. His next stop was what seems to have been a pleasant but uneventful sojourn in Vevey, Switzerland, in a kind of finishing school for young men.

  It wasn’t long after he returned from Switzerland that father and son had their disagreement about Sydney preparing for a learned profession at Oxford. As far as Sydney was concerned his father confused life with work, while he believed life only meant work when it was necessary for survival. He said the only advantage he saw in being his father’s son instead of the gardener’s was that he didn’t have to work for a living.

  This of course takes us back to where we began. But before exploring the early life and family history of Violet Beddington, the woman Sydney loved and would finally marry in 1911, consider what Sydney had to say near the end of Prince Hempseed about marriage, his state of mind, and the ineffable qualities he sought from life. It helps to explain the damage Violet would have to repair. He said he would never marry because he would never find anyone who understood him. And he blamed himself. “I think I was born to be solitary,” he wrote. He was discontented as a young child and was afraid he would always be discontented because what he wanted from life was unobtainable, at least for him. There were things he liked that other people liked—some books, some games, riding, hunting, rowing, swimming—but he didn’t like any of them wholeheartedly. There was always a side of him that wanted something different, something he couldn’t explain, but that he had experienced and couldn’t remember. Many things vaguely reminded him of it, “like the scent of a flower or the rustle of leaves or a broad sunbeam or the glistening of a calm sea when the sun sets.”

  THE BEDDINGTONS

  Violet Beddington came from a distinguished line of Sephardic Jews on her mother’s side. The memory, if not the full story, of perhaps her most illustrious ancestor, Baltazar Orobio de Castro, is still honored by her living descendants, all of whom are now English Christians. Orobio was born in 1617 into a family of what have been variously called crypto-Jews, conversos, Marranos, and Chuetas. These were Jews who professed Catholicism to avoid persecution, but many of whom secretly practiced Jewish rites and observed Jewish law and customs. It took forty-five trying and sometimes harrowing years, but Orobio was ultimately able to fully embrace Judaism. His ancestors, who were Spanish, had settled in Braganza, Portugal, four generations before his birth. It seems likely they left Spain to escape the Inquisition, but to the detriment of their great-grandchildren, by the end of the sixteenth century the Portuguese tribunals had surpassed their more notorious Spanish counterparts in the avidity with which they persecuted Jews. As a result, most of Orobio’s extended family moved back to Spain in the 1620s. His parents settled in or around Málaga.

  It is impossible to know whether the move to relatively gentler Spain saved their lives, but the impeccable records of the Inquisition make it clear that although they were not killed, many family members, including Orobio’s grandparents and parents, were hounded, imprisoned, and tortured by the Spanish Holy Tribunals. On July 21, 1654, Baltazar himself, by then a respected professor of medicine, although most likely lacking a doctorate, was arrested and accused of observing Jewish law and mocking the Christian faith. For a year and a half he denied any lingering adherence to Judaism and professed allegiance to Christianity, but on January 13, 1656, under torture on the rack, he confessed and betrayed several other crypto-Jews. Sometime later in 1656 he was deemed to have repented and was released from prison.

  By the middle of 1660 Orobio managed to flee Spain for France where, not long afterwards, he obtained a professorship in surgery and pharmacy at the University of Toulouse and established a reputation as a philosophical thinker as well. But two years later he left France for Holland with his wife and children, parents, a brother, two sisters, and two brothers-in-law. Orobio’s biographer, Yosef Kaplan, speculated that this was solely because he wanted to live openly as a Jew and Amsterdam was one of very few places in Europe where this was possible. Also, the transition would be smooth because there already was a well-established community of Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the Dutch capital. He soon changed his name to Isaac and all of the other family members also took names from the Hebrew Bible.

  Orobio thrived in his new environment, involved himself in the synagogue, and ultimately became one of the most respected members of the congregation. He read deeply in Jewish sources and before long had won a reputation as a theological and philosophical scholar and a stalwart defender of Orthodox Judaism. While he continued to earn a living from medicine, these scholarly pursuits soon became his dominant occupation. His crowning achievement was a brilliant response to Baruch Spinoza’s radical critique of Judaism, which substituted reason for revelation, rejected the notion that Jews were God’s chosen people, and treated the Torah as a cultural artifact with multiple authors, not the word of God.

  Isaac Orobio de Castro died in Amsterdam on November 7, 1687, not long after a debate with Philip van Limborch on the truth of the Christian religion. John Locke attended the debate, and when van Limborch was preparing a summary for publication Locke read both manuscripts and offered suggestions for improvements. Now, some 325 years later, one can only wonder what Orobio would make of his Christian descendants. The same question might be
asked about Sir John Simon, Violet’s maternal grandfather and a lineal descendant of Orobio, whose forebears immigrated to the British colony of Jamaica, probably in the early eighteenth century.

  John Simon was born in Montego Bay on December 9, 1818. His father, Isaac Simon, was a merchant who was active in the emancipation movement and by one account was the first Jamaican to free his own slaves, a year before the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833. His mother, Rebecca, was the daughter of Jacob Orobio Furtado. When John was fifteen his parents sent him to Liverpool to continue his education and while there he studied Hebrew on his own. He wanted to become a rabbi, but his father disapproved. Unlike Sydney Schiff, he complied with his father’s wishes and attended University College, London, from which he was graduated with a law degree. A year later, in 1842, he became the second Jew admitted to the English bar and the first to practice at the common-law bar. The same year he joined the recently founded Reform Synagogue of London, in which he remained an active member for the rest of his life. And in 1843 he married Rachel Salaman, sister of Charles Salaman, a composer and pianist who had been elected to the Royal Academy of Music at the age of ten. Charles Salaman was especially well known for his Jewish devotional music. He was also active in Reform Judaism and wrote Jews As They Are, a book intended to debunk myths about Jews and Judaism. He was a friend of the Beddingtons and regularly attended their Sunday musical afternoons.

  After their wedding John returned to Jamaica with Rachel and for the next two years practiced law in Spanish Town, then the capital. Their daughter Zillah was born in Jamaica in 1844, the first of five children, not long before the family immigrated to England because Rachel found the Caribbean climate unbearable. John opened a law office on the northern circuit where his practice flourished and included a successful defense of Simon Bernard, who was accused of complicity in an attempt to assassinate Napoleon III. In 1858, the same year as the Bernard trial, he became the first Jew in England to sit as a judge. Subsequently he was appointed serjeant-at-law and then Queen’s Counsel. And in 1868 he was elected to Parliament from Dewsbury, a mill and market town in West Yorkshire. In a photograph that might have been taken around this time he looks magisterial in full-length black law robes and a tightly curled wig that extends below his shoulders. His expression is serious, but not hard, his eyes are deep set, his nose large, and his forehead high and broad. John Simon served for twenty years as a liberal MP, and even though he didn’t have a single Jewish constituent he was widely referred to as “the member for Jewry.” One interpretation of this designation would be that it resulted from his advocacy on behalf of oppressed Jews. He was knighted on August 24, 1886, two years before he retired from Parliament. He died on June 24, 1897.

  The historical record on Violet’s paternal side is considerably thinner, probably because there is no ancestor of comparable stature to Isaac Orobio or John Simon. Her grandfather was Henry Moses, who sometime in the 1860s changed the family name to Beddington, apparently after the town of Beddington in the county of Surrey, where he owned property. He continued to live openly as a Jew after the change, which makes clear that he did not do it to pass as a Christian. He might have thought it would make it easier for his children and grandchildren to get on in Britain, or perhaps he just wanted to identify more as an Englishman. Whatever his motives though, the Moses name had not kept him from becoming a successful wool merchant and real estate investor. He was so successful, in fact, that his son, Samuel Henry Beddington, did not have to work a day in his life, although during his lifetime he acquired a substantial amount of property in England and Australia and dabbled for a while in brokering precious stones.

  In December 1861, Samuel married Zillah Simon. He was thirty-two, she just seventeen. She came from yiches, a Yiddish word that in this context means from a family deserving respect, he from gelt, which always means money. Together they settled into a grand mansion at 21 (now 20) Hyde Park Square. In a portrait of Zillah at age thirty-five by Sir John Everett Millais, she looks young and beautiful at a time when women her age often looked matronly. If this is unusual, as I think it is, it is all the more so because she already had eight children. She was short and plump, her features were regular, her complexion pale, and her auburn hair was usually piled high. Her gaze is direct in the portrait and there is a hint of sensuousness in her full lower lip.

  Zillah’s first love was music, her instrument was the piano, and she devoted more time to practicing and playing than to her children or, it would seem, to her husband. She was said to have been extremely gifted, but she only performed once in public. At Paderewski’s request she joined him in a piece for four hands. She was also a creature of habit. She always ate fried sole for lunch and roast or boiled chicken for dinner, accompanied in both cases by champagne.

  Samuel Beddington’s looks are more a matter of conjecture. He was extremely private and might have been unwilling to be photographed. The only physical description of him I’ve come across is in a brief memoir written by Violet’s nephew Frederick Beddington, which was composed in the form of a letter to his friend Nicolas Bentley. “No doubt he was handsome,” he wrote of his grandfather. “[He] always held himself erect, straight as a poker and had a commanding presence.” The presence was not a facade. Like Alfred Schiff he was a traditional Victorian father. He also suffered from what we would now call OCD. He washed his hands incessantly and wouldn’t touch coins that had been handled by anyone else until they had been set on a table long enough to lose their germs. His bow ties were cut daily from yards of fresh white linen and his dressing gowns were all white so that any speck of dirt would be noticed immediately.

  While Violet’s parents were imposing, the house she grew up in was if anything more so. It was very large and faced Hyde Park Square in front and Sussex Square in back. A wide entrance hall with café-au-lait walls, varnished oak woodwork, and floors carpeted in dark blue and red led to the main staircase. To the right was a morning room furnished with leather chairs, a table covered with a red cloth, bookshelves displaying the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a small grand piano. The spacious dining room, protected by a massive wooden screen designed by Samuel to keep out the draft, occupied the whole of the rear of the house. The decorations included several oil paintings and a large sculpture of a woman holding a conch shell to her ear.

  The stairs, situated under a skylight, swept up to the second floor in three flights, and in a folly of sorts, there was a fern garden with a miniature waterfall on one of the landings. The third flight gave access to a very large double drawing room, a long, wide picture gallery, and a billiards room. There was little doubt as to whom the drawing room belonged: It was dominated by the Millais portrait of Zillah and her grand piano. Eventually electric lights replaced gas lamps in the wall brackets throughout the house, and around 1908 an elevator was installed that could carry two persons to the third-floor bedrooms. And somewhere, although I’m not sure where, there must have been quarters for servants, including Leggatt, the bewhiskered long-serving butler with big gaps between his teeth; Lily Cameron, who looked after Violet from childhood to old age; and Kate Hudson, Zillah’s paid companion and trusted manager of the household.

  Frederick Beddington spent an evening at his grandparents’ house as a child. Five of Samuel and Zillah’s children and three or four grandchildren were at the table. “As always, an empty place was set for any unexpected guest or in case Signor Tosti should drop in.” After dinner they all moved to the drawing room, where Zillah played, most likely Chopin, whose vast and demanding range of piano music she loved and had mastered, and Sybil and Violet sang, probably arias by Puccini or other Italian composers, Tosti’s art songs or German lieder. The music stopped when Samuel Beddington definitively pronounced, “That will do, dear,” after which he solemnly read from the book of Job, concluding the evening.

  The Beddington family was large, but exactly how large remains a matter of conjecture. There were eight children, more likely nine, or just possibly ten.
No one seems sure. It is likely that a ninth or tenth child would have died at or soon after birth. Of the children whose existence is certain Violet was one of four girls and the youngest of all. Beginning with the brothers, Frederick’s father, Charles, appears to have been the most interesting, or at least it would seem so from an anecdote in his son’s memoir. Charles and his wife, Stella, were spending a few weeks at Oxford with their friends Brandon and Margaret Thomas. Brandon and Charles were at Pembroke College, Oxford, at the same time and had the distinction of being sent down together. Brandon Thomas was writing a play, which, as Frederick tells it, turned into a collaborative effort with Charles, who “did much cutting out of the sentimental scenes.” In the end, though, the two men quarreled and Charles withdrew from the project. The play, Charley’s Aunt, opened in London in 1892 and went on to be performed 1,466 times, which made it at the time the longest-running play in British theatrical history. The first Broadway production was in 1893, and Charley’s Aunt became as big a hit in America as it was in Britain. Charles eventually became a divorce lawyer. Violet’s brother Frank’s distinction was his passion for rowing. He twice made the semifinals of the Diamond Sculls, a race for single sculls at the Henley Regatta. Her brother George was known as a “wit and charmer,” but died at about twenty-two of typhoid. And finally, there was Arthur, who suffered a mental breakdown at an early age, never fully recovered, and was put under the care of a doctor near Brussels, with whom he lived for the rest of his life.