Sydney and Violet Read online

  Of Violet’s sisters, especially Sybil and Ada, there is a great deal more to be said. For one thing, the girls got most of the musical talent. They all played the piano and three of the four, including Violet but not Ada, were accomplished singers. Ada, however, and Sybil had long and interesting relationships with two of the most important figures in the arts of their era. Sybil was seven years older than Violet. Her husband, David Seligman, came from a well-established San Francisco banking family. For twenty years she was Giacomo Puccini’s closest confidante and for several years his lover. Ada, who was thirteen years older than Violet, married Ernest Leverson, a diamond merchant. She wrote six novels, contributed humorous articles to leading magazines including Punch, and Oscar Wilde, with whom she was close, called her “the Sphinx.” The fourth sister was named Evelyn. Frederick Beddington thought she was the “most gifted” of the girls. She was said to have been a superb singer. But she had more than her share of unhappiness. Her first marriage to a cousin ended when he cheated on her with his young niece, then committed suicide. Her second marriage was to Walter Behrens, president of the British Chamber of Commerce in Paris, with whom she had twin boys, Walter and Edward. But she died of breast cancer in 1910 when they were thirteen. She would have been about forty-five years old.

  To turn to Sydney again briefly, it seems clear that he was an embryonic aesthete whose refined sensibilities and developing tastes for fine art and literature were alien to his finance-oriented father, who made no effort to hide his disdain. His mother did not seem totally insensitive to his instincts for beauty and culture, but his father ruled. In a kind of rebellion, unacknowledged perhaps even to himself, Sydney married a woman he knew his parents would disapprove of, which condemned him to twenty years of misery. That plus his parents’ serial affairs easily could have soured someone of much less delicate sensibilities than his on ever marrying again. On the face of it, therefore, there is little in his background that would make him a likely candidate to lurch blindly into another marriage. He had two years to mull it over, of course, but very little to mull. What he knew about Violet was nominal.

  For the first time in his life, though, he sensed a soul mate. Violet Beddington was in relevant ways the opposite of Marion Canine. To begin with there were all the things she and Sydney had in common that Marion lacked, foremost among them a love of literature, a cultured, sophisticated worldview, and a fascination with the vicissitudes of human nature. Like Marion, Violet had shrewd insights into people, but unlike her, she valued them for their own sake. Sydney shared Violet’s abiding interest in people and would have recognized and appreciated it in her. And Violet was attractive in a way that was quite different from Marion. Her face was alive with intelligence, her steady gaze and ever so slightly lifted brows registered her frequent skepticism, and no one ever would have mistaken her for an Anglo-Saxon. I don’t know whether her Jewish appearance and affect appealed to him, but they might have. In the end, though, for Sydney it was probably that undefinable, inexplicable inner something that reminded him of “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.”

  What Violet saw in Sydney is perhaps a more interesting question. He was excessively polite and refined to a fault by some accounts, but given her insight, she might have attributed these finicky characteristics to his extreme shyness. Although many years later she said that at first she had been unaware of Sydney’s love of literature, she could not but have noticed that they had been educated in much the same way and that they were both cultivated in the manner of their class. And Sydney was emotionally needy but also knew who he was, a combination that almost certainly would have attracted her.

  It is also worth considering that Violet was thirty-four years old and single. She was self-contained and self-sufficient, but it is not unreasonable to think she viewed someone like Sydney Schiff as a last, best hope for a happy marriage. At forty, he was neither too young nor too old. He was financially independent. And he was not unattractive. As far as the Jewish question was concerned there is no indication one way or the other whether the fact that he was the Anglican son of an Anglican mother concerned Violet or her parents or that his father’s Jewish origins mattered.

  In any event, and whatever the reasons, on May 10, 1911, two days after Sydney’s divorce decree became final, he and Violet Beddington were married, like his parents, at the register office in Kensington. During their honeymoon in Venice a cholera epidemic broke out. It was the same one that inspired Thomas Mann to write Death in Venice, but neither Sydney nor Violet became ill. Their marriage lasted until Sydney’s death thirty-three years later.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MODERNIST WORLD

  When Sydney and Violet launched their leap of faith, what little they knew about each other—not what they felt, or intuited, or guessed, or suspected, but what they knew—would not have filled a teacup. No matter how intense their feelings for one another, the specter of failure must have loomed ominously in the background. Sydney would have worried because he already had made a disastrous mistake. Violet, who by then was thirty-six years old, no matter how self-possessed and self-confident she was, would have worried that she could not afford a mistake. They were making a high-risk bet whether they knew it or not. Among other things they would of necessity begin building their life together on unstable ground, not through any fault of their own, but because the world they inhabited was in turmoil. Their wealth would shelter them from some of it, but rapidly changing values, unsettling scientific and technological advances, pressure on the class structure, and world war would shape their environment and inevitably their lives.

  A decade had passed since the death of Queen Victoria, and Gavrilo Princip’s shot that began World War I, the war to end all wars, was just three years off. More men would be killed than in any previous war. The Paris Conference to divide the spoils in 1919 would dramatically change the political geography of Europe and the Middle East and scatter the seeds of the next war. These events on a global scale had consequences that affected Sydney and Violet personally. Among other things the war created or deepened fissures in the London community of artists and intellectuals. Some, like Bertrand Russell and many of his Bloomsbury friends, were pacifists and did not fight. Others, like Wyndham Lewis, who did fight, and T. S. Eliot, who tried unsuccessfully to enlist, gravitated toward ultraconservatism, authoritarianism, and fascism, ideologies they believed were better suited to preserving order and culture and to avoiding another war and more social upheaval. And still others, like Isaac Rosenberg, a now largely forgotten poet and painter of considerable talent, fought and wrote painfully moving verse about it.

  Each of these others, Lewis, Eliot, and Rosenberg, would play an important role in the Schiffs’ life. Eliot’s and Lewis’s would be long and consequential. Rosenberg’s would be short, but significant. He was born in London and lived in South Africa because he believed the Cape Town air was better for his diseased lungs. But soon after the war began in 1914 he returned to England and enlisted in the army. Sydney and Violet met him in 1915. They liked him, admired his work, and provided him with small amounts of money and art supplies without requiring anything in return. He visited them during leaves and found them easy to talk to, including about the anti-Semitism he encountered in the army. Toward the end of the war Rosenberg was serving in the King’s Own Royal Lancaster regiment on the Somme. He was returning from a night patrol on April 1, 1918, when he was shot and killed. He was twenty-seven years old. Rosenberg is less well remembered than his friends and fellow war poets Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon and his friends and fellow painters Mark Gertler and David Bomberg, but he was a good poet—Eliot thought so—and perhaps an even better painter. He most likely was the first beneficiary of Sydney and Violet’s patronage.

  In the years leading up to and during the war, the creative and philosophical currents that would give content to the Schiffs’ intellectual lives
, form their literary tastes, determine who were their friends and who their adversaries, and that would provide the theoretical substructure for Sydney’s writing were swelling from faint underground rumblings to a rolling thunder. While Sydney and Violet were both sensitive, intelligent, aware adults who would have had their own critical thoughts about the seismic shifts that were occurring around them, it is hard to know exactly when they tuned in to the signs of modernism’s arrival, at first inchoate but well developed by the war’s end. It seems likely, though, that at the very least they would have thought and talked about the implications of the industrial revolution, a question that animated the thought and work of Eliot and Lewis, with whom they would form intellectually fruitful, but in Lewis’s case extremely contentious, personal ties.

  Eliot, Lewis, Ezra Pound, and others, including Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury friends, talked a lot about how the industrial revolution was leading to a loss of support for creative work, a decline in respect for the arts, decreased education in the humanities, and the devaluation of craftsmanship, all of which led to a general coarsening of life. It would have been surprising if Sydney and Violet didn’t share at least some of these views. Most well-educated people of their class did and they would turn out to be right. All they worried about happened. And in some ways it was a shame, especially for those who could not survive without support for their creative work, who depended on respect for the arts to earn a living, who had benefited from an education in the humanities, and who could afford to buy art and other handcrafted objects. The more one learns about these people, though, the more it becomes clear that the real reason so many of them vehemently opposed mechanization and the rise of a new, less cultured middle class had little to do with the general welfare. What troubled them most was that it threatened their way of life.

  It apparently escaped their notice that railroads, automobiles, and large-scale manufacturing would improve the living conditions of millions of workers and their families whose lives had always and inevitably been coarsened by poverty and that a large, thriving middle class was essential to the functioning of an egalitarian democracy. Egalitarianism, however, was a value whose benefits the modernists in general, including the Schiffs, failed to recognize.

  In the spring and summer of 1911 Sydney and Violet were busy choosing mirrors, wallpaper, and paint colors and having expensive contemporary furniture made to order for their new home at 18 Cambridge Square, a short walk from Violet’s parents’ house in Hyde Park Square. Unlike the traditional and lushly furnished house in Como where Sydney once thought he could be happy, but whose memory he now was desperate to erase, everything in his new home was going to reflect Violet’s taste for the cool, the clean, and the modern. In a letter to Proust nearly a decade later Sydney wrote that he had wanted to remake his life in every way, and as a result of Violet’s influence his taste had turned toward everything modern and he had learned to appreciate “the charm and satisfaction of simple tastes and objects without value.”

  Violet’s twenty-three-year-old cousin Irene Ash called at 18 Cambridge Square in 1929 and described her visit. She was received at the front door by Ali, Sydney’s Indian valet, who was “immaculately dressed in one of Sydney’s old suits.” After taking note of Ali’s attire she looked up and saw a fierce-looking self-portrait of Wyndham Lewis glaring down from the landing above. Hurrying up the stairs past it she entered a long room with a high ceiling whose walls were painted with gold leaf and hung with pictures. There was “a great placid woman’s head from Picasso’s blue period,” a large painting by Giorgio de Chirico, and a painting by William Roberts of “fat, elongated figures in a cinema watching an elongated screen.” There were also works by Mark Gertler, John Currie, and Stanley Spencer as well as several busts by Jacob Epstein. At each end of the room were fireplaces topped by mirrors that reached the ceiling, an electric fire burning in one and a log fire in the other. The lighting was hidden in a strip around the ceiling, a Steinway grand piano stood at the far end of the room, and several round tables were piled high with books. There were also a few smaller tables, two enormous sofas with black silk cushions, and several armchairs.

  Shortly after arriving Irene noticed a tall, thin man enter the room. It was Aldous Huxley. Not long afterwards Violet’s nephew Edward Beddington-Behrens came in. He kissed Violet before joining Sydney and Huxley. Irene noticed that Violet did not turn her head away when he kissed her. This was inconsistent with her normal practice, which she believed reduced her chances of getting infections. Beddington-Behrens said nothing to Irene but looked at her in a way that warmly acknowledged her presence before turning his attention to the conversation between Sydney and Huxley, which went on for some time. Eventually though, one by one, Huxley and the other guests said their good-byes and left.

  After all but Irene and Beddington-Behrens had departed, Sydney, relaxing in an armchair, his long legs stretched out in front of him and ignoring the others, said to Violet, “Thank goodness they’ve all gone at last and I have you to myself, my darling.” But moments later he included Irene and Beddington-Behrens. “You know,” he said, “I am always jealous when she is giving all her attention to other people, even when it’s you, Edward. Sometimes those interminable telephone sessions you have together make me quite unreasonably impatient and I have to get out and walk across the park.”

  Violet smiled but said nothing. She rang an electric bell on a cord draped over the arm of her chair. A maid appeared and she ordered tea for herself. Sydney ordered brandy. The conversation continued and somewhat incongruously Sydney said, “I cannot like Aldous. I have tried to, but everything about him is antipathetic to me.” Beddington-Behrens nodded agreement and Violet smiled enigmatically. She poured tea into her cup, added cold water from a little jug, squeezed half a lemon into it, and then added several teaspoons of glucose from a small crystal bowl. “He’s a pure intellectual,” Sydney said. “He has no heart. All that erudition is no use unless there is feeling as well.” Violet remained silent.

  But to return to 1911: Sooner or later, before or after the paint was dry, the wallpaper hung, and the chairs and mirrors bought, Sydney and Violet would have become aware that Henri Bergson and T. E. Hulme, among others, were laying the philosophical foundations of modernism. Maybe it was around the time Eliot and Pound separately explained the big idea of modernist writing. Eliot said writers had to find “objective correlatives,” that is, concrete images that transmit without explanation what writers want their readers to feel. Pound put it even more simply. If you want a reader to feel something about a tree, for example, describe the tree so that she feels it, don’t tell her how to feel about it. There is, of course, a great deal more than this to modernist aesthetics, and there are a great many books on modernism for those who would like to pursue the subject. But for our purposes here just a few words on modernism in the social and political spheres will make it easier to fully grasp the rapidly evolving world the Schiffs inhabited.

  The key sociopolitical distinction the modernists made was between classical (conservative) and romantic (liberal). Hulme was convinced all human beings were one or the other by temperament. Romantics, he believed, think humanity’s inherent goodness justifies liberty for all. Take the shackles off mankind, do away with oppressive laws and customs, and you set loose the forces of progress. The classicists, however, believed human beings are limited animals with a fixed nature. Tradition and organization, which I suspect a romantic would not distinguish from oppressive laws and customs, are necessary to get the best out of them. And for the classicists, progress, at least as far as human nature is concerned, is a myth. Modernists of the Pound, Eliot, and Lewis school were classicists. In this sociopolitical sense, many others were still romantics. The Schiffs, although personally and intellectually close to Eliot and Lewis, fell somewhere in between.

  Of all the gaps in Sydney and Violet’s story, perhaps the biggest is from the time of their marriage in 1911 until about 1915. There are few le
tters and nothing significant in Sydney’s work about that four-year stretch of time. It was presumably a period in which they learned a great deal about one another. Of the relatively few things we know for sure, one is that they had a great deal in common. Apart from the visceral love they shared, both were intellectually curious, passionate about literature—although Violet did not know this about Sydney until after they were married—and connoisseurs of human nature. And it was their good fortune that besides what they had in common their differences were often complementary. Violet’s tough-minded practicality, for example, compensated for Sydney’s otherworldly sensitivity and refinement. And his taste in the visual arts complemented hers in music. They were in short thoroughly compatible. We also know that with Violet’s fervent and unswerving support to motivate him a grateful and newly confident Sydney started to write seriously.

  It was also during this period that the Schiffs began to invite to their home the kinds of people who when they achieved critical mass would amount to a salon. There is no way to tell whether they purposefully went about creating a salon or whether it was a natural outgrowth of their tastes and predilections.

  One evening in March or April of 1912, Filippo Marinetti was in London for a lecture series. Enrico Caruso was also in town. Marinetti was the theologian of futurism, the violent Italian variant of modernism fixated on speed, industry, and technology and best remembered for its painters, especially Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini. Marinetti, with his florid mustache, flowing tie, spats, bowler hat, and bombastic personality, was the model of a music-hall Italian. Most likely speaking in French because he spoke no English, he sprayed invective at his audience in Bechstein Hall, calling England “a nation of sycophants and snobs, enslaved by old worm-eaten traditions, social conventions and romanticism.” His tirade earned him headlines. According to the Times, “some of his audience begged for mercy,” but the Daily Chronicle reported that “the long-haired gentlemen in the stalls and the ladies with Rossetti eyes and lips rewarded him with their laughter and applause.” Although he might easily have been dismissed as an offensive clown, his effectiveness, measured in twenty-first-century terms—which is to say, by press coverage—could not be easily dismissed. In six weeks he racked up 350 articles in newspapers and little reviews.