Sydney and Violet Read online

  Who—or what—brought Marinetti to 18 Cambridge Square on the evening mentioned above is not known. But most likely it was one of his Italian compatriots such as Caruso, who was there for sure, or Tosti, the royal singing master and master of the art song, who probably was. Whoever it was, he had given Marinetti, the professional promoter, another opportunity to stage his carnival act. He had an audience, admittedly just a fraction of the one at Bechstein Hall, but probably more elite, and he was not about to let it go to waste. He took the floor and launched into a lengthy and obscure oration on the theoretical substratum of futurism the details of which reside in the waste bin of history. What else we know is just this: Caruso, wearing a false nose and hiding in plain sight under the Schiffs’ piano, but unnoticed by Marinetti, kept the audience from being bored to death by mocking the futurist seer with a running pantomime of ridiculous faces and gestures. No, we don’t know whether Marinetti ever discovered he’d been made a fool of. We do know, though, that performances, games, and other entertainments requiring a thick skin became fixtures of evenings at the Schiffs’.

  Sydney enjoyed the socializing, but from the day he married Violet until the day of his death in 1944 he lived mainly for two things—her love and his novel. The former satisfied all his needs but one, for which the latter proved indispensable. It provided a catharsis for his unbearable and seemingly ineradicable memory of life before Violet. The record of their thirty-three-year love affair is subtly woven into his book. They spent long hours together at Cambridge Square and Ilchester Place, Abinger, Eastbourne, and Lye Green, painstakingly revising difficult passages, searching for the most accurate and evocative imagery, refining meaning, eliminating flaws in rhythm and pace. And they spent even more hours alone, Sydney writing legibly in longhand, and Violet, whose handwriting was always difficult to decipher and deteriorated in her old age, editing and typing. The novel from beginning to end was a collaboration between an inspired writer with a painful personal story to tell and an intelligent, sympathetic, but unsentimental editor who was dedicated to his success.

  Sydney had published nothing before marrying Violet in 1911 and arguably would never have published anything had he not met and married her. But that year in response to her urging him to write about what he knew best—himself—he began Richard Kurt. He soon set it aside, though, to write Concessions, a novel with much more circuitous autobiographical implications than A True Story. Why he stopped working on Kurt is not known. Perhaps he thought he didn’t know himself well enough yet; or maybe he wasn’t quite ready to tell the full truth, which would have made the task futile.

  After Concessions came out in 1913 Europe was on the verge of war, and everybody’s mind was on when it would begin, when Britain would be drawn in, because it seemed almost inevitable that it would, and how horrible it was going to be. The imminent threat of a devastating conflict might have made it difficult to concentrate on a project that for the times might have seemed self-regarding and even frivolous. The book he wrote instead was War-Time Silhouettes, a collection of short stories with war-related themes. He published only one other book of short fiction, Celeste and Other Sketches, which was issued in 1930. “Celeste,” the title story, was first rate and the others as slight as the word “sketches” suggests. All of the stories had previously appeared in literary magazines.

  Sydney probably returned to Kurt in 1916. That was the year Violet read Swann’s Way, was enchanted by it, and urged him to read it. When he didn’t get it the first time, she persevered, as was her way, and made sure he read it again. Had she not, he very likely would never have recognized Proust’s genius and would not have written the letter that kindled their relationship. And if he had failed to share her love of Proust, it surely would have altered not only A True Story, but their relationship.

  How much of Kurt was already written when they read Swann, what state it was in, how much if any was revised or scrapped, is not known. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that A True Story was influenced by In Search of Lost Time. But even though the similarities are numerous and obvious, they are hardly peculiar to Marcel Proust and Sydney Schiff. Both books are largely autobiographical; both are composed of several individual but closely related novels; both are mainly character rather than plot driven, with an interest in time, an obsession of many modernists of the Bayswater and Bloomsbury persuasions. And in both many of the characters are based on real people.

  But the differences in style and scope are vast. Sydney, benefiting from Violet’s acute editorial judgment, achieved clarity in the traditional way through straightforward plotlines and short sentences with simple structure. Proust achieved it much more originally—despite a maze of subplots—through perfectly crafted, unusually long sentences that are remarkably lucid despite their length and complexity. Moreover, Proust’s three-thousand-page novel is encyclopedic in its interests, while Sydney’s, which is one-fifth its size, is much more narrowly focused. Richard Kurt is a relatively uncomplicated tale in which the narrator is the protagonist and the narrative rarely strays from the narrow path of his life. In Swann, Marcel, the narrator, is not the protagonist; indeed, in the novel taken as a whole, there is no protagonist and complications abound. Furthermore, Proust’s work is a compendium of art, music, philosophy, medicine, history, social mores, sexual deviation, fashion, theater, and much more. Theophilus Boll, an insightful interpreter of Sydney’s fiction, suggested Sydney learned from Swann how to seamlessly combine analysis with description, which he did effectively. But without access to early drafts of Kurt it is impossible to know for sure that Proust was his master even in this respect. It could have been Violet or just his own development as a writer.

  Richard Kurt was the first of seven explicitly autobiographical volumes published between 1919 and 1937 in which Sydney combined fictionalized events with actual ones and inserted invented characters alongside real ones. He exploited this technique to express his own feelings and beliefs in an effort to come to terms with himself, which was his principal motive for writing. But he was not entirely self-absorbed. His own interest in other people had been intensified by Violet’s. Throughout the novel he conveyed the essential qualities that defined all of the significant characters and delineated their human relationships subtly and convincingly. He used characteristics such as religion, ethnicity, class, race, and intellect to describe characters in his fiction but never to evaluate them, a quality that emerged most explicitly in his last book, The Other Side, which Somerset Maugham thought was remarkably real, a “chapter from [Sydney’s] life.” A True Story was published in three separate editions in 1930, 1948, and 1965. The last edition was composed of Prince Hempseed, Elinor Colhouse, The Other Side, a drastically cut version of Richard Kurt, and the last chapter of Myrtle.

  Bernard Bergonzi, a British poet and critic who specialized in the modernist period, wrote in the March 17, 1966, issue of the New York Review of Books that the final rendering of A True Story “may not be the forgotten masterpiece of English fiction that the publishers claim it to be; but it is still important enough for its reprinting to be welcome.” Roger Dooley, however, writing in the Saturday Review of January 1, 1966, found Hudson’s style “as flatly unimaginative as his titles.” The only section of the book he thought worthwhile was Richard Kurt, which he found “absorbing and soundly constructed.”

  Violet was always careful to point out after Sydney’s death that he began Richard Kurt in 1911 because she was sensitive to criticism that he shamelessly modeled his work on Proust’s, which she maintained would have been impossible because the Schiffs did not read the first volume of In Search of Lost Time until years after he began Richard Kurt. But Kurt was not published until 1919. Lacking an original manuscript there is no way to know how much might have been written or rewritten in the three years between his first reading of Proust and its publication. And while hardly dispositive, it does not seem totally irrelevant that the book was dedicated to “M.P.,” initials that would have meant nothing to a
ll but the handful of his readers who were writers themselves.

  In those early years of the twentieth century a small group of writers and artists, many of whom would become the Schiffs’ friends, including Proust, were on the cusp of cultural dominion. And Sydney Schiff, under the spell of the former Violet Beddington, was absorbing the zeitgeist and beginning to mutate into Stephen Hudson. Concessions appeared under his real name, but War-Time Silhouettes and each book after it were signed Stephen Hudson. He took the name “Hudson” because it was the surname of the Beddingtons’ secretary and he was using their address to communicate with his publisher in an attempt to hide his identity from his family and former wife. He chose Stephen as a given name, it has been suggested, because St. Stephen was a martyr.

  Eight novels and a collection of stories was a considerable output considering that Sydney did not begin writing seriously until he was forty-three years old. What he would have written without Violet’s early encouragement and long-term influence is an imponderable, but there is no doubt that her moral and intellectual support was crucial to the quality of his work and to their relationship. He told Edward Beddington-Behrens that “if it were not for her divine companionship, his literary output might have been much larger, but in their interminable conversations together, many long novels had been dissipated.” Not all writers necessarily need a muse, but they all know in their heart of hearts that the only gift as valuable as talent is a good editor. Sydney knew his was better than good. She was by his side day and night and he trusted her implicitly. And perhaps more important, she prodded him to aspire to a level of creativity that without her very likely would have been beyond his reach.

  There is no way to know precisely what or how much Violet contributed. However, Richard, Myrtle and I, which was published in 1926, and in which Richard is Sydney and Myrtle is Violet (the “I” in the title is Sydney’s alter ego), provides some clues. It is constructed as an extended conversation between Richard, Myrtle, and the coldly analytical “I.” The book—or story, more precisely, because it is only forty-three pages long—strongly suggests Violet played a seminal role in Sydney’s writing and that he rarely if ever rejected her revisions.

  Perhaps the best clue to the nature of her contribution to Sydney’s novels is in the notes she wrote when she was in her seventies suggesting changes in various works by Julian Fane, the young English writer she befriended a little over a decade before she died. They give a clear indication of her critical sensibility and the attention she paid to the little things that animate fiction. They also demonstrate that she could be generous with praise, using phrases like “so charming” and “beautifully suggested” where she thought they were deserved, but acerbic when criticism was necessary. She unequivocally recommended that Fane delete pages and details and leave some things to the reader’s imagination. She instructed him that he was writing for an intelligent public, not children, and added bluntly, “I do not care for the description of Dorothy. It is unpleasant and has no interest.”

  Violet became more short-tempered as she grew older, and although she was gentler with Sydney, the man she adored, this was a woman whose ideas about writing, as about most everything else, were clearly formed, who spoke her mind, and who did not suffer fools. If there is a distillation, or a summing up, of what she thought and how she felt about writing, it is probably this quotation from André Maurois’s Reflections that she passed on to Fane:

  “To adopt an artist’s calling is to accept a kind of religion. You must set above all pleasures, all honors, the satisfaction of a well-written page, a well-made sentence, a word that is the only right word. Like love and friendship, art demands from you all that you have to give. And like love it will repay you a hundredfold.” This attitude and sensibility, which Violet and Sydney shared with James and Proust, is reflected to a considerable degree in A True Story.

  Violet was also musical, which Sydney was not, which would have given her a feel for the rhythm and phrasing of language. The modernists were hardly the first to recognize the relationship between music and felicitous language. But they believed this relationship transcended beauty, that it was more than a pleasant sensation independent of meaning. Many of them believed that along with concrete images musical elements were indispensable for communicating feelings as precisely as possible. Henri Bergson, perhaps the most influential philosopher of modernism, went further. He believed music was even more important than images and urged writers to find language that by its musicality helps convey exactly what they want their readers to feel. One of the most powerful influences on Sydney’s writing, however, was Violet’s literary taste. Her favorite writer when she married Sydney was James, and he remained her sole favorite until five years into their marriage she read Swann’s Way. Eventually Proust’s work and their friendship with him transformed their understanding of literature and, to a degree, their lives.

  And as one might expect of someone whose literary assessments were so acute, Violet’s judgments of people were similarly keen. She could be empathetic, sympathetic, snobbish, or acidic in her reactions, but she was always incisive in her analysis. Her ability to identify hypocrisy and deceit, to differentiate genuine from false emotion, in life as well as in print, must have been enormously valuable to Sydney, who, when she married him, was a middle-aged novice writer with the desire but not the confidence to embark on an ambitious literary enterprise. Sydney, as it turned out, was an equally acute observer and equally blunt in his appraisals, which meant that neither was oblivious to the other’s flaws, nor likely silent about them. His fussiness must have gotten on her nerves and her acerbity must occasionally have abraded his delicate sensibilities. Although their love for one another was never in doubt, at times they must have found each other irritating. Violet could be willful and Sydney petulant and by some standards petty.

  More important, though, they were matched in a way that brought out the best in both of them. And in a world where wives didn’t always count, it was as a couple that they were accepted and even courted by modernist royalty. It seems more likely than not that on their own, or with other mates, they would not have met Proust and Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, and Edwin and Willa Muir, or achieved the intimacy they did with these writers. And in their wildest dreams they would not have imagined inviting Proust, Picasso, James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, and Serge Diaghilev to dinner and having them all appear. Their wealth certainly facilitated these relationships, but their patronage was always on a small scale, so it could hardly account for the closeness of many of their friendships. They were gracious hosts, but not lavish. They did not orchestrate elaborate country weekends the way Lady Ottoline Morrell did at Garsington. They preferred quiet dinners with Tom and Vivienne Eliot or Wyndham Lewis, who never took his wife anywhere, or small parties with intimate friends who often knew each other well.

  From about 1916 on, these relationships and Sydney’s literary career more or less defined their lives. Sydney wrote modernist novels, published in the most prestigious journals, translated works by leading German, Swiss, and French writers, and funded and helped edit a prominent journal. Still, the Schiffs’ status among the modernist elite was not completely secure. Although Lewis praised one of Sydney’s novels, his overall assessment of him was that he was no more than a rich amateur. Muir, on the other hand, in a minority view, thought his books had as good a chance as those of Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence of becoming part of the canon. Whatever anyone thought, though, these were the people with whom the Schiffs spent their time, whose books they read, who reviewed Sydney’s books, with whom they discussed politics, painting, poetry, and the rapidly evolving world they were trying to understand, explain, and depict. According to Lewis, who didn’t suffer from diffidence, “It was … a new civilization that I—and a few other people—was making the blueprints for.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE WAR YEARS

  In July 1914 a twenty-five-year-old Harvard graduat
e student a dissertation short of a PhD in philosophy, but with literary aspirations, passed through London on his way to Germany. His name was Tom Eliot and he planned to return to England after participating in a two-month summer program at Marburg University. But on August 1, just before the program was due to begin, his plans abruptly changed. Germany had declared war on Russia and was no longer a safe or welcoming place for Americans. Eliot returned to London.

  A week or two after arriving he called on Ezra Pound at the suggestion of his college friend Conrad Aiken. He showed him several poems, including a draft he had been struggling with for four years. Pound, who was just three years older than Eliot but well established in London, had already published five volumes of verse. After reading Eliot’s poems he wrote to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, that he had never seen a better poem by an American. It was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Monroe published it in 1915. It was, of course, one of Eliot’s best poems and a twentieth-century masterpiece. Pound also wrote to H. L. Mencken praising Eliot’s intelligence and urging Mencken to keep an eye on him, and introduced Eliot to others in his circle, including Hilda Doolittle, the American poet who signed her work “H.D.,” and her husband, the essayist and critic Richard Aldington.