Sydney and Violet Read online

  On the strength of “Prufrock” and Eliot’s obvious intelligence, Pound invited him to his flat at the foot of Notting Hill to meet the acid-tongued painter, writer, intellectual gadfly, and founder of Vorticism, Percy Wyndham Lewis, who hated his first name and never used it. When the two men didn’t seem to hit it off, which Pound attributed to the younger Eliot’s reserve and lack of confidence, he tried to break the ice. “Yor old Uncle Ezz is wise to what youse thinkin,” he said to Lewis in the hillbilly drawl he liked to affect. “Waaal Wyndham I’se telling yew, he’s a lot better’n he looks.” Years later Lewis described Eliot that day as “a sleek, tall attractive transatlantic apparition,” a description at once detailed and opaque, which is characteristic of much of Lewis’s prose.

  Whether Pound’s corny dialect helped or not, Lewis and Eliot quickly became friends. Despite their contrasting temperaments, each respected the other’s intellect and they shared a taste for scathing humor. Moreover, it was a cardinal principle for both that authority, firmly exercised, was a precondition of civilization. The only difference was that Eliot’s views were skewed toward religion and authoritarianism and Lewis’s toward authoritarianism without religion. Lewis thought democracy was the death knell for discipline, by which he meant the destruction of culture and society. Both admired the French nationalist, monarchist, and anti-Semite Charles Maurras, whose mantra, “classique, catholique, monarchique,” Eliot later adapted to his own purposes as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Maurras, a rabid supporter of the Vichy regime, was arrested in September 1944, charged with complicity with the enemy, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. In March 1952 he was transferred to a hospital and he died on November 16.

  Eliot and Lewis had all this in common plus an expansive sense of self-importance. At thirty Eliot considered himself the most influential critic in England, which, to be fair, he might have been. Lewis, in his 1937 autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering, in a chapter grandiosely titled “The Period of ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Blast,’ and ‘The Wasteland’ ”—Blast being the title of a Vorticist journal he edited that died after its second issue—proclaimed, “I was at its heart. In some instances, I was it.” By “it” he meant nothing less than the entire modernist movement. If that were not enough, he also said that by August 1914, the month World War I started, “no newspaper was complete without news about Vorticism and its archexponent Mr. Lewis.” In anyone else’s case you would think they were being arch, but in Lewis’s his remarkable gift for bluster casts some doubt. “I might have been the head of a social revolution, instead of merely being the prophet of a new fashion in art,” he declared.

  Eliot considered Lewis a better painter than he was a writer, but what he especially admired was his erudition and gift as a conversationalist. A few years later in a review of Lewis’s novel Tarr, which has its moments, although mostly the characters deliver short lectures and strain to sound witty or aphoristic, Eliot called him “the most fascinating personality of our time.” This view of Lewis was widely held in Bayswater, but he was reviled in Bloomsbury and after a visit or two rejected by its Garsington branch. He of course thought no better of the Woolf-Bell-Strachey-Keynes crowd, accusing “the really malefic ‘Bloomsburys’ … of having a destructive influence upon the intellectual life of England.” Without them, he wrote, “The writing and painting world of London might have been less like the afternoon tea-party of a perverse spinster.” He also accused “the Bloomsburys” of blocking him from publishing any literary journalism and of accepting his books for review, then “neglecting” to review them. Whether or not this was true I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem far-fetched.

  Bloomsbury was not alone, however, in its distaste for Lewis. Ernest Hemingway once dismissed him as someone who “just looked nasty,” a man with the eyes “of an unsuccessful rapist.” Sydney and Violet however were in the admiring camp and would in time form as close a relationship with Lewis as they would with Eliot. Eventually, though, a disagreement about money and a scathing chapter on the Schiffs in a satirical novel by Lewis all but ended it. In Blasting and Bombardiering, a book that is at its best when describing life at the front during World War I, he gave the Schiffs only one brief mention. He did not even include their first names despite their having supported him with gifts and loans, bought his paintings, funded and published in his journal the Tyro, subsidized his health care, and provided him with many a meal and multiple diversions in the city and in the country.

  In October, Eliot, by then a fledgling member of the Bayswater chapter of the modernist club, went off to Oxford, where he had a fellowship. While there he worked on his dissertation and studied Aristotle, but as the year wore on his interest in philosophy, a vocation leading to the academic career his father and his Harvard mentors wished for him, wore off. He was more and more drawn to poetry, even though the professional prospects were considerably vaguer, and by the time his year at Oxford was over he had pretty much made up his mind to pursue his literary ambitions in London, if only for a time.

  London during the war was a grim city. Sporadic bombing raids, first by zeppelins, then bombers, and finally primitive missiles, began in May of 1915 and continued until the armistice in November 1918. Between six and seven hundred Londoners were killed by the German bombs. There were also food shortages and frequent blackouts. By and large, though, there was remarkably little discussion of the fighting or deprivation in the letters Sydney and Violet exchanged with their friends. And Lewis was the only one of their intimate circle who saw combat, serving first as a noncommissioned officer, then as an artillery officer and a war artist. Never a man to leave his resentment unexpressed, even though in this case it simmered for more than twenty years, he wrote contemptuously, although understandably, in his autobiography that “the ‘Bloomsburies’ were all doing war work of ‘National importance,’ down in some downy English county, under the wings of powerful pacifist friends; pruning trees, planting gooseberry bushes, and haymaking, doubtless in large sunbonnets.”

  Sydney—once characterized by the Bloomsbury princeling-by-marriage and sun-bonneted gooseberry planter David Garnett as a rich Austrian with the acquired manners of an actor playing an English colonel—was too old to fight. Nevertheless he was deeply interested in the progress of the fighting. He told Edward Beddington-Behrens, a captain and later a major in the army who saw action in the Battle of the Somme and elsewhere at the front, that he wanted to know all about the war, both the light and the dark side. Beddington-Behrens took him at his word and in his letters recounted gory details including descriptions of body parts being picked up and dumped into sacks and of the three or four hours he spent searching for and burying the dead within sight of the German trenches a couple of hundred yards away. “It is the only way to get an idea of this war,” he wrote. Sydney and Violet corresponded regularly with Beddington-Behrens throughout the war and sent him packages including everything from socks, a cap, and a waterproof jacket to Devonshire clotted cream from Fortnum & Mason. Violet wrote to her nephew that if she and Sydney had a son they would want him to be like Beddington-Behrens. They were not as close to his twin brother Walter, who was killed in action on July 10, 1917. He was twenty years old.

  The only one of Sydney’s books in which he gave some idea of his dejection during the war was Richard, Myrtle and I. He projects a sense that his world was crumbling around him, that civilization was in ruins, and that even Proust belonged to the past and his writing had little or no value anymore. “The whole thing is broken,” he told his alter ego, who was trying to convince him otherwise. “No one will have time for anything except work. There’ll be no room for people like me.… In the old leisurely world one could do what one pleased. Those who wanted to spend their time hunting or shooting or playing golf could do so. No one minded. The same thing with reading. But all that’s changed now. First, the war isn’t over. When it is do you think those millions of men who’ve been living in hell all
these years, will put up with the old state of things? I can tell you they won’t.” In the end, though, Violet and his alter ego conspired to convince him that Proust still mattered, which seems to imply that while civilization as Sydney knew it was being transformed, quickly and radically, it would survive.

  Although he was too old for the army Sydney managed to play a small part in the war effort in a rather mysterious way. From early in 1915 until the armistice in 1918 he carried on a correspondence with Basil Thompson, a son of the Archbishop of York and a former prison governor. Thompson was then assistant commissioner and chief of the Criminal Investigation Department at New Scotland Yard. During the war the CID functioned as part of military intelligence. It is not clear how or why Sydney and Thompson made contact. Although they both attended G. T. Worsley’s School they were there six years apart. Only Thompson’s letters and those of an agent in Rotterdam have survived. Their language is oblique, but the letters suggest Sydney was trying to do his patriotic duty as a noncombatant.

  Thompson was anti-Semitic and deeply conservative. He was also relentless in pursuit of anyone he thought posed a threat to Britain. His principal targets apart from German spies were suffragettes, Irish nationalists, and British Marxists. Thompson’s first letter to Sydney with a specific request for assistance was dated March 23, 1915. He asked if “there would be any objection to one of our people in Switzerland calling upon Dr. Kuhlmann-Ristner. I think he might be very useful to us.… Perhaps you could prepare Dr. Kuhlmann-Ristner in very guarded language. After all, he can but refuse.” It’s not clear if Sydney was being asked to recruit a spy, but he would continue to be solicited by Thompson to provide various vaguely described services throughout the war.

  In a second letter, Thompson wrote to Sydney that a Mr. Lang had sent him a collection of German propaganda papers, “and I am able to tell you confidentially that action has been taken from them. I am surprised to see from his letter that he has not yet been called upon, and I am taking steps to have this remedied.” The correspondence continued in this vein throughout the war, and in one of the last letters, in January 1918, Thompson wrote to Sydney that “the admiralty is quite alive to the probability of a Naval action, but I will see that your suggestions are brought before the right quarter.” Was Sydney offering strategic or tactical advice? If so, based on what expertise? Did Thompson actually pass it on, and was it followed? I don’t know, but the Thompson correspondence makes clear that the war was never far from Sydney’s mind and that he knew what side he was on.

  In 1919 Thompson was named head of the Directorate of Intelligence, which gave him authority over all British intelligence, military, foreign, and domestic. But in 1921 his office was found to be an unnecessary layer in the intelligence bureaucracy and he was forced to resign.

  Although the Schiffs’ nephews fought in the war and one was killed, among their close friends only Lewis did. In 1914 national service was far from Eliot’s mind. The personal hardships and geopolitics of war were outweighed by the cultural ferment in London and its abundant and, to him at least, welcoming community of native and expatriate writers. And then there was the added attraction of the pretty and by Eliot’s standards socially desirable Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom he met through an old school friend in 1915. Not the least among the qualities he found endearing was her enthusiasm for his poetry. Although not generally given to snap decisions he married her three months later.

  Many years afterwards, however, Eliot singled out his first meeting with Pound as the real turning point in his decision to stay in England. It “changed my life,” he wrote. “He was enthusiastic about my poems, and gave me such praise and encouragement as I had long ceased to hope for.” By that time Pound had become Eliot’s mentor, in the full meaning of the word. He was a wise and trusted counselor and an influential senior sponsor. And if you set aside William Butler Yeats, the greatest of all modernist poets, it seems fair to say that only Pound could have filled that role for Eliot, who arguably became the best known of all modernist poets and critics.

  But if Pound’s early mentoring of Eliot made sense and therefore was unsurprising, it comes as a colossal surprise that Lyndall Gordon, the deservedly respected author of the standard Eliot biography, has unambiguously asserted that Sydney Schiff was Eliot’s mentor. I have read every bit of the Eliot-Schiff correspondence and I feel obliged to say I think Gordon overstated Sydney’s influence on Eliot’s work. What Eliot’s letters to Sydney reflect, rather than mentorship, is a certain dependence Eliot developed on the Schiffs and was not loath to exploit. For one thing, Sydney had connections Eliot valued, among these, Lady Rothermere, who put up the money for Eliot’s journal, the Criterion. Sydney also published Eliot in his journal, Art and Letters, and was always a potential patron. Additionally, Eliot liked being invited to the Schiffs’ houses in town and in the country. And most of all, perhaps, Vivienne found the Schiffs more sympathetic and compatible than most of Eliot’s friends. Eliot did seek Sydney’s opinion on at least one important poem, but he often sent drafts of his poems to friends and there is no reason to think he valued Sydney’s critical sensibilities more highly than those of his other friends.

  The Schiffs’ friendship yielded Eliot tangible benefits, a serious intellectual relationship, and a warm and respectful friendship. There is a sense of ease in many of Eliot’s personal letters to the Schiffs that is rare in his correspondence with others. It is also likely that Sydney and Violet were the only friends with whom the young Eliots had a genuine “couples” relationship. The idea that Sydney and Violet could engage each of them without estranging the other seems all the more remarkable because Eliot and his wife were spiritually and physically, though not intellectually, estranged within weeks of their wedding day.

  There are various accounts of exactly what triggered their alienation, but all of them point to Bertrand Russell, philosopher, pacifist, do-gooder, and Eliot’s professor at Harvard. Russell, who feared his four-year affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell was running out of steam, is said to have caused the rupture by seducing Vivienne, whom he had characterized to his Garsington friends after first meeting her as “faintly vulgar.” While there is a fairly widespread assumption that an affair occurred, there is no hard evidence and little agreement on how long it might have lasted if it did occur. Accounts vary from one night to three years. Lady Ottoline wrote rather circumspectly in her memoir that Russell “was convinced that the Eliots were not really happy together, but by a little manipulation on his part everything would come right between them.”

  Vivienne was beginning to suffer from a series of ailments that would distress her for the rest of her life, but also would endear her to Violet, whose empathy gave her comfort. Eliot meanwhile was doing his best to support them any way he could. First he taught several subjects including Latin, French, German, and drawing at two boys’ schools, High Wycombe and Highgate Junior School. Then, in 1917, through a friend of Vivienne’s family, he got a job in the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyd’s Bank. Full-time employment compromised his ability to write but provided a regular source of income, which he badly needed. Pound and Sydney, among other friends, tried to get him to quit, but he stayed on for eight years.

  Russell, who had eased Eliot into the Bloomsbury circle of modernist society by introducing him to Garsington, soothed his conscience by providing a small amount of financial support to the young couple. Those who believe the relationship with Vivienne lasted for three years accuse him of fomenting depression in her by abruptly breaking it off in the winter of 1918–19 and moving on smartly to another mistress. What Eliot knew, believed, or thought about Russell’s relationship with his wife is not known. He did, however, mock Russell in his 1916 poem “Mr. Appolinax” as “Priapus in the shrubbery,” a man with “pointed ears” and “centaur’s hoofs.” The marriage in any event endured, but Eliot grew more and more distant from his wife, although he continued to show concern about her health and respect her opinion of his work. She ev
entually retreated into drugs and had other affairs.

  The Schiffs and Eliots probably met sometime in 1919. In a letter to her friend Mary Hutchinson written on May 10 while she was on her way to Garsington, Vivienne referred to poems Eliot had asked Leonard Woolf to send to “a man called Schiff” of whom she obviously had never heard. Between Vivienne’s May letter to Mary Hutchinson and early July, however, the Schiff-Eliot relationship flowered. Eliot wrote three letters in nine days to the Schiffs. He told Sydney he had read Richard Kurt “with great interest” and was looking forward to discussing it with him. He also thanked Sydney for his careful study of “Gerontion.” To Violet he wrote, “I was really glad of the bad weather as it gave excuse for more conversation. There are very few people to whom we could say that sincerely.” And in a letter to his mother on August 9, 1920, he wrote: “We spent the weekend at Eastbourne, visiting some friends called Schiff—very nice Jews.” By 1918–19 Eliot was already an adornment to any drawing room with modernist literary pretensions, and he was invited regularly to the Schiffs’ houses in Cambridge Square and at the seaside in Eastbourne on England’s south coast.

  The letters they exchanged regularly began quite formally, but by mid-1920 Eliot was writing to “My dear Sydney” and signing himself, “Affectionately, T.S.E.” In another 1920 letter, Eliot wrote, “With love from both of us to you and Violet.” A year later it was “aff., Tom,” which is especially meaningful because only Eliot’s closest friends received letters signed “Tom.” And in 1921 Vivienne wrote to “My dear Violet” and signed off “With love.” They wrote about where they planned to spend the summer, commented superficially on each other’s work in generally flattering, but occasionally mildly critical terms, and alluded to financial matters, and many of the letters contained more than anyone would want to know about their multitude of minor ailments and discomforts.