Sydney and Violet Read online

  In later years, Violet, who suffered from fevers of unknown etiology among other things, referred to herself as a valetudinarian, a rather arcane word that means someone who is excessively, perhaps even morbidly, concerned with his or her health. She had a sense of humor about it, though, once signing a letter to the Schiffs’ friend, the English writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, “V. Valetudinariana.” It is a word that accurately described not only Violet but the Eliots and almost everyone else with whom the Schiffs corresponded.

  Those were the days in which the Schiffs were hosting parties in Eastbourne in which the guests took part in role-playing games. Tom Eliot and Vivienne especially liked these evenings, and he wrote to their friend Mary Hutchinson that “London life would be more tolerable if there were more people like the Schiffs. They won’t have anyone … they don’t really like. One result is that everyone is ready to … play the fool if necessary.” The Eastbourne gatherings were so successful that Sydney and Violet duplicated them at Cambridge Square. What Eliot called playing the fool Sydney referred to benignly in a letter to Proust as “an exchange of personalities.” Each guest, as well as Sydney and Violet, had to impersonate someone known to all of them, who often was in the room, and the others had to guess who it was. This may sound innocent enough, but as Sydney explained it to Proust it was clearly more wicked than innocent. The goal, it seems, was to expose their friends’ weak points. He wrote that the game was “diabolically entertaining and illuminating at the same time” and that he was very bad at it, but that Violet was brilliant. During one of those evenings Eliot did a caustic impression of Wyndham Lewis, who turned out to be as thin-skinned about being parodied by his friend as he was thick-skinned about parodying everyone else.

  These evenings were important to Eliot not only because he found them distracting, but because Vivienne, who was depressed and took pleasure in very little, enjoyed the acting. It seems that an entertaining evening at the Schiffs’ made Eliot’s life with Vivienne just a bit easier to bear, if only temporarily. Also, it would have been out of character for him to flatter Sydney and Violet in a letter to another good friend unless he meant it. On the other hand, it could have been that the normally shy and restrained Eliot, who was a fan of rowdy, even raunchy British music hall, comic strips, detective novels, and boxing, also enjoyed acting out in a relatively nonthreatening environment.

  During the austere war years Sydney and Violet were able to ingratiate themselves with Eliot, Lewis, and other modernist luminaries because they had the means to be good hosts and they were good at bringing the right people together. But, as Eliot’s letter to Mary Hutchinson indicates, there was more to it—and to them—than that. Neither of them was outgoing, but what they would not or could not do alone, they did well together. This applied not only to their social life but also to Sydney’s work. United with Violet, Sydney was finally becoming the man—and the writer—he dreamed of being. After surviving his father’s contempt for his aestheticism, and twenty poisonous years with Marion, he found himself in the nurturing embrace of someone who loved him, understood him, appreciated his sensitivity, accepted his excesses, and, most importantly, believed in his incipient talent. And Violet, middle-aged for her time and unmarried, had met and wed a man who loved her unconditionally, who responded with perfect pitch to her sensibilities and intelligence, and perhaps of most importance desperately needed her nurturing. To her he was the person whose needs perfectly matched the gifts she had to give. Each gave the other a sense of completeness and fulfillment.

  No one knows for sure what would have become of Sydney without Violet, or Violet without Sydney, but it seems likely he would have remained unhappy and unfulfilled and she would have carried on her life with equanimity. Together, however, between 1913 and 1919, above and beyond their social success, Sydney wrote and Violet midwifed, edited, and typed three books, all of which were published. The first, Concessions, deconstructed his personality into three parts, each represented by a separate character. Violet also appears, as two characters, one a brilliant pianist like her mother and the other a woman named Zillah, Violet’s middle name as well as her mother’s first name. And like Violet, the character named Zillah was an accomplished singer.

  The direct style of A True Story, using the simplest possible language to convey complex insight and emotion, was yet to emerge. But one defining characteristic of Sydney’s later work is evident in this first effort. Without masking his identity, he was as brutally honest about his weaknesses as the pseudonymous Stephen Hudson was in A True Story. The Scottish poet and critic Edwin Muir, who was to become a good friend of the Schiffs, wrote some years later that in A True Story Sydney “pushed his honesty … so far … that he was less than just to himself.” Two of the three aspects of himself he drew in Concessions emphasized character flaws: the artist possessed of the childish selfishness not infrequently found in creative persons and the hopelessly naive man lured into a loveless marriage. The third was generally positive: a man capable of selfless love because he had received it from his mother. It doesn’t take too much imagination to recognize that a composite of these three characters amounts to a self-portrait of Sydney. In a letter to Proust in 1920 he explicitly referred to himself as selfish, but beyond question what he gave to Violet was selfless love.

  In Sydney’s second book, War-Time Silhouettes, two of the stories were based on his relationship with his uncle, Sir Ernest Schiff, and one on a nephew of Violet’s great-uncle, the composer Charles Salaman. But the five others, although probably not pure invention, have no obvious family connections. The stories on the whole are slight, but entertaining, and stylistically they are a bit closer than Concessions to the autobiographical volumes that make up A True Story.

  Richard Kurt was his third book. Soon after its publication Eliot wrote to tell Sydney that he had “read [it] with sustained interest” and that it was “a book which seemed to me a very accurate study of a monde which is almost unknown to me … there was no moment of boredom.” His only criticism was that “the canvas was more crowded with events and people than was essential to the effects.” The letter ends with the Eliots’ plans to visit the Schiffs in Eastbourne on the weekend. Nine days later, Eliot wrote again and by then he had received at least a draft of Elinor Colhouse. He said he had not begun reading it yet, but that he wanted to see “at what point if any, it joins the curve of development of Richard Kurt. I see in R.K. a process of crystallization in the latter part of the book which interests me and which I think may in future lead you further away from or beyond your theory of the novel than you may think.” Just what Sydney’s “theory of the novel” was regrettably is unrecorded. But by then Sydney and Violet had developed a profound regard for the radically innovative work of the still little-known Proust, and they had begun to correspond with him. It would not be unreasonable to think therefore that Sydney was pursuing some sort of Proustian design.

  Between 1916 and Proust’s death in 1922 the great French novelist was at the center of their universe. Swann’s Way was published in Paris in 1913, but few French–language copies crossed the channel. Sydney and Violet were not the first in Britain to read it or to recognize Proust’s greatness nor were they the first to proselytize for his novel, but they were spellbound by his mastery, and proselytize they did.

  They admired other writers, but Proust was their idol. He also eventually became something resembling a friend, which if it were anyone but Proust would be a circuitous way of putting it. But in principle Proust didn’t believe in friendship. Samuel Beckett wrote that according to Proust, “Friendship is a social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of garbage buckets. It has no spiritual significance. For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity.” So Proust, although he did have a few real friends such as Reynaldo Hahn and Paul Morand despite his principles, managed these relationships carefully, especially in the last years of his life. He saw less and less o
f those he knew and certainly was not interested in getting to know anyone new. Mostly he was afraid they would slow his work, which he felt he could not afford to have happen because he expected to die young—an expectation that was realized—and the novel he had conceived was so vast and ambitious that any delay would mean leaving it unfinished.

  But inexplicably Sydney and Violet seem to have been treated as exceptions. Although at first he did not want to meet them at all, and they met in person only a few times, a strong case can be made that with the exception of Morand and Hahn, Proust’s brother Robert, Céleste Albaret, his extraordinarily devoted housekeeper, and possibly Prince Antoine Bibesco, toward the end of his life Sydney and Violet were closer to him than anyone else. During his last year Proust worked steadily and rarely left his room, except for occasional midnight excursions to the Ritz for dinner alone. He spent most of his time in bed under blankets and furs writing. He consumed only croissants and coffee and the ice-cold beer Celeste’s taxi-driver husband, Odilon, collected from the Ritz at any hour Proust wanted it. Yet he made the effort to see the Schiffs on their few brief visits to Paris and he wrote to them frequently. And while the Schiff-Proust letters, all twenty-five of them written between 1919 and the year he died, 1922, are not totally transparent, there is an unmistakable intimacy in many of them suggesting if not friendship as it is generally understood, then something very much like it.

  Proust was a person of interest for the Bayswater modernists with whom the Schiffs were closest, but none shared their adoration of him. He had his admirers, but the more macho and anti-Semitic members of the club such as Lewis and Pound derided him as a rich, effeminate little half Jew of no literary importance. Eliot too was unimpressed by Proust. He wrote to Pound in 1923 that he was publishing a short essay by Proust in the Criterion, but that Proust was “not to my taste, merely a necessary sensation,” and that he would publish nothing else by him. And for the most part the other literary magazines Eliot and his friends published in such as the Athenaeum, the Little Review, and the Egoist, of which Eliot was assistant editor, ignored Proust’s work. This mattered, although less financially to the relatively well-off Proust than most of the others, because these literary journals, although usually underfunded and short-lived, kept their work and names in circulation. Both poets and fiction writers, whose long works the journals excerpted, in most cases depended on them for both income and recognition. Their novels were often privately published or published by small literary houses in editions of fewer than a thousand copies. Poetry collections were generally issued in even smaller editions. And the situation was no better in France. Swann’s Way would have languished unpublished if Proust hadn’t paid for it himself. Sydney’s books were all commercially published, but few copies were printed and fewer were sold, which might have affected his ego but had no effect on his lifestyle.

  While he was hardly a literary star, by early in 1917 Sydney had published two books and was nearing the completion of a third. He also had an unpunched ticket into the arena of literary journalism—discretionary income. His interest had been aroused and he would soon use his access. The challenge was to find or create the right vehicle, which, whether he knew it or not, was in the process of being born. It was conceived by Frank Rutter and Herbert Read, both art critics. Read was also a poet and literary critic. In accord with the professional background of its four coeditors—Rutter and Read, and two painters, Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman—the magazine was designed to give more emphasis to art than the typical literary journal. They called it Art and Letters: An Illustrated Quarterly and the first issue was published in July 1917. It lasted exactly a year in its original incarnation, suspending publication after the fourth issue in June 1918 because of increased costs and the war-related duties of three of the editors.

  Sometime between the last issue and the armistice that ended World War I on November 11, 1918, in an effort to restart Art and Letters, Read met with the Sitwell brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, to discuss the prospects of their investing in the magazine. The deal went through, but the details are fuzzy. What is known is that Osbert Sitwell became a part owner, that he and Read served as the magazine’s literary editors, and that Sydney, anonymously, became the magazine’s most powerful financial backer, a status that apparently gave him a significant amount of editorial control. It is less clear how heavy a hand he exerted on the content of the magazine, but many of the contributors already were or would become friends of the Schiffs. The first issue of the revamped magazine, now called simply Art and Letters, included poetry by Edith Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon, Ford Madox Ford, and Aldous Huxley and prose by Wyndham Lewis, Read, and Rutter. There were drawings by Picasso, Lewis, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Later issues included work by Eliot, Pound, Katherine Mansfield, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Ronald Firbank, and Stephen Hudson. Among the other artists whose work appeared were Matisse, Modigliani, and Severini. The magazine also published drawings by numerous British artists including the Nash brothers, John and Paul, William Roberts, and Jacob Epstein, all of whom were friends or acquaintances of Sydney and Violet and whose work they collected.

  The summer issue in 1919 was notable for the publication of “Burbank with a Baedecker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” one of Eliot’s most blatantly anti-Semitic poems. Although Sydney and Violet never mentioned it in their letters, anti-Semitism inevitably touched their lives, given the temper of the times, the London intellectual milieu they inhabited, and their tenuous but not irrelevant Jewish identity. Sydney, of course, was not Jewish by birth because his mother wasn’t Jewish. And he was Christian by upbringing and belief. But he had two problems—a Jewish name and a Jewish father. Violet was brought up Jewish but was nonpracticing and had a non-Jewish name. As far as most of the Bayswater and Bloomsbury modernists were concerned, though, they were both essentially Jewish, which was not a social asset. Pound was an outspoken anti-Semite, as was Lewis, despite his occasional denials. His halfhearted effort to right matters in a nominally pro-Semitic book with a title only he or Goebbels could have dreamed up—The Jews: Are They Human?—was laughable. Eliot’s anti-Semitism, however, which also cannot be denied, was more complicated and less frequently expressed, and some of his rationalizations for it in later years seemed sincere. Nonetheless, despite the interesting if convoluted arguments made by thoughtful critics such as Ronald Suchard, it is hard to read poems like “Burbank with a Baedecker, Bleistein with a Cigar” and “Gerontion” without concluding that no one but an anti-Semite could have come up with such virulent characterizations of Jews.

  As it happens, during Sydney’s tenure at Art and Letters Eliot sent him these two poems, both of which have figured prominently in the critical reassessment in recent years of Eliot’s attitude toward Jews. In “Burbank with a Baedecker,” Eliot characterizes Bleistein as “Chicago Semite Viennese,” staring from “the protozoic slime.” And Eliot, as we know, had asked Sydney for his critical comments on “Gerontion.” In a separate letter to Violet referring to “Gerontion,” he asked the Schiffs not to show it to anyone else. Both poems contain language that would be considered prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism today, but of course they were not written in this relatively enlightened age. Stephen Spender opined that in 1918 or 1919 using a Jew to symbolize capitalist-industrialist exploitation, as Eliot did in “Baedecker,” hardly represented bigotry. I don’t know whether Spender intended this as a justification or an excuse for the use of anti-Semitic imagery. But I have no doubt that many of the most refined, best-educated people back then would not have been troubled by the selection of a Jew to represent the entire class of oppressors of working men and women. This is probably why Eliot felt comfortable sending the poems to the Schiffs. He was eager for Sydney to publish “Baedecker,” a poem he considered one of his best at the time. And publish it Sydney did without the slightest suggestion that he or Violet found it offensive.

  In Eliot’s letter expressing his appreciation for Sydney’s comments on “Gerontion” h
e added that he would be “glad always to hear anything further you may have to say about it.” If Sydney or Violet had expressed an objection to anything in the poem on grounds of anti-Semitism, Eliot surely would not have let it pass without comment. It seems likely therefore that Sydney and Violet read the following passage without registering a complaint:

  My house is a decayed house,

  And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

  Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

  Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

  Gradations of anti-Semitism such as those exhibited by Lewis, Pound, and Eliot were commonplace among the modernist aristocracy in the pre-World War II years. But it was also true of Eliot and Lewis—literally—that some of their best friends were Jewish, and there is no reason to think they did not include Sydney and Violet. The Schiffs never did become friends with Pound, but there is no evidence one way or the other whether their Jewishness had anything to do with it. A decade or so later they were the subjects of a brutal satire by Lewis called The Apes of God that included anti-Semitic references, but nastiness, even viciousness, was not unusual in modernist satire and nothing was sacred. Others who were not Jewish were just as savagely skewered in the same book.

  In March 1920 Eliot wrote to Sydney at the Schiffs’ house in Roquebrune near Monte Carlo promising to send him a short prose piece for the next issue of Art and Letters and possibly a short poem. This was probably in response to Sydney’s complaint to Eliot a week earlier about how difficult it was to find good material. Eliot seemed of the same mind. “Certainly no new material of any merit has come into my sight lately,” he said. Eliot also encouraged Sydney to shed his preoccupations and work on his novel for six months without worrying too much about the magazine or anything else. Then, perhaps to suggest that Sydney not bother their mutual friend for a contribution to Art and Letters, he wrote, “Lewis of course ought to devote himself to painting for some time to come. His drawings … give me a conviction of permanence that even his best writing does not.” He went on to say that Sydney’s comparison of Lewis’s work with that of the great fifteenth-century Italian painter Andrea Mantegna interested him because he felt the same way. The remark was probably stimulated by Eliot’s recent visit to Lewis’s exhibition at the Adelphi Gallery in London, which came about at least partly as the result of a suggestion by Sydney. Rutter, who ran the gallery, was by then coeditor of Art and Letters with Osbert Sitwell.