Stephen Klaidman - Sydney and Violet: Their Life with T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis

Copyright 2013 by Stephen Klaidman

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Jacket photographs: T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley EverettCollection Inc./Alamy; Ezra Pound Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy;James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Dame Edith Sitwell HultonArchive/Getty Images; Katherine Mansfield Keystone-France/GettyImages; Lady Ottoline Morrell National Portrait Gallery, London.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Klaidman, Stephen.
Sydney and Violet : their life with T. S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and the excruciatingly irascible Wyndham Lewis / Stephen Klaidman. First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Hudson, Stephen, 18681944Friends and associates.
2. Modernism (Literature). I. Title.
PR 6037. C 37 Z 73 2013
823.912dc23 2013006199

eISBN: 978-0-385-53410-9

v3.1

This book is for Kitty, my love, my joy, my inspiration.

May truth, unpolluted by prejudice, vanity or selfishness, be granted daily more and more as the due of inheritance, and only valuable conquest for us all!

Margaret Fuller, from the preface to Woman in the Nineteenth Century, November 1844

CONTENTS

In an age of literary license in which memoirs and autobiographies are often imaginatively embroidered, I prefer to begin with full disclosure. This book portrays the title characters and the glittery modernist milieu they inhabited. But there are many gaps in the record of Sydneys and Violets lives, especially before they met. A thorough account would have been futile without conjecture. Documentation of their life together is better because they and their contemporaries were avid correspondents. More than twelve hundred letters survive, which is why we know as much as we do about them. Regrettably, though, most were written to them, not by them. Of the ones they did write, Violets were in an often unreadable, self-acknowledged chicken scrawl, and not one was from Sydney to Violet or from Violet to Sydney. The cause, as in the similar cases of Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and Joyce Carol Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith, was that they were almost never apart. Sydney wrote to his friend Max Beerbohm that except for two or three times weve not been separated for more than a few hours. Evocative scraps of information from family members and friends remain along with marriage and divorce records, birth and death certificates, and a will. But beyond these meager remnants the biographical background would fade to black if not for one crucial exception: Their lives were tightly entwined with many of the defining figures of literary modernism. Because of close relationships and extensive correspondence with Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and Katherine Mansfield, among others, far more is known about them than would otherwise be the case.

The biggest challenge in writing this book was deciding how to overcome the lack of information about Sydneys life before he married Violet. Apart from the sketchy documentation noted above, the only significant source material is the provocatively titled A True Story, a sprawling fictionalized autobiography influenced by Proust, written by Sydney using the pseudonym Stephen Hudson, and edited, perhaps heavily, by Violet, in which Sydney is portrayed as a character called Richard Kurt. It is tantalizing because it is rich in insight, feeling, and detail, but frustrating because there is no way to verify much of it. The Schiffs nephew, Edward Beddington-Behrens, wrote in his own autobiography that with the exception of what he called external details everything was true. But there is no way of knowing exactly what he thought was true.

Faced with these uncertainties, I have drawn on A True Story in recounting Sydneys life before Violet and aspects of their life together. The novel offers insights into what Sydney thought about himself, or perhaps what he would have liked to think about himself. There are lacunae in Violets early personal and family history as well, but her background is better documented than Sydneys. She had distinguished ancestors whose lives have been recorded, family memoirs survive, and there are several living descendants who have preserved fragments of oral history, papers, and photographs.

Caveat lector.

SDK

London, where Sydney and Violet Schiff were born and where they were based between 1911, the year they were wed, and 1944, the year Sydney died, was the undisputed capital of the English-language literary world. It was also the baptismal font of modernism. There were important outposts, most notably in Paris, but also in Rome, Berlin, New York, and even Chicago. But the seminal modernist creed was composed in and disseminated from London. The most influential little magazines were published in London and the poets and novelists with whom modernism is most closely identified lived and worked either there or in Paris. These were Sydney and Violets colleagues and friends. They included T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust, Aldous Huxley and Katherine Mansfield, and the now mostly forgotten writer, painter, polymath, and insufferable curmudgeon Percy Wyndham Lewis. Eliot, Mansfield, and Lewis read, reviewed, praised, and criticized Sydneys novels and published his stories and translations in their journals. And Sydney and Violet reciprocated, critiquing and publishing their articles, stories, and poems and soliciting contributions from Proust for Eliots Criterion.

The Schiffs were accomplished hosts, and invitations to their homes in the city and country were avidly sought. Evenings consisted of small dinners with sparkling conversation and vintage champagne followed by wicked games usually involving role playing. They were respectful of their guests without being deferential, intellectually curious without being intellectually arrogant, and physically attractive. Violet, whose Semitic background was evident, was in her mid-thirties when they were married. She wore her dark hair piled atop her head in the style of the time, her eyes were brown with long lashes, and she had the slim, graceful fingers of a musician. Her gaze was unself-conscious, reflecting her confidence and interest in others. Sydney, who was in his mid-forties, wore a sandy-colored toothbrush mustache and carried himself with what looked to some like military bearing and to others like pretentious posturing. In either case the image was undercut by his sad brown eyes, a side effect of twenty years of heartache produced by his first wifes relentlessly demeaning treatment.