Wednesday, November 13, 2013

'Sydney and Violet: Their Life with TS Eliot, Proust, Joyce,' by Stephen Klaidman - Washington Post


One hundred years ago today there appeared a novel written by a neurasthenic, somewhat effete young man of reclusive tendencies. To be exact, it wasn’t even an entire novel, just the first part of a very long one. What’s more, the author had paid to see his manuscript published. At the time, few must have thought that this vanity publication would still be remembered a full century later, let alone be revered as the opening movement to the greatest work of fiction of modern times (with the possible exception of, yes, that other prose epic, the one by the half-blind, lapsed Catholic from Dublin). The book that Marcel Proust held in his hands on Nov. 14, 1913 was called “Du côté de chez Swann,” known in English as “Swann’s Way.”


As it happened, Proust met his Irish competitor — James Joyce, of course — only once. On May 18, 1922, Violet and Sydney Schiff, the subjects of this dual biography by Stephen Klaidman, decided to organize a little dinner party in Paris at the Hotel Majestic. Their guests included Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Joyce and Proust, the greatest A-list in modern cultural history. (Its closest rival is probably the immortal dinner hosted by the painter Benjamin Haydon for Keats and Wordsworth, with essayist Charles Lamb providing comic relief.) That evening the two novelists exchanged a few words — nobody is quite sure what each said to the other — and later the sickly Proust gave the somewhat drunken Joyce a lift home in his chauffeur-driven car.






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Today, the Schiffs are largely remembered for that party and for their association with several other great modernists, particularly T.S. Eliot and the controversial painter, novelist and all-round artistic agitator Wyndham Lewis. Still, these well-off patrons of the arts were devoted most of all to Proust. They championed his work in England. They engaged in a warm correspondence with him. “Sodome et Gomorrhe” (“Cities of the Plain”) was even dedicated to Sydney. When C.K. Scott Moncrieff died before he could start translating “Time Regained,” the last volume of what was then called “Remembrance of Things Past” (and is now generally referred to as “In Search of Lost Time”), the job was undertaken by Stephen Hudson, the pen name of, you guessed it, Sydney Schiff.


Both Sydney (1868-1944) and Violet (1874-1962) came from long established and wealthy English families. Violet’s parents were Jewish, as was Sydney’s father, but the couple were nonobservant and astonishingly tolerant of friends with streaks of anti-Semitism in their character (notably Eliot and Lewis). Violet’s family was particularly artistic. Her mother, Zillah Beddington, regularly hosted soirees for the tenor Enrico Caruso, the soprano Nellie Melba and the composer Giacomo Puccini. Violet’s sister Sybil became one of Puccini’s closest confidantes and, more likely than not, his lover. Another sister, comic novelist Ada Leverson, dubbed “the Sphinx” by Oscar Wilde, bravely stood by her disgraced friend when others turned away from the reviled “somdomite.” One of Violet’s brothers even helped Brandon Thomas write “Charley’s Aunt,” which became in its time the longest-running play in British theatrical history.



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