Sydney and Violet

by Stephen Klaidman

  Six issues of the magazine appeared during Sydney’s tenure, making ten in all, not bad by the standard of the time. But Art and Letters should not be judged solely, or even principally, perhaps, by its relatively long life and distinguished roster of writers and artists. Under Sydney’s editorial control it became the model for the most important journal of them all, Eliot’s Criterion. Herbert Read called the Criterion the “sequel” to Art and Letters’s “forgotten experiment.” “Art and Letters,” Read wrote, “in its two years’ existence had precipitated the first crystals of a new literary substance, and it was out of this substance, intensified, to some extent purified, and amalgamated with new ingredients, that the new review was moulded.” But since Sydney regularly took Eliot’s advice in shaping the second coming of Art and Letters it is hard to know to what extent Eliot drew on Sydney’s ideas as opposed to his own while conceptualizing the Criterion.

  Eliot’s explanatory note in the first issue of the magazine said in part: “The object is not to create more experts, more professors, more artists, but a type of man or woman for whom their efforts will be valuable and by whom they may be judged.… A cultured aristocracy cannot indeed create genius, but it can provide genius with an immediate audience, it can keep the national intelligence vigorous and it can check what is crude, tedious and impudent.” In other words, the Criterion was designed to mold new readers for the works of Eliot, Pound, Lewis, and their friends, including Sydney, and keep everyone else—the “crude, tedious and impudent”—at bay. There are no guarantees, but this statement of purpose has the clarion ring of Eliot’s thought and style. Indeed, Eliot might well deserve the bulk of the credit for the design and conception of the Criterion, but who knows whether there would have been a Criterion had Sydney and Violet not introduced Eliot to Lady Rothermere.

  CHAPTER 5

  A VOLATILE RELATIONSHIP

  Despite the occasional lengthy hiatus in Sydney and Violet’s relationships with Eliot and Lewis, usually resulting from Lewis’s financial problems and Vivienne’s poor health, by 1922 they were among the Schiffs’ closest friends. Their social, professional, and, in Lewis’s case, financial lives were entwined with the Schiffs. They were seeing each other frequently and exchanging letters on an almost weekly basis. Sydney and Violet would tell Lewis about visiting Picasso in Paris, and he would tell them James Joyce thought that he, Lewis, was the only prose writer in England worthy of notice.

  The Schiffs knew Joyce by then. Their relationship was more casual than the ones they had with Eliot and Lewis, but they saw him socially, promoted his work, and introduced him to friends such as Katherine Mansfield and her husband, John Middleton Murry. Murry, who at different times edited two highly regarded modernist journals, the Adelphi and the Athenaeum, was a desirable contact for the always impecunious Irish novelist. Lewis, who knew Joyce well, responded to Violet’s account of the Schiffs’ first meeting with him by noting approvingly that Sydney had recognized Joyce’s urbanity and his strong sense of family. He added, though, that he hoped Sydney had also noticed Joyce’s condescension. Then the blissfully unself-aware Lewis condescendingly characterized Joyce as “a pleasing delightful fellow, with all his schoolboy egotism and Irish nonsense.”

  As for Mansfield, Lewis held her in contempt and eventually came between her and the Schiffs. Her relatively brief and often volatile relationship with Sydney and Violet began on April 1, 1920, when the Schiffs were staying at the Villa Violet, their house in Roquebrune. Mansfield wrote asking if she might call on them or whether they would like to visit her in Menton for tea and to talk about Art and Letters. She wrote at the suggestion of the publisher Grant Richards, but she didn’t really need an introduction because she had already had professional dealings with Sydney.

  It appears, however, that they were unpleasant. Virginia Woolf, who admired Mansfield’s work and liked her, wrote in her diary that Katherine “told me a long and to me rather distasteful story about her dealings with a man called Schiff.” Sydney wanted Mansfield to write something for Art and Letters, but when he offered advice about what she should write she reacted huffily. Sydney eventually published her poignant and personal short story “The Man Without a Temperament” in the spring 1920 issue. It recounts how a wife’s illness shapes her husband’s feelings as his thoughts fluctuate between the happiness they experienced together before she became sick and the hostility-engendering misery of their current lives. Mansfield was writing from experience. She suffered from tuberculosis and died at thirty-four.

  In any event, Sydney promptly and personally delivered a positive response to Mansfield’s request and several days later took a horse-drawn carriage to Menton to pick her up. He was greeted by a young woman with dark eyes, a penetrating gaze, short dark hair with bangs, and an air of cultivated plainness. Mansfield was in her early thirties at the time and Sydney was in his mid-fifties. She was pleased he had come in a carriage rather than a car, and he was thoroughly entranced by her. Her first impression of him, however, was less positive. She had written caustically across the bottom of his hand-delivered response: “Marie told me un m’sieu tres grand was waiting for an answer & I went into the salon to discover the most soigné creature in the world—in the false grey flannels—waiting for me.… He seemed horrified by me & I don’t know what he had expected. He kept saying ‘sit down, I implore you. Pray forgive me imagining you could take a tram.’ I wish people didn’t always expect me to be on the point of death. It’s horrid.” But just before being picked up by Sydney on April 7 she wrote to Murry much more enthusiastically, “I’m off to lunch at Roquebrune with the Sydney Schiffs and to see their Gauguins and their Picassos.”

  Later, as Stephen Hudson, Sydney wrote a surprisingly over-the-top sketch for the Cornhill magazine called “First Meetings with Katherine Mansfield.” The florid romance-novel prose quoted here is typical of the sketch but bears little resemblance to his normally cool, understated style:

  “The door opened softly and Katherine Mansfield, young and seductive, came towards me holding out her hand.… She held the index and second fingers, long, delicate and tapering, of one hand palm outwards between her face and mine. The sensitive gesture silenced me; I watched the fingers close slowly and her hand fell softly to her lap.… Her features were mobile; she arrested their movement and sat very still, gravely considering me.… As I helped her to her feet, my hand under her bare fore-arm … I could detect no wastage there nor in her frame, slight as it was; her throat and breast outlined under her silk bodice were full and firm.”

  Mansfield and the Schiffs got on so well that first afternoon that they offered her the use of an apartment they owned in Roquebrune. There was, however, one awkward exchange between Sydney and Katherine resulting from the fact that she had no idea Sydney Schiff was Stephen Hudson. On assignment from Murry, who was editor of the Athenaeum at the time, she had reviewed Richard Kurt five months earlier. She told Sydney she had been reading a book called Richard Kurt by Stephen Hudson and asked him if he had heard of it. Then, without waiting for an answer, she said the book had really irritated her. “I’m not sure it’s altogether a bad novel,” she continued. “The author knows the people he writes about. Jack considers it worthless as literature because it’s autobiographical.… I can’t find a category for it. It is written as though one were overhearing conversation in a train or at an hotel. People come and go for no special reason. There are two characters that are alive. I think its discursiveness irritated me and I don’t see what the writer is driving at.”

  Sydney, unperturbed, said, “Perhaps he’s driving at nothing, just delivering himself of experience,” which seemed to confuse Mansfield. “What made you say that?” she asked. “Do you feel that yourself? I mean do you feel that you want to be delivered of something that oppresses you?” To which Sydney responded, “Yes—I wrote it.”

  Mansfield was mortified, but Sydney, trying to alleviate her discomfort, told her that one reason he wrote the book under a pseudonym
was to get honest criticism. The main if not sole reason, however, was to provide at least minimal cover for his family. He went on to say that for him it had no value as a novel, “It has only the value of truth.” She was deeply embarrassed, though, and in trying to mitigate the damage she gushed unconvincingly, “It’s a thousand-fold more. It is a work of art. I know it is. I do want you to believe me.” And had she been less effusive and more circumspect he might have. While her unsigned review in the Athenaeum was not a rave, it was favorable enough to have pleased all but the touchiest of writers. She seemed puzzled by the odd construction and plotless nature of the novel, but she didn’t appear to be too troubled by it and she marveled at how Sydney had conveyed Elinor’s “brilliant and horrible little personality” as if through a conversation between two people who had known her all their lives. She also said she found Elinor, and Virginia, “amazingly real.”

  As soon as Mansfield got home she wrote to the Schiffs to tell them that for health reasons she would not be able to live in “that darling little flat” they had offered her and to thank them for a lovely day: “I’m lying here living it over and seeing in my mind’s eye your garden and house & hearing the torrent—and—much more important than those things—delighting in the fact of having met you.” Then, just four days later, she wrote to Murry, who lived apart from her, an arrangement that seemed to suit them because they were both difficult to live with and it facilitated their serial affairs. “It makes another great joy in my coming back here this winter to know I’ll have the Schiffs at Roquebrune,” she said. “Do I take violent fancies? … I must say at present, I love Violet Schiff. I think you would too. [You] would certainly find her very beautiful, as I do. I want you to see her and to talk to her. She’s extremely sympathetic.”

  And by the latter part of April, Mansfield, who was by then totally enamored of Violet, had revised her initial impression of Sydney. In a letter to Murry on the twenty-second, she listed some people she considered genuine and worthwhile friends. About the Schiffs she said: “Violet Schiff Id [sic] include and Schiff without the smallest hesitation or doubt. I like him as much as I do his wife but in of course an entirely different way. He attracts me tremendously and his great kindness, sensitiveness, almost childishness, endear him to me. In fact Id [sic] head my list with those 2 but thats [sic] because I look at people from a different angle to what you do.” And finally, in a letter to her husband dated April 24–25, she wrote: “Mr. Schiff is a kind of literary fairy godfather to me. He looks after me so perfectly and so gently and Violet Schiff seemed to me the last time far more beautiful and more fascinating than before.… And their house is always for me the house where lovers dwell. He loves her perfectly.… They are so real and dear and beautiful to me and they understand one’s work.”

  Between the beginning of May and the end of November, however, there appears to have been a gap in their correspondence, at least from Mansfield’s side. She also wrote to Murry between September and the end of November that she was “dead off” the Schiffs. She called Sydney “hectic and arrogant,” and expressed her irritation with Violet for having had the nerve to touch her hair. She referred to them both as “a trifle grotesque” and called Sydney “overpoweringly deaf—deaf to everything.”

  By December 1920, however, their epistolary conversations resumed without the least trace of pique. Mansfield’s letters undulated between the pinnacles of European literature—from Tolstoy, whose work she knew well, and Proust, whom she didn’t feel qualified to speak about—and the marvels of the mundane: “I have an old servant, a butter and sugar thief who is an artist in her way, a joy. Her feeling for hot plates and what dear Henry James might call the real right gravy is supreme. These things are so important. I don’t think I could love a person who liked gravylene or browno.”

  Although Sydney’s letters to Mansfield are lost, we know the Schiffs lent her several volumes of Proust. They also introduced her to Joyce and to his work. She was initially repelled by what seemed to her the smuttiness of Ulysses and found it impossible to make sense of. She was also unimpressed by its linguistic acrobatics. In an entry in her scrapbook headed “An Unposted Letter,” which almost certainly was intended for the Schiffs, she wrote: “I must reply about ‘Ulysses’.… It took me about a fortnight to wade through, but on the whole I’m dead against it.… that is certainly not what I want from literature.” Sydney and Violet persisted, however, and convinced her to read it again. She never became a complete convert, but she did acknowledge its importance. “It shocks me,” she wrote to Sydney, “to come upon words, expressions and so on that I’d shrink from in life. But now it seems to me that seeking after Truth is so by far and away the most important thing that one must conquer all minor aversions.” Despite Mansfield’s reservations and difficulties in decoding the book, Joyce told Violet he thought she understood it better than her renowned-critic husband.

  Nevertheless, Mansfield never really got over her queasiness with respect to Joyce’s work. In a letter to Sydney she wrote:

  About Joyce and my endeavor to be doubly fair to him because I have been perhaps unfair and captious. Oh, I can’t get over a great deal. I can’t get over the feeling of wet linoleum and unemptied pails and far worse horrors in the house of his mind—He’s so terribly unfein; that’s what it amounts to. There is a tremendously strong impulse in me to beg him not to shock me! Well, it’s not very rare. I’ve had it before with men and women many times in my life. One can stand much, but that kind of shock which is the result of vulgarity and commonness one is frightened of receiving. It is as though one’s mind goes on quivering afterwards.… It’s just exactly the reverse of the exquisite rapture one feels in for instance that passage which ends a chapter where Proust describes “the flowing apple trees in the spring rain.”

  Whatever Sydney and Violet made of Mansfield’s distaste for the vulgar, despite their own well-bred refinement and delicate sensibilities, there is nothing to suggest that either of them was ever repulsed by Joyce’s sexual or scatological references.

  In December 1921, this time addressing Sydney as Stephen Hudson and overflowing with enthusiasm, she wrote: “I read your Elinor Colhouse more than twice, and I shall read it again. I do congratulate you sincerely from my heart. It’s amazingly good! So good one simply cannot imagine it better. One pushes into deep water easily, beautifully, from the first sentence, and there’s that feeling—so rare—of ease, of safety, of wishing only to be borne along wherever the author chooses to take one.… Why aren’t you here—that we might talk it over and over.” Perhaps to make up for having been denied the pleasure of praising him in person, she pressed on fulsomely: “It’s your presentation of Richard which I admire so tremendously. I don’t mean only his boyish charm—though Heaven knows that is potent enough—or even his naturalness—which at times takes my breath away. But it’s Richard’s innocence of the wiles and arts of Life! It’s the sight of him, in the midst of all that scheming and plotting and his horror, finally, that this should happen to him.… Of course all the detail, so fastidious, so satisfying, is beyond praise. Elinor lives. I see her, recognize those fingers with the long pointed brilliant nails, look into that little brain. Yes, I honor you for it. It’s an achievement. I rejoice in your success.”

  Mansfield was a woman who when she chose could be as tart-tongued, cruel, and duplicitous as Bloomsbury’s best, which makes one wonder what she said or might have said to Murry about Elinor Colhouse. But then like many of her modernist peers she was also mercurial. Her critical judgment might have reflected what she was feeling about Sydney that particular day, or perhaps for a change her bunions weren’t bothering her. The trick would be to know what she would have made of the book if she hadn’t known who had written it.

  In the end I don’t know if there’s any way to tell whether Mansfield was more hypocritical or less stable than the average modernist or whether modernists as a class were more hypocritical and less stable than their intellectual forebears or
followers. It’s a good bet, though, that they were not less so. And on the evidence available, about modernists in general and Mansfield in particular, it is better than an even bet that her assessment of Elinor Colhouse was either a gross exaggeration or a flat-out lie. I think this is so even after discounting her extraordinary gift for hyperbole. Amazingly good! One simply cannot imagine it better. Beyond praise. Takes my breath away.

  Mansfield takes my breath away. Sydney Schiff, while a talented man, was not the second coming of Cervantes.

  The relationship between Mansfield and the Schiffs was both friendly and stable during the first half of 1922, but resulting from a coalescence of her fragility and their poor judgment that would soon change. Sometime in September Sydney and Violet introduced Katherine to Wyndham Lewis, with whom they were in unusually close contact at the time because Sydney had commissioned him to paint Violet’s portrait, a project that would prove frustrating to all of them. The Schiffs should have known better. The meeting took place at 18 Cambridge Square just weeks before Mansfield traveled to the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau outside Paris. The institute was run by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Russian-Greek-Armenian mystic who taught that every person was born without a soul and had to develop one by following teachings like his, or he or she would “die like a dog.” She believed Gurdjieff’s institute was her last best hope for a cure. At the time, in a sign of her desperation, she also was immersed in a now-long-forgotten book of spiritual nonsense called Cosmic Anatomy, which she apparently thought might help her in some way.