All of this suggests a degree of compatibility between the Schiffs and Proust that was often borne out in their unusually rich correspondence, although here and there Sydney was a bit tone deaf or overstepped the bounds of propriety, which irritated Proust. A glaring example of Sydney’s presumptuousness was an invitation he extended to Proust to stay with the Schiffs in London. Proust, who had never even met Sydney and Violet and had been corresponding with them for less than a month, responded graciously although negatively. He addressed himself to “Cher Monsieur et ami” and apologized for not writing sooner, explaining that he had been too ill. He wrote that he was moved, touched, and delighted by the letter, but that unfortunately he was “uninvitable,” because it was hard enough to get through his crises when he was alone, and it would be much worse in the presence of others. Later, when they knew each other better, if only through their letters, Proust did not hesitate to let his annoyance show. This time, however, he went on to tell Sydney, in his own flattering or ironic way (it’s unclear which) that he had turned down a similar invitation from the Duke and Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre, but that the Schiffs’ offer “touched him a thousand times more because they didn’t know him.” Finally, he added, “In any case, I have never received, or almost never, a letter that has touched me so, you are for me, like a friend.”
If the exuberant warmth Proust exudes for the Schiffs at this early stage of their relationship seems excessive, it is worth noting that his categorical “never” is tempered by the phrase “or almost never” and that he carefully avoided saying Sydney was a friend, but rather said he was “like a friend.” But even with these qualifications and Proust’s well-known gift for graciousness there is still something remarkable about his manner of responding to Sydney and Violet given the short time they had been corresponding and the fact that they had never seen one another. The Schiffs’ invitation at the very least was premature and presumed an unwarranted degree of intimacy. This would not have been out of character for Sydney, but it surely would have been for Violet.
The Schiffs and Proust met for the first time in 1919, although exactly when is unclear. Proust at first did not want to meet them but for some reason changed his mind. The meeting took place in a private salon at the Ritz. Sydney and Violet were dining at the hotel, and when they finished their meal the headwaiter came by to tell them that Proust was waiting for them. Sydney lingered to say good-bye to the French friend they were dining with, but Violet got up immediately and went to Proust’s table. She introduced herself and expressed her surprise at how young he looked, “much too young,” she said, “to have written Swann.” “Swann is not me,” Proust, who was forty-eight, answered. And when Sydney arrived at the table he told him, “Your wife does not believe that I have written my books myself.” All the while Proust was eating asparagus in the French style, with fingers, not a fork. Violet thought he was “remarkably handsome and quite unlike anyone else” with his thick, dark hair and that he looked about thirty-five. He had on a fur-lined coat, which was open, displaying a colored waistcoat that was fastened up to his neck. When Sydney arrived a few minutes later, Proust chastised him for not bringing his friend to the table. He said it was “unkind to neglect an old friend for a new one.” The friend, however, might have been just as happy to have been left behind because he thought Proust was a bad writer and a snob.
Proust then invited the Schiffs to his apartment. They were driven there by Odilon, who was always available to drive his master anywhere at any hour. Proust and Violet got out of the car first and went into a dark entrance hall that looked sordid. Proust said they had better wait for Schiff and Odilon because neither of them knew how to operate the elevator. When the two men got there they all took the elevator up to Proust’s apartment, where they were let in by Céleste, who was young, graceful, and dressed in black. It was late and Proust sent Céleste off to rest, which she did knowing that when the Schiffs left, no matter what time it was, Proust would need her again. Proust, Sydney, and Violet sat together talking into the early morning hours. At some point during the conversation Proust noticed that Sydney was somewhat hard of hearing and insisted on making an appointment for him with an otolaryngologist he knew.
“The strange enchantments of the nights we passed with Marcel Proust made us believe that no daytime meetings could have equaled them,” Violet wrote years later. “Nothing he said was trivial or unimportant, not that he was by any means serious all the time. His astringent satire left one with no feeling of sadness or bitterness. He put himself into his conversation as he did into his books, but not by talking about himself. He made it clear that what mattered to him was the motive of people’s acts and words. He was always seeking the truth about everything and everybody. He was bored by insincerity.”
At daybreak Odilon, who remained on duty waiting, drove the Schiffs back to the Ritz, where they were staying. Afterwards Proust liked to tell a story about how Sydney stopped friends on the street in London and told them that the most remarkable thing he had seen in Paris was Marcel Proust, the only man he had ever known who dined in a fur coat.
The next three letters from the Schiffs to Proust, which are also missing, apparently were written by Violet, the first sometime in June. She must have read Within a Budding Grove by then because in the first letter she expressed her disappointment that Proust had emphasized an unattractive side of Swann in this second volume of the novel. The Swann the Schiffs loved, admired, and believed in as a living person, Proust responded, was made to look “less sympathetic, even ridiculous” because he [Proust] wasn’t free to “go against the truth and violate the laws of characters.” He added that it wasn’t easy for him to see Swann go in that direction and then noted wistfully that sometimes even the nicest people have hateful periods. Finally, he appended in Latin, “Amicus Swann, sed magis amica Veritas” (Swann is my friend, but the truth is a better friend). Proust told Violet not to worry, though, because in the next volume Swann would become a “dreyfusard” and sympathetic again. But, no doubt in response to another immutable law of fiction, there was to be one last twist. In the fourth volume, Proust warned Violet, to his own great sorrow, Swann would die.
He concluded his letter with an overarching aesthetic principle in the form of a nine-word epigram: “Art is a perpetual sacrifice of sentiment to truth.” Sydney, of course, had told Katherine Mansfield, who was somewhat dismissive of Richard Kurt, that truth was all he cared about in his novel. And Joseph Conrad, a godfather of modernism, wrote “truth alone is the justification of any fiction that makes the least claim to the quality of art.” The work of Stephen Hudson is not comparable to that of Proust or Conrad, but he shared with them a firm understanding of the nature of literary truth—without any postmodern condescension—and its place as the preeminent value of art in general and fiction in particular.
The next letter from Proust was to Violet. He addressed her more formally and less affectionately than he did Sydney, simply as “Madame.” The letter was filled with apologies because they had not received first editions of his books he had reserved for them and with further apologies that he could only send third editions in their place. It was written in August from an apartment at 8 bis, rue Pichat, an address he correctly characterized as “very temporary.” He also alluded briefly again to the subject of Swann, telling Violet that he hoped Sydney “is as indulgent as she has been and gives him his permission to render Swann as ridiculous alas as conforms to his character.”
After that several months passed before Proust wrote again, on November 17, this time from 44 rue Hamelin, an apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. He said he was “at least provisionally installed,” possibly suggesting that he hoped to move to more comfortable quarters. In fact 44 rue Hamelin would be his final address, the place where he would struggle mightily to finish In Search of Lost Time, and where he would die. This letter to Violet is one of the most interesting in the early correspondence. Proust referred to a brief article about his work Sydney had
written as Stephen Hudson for Art and Letters and to a copy of Richard Kurt the Schiffs had sent him and he had been reading. He expressed delight in both the article and the book, although he noted apologetically that he read English “with great difficulty.” But as he went on it soon became obvious he was operating under what could properly be called a misconception, although in an important sense it was not entirely wrong.
Proust had concluded that Violet was Stephen Hudson. Therefore, referring to the highly flattering article, and believing that Violet had written both the article and Richard Kurt, he wrote effusively to her that Kurt, much more than Swann, deserved all the praise in the article. In his confused state he compounded his error by saying he now understood that the letters from the Schiffs, the article in Art and Letters, and the novel were all the work “of the same person: you.” Violet’s letters, Proust wrote, “confirmed my hypothesis and hope, that this pair of readers, as [Sydney] too modestly referred to you, was a household of artists and creators.” Convinced he was right, Proust waxed on: “I have been able … to compose without any gap your moral and intellectual physiognomy.” He then thanked Violet profusely for dedicating Kurt to him and apologized for the quality of the paper on which he was writing, explaining that it was the middle of the night and he couldn’t call for his normal writing paper. He ended curiously by implying that because he believed Violet was Stephen Hudson he understood Sydney’s life and his soul and sent him his respects.
After that letter there was a nine-month gap in the correspondence. It is not clear whether letters are missing or none were written. The correspondence resumed with a letter from Proust to Sydney written a little before August 30, 1920, and addressed with moderate formality as “Cher Monsieur” (dropping “et ami”). The letter began in typical Proustian fashion: “I have been so sick since seeing you—a little like the living dead—(and my vision continues to get worse) that I haven’t been [able] to write to you or Madame Schiff, and this just at the time I was getting to know you.” Proust then offered another of his elaborate apologies, this time for having used Sydney’s name without his permission in a story he wrote for the Paris newspaper Le Matin. In a reference to the Italian diplomat Sydney Sonnino, whose “real name [was] Schiff,” Proust wrote parenthetically, “nothing to do with the charming Sydney Schiff.” This, he wrote to Sydney, was intended “as a little friendly visiting card for you.” But just at the time the story was being prepared for publication, and before Proust had a chance to make sure Sydney didn’t mind, he won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, which apparently completely disconcerted him. A month later, in mid-January 1920, the Le Matin article was reprinted in a magazine called Feuillets d’Art, again with Sydney’s name. As a final word of apology-cum-explanation, before getting to the real purpose of his letter, Proust wrote that at that point, “I was in no condition to open my eyes.”
Then, eyes wide open, presumably, Proust wrote: “Today I’m writing to you with a practical goal,” which, editing out the flattery and excessive deference, amounted to a request that Sydney round up subscribers for a deluxe edition of Within a Budding Grove, which would include fragments of original manuscript. Proust complained that the publisher had underpriced it at three hundred francs a copy and told Sydney that André Gide thought it should have been a thousand francs. He also wrote that what upset him most of all was that they were only planning an edition of fifty copies, which he thought was “ridiculously small.” When the deluxe edition was first discussed Proust thought an edition of twenty would be adequate, but that was before he won the Goncourt. Before moving on to another subject, he told Sydney not to worry if he couldn’t find subscribers because fifty copies could easily be sold.
Sydney and Violet bought a copy for themselves—it is not known whether they found any other buyers—but Sydney, in keeping with his sometimes indiscriminate cult of honesty, made emphatically clear his disapproval of such editions generally. In a letter from Eastbourne to “Cher Monsieur Proust” dated August 30, he wrote: “I am not a friend of these bibliophile editions, which to me seem artistically unjustifiable. I am disgusted by the commercial exploitation of the personality and the intimate particulars of an author loved as you are loved.” He went on to say he considered it a “sacrilege” to make original manuscript pages “a plaything or a commercial object,” a bit of hyperbole to which Proust objected in his next letter. “Do you think it’s necessary for authors to die of hunger?” Proust asked. “I wrote Swann in a hovel, it’s true, but because of the rental crisis, this hovel cost 2,600 francs a month.” After a couple of obscure allusions to Ruskin and Whistler, Proust allowed that he was in complete agreement that deluxe editions were of no interest and neither were autographs, which should have put an end to the matter but didn’t. Sydney couldn’t contain himself. He admitted somewhat guiltily in his response to Proust that he would have liked to have not just a fragment but the entire manuscript in his hands. And, driven to excess by the thought that “some idiot by paying 300 francs can think he loves your pages as much as I do,” he added, “Yes, I would like many writers to die of hunger, but that the rare artists of value [would be] in your happy position of independence.”
The deluxe edition was not the only subject of the sequence of letters exchanged in late August and early September of 1920. Nor was it the only source of disagreement. In Proust’s letter dated a few days before August 30, he briefly noted that he was unaware Sydney was related to his young and relatively new friend, the writer Louis Gautier-Vignal. The relationship was not by blood but by marriage. Sydney’s sister Edith was the second wife of Count Albert Gautier-Vignal, Louis’s father. Proust said he would have liked to talk to Sydney about Louis, whom he admired for his kindness and intelligence and of whom he wrote, “I may not know anyone else so free of disagreeable qualities. His spiritual and moral purity are charming.” Sydney, whose propensity for not letting well enough alone must have been obvious to Proust by then, once again could not restrain himself. Either from tone deafness or compulsive honesty he delivered a diatribe in his next letter in which he called Louis “artificial, superficial, [and] full of exotic tastes.” And if that were not enough, after denigrating Louis’s sisters in particular and his family in general, Sydney turned on Louis again, accusing him of liking “things rather for their appearance than for their intrinsic value.”
Proust’s initial response, had he been anyone else, would have seemed ironic. He said he was “enchanted” by Sydney’s characterizations of the members of the Gautier-Vignal family and his “juicily and spitefully profound views on humanity.” But being Proust, he probably meant exactly what he wrote even though he abruptly changed course and defended Louis. He said Louis had “more nobility of spirit” than Sydney gave him credit for. But that wasn’t nearly enough to get Sydney to drop the subject. He couldn’t resist attacking Louis in another letter, accusing him of being a congenital liar. “He always lies in the family and it is boring and tiresome. Nothing kills friendship like lying and even obligatory family affection can’t resist it for long,” Sydney wrote. It apparently never occurred to him that relentlessly attacking your friend’s friend might be boring and tiresome and might even kill a friendship. In any event, with a heroic display of restraint Proust let the dialogue peter out with no apparent hard feelings.
Sydney’s tactless unsolicited critique of Gautier-Vignal—a friend for whom Proust had clearly expressed affection and admiration—raises questions about his judgment and character. This is especially so in the context of his still developing relationship with Proust, a man he held in almost godlike esteem. It seems highly unlikely that he knowingly would have risked endangering a still fragile connection he valued more than any other except the one he had with Violet. Perhaps he thought Proust would not hold his blunt criticism of Gautier-Vignal against him, which would mean he believed Proust shared his unconditional commitment to truth telling, at whatever cost, in life as well as literature. But even so,
his failure to at least temper his vitriolic tone when writing about Proust’s young friend demonstrates either a conspicuous unawareness of or a lack of concern about how others might react to his blunt criticism.
Perhaps the best context for judging Sydney’s abrasive comments and writings about Gautier-Vignal and a whole cast of other characters, including his parents and siblings, is the remarkably candid way he assessed and portrayed himself. The critic Edwin Muir’s strongest criticism of Sydney’s novels was that he was too hard on himself. The final version of A True Story seems unsparing of Richard Kurt, the fictionalized Sydney, but the version Muir read was even tougher. Violet’s editing after Sydney’s death eliminated some of the harshest self-criticism. Sydney was uncompromisingly self-critical in his books and of his books. He accepted Katherine Mansfield’s criticism of Richard Kurt with equanimity and when asked to contribute an article on his work for a book titled Ten Contemporaries: Notes Toward Their Definitive Bibliography, he wrote that he “wanted to make an apology rather than to offer explanations [for his] unfinished novel,” meaning A True Story. He called Richard, Myrtle and I “unsatisfactory” and labeled his 1923 novel Tony “a failure.”
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