Sydney and Violet

by Stephen Klaidman

  The next day, after having dined alone the night before, Sydney sent Proust one of his more peculiar letters. Out of nowhere he announced that because his valet, Ali, was a homosexual “everyone here must think I’m one, too.” But “I’m just the opposite,” he protested. “I’m excessively male, male to the point where I can’t stand being shaved by a man, or having my hair cut by a man, or even having a man near me. Ali, who is like a young girl, is exactly right for me.” And elaborating on his curiously made point, he told Proust he wanted Ali to cultivate “feline gestures and movements, smooth and sure, in contrast to the nervous, abrupt, uncertain canine movements of a dog.” Sydney closed with a thinly veiled plea for Proust’s company: “I’m going to lunch now at the Ritz—alone and I will dine there also—alone.”

  Proust wrote back the next day that he didn’t know why Sydney would want to spend an evening with someone in his dreadful condition, of which as usual he provided a detailed account, but that if Sydney would make all the arrangements at the Ritz—and only the Ritz—and be sure that all the windows in the dining room would be closed, he would be ready to be picked up at eight. Sydney responded as soon as he received Proust’s note. “Everything will be as you said,” he told Proust, adding that his table was in the corner to the right of the entrance and that he would be at his door at eight. In fact, though, it was Violet who picked up Proust. Many years later she described him as “charming and gentle” that night but added, “He objected to my husband’s drinking too much champagne, although he himself drank an enormous quantity of iced beer.”

  A day after their dinner together, Sydney intimated to Proust—by then addressed as Mon très cher Marcel—that each time they met his understanding of and feeling for Proust increased. But his primary point seemed to be that each time they met, Proust had an opportunity to learn more about Sydney. He was eager for Proust to appreciate his presence, habits, manner of speaking, and way of acting, in short, all of those superficialities a novelist needs to know to bring a character to life. And with a closely related and possibly more important goal in mind he told Proust that thanks to Jacques Rivière he had found a marvelous French translator for his short stories, which would allow Proust not only to read them and evaluate his work but also to understand “what I think and who I am when I withdraw into my secret garden.” What he wanted was for Proust to feel the same kinship Sydney felt for him and to believe its reciprocation was justified. And most of all, he wanted Proust to know that their emotional experiences as children were similar because of a strong sense of inadequately expressed paternal love.

  Proust wrote six days later, but his brief note was not responsive to Sydney’s letter. Instead he reminded Sydney that he had suffered a painful attack before their dinner as a result of taking adrenaline and told him that after returning home from the Ritz he became violently ill with a high fever. As Violet recollected the evening, however, “No one could suspect that a few hours before he had nearly killed himself.” Proust said he still wasn’t able to get out of bed, but that as soon as he could they were the first people he wanted to see.

  Sydney wrote again the next day, not to respond but to complain that his marvelous translator was turning out to be somewhat less adept than he had hoped. The work she was translating was written in his voice as a child (most likely an excerpt from Prince Hempseed), which she seemed to have great difficulty capturing. Sydney said he was reworking her translation but was having a hard time finding the right French idioms. He asked Proust’s indulgence and said he would bring it to him the following day. Then, after praising Sodom and Gomorrah, Part 2, which he was reading, he outdid himself in praise of its author: “You are the most marvelous of men,” he wrote. “With you the novel has reached its greatest height, after you it will go into decline because there is no more to do.” And in what might have been an afterthought, but more likely was wishful thinking, he wrote the following:

  “Thursday evening we are going to the premiere of a new Stravinsky ballet, and some old Russian ballets. Afterwards, we are having Diaghilev and some members of the ballet to supper at the Hotel Majestic where I have taken a salon because Elles does not permit music [at the Ritz] after 12:30 a.m. There is no one worthy of meeting you except those you choose, but if, by a miracle, you decided to come, you would find us on the main floor around 12:30.” Among the guests, he told Proust, would be “M. et Mme Picasso.” He did not tell him that James Joyce, his leading competitor for the heavyweight championship of modernist novel writing, would be there too. Ulysses had been published in Paris just two months earlier. Nor did he tell him that Igor Stravinsky, modernism’s music icon, would be there.

  THE BIG FIVE

  When Sydney and Violet Schiff awoke in their apartment at the Villa Majestic on the morning of May 18, 1922, the sun was shining and the forecast was for a clear, mild day with good weather expected throughout the evening and into the early hours of the next day. But Western Europe was on the cusp of a broiling heat wave that would give Paris its highest temperature in 116 years. Sydney and Violet however were too focused on the night to come to have noticed or cared. The evening was going to begin at the Palais Garnier, the vast and opulent Paris opera house named for its designer, Charles Garnier, a thirty-five-year-old architect who was picked from a field of 172 by Napoleon III. It was begun in 1861 and, slowed by a variety of geological and geopolitical problems including underground water on the site, war with Prussia, and the Paris Commune of 1871, completed only in 1875. Although it was of indeterminate style—Garnier told the Empress Eugénie that the extravagantly decorated building was pure Napoleon III—Claude Debussy described it as a railroad station on the outside and a Turkish bath on the inside. Nevertheless, it quickly became a Paris landmark and a favorite venue for the world’s greatest composers, singers, conductors, dancers, and choreographers. It is hard to conceive of a better launching pad for the great Schiff gala.

  In 1922 the Garnier was home to the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, one of the world’s leading companies, under the direction of the imposing Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. Its dancer-choreographers, especially Vaslav Nijinsky and Bronislava Nijinska, were among the world’s best. Sets were designed by Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Russia’s finest avant-garde painters, such as Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, and performances were staged by Michel Fokine. Diaghilev, who recognized talent early, commissioned new ballet music by young modernist composers—some of whom would achieve greatness, most notably Stravinsky, a Russian who became French and ultimately, in 1945, American. The Ballets Russes had performed his Firebird in 1910 when Stravinsky was just twenty-eight and he remembered the premiere for reasons other than the success of his music and the dancing. “The first night audience glittered indeed,” Stravinsky wrote, “but the fact that it was heavily perfumed is more vivid in my memory. The … London audience … seemed almost deodorized by comparison.” He also remembered meeting Proust. A year later his Petrushka was performed at the Garnier. Both ballets were fairly traditional and warmly received. But The Rite of Spring, which premiered in 1913, was something else altogether. It was dissonant, rhythmically radical, featured cumbersome choreography, and was both grisly and primitive in its subject matter. It provoked a full-scale riot. It also heralded the beginning of musical modernism.

  The featured attraction on May 18, 1922, was a short, lighthearted Stravinsky ballet of a type sometimes called a burlesque. The music was originally commissioned in 1916 by a friend of Proust, the Princess Edmond de Polignac, formerly Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Diaghilev’s ballet version was called Le Renard and it portrayed the triumph of a cat, a cock, and a goat over a wily fox. It was only twenty minutes long. The choreographer was Nijinska, who also danced the fox, the conductor was Ernest Ansermet, and Larionov designed the production and costumes. The opening-night reception was mixed, tilting toward disapproval, but there is no indication that the lukewarm response dampened the enthusiasm of the
Schiffs’ guests, onstage, backstage, or in the audience. Toward midnight, this very select group—men in white ties and opera capes and women in long gowns—exited the opera house and made their way across town in taxis and private cars to the Hotel Majestic. The Princess de Polignac was among them.

  The Schiffs’ guests filed into the upstairs dining room; neither Proust nor Joyce had attended the performance and both arrived later. Dinner service had begun when Joyce appeared shortly after midnight. He did not own evening clothes so he came wrapped in an alcoholic fog to insulate him against any embarrassment resulting from lack of proper dress. Proust turned up an hour or two later wrapped as usual in a fur coat, that evening worn over a gray suit. The princess later complained that Proust had not worn evening clothes and that the collar on his fur coat looked ratty. Joyce thought Proust looked ten years younger than his age. The Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell thought Proust looked “altogether too sleek and dank and plastered,” although he described his eyes as “glorious.” Stravinsky found Proust “as pale as a mid-afternoon moon” and said disapprovingly that “he spoke ecstatically about the late Beethoven quartets … an enthusiasm I would have shared if it had not been a commonplace among the literati of the time.” Stravinsky learned afterwards that Joyce had been there but said that in his ignorance he had failed to recognize him.

  Proust and Joyce were introduced, but they had little or nothing to say about each other’s books or anything else. Joyce actually had read a bit of Proust and chose not to mention it, but Proust had not read a word of Joyce. Each made excuses for having read little or nothing of the other’s work. Joyce’s was his failing eyesight, which made it difficult to read Proust’s long, dense sentences, and Proust’s were his poor English, his failing health, and his almost fanatical focus on finishing his own novel.

  In the absence of any written comments by Joyce or Proust about their meeting or the party, all that remains are three very slight firsthand accounts by Violet, Bell, and Stravinsky. There are also two similar but not identical versions of what happened when Joyce, uninvited, joined the Schiffs and Proust in Odilon’s taxi at the end of the evening, one by Sydney and the other by Violet. And then there are two funny but totally unreliable secondhand accounts of the Joyce-Proust meeting by Joyce’s friends Mary and Padraic Colum and Ford Madox Ford. The Colum and Ford versions are virtually identical in what they purport to describe, differ significantly in what they actually describe, and are both wrong about verifiable facts such as the venue and the hosts. I take both to be no more than entertainments. Here they are, the Colums’ first:

  A certain hostess had thought she could create a historic occasion by bringing the two celebrated authors together in her salon, and Joyce told us about the event. He had arrived about ten o’clock. Eleven o’clock came and no Proust. Twelve o’clock came and still no Proust. At 1:00 a.m. Proust entered the salon, dressed, Joyce said, “like the hero of The Sorrows of Satan.” The two authors were presented to each other, and the company arranged itself so as to not miss anything of the conversation. Here is what was said:

  PROUST: Ah, Monsieur Joyce … You know the princess …

  JOYCE: No, Monsieur.

  PROUST: Ah. You know the Countess …

  JOYCE: No, Monsieur.

  And that terminated the Proust-Joyce meeting of minds.

  It was probably characteristic of Proust. It was also characteristic of Joyce: he was wont to be taciturn in the presence of the featured great.

  Ford Madox Ford’s version is a bit longer and thus larded with more errors. Here it is:

  When he heard me say that I had read no Proust [Joyce] confirmed for me a story that I had heard from the lips of the lady in whose house it had happened.… The lady had asked Joyce to a reception to meet Proust. Joyce, knowing nothing of Proust’s habits and no hour having been named, attended at about eleven. Proust in those days rose at four in the morning. But in honor of Mr. Joyce he had got up that night at two and arrived about two-thirty. Mr. Joyce was then tired.

  Two stiff chairs were obtained and placed, facing the one the other, in the aperture of a folding doorway between two rooms. The faithful of Mr. Joyce disposed themselves in a half circle in one room; those of M. Proust completed the circle in the other. Mr. Joyce and M. Proust sat upright, facing each other and vertically parallel. They were incited to converse. They did. “As I’ve said, Monsieur, in Swann’s Way, which without doubt you have read …”

  Mr. Joyce gave a tiny vertical jump on his chair seat and said: No, Monsieur. Then Mr. Joyce took up the conversation. He said: “As Mr. Blum [sic] said in my Ulysses, which, Monsieur, you have doubtless read …”

  M. Proust gave a slightly higher vertical jump on his chair seat. He said: “Of course not, Monsieur.” Service fell again to M. Proust. He apologized for the lateness of his arrival. He said it was due to a malady of the liver. He detailed clearly and with minuteness the symptoms of his illness.

  “… Well Monsieur,” Joyce interrupted. “I have almost exactly the same symptoms. Only in my case, the analysis …”

  So till eight the next morning, in perfect amity and enthusiasm, surrounded by the awed faithful, they discussed their maladies.

  Whatever time in the morning it was, and although it wasn’t planned that way, it does seem to be true that Proust and Joyce left the Majestic more or less together. Proust had invited Sydney and Violet to come home with him, and Joyce, unnoticed at first, stumbled after them. This is how Violet remembered it:

  As soon as our guests had gone we followed Proust to his taxi and Joyce got in after us. Joyce’s first gesture was to open the window and his second to light a cigarette. Sydney [a heavy smoker himself of cigarettes and one cigar a day] shut the window and asked Joyce to throw away the cigarette, knowing that Proust dreaded air and smoke on account of his asthma. Joyce watched Proust silently, while he [Proust] talked incessantly without addressing Joyce. When we arrived at the flat in Rue Hamelin, Proust said to Sydney: Please ask Monsieur Joyce to let my taxi driver take him home. Proust and I quickly entered the doorway, leaving Sydney and Joyce on the pavement.

  Sydney’s version is told in the voice of Proust’s housekeeper, Céleste, and Sydney is represented as Richard Kurt:

  Dawn was streaking the sky when the muffled bell at the entrance rang. My master entered on Madame Kurt’s arm and both were laughing, because one of the guests, a famous English painter who was drunk, had come with them in the car, and as Monsieur did not want to bring him to the apartment, Monsieur Kurt had to keep him company until Odilon, who had brought them up in the lift, could return and drive him home.

  Sydney and Violet never saw Proust again. But they exchanged more letters during the six months before he died than at any other time in the three years they had been writing to each other. They expressed their love and devotion for each other often and in language that at times seems strained and extravagant to a postmodern ear, and occasionally were testy with one another.

  On May 29, two days before the Schiffs left Paris, Proust wrote to Sydney that although he was “physically incapable of writing, he was morally forced to.” The impetus for this superhuman effort was Sydney’s apparent misapprehension that he was “running after” Proust whereas, Proust said, the truth was he was “running after” the Schiffs. Proust knew Sydney and Violet were about to return to London and told them he might be better in a day or two and if he were they shouldn’t miss the opportunity to see each other one more time, perhaps thinking it would be the last. The next day Proust wrote again in response to a letter in which he apparently found Sydney too demanding and replied that although he was faithful and submissive, Sydney was tyrannical. But then he said Sydney was the man he loved the most and ended his letter with a paean of praise to Violet, whom he called more beautiful than Leonardo’s women. To “the angel Violet, whom I have never seen in the same dress, but in whom I have always found the same character, the same comprehensive and inalterable sweetness,” he sent his resp
ectful homage, which, he said, he shared with Sydney. Just before the end of the letter, though, Proust made a rather abject apology to Sydney for having inflicted on him a visit to “the Turkish baths.” This was apparently a guarded reference to his having taken Sydney to see Le Cuziat’s brothel, where Proust went to gather information about clients and practices that he used to portray Jupien’s homosexual brothel in his novel. This visit, judging from the apology, had not pleased Sydney.

  Two weeks later Proust wrote a trivia-filled letter but concluded on a serious note. He expressed his concern that Sydney was drinking too much champagne and that if he didn’t cut back on his consumption he would eventually damage his liver. He then advised him that if his blood pressure was too low and he suffered from fatigue a shot of adrenaline would do more good than a bottle of champagne. Sydney wrote back that he knew he sometimes drank too much champagne, but he hadn’t had a drop since returning to London. He explained to Proust that he was nervous and unable to sleep well in Paris and that keeping Proust’s late hours exhausted him. He did not respond to the suggestion that he switch to adrenaline. Sydney also advised Proust somewhat brazenly that the Schiffs’ visits had made him feel better. His slightly tortured reasoning was that the effort Proust made on their behalf was the medicine that put him on his feet.

  He then added that Wyndham Lewis was making drawings of Violet and himself and if they turned out well he would give them to Proust as a gift. “Wyndham Lewis is our Picasso,” he told Proust, “but a difficult man, hard and without charm. He is very intelligent, perhaps the most intelligent man (after you) I know, but not at all wise, although intellectual.… I was afraid to introduce him to Violet, but they understood each other from the first moment they met. I don’t like him, but he interests me enormously. As for the rest, I love no man but you and I don’t want to love any other. Lewis’s life force is as strong as Picasso’s, but he hasn’t reached the point where he paints as well as Picasso. Perhaps he never will.… Would you like me to ask Picasso to do a drawing of you … I have to write to P.”