Sydney and Violet

by Stephen Klaidman

  In his next letter to Proust, Sydney began modestly by professing that he lacked the “critical gift, the knowledge and the technique” to write a serious critique of Proust’s work. But typically he qualified his self-deprecating observation by adding that no one else in England was capable of doing it either. When it came to the question of who was best qualified to translate Proust’s novel into English, however, he was unrestrained by modesty and expressed his opinion without qualification. “I know I’m the only one who can do the translation,” he wrote. “You won’t believe it after having read and listened to my execrable French, but I know French better than it seems, and it really isn’t a question of that, it’s a matter of my sympathetic intuition, my literary taste and my mental faculties.” His excessive self-confidence—especially given the colossal challenge of rendering Proust’s French into English—was breathtaking, but there is little reason to think it wasn’t genuine. It was consistent with his belief in his intellectual powers, his commitment to honesty, and his love of Proust. “I often think about it,” he wrote. “Wouldn’t it be better to set aside my work and undertake the complete translation of La Recherche?”

  Sydney indirectly answered his rhetorical question by telling Proust he still had four books to write to complete his own multivolume novel and other writing projects. He specified two, a collection of short stories and a book whose working title was The Rock but was almost certainly published as Tony. He told Proust it was based on the life of his uncle, Sir Ernest Schiff, his father’s partner in A. G. Schiff. Tony does include an important character nicknamed “the Rock,” who appears to be based on Sir Ernest. The title character and narrator was based on his brother, who was also named Ernest. Using his brother as the narrator was a device that allowed Sydney to say things about himself that would have sounded inappropriate coming from the mouth of Richard Kurt. Tony, as Sydney indicated it would be, was followed by two more novels, Myrtle and Richard, Myrtle and I. It turned out, though, that Sydney wasn’t finished. After an eleven-year hiatus, at the age of sixty-eight, he published one more novel, The Other Side, which focused on some of the same deeply personal and painful issues raised in Prince Hempseed and Richard Kurt.

  Although he appeared to have resolved the problem in favor of completing his own work, in a rather transparent attempt to have Proust beg him to do the translation, Sydney once again expressed ambivalence. After announcing that what he had set forth was the program for the rest of his life, which he was certain to accomplish because it was his destiny, he asked, with feigned reluctance: “Do I have to translate La Recherche?” How would he find the time? He said it wasn’t about having the energy or anything like that, but rather it was about him being the only one who could do it “the way it had to be done.” You can almost hear a plaintive “Oh Proust, dear Marcel, please ask me to do it” in his tone. In the end, though, Proust never asked and Scott Moncrieff was hired to do the translation.

  Toward the end of this letter Sydney shared with Proust his belief that some in his British literary circle were, if not envious, then resentful of any success he might achieve with his writing. He named Eliot, Mansfield, and Murry but for some reason neglected to mention the gorilla in the room, Wyndham Lewis. The source of the resentment, he wrote, was that he was not a professional, by which they meant he did not have to earn his living by writing. “They also have a kind of idea … that what I do has real value, that my books don’t die as quickly as they would hope, and that far from being discouraged by the small sale of my books, I go on with full confidence in my ideas, in my means and in my future without, nevertheless, the least ambition.”

  Sydney must have written again before Proust wrote to him around July 5, but his letter is missing. Judging from Proust’s response, though, he complained bitterly that Proust was not paying enough attention to him. Proust, angry at having his loyalty questioned and his declining health unappreciated, found Sydney’s letter “revolting” and wondered whether he should respond at all to what he felt was emotional “blackmail.” “You know perfectly well that I see no one,” he wrote to Sydney, and indeed with one exception, about which they already knew, he added, the Schiffs were the only people he had seen for many months. He also said that in his condition he could not even write letters and that the one to them was an exception written on scraps of paper he saved to light the powders he used to fumigate his room. He had to make do, he said, because his writing paper was out of reach and Céleste was asleep. He then launched a kind of counterattack against Sydney, accusing him of many things, but in at least one case—not reading his book—unfairly.

  “You know that you yourself lead the kind of life that I don’t, but that you reproach me for,” he wrote. “If you read my book you will see the infatuations and bad tempers of this frivolous life from which I detached myself at the age of 20, but that didn’t keep the Nouvelle Revue Française from rejecting Swann twenty years later as the work of a frivolous socialite. But you don’t read my book because like all the socialites … in Paris you are too nervous, in London you are too busy and in the country you have too many guests.” Obviously feeling sorry for himself, Proust said he wasn’t sure Sydney even liked him, an allegation calculated to wound his devoted acolyte. And probably because of his state of despondency he told an irrelevant story with an opaque moral about the sad state of impoverished artists, which didn’t apply to either the Schiffs or himself.

  Whistler, he wrote, was accosted by bailiffs for nonpayment of debts while dining with several millionaires, any one of whom could have easily bought a picture or two and sent the bailiffs packing. But they didn’t. Whistler said he didn’t think this was because of avarice, or because they were bad people, but rather because of a lack of imagination. Then, recognizing the inapplicability of his story, Proust wrote, “the Whistler example has led us astray from the case I’ve unsuccessfully been building against you, but I’m too tired. I’m content to cite one example of my faithfulness,” at which point Proust offered to show Sydney some fifty dinner invitations from Prince Antoine Bibesco, none of which he had accepted.

  He seemed to think he was done when he wrote, “Place my respects at the feet of Madame Violet and believe in my profound affection, Marcel,” but he wasn’t. Despite his professed fatigue, he addressed several other simmering matters in a lengthy postscript.

  Proust strenuously objected to Sydney’s self-regarding supposition that he was feeling better after their last evening together. He was irritated at Sydney’s inability to understand that the Schiffs’ departure could only have caused him tears and emotional desolation. And on strictly physiological grounds Proust, whose father and brother were physicians, did not believe in mind over matter. He believed in and knew something about traditional medicine, as a result of which he repeated a series of recommendations he had given Sydney earlier about taking care of his health. These included quitting alcohol, not taking adrenaline if his blood pressure was low, and seeing a “serious” doctor about his “tension” and to examine his heart. Finally, he offered some fresh advice to Sydney that was not necessarily addressed to a specific complaint: “Take some Boissy laxative pills once every two weeks … and make sure to take them after eating and not to eat after taking them.”

  An increasingly touchy Proust, noting that their letters had crossed, wrote to Sydney about two weeks later to correct “many errors” in Sydney’s letter. He asserted emphatically that he was “by no means cured” of his various ailments even though he had written to Sydney that his dizziness, the weakness in his legs, and his problems with language had almost entirely disappeared. He also alleged that Sydney had misunderstood his comments about Antoine Bibesco and praised Bibesco for having shown great enthusiasm for Swann in 1911 when he read extracts in manuscript. Then he took issue with a view of Sydney’s that he most likely reaffirmed in the lost letter. Sydney took the position that if you really knew a person you didn’t need to read his or her books, an attitude Proust thought was “absurd.�
�� Proust wrote that there was “a world” between what someone said in drawing-room conversation and the profound meditations they set down in their written work. He did allow that there were those who had things to say in conversation that were better than what they wrote in their books, but in those cases, he said, their books were not serious.

  When he wrote only three days later Proust complained that their letters had crossed again and that it was “as bad as when one of us was left abandoned at the Ritz while the other was staying at the Foyot.” He was so annoyed by it that he returned to the subject of crossing letters later, calling it “a form of epistolatory hell.” In a different vein, Proust played with the option of using toi, the familiar form of address, instead of the formal vous, which in those days in France indicated profound intimacy. But he did it in a way that left it open for Sydney to decide how to respond, although he must have known Sydney would be thrilled to have achieved that degree of closeness with him.

  After explaining to Sydney in great detail and somewhat defensively his thoughts on the sale of his original manuscripts, he addressed the rest of this long letter to “Dear Madame Violet, hidden flower, fragrant and marvelous.” He told her self-effacingly, but not credibly, that he was intimidated by her and therefore he would be brief. He thanked her for an apology she apparently had made for inviting his niece Suzy to visit Sydney and herself without asking his permission and generously added that it wasn’t necessary to ask. Besides, he added, he knew nothing about it because his brother was too busy “cutting out tumors and resuscitating the dead” to give him any of his time. Suzy, however, offered another perspective. She said Proust was violently opposed to her going, which resulted in her never being invited again.

  Proust asked Violet to tell Sydney he was going to be silent for a while because he needed to work and “hundreds” of letters had accumulated and he had to answer them. He also told her he had had lunch at the Ritz and had seen two men walking in the garden. He asked who they were and was told one was Mortimer Leo Schiff, the American banker who was staying at the Ritz the night he waited in vain for Sydney and Violet. The other was his son. He also said he had two stories to tell Sydney, but that it had taken him four days to write the letter she was reading and it had almost killed him.

  Sydney wrote back to Proust the next day, July 30, and diametrically reversing his previously adamant position told him that not only did he not object to Proust selling his manuscripts, but if possible he would like to buy them. Indeed, he said, he had dreamed of possessing them for a long time, and the only thing that kept him from making an offer was his fear of getting involved in financial dealings with a friend. Perhaps he also was beginning to believe that Proust might really die soon. He said the only other writer whose manuscripts were of any interest to him was Wyndham Lewis. He distinguished between them, though, in that he wanted Proust’s manuscripts because of the incredible achievement they represented while in Lewis’s case it was because of his as-yet-unfulfilled promise. Sydney then evaluated Proust’s work in a way that for almost any other writer would have seemed extravagant, but in Proust’s case, arguably, was justified.

  He began by saying Proust was on a level with the greatest writers of the past and that his works “have their permanent and definitive place in the history of European literature above everyone since Balzac.” With respect to In Search of Lost Time, he wrote, “I think that with you we have arrived at the end of the novel form. There is nothing more one can do, everything of which the novel is capable you have done or will do.” He said that he and Violet had read the best contemporary French literature and other European literature in translation and “without exception, it all fades, lacks reality, finesse, individuality, even intelligence, after you.”

  Having concluded that Proust had rendered novel writing “superfluous and vain” and having told him so, Sydney nonetheless tried to explain to him what he was after in his own work. “I am trying,” he wrote, “in a very modest, simple and primitive way, to create a small chain of childhood memories, of brief scenes, each of which must show a phase of development of a person who is intelligent and sensitive, but rather middling in his intellectual attributes. I fully realize that the two badly translated little stories I have given you have not made a very favorable impression, but I think, first of all, if you knew the psychology of the English child, and above all, if you were able to read in English, you would say that I’m on the way to a new form of presentation that is worthwhile from the realist point of view.” Once again Sydney’s high regard for modesty was trumped by the vanity raging in his soul.

  At the end of his long letter Sydney told Proust that he and Violet would come to Paris, and for the first time he used the familiar form of address, which Proust had implicitly encouraged him to do. But he did not do so without expressing his discomfort in a brief postscript. “ ‘Tutoyer’ doesn’t come easy to me,” he wrote. “As you know I’ve never spent more than ten weeks in France, with the exception of the Italian-French-English midi, which is not France.” What he seemed to be saying, of course, was that he didn’t know the French well enough to be sure he wasn’t overstepping the bounds of propriety. By then, though, he and Proust were using first names in their salutations and freely expressing their devotion to one another, which suggests that Sydney’s trepidations about using tu were overly fastidious.

  Almost a month passed before Sydney received another letter, but this, Proust explained, was because a very long and important letter he had written was somehow lost, perhaps mistakenly thrown in the garbage, before it was mailed. “God knows what suffering it is for me to write,” Proust complained, before addressing the tutoyer question in a complex, but comprehensible paragraph. He wrote: “My letter would no longer be altogether appropriate since I was reproaching you for things your new letter renders moot. Thus you were addressing me as ‘tu,’ while I was hesitant to do the same, but still had decided to do so. However, you answered me with a ‘vous’ letter, so I berated myself about my step forward causing me to make two steps backward. All the more so since you had said ‘it is too difficult to say ‘tu,’ etc.’ Nonetheless, the last letter annuls my self-berating since it is couched in ‘tu’. All of this reminds me of Mallarmé’s verses.” Here Proust misquotes the first two lines of Mallarmé’s poem “Placet futile,” but his point and the point of the poem, which is dedicated to Mallarmé’s mistress, Méry Laurent, is a slightly risqué switch from vous to tu.

  The rest of the letter recounted a bit of gossip of the kind Proust believed interested Sydney. It concerned a report from Deauville in the Figaro that the daughter of one of Proust’s friends, who according to Proust was married to a “detestable” Romanian, had entertained the shah of Persia at tea and the Prince of Greece for an afternoon snack. Proust questioned the difference between the two, asking himself wryly whether at tea there was nothing to eat and at a goûter, or snack, there was no tea. The letter was signed simply “Marcel.”

  A couple of days later Sydney wrote back to Proust from his country house at the time in East Sussex about thirty-five miles from London. He explained right off that his difficulty in using tu had nothing to do with his feelings for Proust, but rather with the fact that his lack of familiarity with using tu caused him to forget and lapse into the formal vous in the course of a letter. Indeed, he wrote, his feelings ran much deeper than the familiar personal pronouns could possibly express, an indication he was beginning to slip into one of his more excessive moods. He soon carried it to an extreme, one Proust hardly could find congenial. After declaring that Proust’s letters were “the joy and the reward” of his life, he added bizarrely that “it would have been better if Céleste had thrown Odilon into the garbage [rather than the lost letter],” which, he said, “would have saved me undeserved suffering.” Sydney was not beyond thinking this was a joke. Most of his efforts at humor were lame in this vein, and it is not always easy to tell if he meant something to be funny.

  Sydney reported t
o Proust that Eliot had just spent a night with him and Violet in the country. Although Eliot did not admire Proust’s work, his receipt of the Prix Goncourt had sent his reputation soaring, and Eliot had sought Sydney’s help in getting a contribution for the Criterion. He had written directly to Proust, but Proust had not responded and Sydney took it upon himself to apologize on Proust’s behalf, saying he hadn’t answered because the appropriate persons at his French publisher were unavailable.

  Sydney then returned, as he always seemed to at that time in his life, to his own work, reminding Proust of the sketches he had sent him. “I finished today my book that constitutes a chain of 28 of these stories,” he wrote. “They are incidents or scenes in the life of a boy from the age of 3 until 18 written from his own point of view at the time of the incidents.” He apologized for explaining the book’s premise poorly, but said he was sure Proust would understand it. The book, although he didn’t say so, was Prince Hempseed. He wrote that he hoped his friend the Belgian poet Jean de Bosschère would translate the volume and that nothing would make him happier than to be able to dedicate it to Proust. Rather than just ask Proust’s permission to dedicate the book to him, though, Sydney, in his typically convoluted fashion, recited an argument against doing it before rather unsubtly trying to influence Proust to do it. The argument against was that he would be taking unfair advantage of Proust’s immense literary prestige. The argument for was that he had poured his heart and soul into the book and it was the best thing he had done yet. So, he asked Proust, “What do you think?”

  On September 9, Sydney wrote again to Proust, this time very briefly to let him know that the first announcement of the forthcoming publication of Swann’s Way in English had appeared in the Athenaeum and to register his disapproval of the volume’s title and also the general title, Remembrance of Things Past. With respect to Swann’s Way Sydney favored something more like In the Manner of Swann, but he had misunderstood Proust’s meaning, which referred only to the physical path on which Swann’s house was situated. His objection to the general title was better founded, however. Although Sydney had missed the fact that Scott Moncrieff had taken his title from the second line of Shakespeare’s sonnet number 30, this was irrelevant because Scott Moncrieff, in choosing the line from Shakespeare, had missed Proust’s larger purpose in the novel, which was to explore the nature of time. Although the phrase “remembrance of things past” can be read as an allusion to the recollections stimulated by the taste of a madeleine dipped in lime tea, it does a disservice to the complex treatment of time as a central theme of Proust’s novel and loses the resonance between the general title and the title of the final volume, Temps Retrouvé, or Time Regained. Sydney said he would get a copy as soon as they became available and let Proust know what he thought of the translation.