Sydney and Violet
Their Life with T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A long overdue biography of the power couple that nurtured and influenced the literary world of early twentieth-century England
"I write primarily to pay homage to a beloved friend, but also in the hope that some future chronicler of the history of art and letters in our time may give to Sydney and Violet Schiff the place which is their due."
—T. S. Eliot, in a letter appended to Violet Schiff's obituary, Times of London, July 9, 1962
Largely forgotten today, Sydney and Violet Schiff were ubiquitous, almost Zelig-like figures in the most important literary movement of the twentieth century. Their friendships among the elite of the Modernist writers were remarkable, and their extensive correspondence with T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Proust, and many others strongly suggests both intimacy and intellectual equality. Leading critics of the day considered Sydney, writing as Stephen Hudson, to be in the same literary league as Joyce, Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence. As for Violet, she was a talented musician who nurtured Sydney's literary efforts and was among the first in England to recognize Proust's genius and spread the word. Sydney and Violet tells the story of how the Schiffs, despite their commercial and Jewish origins, won acceptance in the snobbish, anti-Semitic, literary world of early twentieth-century England, and brings to life a full panoply of extravagant personalities: Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and many more. A highly personal, anecdote-filled account of the social and intellectual history of the Modernist movement, Sydney and Violet also examines what divides the literary survivors from the victims of taste and time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On May 18, 1922, at Paris's Majestic hotel, Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev dined together for the first and last time. Their hosts? Sydney and Violet Schiff. In this delightful book, which draws on extensive private correspondence, interviews, and personal friendship, journalist and editor Klaidman (Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry) invites us to share the Schiffs's privileged view of the modernist elite who reshaped literature, art, and music in the early 20th century and offers plenty of dishy details for cultural history junkies and readers interested in the period. Like Sara and Gerald Murphy, the Schiffs were independently wealthy and well connected. Their friends included T.S. Eliot, Proust, Katherine Mansfield, and bombastic gadfly Wyndham Lewis, who portrayed the Schiffs as social-climbing sycophants in his satiric novel, The Apes of God. The Schiff marriage was, in Klaidman's words, a "thirty-three-year love affair," a "collaboration between an inspired writer with a painful personal story and an intelligent, sympathetic but unsentimental editor" namely Violet. Sydney wrote eight novels, many of them published under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson. Klaidman leaves the question of their literary merit to Sydney's contemporaries, forcing us to draw our own conclusions. "I'm not sure it's altogether a bad novel," Mansfield told Sydney, unaware that he was the book's author. When she realized her mistake, she was embarrassed: "It's a thousand-fold more. It is a work of art."
