Sydney and Violet

by Stephen Klaidman

  Although they had not met until then, Mansfield and Lewis knew a fair amount about one another’s work. His opinion of her stories was dismissive, and although she admired his draftsmanship and fiction, she was put off by his general negativity and, by her lights, his contempt for any conception of a human soul. Although Lewis’s respected biographer Jeffrey Meyers wrote that “Lewis could not have known very much about her desperate condition,” it is a bit hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have. Her illness was widely known in the gossipy circles they all inhabited, and it seems unlikely that Sydney and Violet, knowing Lewis and Mansfield as they did, would not have prepared him for the meeting. And, as dense as he was about certain things, it is hard to believe that he would not have noticed the debilitated state of a woman on the verge of dying from tuberculosis.

  Lewis’s callous behavior toward her that day, whatever he knew or didn’t know, was both characteristic of him and inexcusable. He went on at length about the triviality of her stories and mocked Gurdjieff. He called her putative savior a “Levantine psychic shark.” I don’t know what expectations Mansfield had of Lewis, but just as it is hard to believe he knew very little about her condition it seems unlikely that she was unaware of his reputation for crudeness and cruelty. Of course expecting cruelty does not necessarily palliate it. Lewis made a feeble attempt to excuse his behavior, but to the Schiffs, not to Mansfield, who was furious at the Schiffs for not defending her.

  After the lunch at the Schiffs’, Lewis received a note from Mansfield. There is no indication he responded, but he did write to Violet: “I don’t see how, short of possessing such powers of divination as [Gurdjieff’s] Institute would provide you with, you could have foreseen the rather comic denouement of my meeting with the famous New Zealand mag. short story writer, in the grip of the Levantine psychic shark. I am rather glad not to be troubled with her, though I hope she won’t be too venomous.” In another letter to Sydney he accused Mansfield of picking a quarrel with him and making a fuss “both with you and Violet and me, about nothing in particular.” He then went on to malevolently disparage her work: “she is nothing but a writer of 2 books of short stories, as she puts it, which have been advertised and pushed cynically out of proportion to their merit. I find them, as I have always said, vulgar, dull, and unpleasant.” Finally, in a stingy attempt at an apology, he gave with one hand and took away with the other: “I’m afraid I must have been too uncouth,” he wrote, “or perhaps, who knows, too sincere.”

  Sydney and Violet had sat silently through Lewis’s savage verbal assault on their sick friend and now he was shifting the blame to her. Apparently they tried to apologize to Mansfield, but it was too little too late and she wasn’t having it. The evidence that the Schiffs failed to defend Mansfield lacks specificity but, given the timing, seems persuasive. In a cryptic diary entry on September 17, 1922, she wrote: “Lunch with Sydney and Violet. Odious.” She also wrote to Murry on September 22 that “Schiff continues his epistolatory bombardment. I refuse to reply anymore. He is a silly old man.” There were no more letters from her to the Schiffs, but many years later Murry confirmed that she was devastated by Lewis’s behavior and Sydney and Violet’s failure to stand up for her. He wrote to Violet that after the lunch Mansfield was “a naked nerve quivering upon the air.” He said Lewis had outraged her and she felt Sydney and Violet didn’t protect her as she thought they should have. According to Murry, she “quivered for days afterwards.” Three and a half months later Mansfield was dead. It wasn’t Lewis’s fault, as much as his callousness and monumental lack of self-awareness would make one want to think it was, but it probably wasn’t Gurdjieff’s either, as has frequently been alleged.

  CHAPTER 6

  ANNUS MIRABILIS

  The Schiffs’ relationships with Mansfield, Eliot, Lewis, and Joyce were genuine even if at times contentious, but for quality and intensity, none of them rivaled the almost pathological attachment and affection they shared with Marcel Proust. This was true despite the fact that their intimacy was achieved almost entirely through letters. They met in person at most four or five times over three and a half years. The amount of time they spent in each other’s company is best measured in hours. And most of those hours together took place after midnight during one brief period just months before Proust’s death. They were among the very few friends the eccentric French novelist was willing to see during the last year of his life.

  The year 1922 would have been notable in the history of literature if only for Proust’s death and the completion of his novel. But 1922 was much more than notable, it was the annus mirabilis of modernism, the year of the century in letters. And three of Sydney and Violet’s friends—Eliot, Proust, and Joyce—were the writers who made it so. Each published or completed a work many critics still consider one of the three greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century. Eliot’s The Waste Land appeared in the first issue of the Criterion, which turned out to be the most important and longest-lasting of all the modernist literary magazines, in February 1922. Sylvia Beach published one thousand copies of Joyce’s Ulysses the same month. And Proust finished correcting the last pages of In Search of Lost Time three days before he died in November. All this is of interest here mainly because, Zelig-like, Sydney and Violet kept popping up.

  Their friend T. S. Eliot was not poor like Wyndham Lewis. He earned just enough at Lloyd’s Bank evaluating World War I debt obligations to cover his modest living expenses. But he spent so much time and energy on bank business and slight literary journalism to supplement his income that he had little left of either for poetry or criticism. He was so physically and mentally exhausted toward the end of 1921 that he took three months off to recuperate, which led some of his friends to worry about his health, state of mind, and dwindling poetic output. The perpetually self-absorbed Lewis, on the other hand, wrote to the Schiffs that he hadn’t seen Eliot for a long time and, oblivious to his friend’s physical and mental state, blamed Eliot’s absence on “his Bloomsbury cultural groove, combined with the wife obsession.”

  The ever big-hearted Ezra Pound, however, was genuinely concerned and acted reflexively and to some extent recklessly. Without telling Eliot he began to solicit ten-pound annual subscriptions from his friends to provide enough of an income to allow him to leave the bank. The scheme, which Pound called Bel Esprit, was not unusual at the time. Lewis often lived on similar subscriptions. But it was perfectly designed to embarrass Eliot, who, in line with the Protestant Ethic, was brought up to be self-sufficient, not a charity case. At first it attracted few subscribers, but Pound was persistent.

  Meanwhile, convinced Eliot was the best poet of his generation, Sydney and Violet, in a generous gesture more suited to Eliot’s temperament, had introduced him to Lady Rothermere. She was the wealthy wife of the English press baron Harold Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere, and had an idea for a modest project of her own, a London-based literary journal. The timing could not have been better. Eliot had been pondering how he might get financial support for a successor to Art and Letters, a journal in which he had published two important poems and that he admired, especially during Sydney’s tenure as what today might be called its chief financial and creative officer. Eliot needed the money, but he also craved editorial control of a literary magazine and Lady Rothermere needed an editor of Eliot’s stature. But despite the apparent good fit and Sydney and Violet’s best intentions it was not a marriage made in heaven. They had different concepts of what the magazine should be like, and notwithstanding Eliot’s literary credentials the lady with the money left no doubt about who would have the last word.

  Eliot, whose needs took precedence over his cravings, was determined to make it work, but this turned out to be a lot harder than he expected. He and Lady R., as Eliot and his friends called her among themselves, quickly agreed it would be a quarterly, but about the rest there was little agreement, only long, tedious negotiations Eliot found debilitating. During this period he wrote to Sydney in frustration,
if not utter despair, that he was “about ready to chuck literature altogether and retire.” And editorial disagreements with Lady Rothermere were not the only problem. Under the bank’s rules Eliot could not simultaneously hold another paying job. His income for editing the journal would be about the same as what he was earning at the bank, but his bank salary was relatively secure and the average life of a new literary quarterly was about four issues. This was a risk he could not afford to take, which brings us back to Bel Esprit, whose history is eternally entwined with the birth of the Criterion.

  Eliot wrote to Pound, who was living in Paris, to tell him about his discussions with Lady Rothermere and offer him an opportunity to make regular contributions to the new journal. But Pound refused to have anything to do with it and told Eliot that England didn’t deserve a good review. He then added rather obscurely, “Of course if Lady R. is willing to cooperate with me in a larger scheme, which wd. mean getting you out of your bank and allowing you to give up your whole time to writing, I might reconsider … I cant [sic] see that editing a quarterly will give you any more leisure to write poetry.” Pound’s response could have been motivated by jealousy or self-interest. Pound, like Eliot, was eager to edit his own journal and if Eliot didn’t take the job it just might be offered to old Ez.

  Pound enclosed in his letter to Eliot the template for Bel Esprit, which he was getting ready to send to potential donors. He might have hoped that an endowment would entice Eliot to give up both the bank and the journal. The template said in part that “the greatest waste in ang-sax letters at the moment is the waste of Eliot’s talent.… He must have complete liberty” to devote his entire time to literature, which meant his own writing. It sought thirty contributors of ten pounds a year to endow Eliot for life. Pound, Richard Aldington, and the novelist May Sinclair were the first subscribers. Other subscribers were not so easily found, although twenty-two eventually signed up. Eliot wrote to Aldington that Pound wanted everybody in England, including the Schiffs, to deal with him about subscriptions.

  Eliot was uncomfortable with the idea from the outset but did not immediately reject it. In time, although he remained conflicted, his desire for more freedom to pursue his writing free of economic concerns eroded his principles about accepting charity. He did, however, want to make sure that if he accepted the endowment it would provide a sufficient and secure income. He wrote to Pound in mid-July that a vague guarantee of three hundred pounds a year would hardly suffice for him to risk leaving the bank. Two weeks later he wrote to Sydney that “those who are accustomed to small or precarious incomes [Pound, for example] cannot take my circumstances into account and realize why I should need more money or more security.”

  At the time Eliot did not specify why he would need more, but the main reason was Vivienne’s worsening health, for which he felt some responsibility. Furthermore, Eliot valued privacy and was distressed by the spotlight the ongoing discussions about Bel Esprit were putting on his personal circumstances. And when he accidentally came across one of the circulars soliciting funds for Bel Esprit it clearly upset him, mainly because it strongly suggested that Lloyd’s Bank interfered with literature. “If it is stated so positively that Lloyd’s Bank interferes with literature,” Eliot wrote to Pound, “Lloyd’s Bank would have a perfect right to infer that literature interfered with Lloyd’s Bank.” He wrote that he needed time to decide what to do and that if there was any more publicity for Bel Esprit he would publicly repudiate it. There was and he did. In November the Liverpool Post published an article on the scheme, which embarrassed Eliot terribly. He wrote to the paper saying he disapproved of it and had not accepted it.

  While Eliot was still engulfed in controversy with Pound about Bel Esprit and Lady Rothermere about the Criterion, Pound, in his predictably inept fashion, tried to get Eliot to ask his titled angel to contribute to the endowment fund. Eliot, although overworked and under pressure, refused. He was focused above all on putting together volume one, number one, the reception of which, he knew, could determine the success or failure of the entire enterprise. Sydney had contributed a short story called The Thief, which was scheduled to appear in the first issue. But for reasons most likely related to Eliot’s desire to achieve maximum impact, at the last minute it was held for the second. It was one of several contributions he and Violet would make to the magazine over the years. They also helped Eliot solicit original work from others. But their efforts at Eliot’s request to get a contribution from Proust for the first issue, to be translated by Sydney, were unsuccessful.

  Despite the long labor and intense birth pangs, the Criterion was destined for a life Eliot would not have dared to imagine—seventeen years, longevity unheard of for a little modernist quarterly. Its most distinguished contributors populate the Who’s Who of modernism. They include William Butler Yeats, Luigi Pirandello, Ezra Pound, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, W. H. Auden, Paul Valéry, Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, and Hart Crane. At the time Stephen Hudson did not seem particularly out of place in their company. Apart from his novels he published short stories, essays, and translations from German and French in the leading journals of the day. But in the end he was just one of a multitude of forgotten contributors to the Criterion who were well-regarded in their time.

  The first Criterion, in an edition of six hundred copies, appeared October 15, 1922, flush with articles and stories by distinguished contributors. But more than anything else it is remembered because it was the vehicle for publication of The Waste Land, the signature poem of modernism. Eliot most likely began The Waste Land early in 1921. He continued working on it during his convalescent leave from the bank in Margate on the southeastern English coast and finished it in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had gone for treatment by a renowned Swiss physician named Roger Vittoz who had developed a treatment based on mental exercises that was designed to cure anxiety. When Eliot returned to London, however, he found that his poem was not finished. What remained was the fairly drastic cutting and editing done in collaboration with Pound and with a little help from Vivienne that resulted in the first published version.

  Even before The Waste Land appeared in the Criterion, however, Eliot had sold the rights in book format to the American publisher Horace Liveright. The offer was made at a dinner in Paris arranged by Pound that included Joyce and, of course, Eliot. Imagine Pound, Eliot, and Joyce sitting around the same table—at the time it could easily have constituted “the most extraordinary concentration of talent,” as Jack Kennedy famously said about a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners, since “Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” But if it was, the distinction was short-lived. Ten months later an even more stunning concentration of genius coalesced around several tables in a Paris hotel at Sydney and Violet’s invitation.

  In the meantime, the Schiffs followed the progress of The Waste Land from Cambridge Square, Eastbourne, and their house at Roquebrune near Monte Carlo through correspondence with Wyndham Lewis and Eliot himself. Sydney, who was finishing up Elinor Colhouse with Violet’s help, was the first to write in praise of it. Vivienne was so moved by his letter, which the Eliots received the day after the poem appeared, that she wrote back immediately to express her gratitude for Sydney’s understanding and appreciation of the work, which undoubtedly also reflected Violet’s critical sensibility. Eliot wrote the same day, saying, “You could not have used words which would have given me more pleasure or have so persuaded me that the poem may possibly communicate something of what it intends. But I cannot expect to find many critics so sympathetic.” About this, of course, Eliot was wrong.

  The Schiffs also monitored the evolution of the Criterion from the perspective of matchmakers with an interest in seeing their undertaking flourish. There was no guarantee that the magazine would land with a bang, not a whimper, indeed the odds were heavily against it, especially given the friction between Eliot and Lady R. But it did. Although like almost all literary magazines it never made money, measured by the sta
ndards of the day—quality and survival—the journal was a great success. It was talked about, even respected, in the right circles. And its owners—Lady Rothermere for the first four years and then the book publisher Faber & Gwyer, which in 1929 became Faber & Faber—were willing to accept the losses it consistently incurred.

  None of this meant, however, that during the time she owned the Criterion Lady Rothermere was content and would always let Eliot do things his own way. Indeed after the first issue appeared to general acclaim, she wrote three biting letters to her editor complaining about what she viewed as its shortcomings. The letters were written from Gurdjieff’s recently opened institute, and the Eliots seemed more troubled about what Lady Rothermere was up to there than her criticisms. Vivienne wrote to Pound that the institute was an “asylum for the insane” and that Lady Rothermere was doing “religious dances naked with Katherine Mansfield,” who had gone there in a last-ditch effort to cure her tuberculosis. Vivienne’s concern, it seems, was not that Lady Rothermere was doing naked devotional dances, but that she was doing them with Mansfield, whom the Eliots abhorred. In the great tradition of the modernists Eliot satirized her (as Scheherazade) in his only short story, “Eeldrop and Appleplex.” He and Vivienne not only disliked Mansfield personally but were contemptuous of her short stories, which were part of the literary canon for decades but now are infrequently read.