Sydney and Violet

by Stephen Klaidman

  These severe assessments of his work probably resulted in part from insecurity induced by his father’s lifelong disapproval as well as twenty years of abuse and mockery from Marion, but his quasi-religious commitment to truth telling can’t be overestimated. Of course, when it came to acid observations about putative friends he was not out of step with the literary royalty of Bayswater and Bloomsbury. The only difference was that the residents of these rival intellectual neighborhoods lacked the courage of their convictions. Unlike Sydney, when confronted with their cruelly satirical representations of supposed friends, Huxley, Lawrence, Lewis, and company lied.

  Sydney was rarely duplicitous. In his life as in his work he considered the truth sacred. And he believed complete honesty could not always be achieved without using disagreeable language, as a result of which he sometimes came across as self-righteous. He responded to Proust’s late-August letter in a way that seems compulsively honest because it was so painfully revealing about his insecurity. “Looking for an explanation for your long silence,” he wrote, “I thought you had been disillusioned by your perception of my personality. That didn’t trouble me. I’m sure it would have been otherwise if the occasion had arisen for a more intimate acquaintance.” It is understandable that Sydney was distressed by the long break in the correspondence, but since Proust’s letters almost always began with disclaimers that his poor health and the demands of his book had kept him from writing, Sydney’s self-regarding comment could easily be seen as almost childishly obtuse. Proust, who was either offended or disappointed by Sydney’s lack of understanding, said he was “stupefied” that Sydney could have thought he failed to write because he didn’t like him. “How could you possibly think I didn’t like you right from the start?” he asked. “There is no one I would rather see.”

  A long, rambling paragraph later in Sydney’s letter even more clearly indicates his insecurities and internal contradictions as he vacillates between intellectual arrogance and self-deprecation. It evokes his voice and feelings—petulant but poignantly honest:

  We are by the sea—a spot of little interest, but healthy, having rented this house for six months to be able to invite some young people, relatives of my adored wife. It is very tiresome for me because I don’t like being constantly with young people. I am distressed by their naivete, which I am afraid of corrupting or at least compromising. I have no patience for being restricted. I like to come and go, talk and be quiet, when I like. I am selfish, not extremely, but too much to put up with personal sacrifices, except some financial sacrifices. Any kind of reining in irritates me and generally speaking people bore me terribly because they understand nothing. My wife is an angel. She thinks it’s for them that she likes the young, but it’s for herself. I don’t bore her because she loves me. If she didn’t love me, she would prefer to be with young people. She is frightfully young and I am very old and I only live by her and for her. The human being sometimes interests me, but I don’t like him because he has too little intelligence, but my wife to the contrary is not troubled by stupid people if they are sincere and honest. She finds all sorts of qualities that are really pale reflections of herself. If I could write adequately in French and if I were not certain that I would tire you I would tell you many things. I know life well, but I am ignorant; people’s ignorance irritates me, they think one is full of knowledge because one has scratched the surface and one never listens to the little things one knows, the things life has taught you. To be able to imagine that I have for a moment the slightest bit of contact with you is a precious gift I don’t want to abuse. I stop.

  To begin on the bright side, it was a testament to Sydney’s love for Violet that he rented a house for six months in a place he found uninteresting to entertain her young relatives, whom he found naive and boring and who limited his freedom. He admitted he was selfish, which indicated some degree of self-awareness, then tried to mitigate his admission by adding “not extremely,” which would have been good news if he hadn’t tacked on his unwillingness to make personal sacrifices. The single non-Violet-related exception he made for certain financial sacrifices must have, or probably should have, referred to his largesse in giving the despised Marion the villa on Lake Como and half of his income for life. His gifts to Lewis and others were insignificant compared to his wealth and ought not to count as sacrifices although he might have thought they were.

  Toward the end of this outpouring of self-revelation, Sydney blurted out his contempt for young people as a class and the masses in general. It’s hard to tell whether he was expressing firm convictions or momentary pique. And one has to wonder whether he thought Proust would share his views. If he did, he would have been wrong, which he soon found out. Proust told him rather gently not long afterwards that his intellectual work was an internal affair and, just as it did to Violet, sincerity mattered a great deal to him. As far as his fellow men were concerned, he wrote that he cared whether they were nice or not, but was somewhat indifferent to whether they were intelligent.

  Finally, to conclude a letter that was essentially one long bleat, Sydney wrote that “since reading [Proust’s] books he had less desire to write.” He said Proust had “expressed a large part of what he felt” and that he didn’t “know whether it was worth the enormous effort to continue writing.” The entire letter suggests Sydney was feeling terribly sorry for himself, but especially so when he expressed his frustration and sense of futility about his writing. He was, however, in good company. Even Eliot, when overwhelmed by work at the bank, caring for Vivienne, and his editing chores and literary journalism, once wrote to Sydney that he was considering giving up writing altogether. He of course got over it, as did Sydney.

  Sydney’s next letter to Proust continued to reflect his odd blend of diffidence and arrogance, the poles of his personality. He wrote diffidently that Proust was right to feel closer to Violet than to him because her nature was “more instinctively noble” than his. He said he was working at improving himself, but that Violet “always has been and always will be what she is.” He praised her wisdom and analytical abilities and observed that she never prejudged anything and was incapable of pettiness, all of which, in context, seemed to contrast with his view of himself. Perhaps most revealingly, though, he wrote with obvious approval that what Violet didn’t say was often more significant than what she did, demonstrating that he had the intelligence to recognize that there were times when silence was the most appropriate form of communication. But he seemed emotionally incapable of acting on his insight. He showed once again that he either lacked a basic understanding of how his words might affect the person to whom they were addressed or believed he had an irrevocable moral obligation to express whatever he believed to be true even if there was no compelling reason to do so.

  In the next paragraph, which initiated a discussion of how best to get In Search of Lost Time translated into English, he told Proust that the audience for good literature, especially good French literature, was very small in England and that the best-educated audience preferred to read the books in French. He strongly suggested that the likelihood of an English edition earning Proust any money was nonexistent. But then, having told Proust in effect that the effort would be wasted, he wrote that he knew of no one other than himself who could produce an acceptable translation. Eventually H. L. Scott Moncrieff was selected to do the English translation, which Sydney initially considered poor—probably because it wasn’t his—but in the end came to admire. This translation in edited and updated versions is still the standard. Scott Moncrieff, however, died before finishing the job and Sydney translated the final volume, whose English title is Time Regained. His translation has long since been replaced by other versions, the most commonly used of which was done by Andreas Mayor.

  In his next letter Proust again offered to get Sydney an appointment with a leading French physician he believed might be able to treat his deafness. But in his reply Sydney, who took Proust’s well-meaning offer as an insult, said he wasn’t
really going deaf at all. He said his inability to hear was a function of his nerves and that no doctor could control or correct the problem. And he added with exaggerated politeness that bordered on mockery: “Therefore, dear sir, if in the future I will need recourse to your gracious intervention, it will be because I have grown deafer still and I dare to hope that this misfortune, if it has to happen, will happen with an indulgent slowness.”

  Sydney did not write again until November 15, at least in part because Violet had been ill and had undergone an operation. He described the surgery as painful but not serious and did not specify the reason for it. Violet, who had been bedridden for four weeks, also wrote to Proust. Although Sydney and Violet lived in a large house, during Violet’s convalescence he slept at his mother-in-law’s so that two nurses could sleep near her. He seemed to have enjoyed his stay and with a certain amount of pride described the Beddington milieu to Proust.

  After noting that Zillah, whose husband, Samuel, had died in 1914 at eighty-five, lived in a spacious Victorian residence he wrote that two servants, one of whom had been with the family for thirty-five years and the other for about forty years, had retired. For most people this would have been an odd fact to emphasize, but it was Sydney’s way of highlighting the stability, solidity, and social status of the Beddington family. He went on to describe Zillah as the best amateur pianist in existence and told Proust she knew all the great musicians. Then Sydney blissfully recounted for Proust the most emotionally charged experience of his stay at 21 Hyde Park Square:

  “I had the good fortune to sleep in the same room my wife occupied for her entire life before we were married.… my eyes encountered the same prints on the walls, the same furniture and rug; from the window I saw the same branches dried by the wind in the old square.”

  Then, returning to the mundane, he wrote that the Beddingtons’ old butler had taken good care of him and that he had enjoyed pleasant conversations with Zillah about concerts she had attended and musicians she had known. But rather than moving on and leaving well enough alone, Sydney could not resist sharply criticizing his mother-in-law. She was, he wrote, “egotistical in a way that was infantile and naïve” because she seemed more interested in her concerts than her daughter’s illness. It seems almost as if the distinction between life and art had dissolved in his mind, as if the truth-telling injunction requiring full disclosure was in effect and he was treating her as a character in a novel. On the other hand, he knew to whom he was writing.

  Much of the rest of this letter was devoted to Proust and his fiction, which Sydney discussed with voluptuous praise. “I taste your sentences,” he emoted, “like I taste the flavor of an old Chambertin that one rolls in one’s mouth, on the tongue before swallowing it.… No one but you can express the spirit of the times, the thoughts, moods and innate emotions of the most civilized people.” Then, in comparing Proust to Henry James, he combined with the flattery a crystallization of one of his own primary concerns. “Before you,” he wrote to Proust, “Henry James enlightened us and transported us to a Jamesian plane where Jamesian spirits lived. [But] he never succeeded in making us feel human beings mattered to him, he didn’t know how to make one feel the skin and the blood and one descended from the heights disillusioned.” In contrast, he wrote of Proust: “you take us by the hand, you lead us to the place you live where we find not only splendidly generous hospitality, but meet many people we know, precisely those you had wanted us to remember and meet again, and just like that your true friends are our friends. More than that, you give us yourself whom we love and keep in our hearts like a part of ourselves.”

  Sydney not only shared with Proust a reverence for truth and a strong conviction that it was the primary if not the sole object of literature, but apparently also similar beliefs about how best to tell the truth in fiction. In A True Story, like Proust in In Search of Lost Time, he assembled a large cast of characters, some of whom were introduced, then disappeared from the narrative only to turn up again and ultimately become well known to the novel’s readers. And like Proust, who is present throughout his entire three-thousand-page work as a character and narrator named Marcel, Sydney as Richard Kurt is ubiquitous in his novel. It was also important to Sydney, like Proust, that his readers feel the flesh and blood of his characters and in this he largely succeeded.

  Moreover, like Proust’s, his novel concerns itself mainly with the inner lives of the people he considered most civilized, which reinforces the overly simplified notion that Sydney was a snob, an allegation often made about Proust. Yet when it came to their fiction both men were brutally honest about their characters, most of whom were identifiable as socially prominent real people. Proust, even more than Sydney, shredded the pretensions and moral enervation of the aristocratic class to which he was regularly accused of aspiring. And he wrote convincingly in his own defense that “a snobbish writer would never write that he would like to meet a duchess nor would he make fun of one.” These similarities, of course, do not suggest that Sydney deserves a place in the history of literature anywhere near Proust, but they contribute to an assessment that he deserves some place in the history of literature.

  At the end of his letter Sydney returned to everyday affairs, telling Proust he was taking Violet to Eastbourne in the hope that the fresh sea air would chase away what remained of her illness, and he noted in passing, without any expression of regret, that they would not stop in Paris on their way to the south of France in mid-December. But he added that in the spring they hoped to realize their long-standing desire to spend several weeks there.

  In a valetudinarian’s version of one-upsmanship Proust replied to Sydney a few days later that while Violet was sick, he was at death’s door. Then, perhaps to allay their concerns, he said he was feeling better. Toward the end of his letter, however, he reverted to his initial dolorous outlook, reporting that he was “a thousand times worse” than when they saw one another. He said he could not reply to both Sydney and Violet, which suggested he was not feeling well, but also that he had received a letter from Violet that subsequently was lost. He then proceeded to the main subject of his letter, which must have come as a pleasant surprise to Sydney. Proust wrote that some of Sydney’s letters were so good they should be published and that the last one in particular was extraordinarily evocative: “the mother-in-law, the concerts, the tree, the marvelous servants, Henry James, all that,” he elaborated, “is more remarkable than what one typically reads in books.” He also went on fulsomely about the letter on the various Gautier-Vignals, emphasizing with obvious delight Sydney’s “misanthropy” and the “tender contrast” he described between himself and Violet. Then at the end of the letter Proust acknowledged that he had come around to Sydney’s way of thinking about Louis Gautier-Vignal. Some of this could have been mere flattery, but it seems likely that to some extent Proust’s observations intimate a shared sensibility with Sydney, especially in their taste for the misanthropic. Whether he actually had changed his mind about Louis is harder to know.

  Sydney’s satisfaction with Proust’s comments was evident in his swift response. “It is above all your delightful candor we like,” he wrote, “your way of saying things as they are, not more, not less.” Another recipient of a similar letter might have been more skeptical, but the temptation to uncritically accept Proust’s praise must have been irresistible, even for a truth lover. Of course, Sydney might have been right. Proust could have meant what he said. But then again, for both Sydney and Proust flattery was a notable exception to the rule of absolute truth telling.

  Sydney, to his credit, did not dwell on the subject but rather launched into a curious discourse on snobbery. “To want to be noticed, to dissimulate, to pretend, these are the stigmata of snobbery,” he wrote. “[But] there is no snobbism where there is candor.” In other words, in life as in fiction, truth triumphs over all. He then provided a bizarre example of what he considered justifiable snobbism. The protagonist of his object lesson was his brother-in-law, the hu
sband of his half sister Louise.

  First he told Proust that Louise was “ugly, vulgar and a little (not too) nasty,” information, even if accurate, that was irrelevant. Louise’s husband was a physician who had benefited substantially from the largesse of his father. Alfred Schiff bought a provincial medical practice for his son-in-law and left the couple a generous inheritance. Soon thereafter Louise’s husband became mayor of Faversham, the town in which they lived, and, in Sydney’s words, “thanks to his decency and the relationships his money procured for him in important circles thereabouts, he obtained the title ‘Sir,’ which was the height of his ambition. So you see a man who was justified in his snobbery by the halo with which his career was crowned.”

  Then, in a glittering display of his own intellectual snobbery, Sydney wrote to Proust that “Setting aside all the rest, there are only three people in the world with whom we have any desire to have a commerce of ideas and thoughts and you are one of them. The two others, men about 35 years old, are a poet and critic, T.S. Eliot, and a writer [and] painter (perhaps the most noteworthy of our modern painters) Wyndham Lewis.” Although Sydney appeared to put Eliot and Lewis on the same intellectual plane as Proust, he made a clear distinction between the relationships. With Proust it was a blend of intellect and love. “[It] is this mix of heart and head,” he wrote to Proust in conclusion, “that we, my wife and I, have found reciprocally, that has been and will always be the insoluble cement of our life together.” This, he told Proust, was the kind of relationship they shared with him. With Eliot and Lewis, he explained, while the friendship was genuine, its substance was purely intellectual.

  It was not until eight months later, in July 1921, that the Schiffs received their next letter from Proust, in which he wrote he had sent them copies of the two latest volumes of his novel. He said he would have sent them sooner had he not been “just about moribund.” The letter was relatively brief, but unusually revealing about Proust’s attachment to Sydney and Violet. Proust wrote in a way that seems heartfelt that he wanted to know when the Schiffs would visit him again because, “as incredible as it might seem, I, who never miss anyone, constantly miss you.” Then, almost plaintively, perhaps injecting a little guilt into the equation, he added, “now that you have so many villas everywhere I have little hope of your coming to Paris.” At the time Sydney and Violet had houses in London, Roquebrune in the south of France, and at Eastbourne on the southern coast of England.