Sydney and Violet

by Stephen Klaidman

  At this point there was either another hiatus in the correspondence or, as appears likely from Proust’s next letter to the Schiffs, more missing letters. In a letter dated October 12, 1921, Proust wrote to express again his longing to see Sydney and Violet. “You and Madame Schiff,” he said, “are the only two human beings I feel the desire to see every day.” The letter also implied that once again Sydney and Violet had invited him to stay with them in England. He responded that such a visit was extremely unlikely, but that if it were to become possible he would rent an apartment and they could visit him. “But even that,” he quickly added, “is undoable.” He said he had suffered attacks of uremia and had been bedridden for four months, but on his doctor’s advice he had begun going out once a week, usually to dine at the Ritz.

  He lamented to Sydney, though, that even at the Ritz conditions were difficult—the dining room was full of people he knew who, seeing he was out, assumed he was better and invited him to dinner at their homes, a prospect he could not face. There were also breezes from the open windows he found unbearable. He said he had rented private rooms for dinner, but that it was very expensive. He also said, perhaps tongue in cheek, that he wanted to avoid being warned by the management that he would “be obliged to leave before the end of dinner if an American arrives on the boat.” All of this complaining was to get Sydney to write on his behalf to Henry Elles, the codirector of the Ritz, who he thought was ignorant of his eminence and therefore not sufficiently attentive to his needs. Sydney, who knew Elles slightly, wrote a letter to him and enclosed it in his next letter to Proust. But he wrote it in English, so Proust sent it on without reading it. Whatever the letter said, and whatever Elles made of it, Proust continued going to the Ritz, and Odilon continued making midnight beer runs to the hotel almost until the day Proust died.

  Proust wrote to Sydney again on October 21, addressing him for the first time as simply “Cher ami.” But once again the content of his letter made clear that at least one more of Sydney’s letters was missing. “Your letters,” he enthused, “are as full of portraits as a museum and as full of people as a town. I don’t understand why you don’t take advantage of these astonishing gifts to write books.” Evidently, after almost two years and many letters, Proust was still laboring under his original misconception that it was Violet who wrote books, that she was Stephen Hudson. He followed up with a laundry list of the hardships he overcame daily just to be able to write and exhorted Sydney, who he obviously thought had far less to overcome, to show “a little courage [and] work!” Then, in an abrupt change of tone, Proust lashed out at Sydney, apparently in response to a recent letter, for not understanding the difficulties he had to overcome just to continue living, let alone writing. He implied that Sydney expected too much from him and wrote explicitly that the Schiffs didn’t realize what a sacrifice it had been just to meet them at the Ritz sixteen months earlier.

  But then Proust, who was often mercurial in his letters, shifted gears again and thanked Sydney, whose letter, he said, forced him to confront a reality he didn’t want to face and that in the end he didn’t regret because “the truth is always salutary.” Before switching subjects, he asked Sydney and Violet to be sure not to tell anyone about his complaints because, he alleged, he never talked about himself. He went on to say he told people that “the only reason I never see anyone is my work” and that it would bother him if anyone thought otherwise. A commitment to truth telling, it seems, sometimes allows for an exception other than flattery.

  In early November Proust wrote again, this time very briefly, to let Sydney and Violet know he had sent them a copy of a journal containing a fragment of the second volume of Sodom and Gomorrah, more commonly known in English as Cities of the Plain, a book which when finished he would dedicate to Sydney. And, in a phrase that suggested he had received another letter from Sydney, he wrote, “You and Madame Schiff impregnate even the simplest things with flavor and render them delicious. A banality from you seems impossible to me.”

  The next surviving letter from Sydney to Proust was dated Christmas Day, 1921. Hyperbole being of a piece with his conception of honesty, I think what he wrote was what he felt despite the excess. There is no reason to believe he ever attempted to hide who he was.

  “Whether it is banal or not,” his letter began, “I cannot let the New Year approach without telling you a little of what is in my heart and my mind for you. First I want to tell you that you are more than ever in our thoughts. Understand that our lives are lived in an atmosphere penetrated by you that is essentially yours. We are not ourselves when circumstances force us to leave you and our return to you is our return to ourselves. Therefore there is no question of a welcome. You are always alongside us, feeling what we feel, talking, listening, above all, laughing with us.”

  Sydney maintained that he and Violet knew Proust better than he knew them because as one of the world’s great artists he had shared his soul with the world. Then, perhaps in response to Proust’s mistake about Stephen Hudson’s identity, he begged Proust to recognize him as a writer, by no means on a plane with himself, but as a writer nonetheless. He had recently sent him a copy of Elinor Colhouse, hoping Proust would help get it published in French and he assured Proust that if he read the book he would not think less of him. Then, switching from the serious to the frivolous, Sydney ended his letter with a preview of the Christmas dinner he and Violet were about to attend at the home of the poet Osbert Sitwell.

  “His sister Edith and his brother Sacheverell are also poets,” Sydney wrote, adding pointedly that “ ‘Sachy’ has a future.” He described Osbert as a young patrician who was charming, fickle, and homosexual, and who belonged to an extreme left-wing set, “a way of thinking we’ve discerned among the elite and share to a small degree.” He said it was all very amusing and went on to list the rest of the guests, including his sister-in-law, Ada Leverson (whom he described as a “novelist of the ’90’s and a friend of Oscar Wilde”), Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria Nys (“a not particularly intelligent Belgian”), and Michel de Zogheb, whom Sydney described as “a man of Italian-Syrian-Danish descent” who was charming and his friend. He said Violet had arranged the table so that the two of them wouldn’t be far apart and to provoke a touch of wickedly humorous friction between Lewis and Osbert Sitwell, who didn’t much like each other. Sydney then signed off, telling Proust he had to stop writing because it was time to dress for dinner. To surprise Osbert, “who loves fancy dress,” he said he was going to wear a scarlet hunting coat.

  CHAPTER 8

  A FRIENDSHIP IN LETTERS II

  On April 7, 1922, in the hope that they might see Proust, the Schiffs traveled to Paris for an open-ended stay. Before trying to arrange a meeting with him, though, they paid a visit to Picasso. Sydney and Violet wrote separate letters to Wyndham Lewis about the visit, but Lewis responded only to Violet, with whom he kept up a regular correspondence during the Schiffs’ Paris sojourn. He was, unsurprisingly, more interested in what he was or in some cases was not doing than in what they were doing. Among other things he bragged that Joyce thought he was the only prose writer in England worthy of notice.

  The day the Schiffs arrived Proust, who knew they were coming, wrote a letter seeking a favor from Jacques Rivière, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, whose owners had started the publishing house Gallimard a decade earlier. Some time before, Proust had sent Rivière a copy of Elinor Colhouse. Rivière had not responded to Proust, who by then knew that Sydney was the writer, not Violet. He wanted Rivière to write immediately to Sydney about the book and forward the letter to him the same day so that he could pass it on.

  Aware that he was asking a lot, Proust took no chances. Instead of leaving the contents of the letter to Rivière, he included what he modestly called a “little aide-memoire,” but which in fact was the full text of the proposed letter. After making a few excuses, including illness and business travel, he had Rivière say he had sent Sydney’s novel to a specia
list in English literature to be translated into French and that when he finished reading the translation he would decide whether, in accord with Proust’s wishes, he would be able to publish it in the Nouvelle Revue Française.

  One might have thought that would have been quite enough, but Proust, acting in this instance a bit like Sydney, added a carefully couched request that Rivière consider a postscript saying that he knew Sydney was a friend of the Nouvelle Revue Française and inviting him cordially to visit the magazine’s office. Proust also made sure to include a line in which Rivière made clear he was aware of Proust’s considerable admiration for Sydney. And finally, Proust apologized for providing a ready-made text and for asking Rivière to respond instantly.

  That night Proust, who was running a high fever, answered a letter from Sydney confirming that he and Violet had arrived in Paris. He agreed to meet them for dinner, but moaned, “You are about to see the total tragedy … of my situation.” He immediately began injecting himself with adrenaline to have the energy to go out and reserved a room at the Ritz with the intent of spending the entire evening there and only going home to sleep. The Friday they were supposed to meet he arrived and asked a bellhop to find out for him what room Mr. and Mrs. Schiff were in. The boy left and didn’t return for half an hour. When he finally reappeared he told Proust that Mr. Schiff was there, but without his wife. Proust, somewhat dismayed, sent him to check with the concierge, but another bellhop was filling in for the concierge and knew nothing. Proust was getting really worried at this point and exasperated about the service at the hotel. When the boy came back he told the by then anxiety-ridden Proust that “Mr. Schiff was definitely there, Mr. Mortimer Schiff.” Sydney and Violet, it turns out, were at the Hotel Foyot near the Luxembourg Gardens, not at the Ritz. They either neglected to inform Proust or in his weakened state he failed to notice where they were staying and just assumed it was the Ritz.

  Proust went home as soon as he discovered that the Schiff at the Ritz was not his Schiff. And when he wrote to tell Sydney about the foul-up he offered a detailed and mildly confusing explanation of the misunderstanding including the fact that he couldn’t refer to their letter because his concierge’s daughter, who handled the mail, had measles and whooping cough, as a result of which his mail was being sterilized and it was too soon to touch it. He then said he needed a minimum of eight days’ rest before he could possibly go out again and asked Sydney for a time they might meet. Whatever times Sydney suggested, one of them worked. Proust’s next letter, dated April 22, referred to their having been together. It was probably at the Ritz and late at night, but no account remains of the dinner.

  Proust then told Sydney that he had taken advantage of his visit to Paris to try to get some action out of Rivière on Elinor Colhouse and that if it were not for his health he would come across to London often for twenty-four-hour visits.

  Meanwhile, Rivière had sent Proust the letter to Sydney he had requested and followed up the next day with a report on the progress of the translator, a man named Charles Du Bos, who on first reading was unenthusiastic about Elinor Colhouse. But when he learned of Proust’s interest he asked for an extension of three days to read the book again, which Rivière granted, and he said that if the Nouvelle Revue was unable to publish it he would try to find a French-language journal that would. Then, while Rivière was in the midst of writing to Proust, Du Bos phoned to say that he had finished rereading Elinor Colhouse but could not render a final judgment until he had read Richard Kurt. Rivière asked Proust if he had a copy Du Bos could borrow because Du Bos did not want to approach Stephen Hudson directly for fear that it might compromise him in his role as an independent reviewer. He also renewed his offer to see if it was possible to find the book another publisher in the event the Nouvelle Revue Française decided against it. Rivière then added parenthetically, and somewhat ironically, that he had given “quasi-exclusivity” for reports on English-language books to an Englishman, T. S. Eliot, “who seems rather difficult to influence.”

  In his letter of April 22, after referring to his recent meeting with Sydney and Violet, it is clear that Proust was again responding to something Sydney wrote in a letter that has been lost. “You were right,” he told Sydney, that “we speak much too much of serious matters; serious conversations are made for people who have no inner life. Those who have an inner life, like the three of us, when they get outside of themselves and leave their hard interior labor behind, need some frivolity. We must as you said talk about all the little things in life and leave philosophy for our solitude.” Proust also told Sydney he found it offensive that he thought Proust’s opinion of him could be affected by the opinion of the Nouvelle Revue Française, whose staff he characterized as mediocre although allowing for one or two superior minds. Finally, he said, “If by chance you go to the Ritz before you leave, please let me know.”

  Sydney answered four days later from the Villa Majestic, where he and Violet were then staying. The letter was one of a series over the next three weeks in which he swung wildly from fawning over Proust to whining over trivia. Even though Sydney took the fawning to a new level, Proust, who had similar tendencies but a lighter touch, was reservedly receptive.

  After extravagantly praising Proust’s writing paper and asking where he might buy some, Sydney transcended the banality of stationery to deliver an encomium to the two loves of his life. “Violet and you represent my world,” he wrote, “because you alone give me what I want, what I ask from life.” Then, in a schizophrenic mood swing, he descended again, this time into a discursive complaint beginning with how tiring it was to get dressed for the day even though the pain was palliated by the tender attention of his servant, Ali, “who,” he said, “little by little is becoming very helpful.” But of course there were those annoying problems having to do with getting breakfast, the car, etc., after which came the travails of the restaurant Larue, which was “passable for breakfast, but foul in the evening.” Then Sydney told Proust that the Ritz was acceptable, that they would meet him there anytime and, he implied, it wouldn’t be an inconvenience because they went out for dinner anyway. But then, and it could only have been out of pig-headedness, he invited him to dine in their apartment, knowing that Proust only liked the Ritz and that the food was mediocre at the Villa Majestic.

  And then, for no apparent reason, he served up a snide put-down of his sister Rose, whom he called “a big snob” who was never admitted to the set she sought to join, probably because she went out of her way to be disagreeable to everyone in it. Superficially, he wrote, “she seems to be intelligent because she is so emphatic,” but actually “she is not reflective and never listens.” He continued to disparage his sister with an account of their evening together at Larue, where they met some people Sydney knew, including a socially prominent woman named Mrs. Cohen. He wrote that Rose tried to get him to snub Mrs. Cohen, whom he had known all his life, because she was afraid it would look like she was running after her. The account continued with names dropped, references to wealth, and hints of Jewish backgrounds or connections. It’s hard to tell whether Sydney was knowingly feeding Proust’s gargantuan appetite for this sort of information or just being Sydney. Finally, he complained that they charged him champagne prices for beer and that his reserved table had been given away, which resulted in their party being served in a private room. This last bit of good news salved Sydney’s wounds, but he just didn’t have it in him to end on that note.

  He couldn’t resist getting in another dig at Louis Gautier-Vignal and, at the same time, his sister Edith. He had asked Edith if her stepson could recommend a young friend to act as a guide for him and Violet in Paris. She said she would ask but then reported to Sydney that Louis had told her he had “no such friend.” Sydney allowed that this could have been true, but he was offended by what he took to be his sister’s apparent pleasure in telling him so. “She was happy,” he whined to Proust, “that I would have no one to help me and provide me with information.” And t
o make matters worse, when Sydney complained to his sister that he was suffering a great deal because of his nerves, she blithely told him to take up golf and go dancing. He never did take up golf, but in later years he and Violet did go dancing.

  Proust wrote again very briefly on April 29, enclosing a sheet of the paper he thought Sydney liked and requesting John Middleton Murry’s address, which he asked to have left with the concierge, suggesting that he did not want Sydney or anyone else to disturb him. Sydney answered Proust the same afternoon. After noting that they had decided to remain in Paris until May 7 and that Violet was not feeling well and staying in bed, Sydney sought Proust’s sympathy by saying that he had had lunch alone and would have dinner alone. He added that Violet was consoling herself by reading Proust’s novel, but he, who was suffering only as much as he always suffered, had nothing with which to console himself. And then, in a fairly obvious attempt to lure Proust into joining him for dinner, he concluded wanly: “Think of me alone at the Ritz this evening as I will be thinking of you.”