Women: An Inquiry is not a traditional feminist work. It is, as its title indicates, a series of questions, the subject of which is the difference—or differences—between men and women. Muir defined its scope as an effort to find out if dividing the human race into men and women implies a division of spiritual as well as sexual functions. She was mainly interested in whether creativity in women differed from creativity in men. She began by asserting that many reputed differences between men and women were not essential but were socially constructed. To support her contention she made the following claim:
“In a State where men are dominant, as in most of our civilized States for the past 2000 years, certain attributes are considered to be characteristic of women which are equally characteristic of men in a State where women are dominant, as it is said they were for some time in ancient Egypt.” She went on to say that in each case, “The subordinate sex … is excluded from complete development, and is considered to be less intelligent, less courageous, and more domesticated,” but both men and women “are capable of courage, fear, cruelty, tenderness, intelligence and stupidity. When exhilarated by power and responsibility they display the more dominating qualities, and in subordinate positions they manifest a ‘slave psychology.’ ”
She quickly departed from this sociological line of argument, however, and got to the heart of the matter. The fundamental difference between men and women, she argued, is that men are principally intellectual systematizers and organizers of life whereas women are intuitive creators and nurturers of life. What this leads men to do is substitute for life’s vicissitudes a behavioral model. “Religion becomes a creed, morality a code of law, government a party machine … The financial machine in our own day,” she contended, “is an excellent example of masculine activity pushed to extremes: it has been successfully detached from human values so that it exists for the production of money and not for the production of goods and services to humanity.”
From an early-twenty-first-century perspective one would have to say this is not bad for someone writing in the early twentieth. At the same time, one can’t help wondering what Muir would make of today’s women who run corporations and work in the City (London) and on Wall Street.
In the section of the essay most obviously influenced by Violet, Muir wrote that people are what most interest women. “Almost from the cradle a girl studies the people around her more attentively than a boy does, and is quicker in imitating their tricks of speech and behavior.… She is inquisitive about human relationships of every kind … she values things for their associations, or the power they give her over other people.… Their interest [in life] is not that of mere spectators … they are ready to play important parts in it; and they test at every point their influence over others.”
The essay and the letters exchanged until then suggest a deeper, richer friendship between the two women than between the two men. Sydney and Edwin Muir’s correspondence, with a couple of notable exceptions, exemplifies a relationship more intensely focused on the intellectual and practical—the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”—aspects of literature. Through the years there were occasional forays into politics, religion, and morality, but the dialogue almost always returned to books. While the two men seemed to have similar literary taste and generally liked each other’s work, they disagreed about the work of some of their contemporaries, including Wyndham Lewis. At a time when Sydney admired Lewis’s work greatly, Muir thought he had come nowhere near fulfilling his promise, which he did, however, think was considerable. Muir wrote to Sydney that he thought Lewis’s first novel, Tarr, was “as a work of art … almost completely a failure.” He went on to say that “I can hardly include Lewis in my book of criticisms.”
Sometime in mid-1925, after they had moved into the cottage the Schiffs had found for them on the outskirts of the village of Penn, Sydney arranged for the Muirs to meet Lewis for tea in London. But, as in the case of Katherine Mansfield, it did not go well. Lewis watched both Muirs suspiciously the whole time and barely spoke to Willa. She felt he resented her for being there at all and thought Edwin was a coward who had brought her along as protective cover.
Later, in a letter to Sydney, Muir returned to the subject of Lewis. “About Lewis I have never come to any satisfactory conclusions,” he wrote, “except unconsciously, where I know I dislike him … I find him interesting—there are very few evil, positively evil figures in our literature at present, and positive evil has an inspiring quality.” But he added that Lewis’s evil struck him as a limitation because he did not seem to recognize it himself and because he was so self-righteous, always thinking he was right and everyone else was wrong.
Meanwhile, Richard, Myrtle and I had become a source of friction between the Muirs, who found its meaning obscure, and Sydney, who apparently took their criticism personally. His letter complaining about their criticism is missing, but Edwin Muir’s response makes clear that it was full of resentment. Muir wrote that he was pained by Sydney’s letter, but although his affection for Sydney made it difficult, he wrote in perfect honesty, which was what he would expect from a friend criticizing his work. He softened the blow as best he could by saying he thought “the whole conception of the book more profound than that of any other written by any living writer,” then added candidly, “but, there it is, for me the presentation is not adequate to the conception.”
Letters continued after that, but less frequently. In the spring of 1927 Sydney wrote to Muir that he and Violet had decided to stay in Switzerland. They were spending their time in Caux enjoying their “bourgeois” activities and the spectacular view of Lake Geneva from the thousand-meter elevation of the village. The hotel had a dancing instructor who taught them the Charleston, which Sydney said was “the most damnably difficult dance I have ever been up against.” They were also spending time on the lakeshore in Montreux, and in Paris. There is no indication Sydney was writing during this period.
In the same letter Muir also had some things to say about Lewis and Joyce. At the time Lewis was editing another of his short-lived journals, this one called the Enemy, in which he published an essay of his own on Joyce. Muir called it “a brilliant and decisive piece of work” that “cleared up a number of things” for him about Ulysses. He said Lewis’s article showed him that much of the book was “atrociously written … and that it is packed with sentimentality.” But, he added, “I think that Lewis is altogether wrong about Bloom, who I still think is the greatest character in contemporary fiction. Lewis takes him as a Jew, but I never think of Bloom particularly as a Jew, but as a human being, like Shylock, who is much more human than Jewish.”
After this 1927 letter from Muir the correspondence between the couples tapered off, and although the relationship was not obviously strained they probably saw little or nothing of each other. Most likely this was because of the Muirs’ peripatetic existence. After a stretch in Italy and Austria they settled in England, but this was while the Schiffs were still living in Caux, and then, in this order, Edwin and Willa moved to France, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, and Italy.
It seems that this on-again, off-again kind of relationship was not unusual for the Schiffs and their footloose friends. From the letters between Sydney and Aldous Huxley, for example, it would be easy to assume—correctly or otherwise—a degree of intimacy that the actual time they spent together would not justify. The Schiffs and Huxleys probably met sometime in 1920 and saw each other socially even though the Huxleys were Bloomsbury hangers-on and Garsington habitués. They often spent weekends at Ottoline Morrell’s country estate, where it appears the Bayswater Schiffs were never invited.
Edith Sitwell, with whom the Schiffs were also quite friendly and who was consistently enthusiastic about Sydney’s writing, described Huxley in her autobiography in words that are hard to improve on: “Aldous Huxley was extremely tall, had full lips and a rather ripe, full, but not at all loud voice. His hair was of the brown, living color of the earth on garden beds. As
a young man, though he was always friendly, his silences seemed to stretch for miles, extinguishing life, when they occurred, as a snuffer extinguishes a candle. On the other hand, he was (when uninterrupted) one of the most accomplished talkers I have ever known, and his monologues on every conceivable subject were astonishingly floriated variations of an amazing brilliance, and, occasionally, of a most deliberate absurdity.” In an age renowned for its brilliant talkers and replete with connoisseurs of absurdity, this had to be the Everest of encomium.
On May 1, 1925, Huxley wrote to Sydney from Florence to thank him for generously praising his novel Those Barren Leaves, in which, as he had done in Crome Yellow, he eviscerated his Garsington hostess and her guests. Sydney apparently also passed on “praise” for the book from Stella Benson, a writer living in China with whom he had been corresponding. He had sent her Those Barren Leaves along with four volumes of Proust in French. Huxley, who knew of but hadn’t met Benson, called her words “charming.” But what he didn’t know, because Sydney hadn’t told him, was that she detested his novel. She trashed it for pages, calling it unworthy, savage to women, wicked, and dishonest before weakening and tacking on, rather unpersuasively, “The book is witty and brilliant and perhaps it is leaden-minded of me to feel so much shaken up by it.” It’s more than likely that all Sydney quoted to Huxley were the first six words in Benson’s final sentence, which would demonstrate still again that despite his sworn attachment to truth, like most if not all of his illustrious literary contemporaries, at times Sydney approached veracity with flexibility.
Huxley invited the Schiffs to visit in Florence, which he diffidently belittled as provincial, but added that “the sun atones for much,” inexplicably ignoring the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, the Accademia, the Medici Chapel, and the Bargello. He said he would knock on the Schiffs’ door when he arrived in London in July. His next letter to them, in November from Lahore, described his travels with his wife, Maria, in Kashmir and northern India.
“This place is rather a disappointment,” he wrote, with the condescension typical of his nationality, class, and time. “One has seen the same thing before in Europe. It is Switzerland and the Italian lakes on a larger and coarser scale.… The palaces and gardens of the Moguls are very inferior to anything of the kind in Europe.… Kashmir is a small and very corrupt despotism; there are courtiers and intriguers; plots and counterminings; Judas-like betrayals, monstrous prostitutions and panderings.” He found similarly descriptive language for relations between the English and their “educated” Indian subjects, especially when a mixed marriage was involved. “The cruelties,” he wrote, “the humiliations, the pompous make-believes, the snobberies … Proust should have lived here for a few years.” But he did allow with refreshing objectivity that in these relationships the English were as bad as “their darker brothers.” He summed up the entire scene as “an Arabian Nights entertainment.” And finally, with an odd mix of concern and detachment, he wrote: “I look on with a horrified amusement at this farce which is always potentially a tragedy and which is obviously destined to work up, within a few years, to some unheard-of and appalling denouement. One day, I think you ought to persuade your wife to come and have a look at it all. It would amuse you both.”
The Schiffs and Huxleys stayed in touch and grew closer. The salutation, which was “Dear Schiff” in 1925, had become “My dear Sydney” by 1930. Also, by then Huxley referred to Violet by her given name, not as “your wife.” However, he never signed his letters anything other than “Yours” or “Ever yours.” When Huxley wrote on March 28, 1930, it was to tell the Schiffs that he had been in the south of France with D. H. Lawrence, whom he knew well from Garsington, during the week he died—“a very painful thing to see an indomitable spirit finally broken and put out.” Huxley also apologized to the Schiffs for having been in London for three weeks without trying to contact them. And the last but not the least important thing Huxley told the Schiffs was that he and Maria had bought “a little house in the Midi” two hundred yards from the sea “with a very nicely planted vineyard and fruit garden” and that they would be welcome guests, especially around Easter.
Huxley had visited the Schiffs at 37 Porchester Terrace in London, a house they bought after deciding against living in Switzerland, in early May of 1930, and on May 6 he wrote from the Athenaeum Club to thank Sydney for returning his waistcoat, which he had left at their house the night before. He also thanked him for a copy of Kafka’s The Castle, most likely the edition translated by the Muirs, and enclosed the first three acts of a play he was writing called The World of Light. He apologized for staying late, which, he said, “was in a sense your fault for not having allowed me to be for a moment bored and so preventing me from realizing the passage of time.” He concluded with regrets that they had not talked about A True Story, which had just been published in a single volume comprising Prince Hempseed, Richard Kurt, Elinor Colhouse, and a section of Myrtle. Huxley said he had already read it “with great pleasure and admiration of the very subtle way [Sydney] had made the consciousness of the hero expand through the first half of the book, as he grows up—so that everything grows up including the style, the words, the thoughts.” Huxley found Virginia “a fascinating character” and his one regret was that Sydney’s method, “which entails only looking thro’ Kurt’s eyes, shouldn’t have allowed [him] to get inside her skin and give her vision of the curious events. But as a piece of observed, strictly ‘behaviorist’ psychology, her character is masterly.”
Sydney and Violet studied Huxley’s play and sent him suggestions, which he apparently followed. “I have re-modeled the end of my play,” he wrote in mid-June, “omitting the scene on the island altogether—for you and Violet were quite right: it was complete as it stood, complete, but improvable.” He said he had also read the two books in German the Schiffs had sent him, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Kafka’s The Castle. He thought Steppenwolf was “good, but not so very good.” The Castle, on the other hand, was “a different story: it’s so exceedingly queer and incalculable in its realistically nightmare-like way that it’s quite unlike anything. One would have to have a very special sort of mind to write it; it’s something new, something one couldn’t do oneself.” He admitted to uncertainty about the allegorical meaning of the book, but found it “strangely significant” nevertheless. He also said that he’d been absorbed mostly in historical and philosophical works, but for a diversion—“and a most hair-raising diversion”—he had been reading Michelet’s L’Amour. “It’s one of the most extraordinary and appalling works I ever set eyes on,” he said, urging both Schiffs to read it. “You feel that the whole of its four hundred pages were written in a continuous state of erection—erection, moreover, provoked by the most extraordinary stimuli, such as tender broodings on the anatomy of the matrix, or the menstrual flow.”
Huxley wrote again in December asking Sydney how long he and Violet intended to stay in their chalet, which suggests that they were in Switzerland again, although not at the Grand Hotel, and noting that except for painting, the work on the Huxleys’ cottage in the south of France was finished. He said the place was lovely and he hoped the Schiffs would visit them. Sydney must have answered Huxley’s letter almost immediately. In responding, on January 5, 1931, Huxley wrote, “I reply at once at [sic] your letter with its Proustian enigma.” Sydney was working on his translation of Proust’s final volume, Time Regained, and asked Huxley’s help in resolving a knotty linguistic problem involving whales, protozoa, the perfection of animal and physical life, and the organization of spiritual life. In a translator’s note he acknowledged Huxley’s help and attributed the difficulty to a misreading of Proust’s manuscript or a printer’s error.
Huxley wrote again on May 7. He said he was writing a novel about the future “and the absolute horror of it” and described the project as “amusing, but difficult” because he wanted “to make a comprehensible picture of a psychology based on quite different first principles from ours.”
The book, of course, was Brave New World, the best known and most popular of Huxley’s novels. He also told Sydney he had seen a London production of The World of Light, which he liked, and he said most of the critics liked it too, “at least all those who matter intellectually, tho’ not those who matter box-officially: for the public remains conspicuous by its absence.” Finally he asked Sydney how he was getting on with his translation of Time Regained.
Sydney, who was nearly done, sent Huxley a copy at the end of June. When he wrote back, Huxley said he had read enough to know he liked the translation, adding that it “seems to me to walk along Proust’s devious tight rope of stretched words with all the grace and nimbleness that can be put into that all but impossible proceeding.” But not everyone agreed with Huxley about the quality of the translation. By 1934 Andreas Mayor’s version had replaced it in most English-language editions. Huxley then told the Schiffs he was struggling with revisions of early chapters of Brave New World while long sections remained to be written. He said he hoped Sydney’s shingles were better and asked him if he had tried Delbiase, a French remedy composed of magnesium chloride and bromide that was relatively new at the time. Its inventor, Pierre Delbet, believed it would increase the ability of white blood cells to protect against infection. Huxley for some reason was under the impression it would work wonders with “anything wrong with the skin.” It is still available today as a dietary supplement, but there is no evidence it prevents infection or does anything for the skin. Coincidentally, one of the first sites that pops up on Google when you enter “Delbiase” is a pharmacy almost directly across the street from where the Huxleys lived in Suresnes before moving to their cottage in La Gorguette. Anyone interested can order it from them.
Sydney and Violet Page 20