Sydney and Violet

by Stephen Klaidman

  The letters exchanged during the thirties were warm and similar in content and tone to those written earlier. One interesting if minor item that emerges from one written in 1932 is that despite their falling-out Sydney was still reading Wyndham Lewis, apparently with pleasure. He sent Huxley a copy of Snooty Baronet, which Huxley referred to in a 1933 letter from Kingston, Jamaica. Like his letter from Lahore, it is richly redolent of the mood there, but also the condescension the modernists so eloquently expressed toward those they considered their inferiors:

  Our voyage was pleasant; for we called at curious and amusing places—Barbados, Trinidad (a lovely island and we met some really charming people); La Guayra, the port for Caracas, capital of Venezuela—most picturesque and exceedingly odd in its Spanishness: Panama, where the mixture of races is even more extraordinary than in the rest of the West Indies—for on top of the usual negroes, Hindus and Chinese, there are many Japs, local Indians (Red Men), Arabs, and representatives of all the white races—the whole quietly simmering in the tropical heat: queer and profoundly depressing (as indeed most of these hot countries are au fond—such a sense of hopelessness).

  The last letter from Huxley to Sydney and possibly the last contact between the Huxleys and the Schiffs was dated March 17, 1937; it was only two brief paragraphs long, but its sense and sensibility are of a piece with all of the others. There is no hint there had been a four-year break in the correspondence, nor that this very likely was the last letter that ever passed between them. Huxley was in London and wrote to thank Sydney for sending him an inscribed copy of his novel The Other Side, which had just been published. He said he read it with “a great deal of pleasure” and said he was “specially delighted with the extraordinary freshness and youthfulness you manage to express.” To have “captured and held throughout a whole book the spirit of adolescence is a most remarkable achievement.” The last paragraph, which is just five lines long, includes hopes the Schiffs are well, a report on the extraction of Lewis’s impacted wisdom teeth in Paris, a few words about their impending trip to America, a wish that they might meet before they leave for the States, and, in a break with past practice, “Our love to you both.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE APES OF GOD AND MODERNIST SATIRE

  Wyndham Lewis, a man with a capacious intellect, had a diminutive idea that he transmogrified into a monstrous, ramshackle literary blunderbuss. He called it The Apes of God. It was published in 1930 and was almost immediately forgotten because most of it is hopelessly obscure unless you are intimately familiar with the lives of the real people who were its hapless targets. It was also forgotten because it is pretentious in its display of frequently irrelevant erudition that would distract from the narrative if there were one. And it was forgotten because its argument, much but not all of which is banal, is too often encrusted in deliberately baroque language spoken by puppets, not people. Lewis’s prose envelops you like quicksand; you feel you will suffocate if you don’t extract yourself from it. And for good measure it is plotless, packed with prejudices, gratuitously mean-spirited, practically humorless, and 623 pages long. At bottom The Apes of God was a self-serving vehicle for Lewis to express his towering rage driven by envy and resentment toward putative friends, especially those who were better off than he was, more especially if they had artistic aspirations and most especially if they also had fed, clothed, and housed him.

  On the other hand, the great William Butler Yeats seemed to think the book, which was so radical that to this day there is nothing comparable to it, was a worthy successor to the works of Swift. What’s more, Lewis, whose forte was not consistency, never deviated in this work from his passionately held and explicitly stated belief that “True satire must be vicious.” And, as one might suspect, it was an almost bottomless source of scintillating gossip among the precious elite for whom it was intended.

  So why bother with any of this here? The easy answer is that second only to the Sitwells, Sydney and Violet were the most obviously and viciously attacked. As we know, Lewis was not always antagonistic to the Schiffs. They were what passed for friends and for a time he actually seemed to like them, enjoy their company, and even respect—or at least not be contemptuous of—their intellects. He praised Prince Hempseed when it first appeared and published a fragment from it in his journal the Tyro (which Sydney supported financially). But their quarrel over money, which ultimately led to the disintegration of their relationship, most likely motivated his strikingly disproportionate if not totally unwarranted assault. On the other hand, Lewis was not a man who would let friendship keep him from shooting a pair of sitting ducks. He couldn’t help cutting the Schiffs down and carving them up. It satisfied his insatiable need to feed the rage and insecurity at the core of his arrogance and bluster. They were wealthy, had literary aspirations, and were Lewis’s financial benefactors, which made them delectably fat targets. They were in Lewis’s mind the essence of “Apedom.”

  The Apes of God is the most notorious—or, for the Lewis scholars, the most glorious—work in the tradition of modernist satire. It was certainly the most ambitious and the cruelest, which, considering the highly competitive environment in which it was composed, was a considerable achievement. Moreover, its large cast of characters features a pantheon of modernists, not all of whom were “apes.” These include James Joyce, who was conflated with the Jewish poet, editor, and publisher John Rodker to create James Julius Ratner; a young Stephen Spender as Dan Boleyn, a species of idiot who was passed off as a genius; Edwin Muir as Keith, a fawning critic; and T. S. Eliot in a cameo role as Mr. Horty.

  In most ways The Apes of God was a thing unto itself, but in one respect it was typical. The satirical novel was the weapon of choice for settling scores among the modernists. Unsurprisingly, sometimes the victims took revenge on their tormentors. Edith Sitwell responded to Apes with I Live Under a Black Sun, in which Lewis appears as the villainous sculptor Henry Debingham who lives in a studio “situated in a piece of waste ground haunted by pallid hens.” He was capable, Sitwell wrote, of transforming instantly from “the simple-minded artist sunk in an abstruse meditation” into “a rather sinister, piratic, formidable dago.” And he practiced his art, she added, “in those moments which he could spare from thinking about himself, and from making plans to confute his enemies.” It is clearly printed in the front of her book that all of the characters are fictitious, but Lewis is as easily identifiable as are the Schiffs and Sitwells in The Apes of God.

  Lewis denied that he had modeled his characters on real people. But just like Aldous Huxley, who caricatured Lewis as well as many of his Bloomsbury/Garsington friends, D. H. Lawrence, Sitwell, and many others, he lied. His long chapter in The Apes of God titled “Chez Lionel Kein, Esq.” is transparently about the Schiffs. No one in London literary circles at the time would have had the slightest trouble identifying Lionel and Elizabeth Kein as Sydney and Violet. Their double portrait, like all satire, was exaggerated and unflattering, like much satire it was unfair, and like some satire it was needlessly cruel. But it also necessarily contained a few easily identifiable truths and half-truths. Sydney and Violet’s relationship with Proust, for example, characterized by Lewis in the exaggerated form appropriate to satire, really was uncritical, more like worship than admiration.

  To put Lewis’s assault on the Schiffs in context, it helps to consider the gentler satirical tradition from which he, more than any of his contemporaries, radically departed, a tradition that includes the novels of Violet’s sister Ada Leverson. Ada, who, like Sydney and Violet, was ridiculed in The Apes of God, was thirteen years older than Violet. She was more Victorian in her tastes and temperament than her younger sister, which clearly influenced her articles, theater reviews, and, most notably, a series of six lighthearted and mildly satirical novels that are no better remembered than Stephen Hudson’s or Wyndham Lewis’s. For those few who do remember Ada, it is most likely for an act of courage and kindness she and her husband performed in May of 1895. />
  Like Sydney and Violet, Ada cultivated relationships with famous writers and artists including the Sitwells, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, and George Moore. Her most notable friendship, however, was with Oscar Wilde, who called her “the Sphinx,” apparently because she had written a flattering sketch in Punch about his poem “The Sphinx,” titling it “The Minx.” After reading it Wilde wrote her a note saying, “I am afraid she really was a minx after all. You are the only Sphinx,” which was how he referred to her ever after. It was not until three years later, though, when Ada and her husband Ernest supported Wilde in his time of greatest need—a time when virtually all of England viewed him as a pariah—that their friendship was forged forever.

  Just four days after Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened triumphantly in London, a seemingly trivial event occurred that marked the beginning of an abrupt descent in his fortunes. John Sholto Douglas, the eighth Marquess of Queensberry, whose son, Lord Alfred Douglas, was intimately involved with Wilde, left his card with the doorman of the Albemarle Club bearing this murky, spelling-challenged message: “To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite.” Wilde, presumably to his ever-lasting regret, was sufficiently offended by Queensberry’s note to make the biggest mistake of his life. He sued the rich and powerful marquess for libel. He denied to his lawyer that there was any substance to Queensberry’s allegation, which was a lie, and then he lied again, this time under oath, when asked the same question in court.

  It soon became clear that Wilde’s case was doomed, and his lawyer convinced him to withdraw the suit, but it was too late. The marquess’s lawyer had already sent the public prosecutor copies of statements by several witnesses who were prepared to testify that they had had sexual encounters with Wilde. That same afternoon, under a recently enacted law that had been interpreted to mean homosexuality was a criminal offense, a warrant was issued for Wilde’s arrest. His friends Robbie Ross and Reggie Turner urged him to catch the last boat train to France, but instead he sat in a bar at the Cadogan Hotel too traumatized to act, drinking hock and seltzer until he was arrested. He was denied bail and held in Holloway Prison until his criminal trial began on April 26.

  Wilde was confronted on the first day with one young male witness after another who testified that they had had sexual contact with him. When he finally took the stand after listening to four days of their testimony he quietly denied that he was guilty of any indecent behavior. And when the prosecutor asked him, “What is ‘the love that dare not speak its name’?” a line from a poem by Douglas, Wilde responded confidently and eloquently:

  The love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as ‘The love that dare not speak its name,’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has an intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

  What effect these words had on the jury is unknown, but they acquitted Wilde on one count and were unable to reach verdicts on the others. A new trial was scheduled for three weeks later and this time Wilde was released on bail. He spent those three weeks with Ada and her husband, Ernest, who took him in when he was unwelcome elsewhere. Ernest also advanced him five hundred pounds to pay his lawyers.

  All of the hotels and clubs in London and even his friends refused to take in Wilde between the trials. He had the option of staying with his family but chose to stay with Ada and Ernest. Before he came to their house the Leversons called the servants together, told them Wilde was coming, and offered them a month’s wages if they wanted to leave. The affair was now a major scandal and the papers were full of it. According to Leverson, “America, Germany, all the Continent joined in the controversy, the [Europeans] saying, ‘This is how you behave to your poets,’ while the Americans said, ‘This is how your poets behave.’ ” The servants all stayed, but the Leversons sent their coachman away because they were worried he might talk in the pubs.

  Ada went to pick up Wilde in a carriage and installed him in an apartment on the nursery floor of their house. She asked him if he would like her to take away the toys, but he asked her to please leave them. As a result, his conversations with his lawyer about the upcoming second trial were held “in the presence of a rocking-horse, golliwogs [and] a blue and white nursery dado with rabbits and other animals on it.” A considerable effort was made to keep Wilde’s whereabouts secret, although his hairdresser visited him daily to shave him and wave his hair. Ada said his “ambition was always to look like a Roman bust.” He never left the nursery floor during the day but came down each night, dressed for dinner with a flower in his buttonhole—probably a green carnation. He ate with the Leversons, then stayed on a bit to talk and chainsmoke in the drawing room. However, in an exquisite display of delicacy, he never mentioned his troubles. Otherwise his conversation ranged widely, including a disquisition one evening on the effects of absinthe. “After the first glass,” he said, “you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”

  Wilde’s wife, Constance, came to visit him with a message from her lawyer urging him to leave the country immediately because the next trial would surely land him in prison. But again, he would not go. His mother had told him that to leave would be dishonorable, and, according to Ada, “he never expected anything in his life to turn out badly.” On the morning the second trial was due to begin Wilde stopped on his way out of the house and asked Ada to please write to him if things ended badly. Then he left for the Old Bailey in a brougham the Leversons had hired for him. Later that day Ada received a telegram telling her that he had been convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. While he was in prison Wilde’s mother and brother died, and less than a year after he was released Constance died. She had changed her name and the children’s to Holland and forced Wilde to give up his parental rights.

  The day of his release the Leversons rose early to meet Wilde at the Bloomsbury house of the Reverend Stuart Headlam. Ada was dressed all in black and wore a floppy wide-brimmed hat. Wilde, with a flower in his buttonhole and smoking a cigarette, said to Ada with his usual aplomb, “Sphinx, how marvelous of you to know exactly the right hat to wear at seven o-clock in the morning to meet a friend who has been away.” She continued to dress that way for the rest of her life. Wilde spent the remaining three years of his life abroad. Ada visited him only once, in Paris. He died on November 30, 1900, and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery under a monumental sculpture by Jacob Epstein paid for by Wilde’s friends and admirers and put in place ten years after his death.

  Ada did not begin her cycle of six novels until several years after Wilde died. The first one, The Twelfth Hour, was published in 1907 and the last, Love at Second Sight, in 1916. The satire in all six is nontoxic, mostly of types rather than individuals, and relies on paradox for most of its humor, such as it is. On the first page of The Twelfth Hour, for example, a sixteen-year-old boy knocks on his sister’s door: “ ‘I say, Felicity, can I come in?’ he asks. ‘Who’s there? Don’t come in,’ she says. Upon which invitation he entered the room with a firm step.” If you think this eventually becomes tiresome, you are right.

  Nevertheless, Leverson’s books are not witho
ut their rewards. She was especially good at both physical description and sketching relationships. The novels are all quite similar and some are sequels. Their territory is the confluence of the haute bourgeoisie and the bottom tier of the aristocracy, beer barons and baronets. New money mixes with old money, a cultural icon or two is displayed, and there are affairs, lots of affairs, all of which are treated lightly. Occasionally a character reminiscent of a real person turns up, for example, Sir Tito Landi, the Italian composer in Love at Second Sight, who always speaks in French, just like Sir Paolo Tosti. These books have more in common with Jane Austen and Trollope—although they are very slight by comparison—than they do with Wyndham Lewis. But many of Lewis’s readers read Leverson’s novels before reading Lewis’s satirical bombshell.

  The Apes of God broke sharply with the gently satirical tradition of Leverson and the Grossmith brothers’ Diary of a Nobody, the story of a lower-middle-class man with outsized pretensions, and Robert Hichens’s The Green Carnation, which parodied Wilde and his crowd. And compared to Lewis even writers like Huxley, Lawrence, Richard Aldington, and the Sitwells were pussycats. Aldington parodied Eliot in his novel Stepping Heavenward, but denied that his Eliot-like character Jeremy Cibber was modeled on a living person. However, in making the transparently false claim that his satire aimed at “something beyond the personal by attacking intellectual vices and emotional defects common to the highbrow ‘aristocracy’ and, especially, the dangerous fad of Anglo-Catholicism,” he made it obvious to all of Bloomsbury and Bayswater that he was talking about Eliot, a highbrow aristocrat closely identified with Anglo-Catholicism.