Sydney and Violet

by Stephen Klaidman

  Alone with her memories: Sydney was gone, her parents were gone, and so were all of her brothers: George, who died of typhoid when he was twenty-two; Charles, who played a role in the writing of Charley’s Aunt and became a successful divorce lawyer; Frank, who made the semifinals of the Diamond Sculls twenty years apart; and Arthur, who had a mental breakdown as a young man, lived under a doctor’s care in Brussels, and believed he was far ahead of Einstein in his understanding of the physical universe. Her sisters were dead, too. Evelyn, her favorite, died in Paris when her twin sons were still children. Ada, the author of gentle satires and friend and benefactor of Oscar Wilde, lost her hearing, but not her sense of humor before dying at seventy. And Sybil, who was small and sweet-natured and had a fine singing voice of unusual power for her diminutive size, died in 1936 at sixty-seven.

  It was perhaps Sybil she thought of most because without Sybil she would not have met Sydney that night at Covent Garden. The opera, as we know, was La Bohème and Sybil would not have missed it for the world, no matter how many times she had already seen it, because her very special friend was its composer. Sybil, who was married to the American banker David Seligman, had a twenty-year relationship with Giacomo Puccini, who was also married. There is to this day doubt about the precise nature of the relationship, but Violet, in whom her older sister confided, was convinced that at least in the early years they were lovers. What is certain is that Violet told Mosco Carner, one of Puccini’s many biographers, that “Sybil’s relationship with Puccini was at first by no means platonic.” Why she told Carner this, whether it was true or not, remains a mystery. In the years that followed, Sybil was Puccini’s closest confidante, with whom he discussed his health, marital problems, and much more. She was also a source of ideas, although mostly bad ones in his opinion, for new librettos.

  But alone as she was—the last of her generation of Beddingtons and without her beloved Sydney—Violet was not about to spend the rest of her life mourning. Sydney had often told her that if she survived him he wanted her to live “in the same way and in the same spirit” as she had with him. Three days after his death she wrote to her friend Joan Countess Drogheda, wife of the Earl of Drogheda: “I can’t talk to you on the telephone because I’d only cry. I long to see you, but today I’m in bed—I can’t sleep or eat yet. I shall never get over it of course. But I am not a miserable person, I believe in love and happiness and goodness because I have known them. Also I refuse to be a widow—I am not one somehow—I am still darling Sydney’s wife as I always have been.”

  She was in the best sense of the word pragmatic. She believed consciousness and meaning ended with death and that those who still had some life left in them should not willingly waste it in mourning or otherwise. She also had a mission—to promote A True Story, her late husband’s life work. Without that, perhaps, she would have given in sooner to her physical disabilities—primarily chronic back pain and increasing deafness—and her self-described valetudinarianism. She was looked after by a doctor named Leo Rau in whom she seemed to have a great deal of confidence.

  Violet went out rarely, according to Julian Fane, the young writer who befriended her around 1950 when he was in his twenties and she was in her seventies. During a ten- or eleven-year period, he remembered her leaving the house only three times—to visit her friend Countess Drogheda, to attend a matinee of a Cocteau film, and to see Danny Kaye at the Palladium.

  An accident she had right around the time she met Fane contributed to her preference for staying at home. She tripped in her bedroom at Abinger cottage, broke her femur, and injured her leg below the knee as well. She was taken to the London Clinic, where a minor operation was performed and her lower leg was put in a cast. Four days later she was taken back to the cottage, where Fane first met her, for three months of bed rest. She saw friends and occasionally other interesting visitors at home in the country and at Ilchester Place. Her nephew Frederick Beddington recalled inviting her to see Charlie Chaplin’s recently released 1952 film Limelight with him. She told him she really couldn’t bear the idea of going out to the movies and that “in any case he’s coming to tea with me tomorrow and will tell me all about it.” In December 1953, in a departure from the house that Fane apparently missed, she went out for the second time that year to have her eyes checked. But when Dr. Rau offered in 1954 to take her to visit Max Beerbohm in Rapallo, where he had returned after the war, she did not accept.

  In 1957 Violet renewed her friendship with T. S. Eliot and warmly welcomed his new wife, Valerie, into her small but devoted circle of friends. Violet also kept up an active correspondence with a few other friends, including the Beerbohms. Florence died in 1951 and from then on Max’s secretary, Elisabeth Jungmann, cared for him like a wife. She also wrote to Violet, looked after her briefly when she was ill, and visited her several times without Max. Beerbohm married her in 1956, a few weeks before he died.

  Fane was introduced to Violet by a woman he identified in his brief book Memoir in the Middle of the Journey as Ellen C., but who actually was Countess Drogheda. Fane, the second son of the fourteenth Earl of Westmoreland was, among other things, one of Princess Margaret’s escorts when she was young and single. Almost half of his Memoir in the Middle of the Journey, which came out in 1971, is devoted to his recollections of Violet. There is a section on his nanny, Anne Harvey, and about a third of the book is about Joyce Cary. He read Cary’s great novel The Horse’s Mouth, whose protagonist, Gulley Jimson, may be the finest characterization of an artist in all of literature, about three years after he met Violet. The lessons he learned from it, apart from the pleasure it gave him, go a long way toward explaining what Violet eventually would mean to him although he was still too young to realize it.

  Gulley Jimson was a poor, old recently released convict who was supposed to be a great artist but couldn’t sell his work. Yet he took life as it came and didn’t complain. He knew who he was. Young Fane saw himself as a beginner, which of course he was, who “had no right to expect success and feared [he] could not get along without it.” While he was experiencing these feelings of inadequacy, although he probably didn’t know it, Violet was already in the process of doing for him what she had done so successfully for Sydney: nurturing his talent and building his confidence, laying the groundwork for self-respect. If she had lived long enough she would have been gratified to know just how successful he was. Shortly after Fane died in December 2009, his fiftieth book was published.

  Countess Drogheda took Fane to tea with Violet at the cottage in Surrey where the Beerbohms had lived during the war. Edward Beddington-Behrens was living in the manor house, which he would inherit on Violet’s death, with his son Serge, who was about five at the time. Fane remembered entering into a combined living and dining room that was painted white and that there were many windows, the furniture was “expensively austere,” and a painting by Stanley Spencer hung over the fireplace.

  Violet was reclining “against pillows in white linen pillow-cases as well as the cushions on the sofa, her feet up, a rug covering her legs.” Evelyn Richardson, Violet’s grandniece, saw her between twenty and thirty times during the fifties. She always found her lying on a sofa elegantly dressed in dark flowing robes, her white hair piled high on her head, and wearing a long strand of pearls. Violet was losing her hearing and used a large contraption in a leather case with two receivers and wires leading to an earpiece to amplify sound. In her eagerness not to miss anything she shifted back and forth between them, which tangled the wires. Fane, who couldn’t take his eyes off her, thought “her Jewish origins showed” in profile and that she looked like “the feminine equivalent of some beautiful statue of Moses.” It was an odd image, but well meant. Obviously Fane was not thinking of the famous horned Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, which Serge Beddington-Behrens’s bitter childhood memory of Violet conjures up. Beddington-Behrens’s image, like Michelangelo’s sculpture, is powerful and forbidding. He called her “a ghastly old heartl
ess bag … who held some kind of a perverse hold [over my father] connecting him to his artistic Jewish side.”

  Violet would have been seventy-four or seventy-five when Fane met her and there is no doubt that she remained intellectually formidable, held strong opinions about the things that mattered to her—literature, music, human character and motivation—that she would not suffer fools and could be intimidating, and that she was not particularly child-friendly. Evelyn Richardson came to visit when she was between ten and fifteen years old and Violet would always say, “Come here Duckams,” in her rather posh manner of speaking and command her to play the piano and then would be deep in conversation with someone else before the first note was struck. Young Evelyn, as one might expect, found this rather irritating. Violet also often asked Evelyn’s mother, Irene, and her stepfather, Edward Beddington-Behrens, to sing and Joan, a talented musician, to play the piano. She inherited the instrument when Violet died. The one time they ate lunch together Violet instructed Evelyn to hold her fork like a pencil and apart from that said nothing to her.

  As a young girl Violet would not spend her time with anyone she thought would waste it and she was even less likely to do so as a septuagenarian. Fane took to her immediately nonetheless, not only because of “her wit, imagination [and] subtlety,” but also because of the intimacy of her conversation, her ability to make the universal themes she was articulating directly relevant to whomever she was with.

  She wasn’t necessarily looking for a project. There was still work to be done with A True Story. But right from the beginning she must have sensed something in him—his budding intellect, his embryonic talent—and before long she surely felt genuine affection for him. Perhaps in time Fane became the son Violet never had. Like Sydney he was an aspiring writer who needed encouragement and was more than grateful for her support, for her editorial assistance, and for her friendship. She also did whatever she could over the next decade to help him publish and get his books reviewed where it counted. He returned her loving friendship with deep affection of his own and with his adoring memoir.

  Sometime during the summer Fane met Violet she became ill and returned to 1A Ilchester Place, the last of the three houses she and Sydney had shared in London, and never stayed overnight at the cottage in Surrey or anywhere else again. It was a large, pink brick house in West Kensington that looks much the same today. The interior reflected Violet’s eccentricity as she grew older and also conveyed something of the surroundings in which she had lived with Sydney. Fane believed, I think correctly, that the art and the black and gold Biedermeier furniture with orange upholstery and black cushions reflected Sydney’s taste, but the security measures, the piano, and the phonograph probably owed more to Violet’s concerns and interests than his:

  The front door was fitted with an assortment of anti-burglar devices, locks, bolts, chains and a barred peephole. On the ground floor were the usual offices, a dark hall and an ugly angular staircase, a dining-room and a sitting-room. The sitting-room had five big windows, two marble and stainless steel fireplaces with mirrors over them, sofas at each end and chairs to match, a circular table with piles of books round the edge, a grand piano, a gramophone and bookshelves.… The curtains were … brown. There were several pictures painted in the twenties and thirties hanging on the dun-colored walls, a sculpted figure of a girl dancing in the nude by Gaudier-Brzeska and a couple of heads by Epstein.

  A portrait of Violet as a young woman hung in the dining-room. She was leaning on a parasol, “wasp-waisted, soft-eyed and a little florid.”

  The mood inside the house was somber. The windows were shaded and closed. Violet hated sunlight and had a morbid fear of fresh air. She disliked the outdoors and avoided all exercise, including walking. Everything she needed was delivered by tradesmen or picked up by Cam, who continued to look after her needs just as she had when Violet was a young girl. Freda Almond, the Schiffs’ longtime secretary, managed the affairs of the house. Even her dentist treated her at home. But none of this was new to Violet. She had always lived that way.

  She missed Sydney terribly, but she gradually rebuilt her life and somehow managed to keep him in it. “After the first frightful year,” she wrote to Countess Drogheda in 1948, “when I nearly read myself to death (mercifully I was able to do that) I managed to restore some sort of equilibrium to my inner life. I was not forced into an alien atmosphere, and could live on in the same mental world which Sydney and I had shared.”

  One of the ways Violet did this was to throw herself yet again into what must have seemed like a never-ending task, the editing of A True Story, and in trying to find a new publisher for it. She wrote to Thornton Wilder, whom she barely knew, asking for his help. He answered her letter on June 27, 1947, saying that in the past he had helped various unknown writers and some difficult known writers such as Gertrude Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre win audiences. But he said he did not think Stephen Hudson’s novels fit either category because they “have been long before the public and have had many readers as appreciative as myself.” Therefore he respectfully declined to help.

  In April or May of 1948, while going through some papers of Sydney’s, she came across a brief essay he had written that she thought would make a perfect epilogue to his novel. On May 3 she wrote to Peter Baker, who owned the Falcon Press, which was preparing to publish her newly edited edition of A True Story, to tell him about her discovery. Sydney’s essay was an undisguised love letter to Myrtle, which is to say to Violet, which makes abundantly clear why she was so eager to have it used. But if there is any lingering doubt, this brief passage from the epilogue should lay it to rest:

  Morning after morning as we lie side by side, from the moment of opening my eyes the working consciousness struggles with the memory of dreams and reveals your presence there in the flesh and the ever-fresh wonder that all this is mine to take and hold during our time together here within the brittle shell of numbered days, each one made memorable by your magic.… And you wonder why I touch your hands and lean over to kiss you.

  Her commitment to Sydney’s memory and his legacy was formidable and she did succeed, but with a caveat. The Falcon edition of A True Story was published later in 1948 with the epilogue. But unfortunately, soon after it appeared, Baker was convicted of defrauding Barclay’s Bank of about forty thousand pounds. He went to prison for seven years, and A True Story for all practical purposes disappeared until it was republished in 1965. Violet sent Eliot a copy of the Falcon edition. In his letter of thanks he wrote that he considered it “a document of its age (and I think a well written one) which ought to last.” But promoting Sydney’s novel was not Violet’s sole occupation. Despite her bad back, her deafness, and a variety of other ailments real and imagined, she also found time to translate several books from French into English.

  Fane admired her greatly, but he was not blind to the strategies she used to accomplish as much as she did despite her apparent physical weakness. He believed she had realized long before that to meet her highly focused goals she had to set clear priorities, which meant avoiding certain responsibilities. And in a not-unrelated summing up of her realistic attitude toward the things she cared most about in life, he wrote: “Violet never forgot that the preliminary condition of her atmosphere, her moral and aesthetic elevation, the quality of her friendship, the happiness of her marriage, love itself as she saw it, and the creation of ninety per cent of the masterpieces of art she preferred, was financial independence.” So there you have her philosophy of life in a nutshell: Don’t waste energy on things that are not important and make sure you have enough money to enjoy those that are.

  From an early age it seems Violet felt self-confident and secure. For one thing, money was never a problem. It was simply there, and there was never any fear that it wouldn’t be. Her parents were happily married. She grew up seeing that her mother was completely free to pursue her music, which meant six or seven hours a day at the piano, and the female children were treated as equals to their b
rothers. In other ways Samuel and Zillah provided a stable and very comfortable Victorian environment for their large brood of children. Violet, as the youngest and her father’s favorite, might have been pampered a bit more than the others, but if she was, it did not keep her from being tough-minded. She knew what mattered to her long before she met Sydney, and when it came to her values and principles she was uncompromising. She demonstrated her steadfastness often and in diverse circumstances, but never as convincingly as when she bluntly told Sydney, to whom she was deeply attracted, that until he made a clean break from Marion she would not see him again. Her moral certainty and her unwillingness to compromise on matters of principle was what attracted to her a certain breed of person that included Sydney Schiff, Julian Fane, Eliot, and Proust and alienated others, like most of Bloomsbury.

  Edward Beddington-Behrens, who spent summers with the Schiffs as a boy after the death of his mother, Violet’s sister Evelyn, felt deeply indebted to and affectionate toward them, regarding them almost as a second set of parents. But there were times when he felt their love and attention were suffocating. Once when he was short of money because of bad investments he decided to explore business opportunities in the United States, partly because he wanted to be away from their dominating personalities. He knew he might make mistakes, but he wanted to make them on his own. He also resented their opposition to his marrying Irene Ash, his first and greatest love, who eventually became his third wife. But almost everything he had to say about them was positive and affectionate. They clearly felt close to him because they left him Abinger and most of their art collection.

  Beddington-Behrens’s son Serge, however, who holds an English literature degree from Oxford and a PhD in holistic psychology, first met Violet in 1950 when he was five years old, and saw her on and off until her death twelve years later, took an immediate and violent dislike to her. Time has not dulled his animus. He has expressed his feelings about Violet in writing several times and the basic sentiment never varies. “I found ‘Aunt Violet’ malevolent and sinister. Not a loving presence. Full of a certain kind of Jewish intellectuality which was wholly devoid of heart. I felt this when I was a lot older than five. I can’t remember when she died, but I was born in 1945, and my feelings go up to that time.” Serge felt Violet had been a very bad influence on his father. He believes that because his father’s mother died young and his father was never there for him, and because he suffered from “shell shock” during World War I, his father was vulnerable and fell under Violet’s spell.