Sydney and Violet

June 24, 2013
On May 18, 1922, at Paris’s Majestic hotel, Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev dined together for the first and last time. Their hosts? Sydney and Violet Schiff. In this delightful book, which draws on extensive private correspondence, interviews, and personal friendship, journalist and editor Klaidman (Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry) invites us to share the Schiffs’s privileged view of the modernist elite who reshaped literature, art, and music in the early 20th century and offers plenty of dishy details for cultural history junkies and readers interested in the period. Like Sara and Gerald Murphy, the Schiffs were independently wealthy and well connected. Their friends included T.S. Eliot, Proust, Katherine Mansfield, and bombastic gadfly Wyndham Lewis, who portrayed the Schiffs as social-climbing sycophants in his satiric novel, The Apes of God. The Schiff marriage was, in Klaidman’s words, a “thirty-three-year love affair,” a “collaboration between an inspired writer with a painful personal story and an intelligent, sympathetic but unsentimental editor”—namely Violet. Sydney wrote eight novels, many of them published under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson. Klaidman leaves the question of their literary merit to Sydney’s contemporaries, forcing us to draw our own conclusions. “I’m not sure it’s altogether a bad novel,” Mansfield told Sydney, unaware that he was the book’s author. When she realized her mistake, she was embarrassed: “It’s a thousand-fold more. It is a work of art.” Agent: Chuck Verill, Darhansoff and Verill Literary Agency.

August 15, 2013
An engaging account of an author and his editor wife who may be obscure even to critics of modernist literature. Here is a biography in which the supporting cast generates most of the interest. Klaidman (Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry, 2007, etc.) recognizes that it was a challenge proposing such a book when "only a small number of scholars and aficionados of the modern period had ever heard of the Schiffs." Yet Sydney and Violet Schiff were well-known to the likes of Proust, Eliot, Joyce and Picasso, with whom they socialized and corresponded. They hosted a literary salon, and they served as patrons of the arts. They were also literary figures themselves, he the author and she his editor of A True Story, a Proustian series of autobiographical novels that were praised at the time by their famous friends but have since succumbed to obscurity. It isn't necessarily Klaidman's intent to generate interest in work he believes has been unjustly neglected, but to explore the literary London of a century ago--when it was "the undisputed capital of the literary world...the baptismal font of modernism"--through the experiences and particularly the letters of a couple in the midst of its social swirl. Some dismissed them as "rich poseurs" and "fawning acolytes" (particularly toward Proust), while Eliot once wrote after a visit that they were "very nice Jews." The book builds toward the savage skewering of the Schiffs by Wyndham Lewis, a painter who had accepted both their friendship and their money, in his novel The Apes of the Gods, "published in 1930 and...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." Few readers will be, though they'll know more about the Schiffs after finishing this book than almost anyone knew before. An enjoyable extended footnote to the lives of the better known.

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September 15, 2013
Sydney and Violet Schiff were rare creatures: people Proust the recluse was willing to dine with. Wealthy literary Londoners, the Schiffs had all but faded away until Klaidman (Coronary, 2007) found them irresistible. In a clearly relished departure for this public health expert, bioethicist, and distinguished journalist, Klaidman recovers the many-chaptered lives of the couple who worshipped Proust; befriended T. S. Eliot, Katharine Mansfield, and Aldous Huxley; and supported the vicious painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis. When they met, Violet was single at 34, and Sydney, 40, was stuck in a doomed-from-the-start marriage to a grasping woman from Louisville, Kentucky. Married two years later in 1911, Sydney and Violet rode the modernist wave in homes full of art and illustrious guests until Sydney died 33 years later. Guided by his beloved muse, editor, and champion, Sydney wrote eight novels as Stephen Hudson, a pseudonym Proust initially thought was Violet's. Klaidman's crisply written, deliciously gossipy, often hilarious, and painstakingly assembled double portrait celebrates the generous, influential Schiffs as intellectually curious, passionate about literature, . . . and connoisseurs of human nature. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)