Sydney and Violet: Their Life with T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis

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. (Sept.)