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