Stephen Klaidman, _Sydney and Violet: Their Life with T. S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis_

SYDNEY AND VIOLET are the Schiffs, prominent patrons of the arts, especially the literary ones, in England during the High Modernist days after World War I. Sydney was also a translator, finishing the final volume of the English translation of Á la recherche de temps perdus when C. K. Scott Moncrieff died. He also, as "Stephen Hudson," wrote several autobiographical novels. As a couple, they served as model for Lionel and Isabel Kein, characters in a prominent episode of Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God.

I picked this up mainly out of interest in that excruciatingly irascible figure. Not much in the way of tidbits for me, though, and Klaidman's attitude towards Lewis is irritating.

Of The Apes of God, Klaidman writes:

It was published in 1930 and was almost immediately forgotten because most if 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.

But then on the following page, he writes:

    The Apes of God is the most notorious--or for the Lewis scholars, the most glorious--work in the tradition of modernist satire.

Now I ask you--can a book be both "forgotten" and "notorious"? (Let's forget about "glorious" for the time being.) Klaidman first says the book disappeared from memory from the moment dropped from the presses, then says it has a very marked reputation in the present. That's just a contradiction.

If Klaidman wanted to cut the book down to size a bit, he could have said it is never sold well (quite true) and is currently out of print (also true, although used copies can fetch a lot of money). But people who know much of anything about interwar Anglophone fiction know about The Apes of God. It isn't forgotten. It wasn't forgotten at the time, either. People were pissed off about it for years.

Then, a couple of pages further on, Klaidman refers to the novels of Ada Leverson (friend of Oscar Wilde and Violet Schiff's older sister) as "a series of six lighthearted and mildly satirical novels that are no better remembered than Stephen Hudson's or Wyndham Lewis's." Well. It's certainly true that her novels are not better remembered than Lewis's. But that phrase seems to throw them, and Schiff/Hudson, into the same box of "obscure British novelists," when in fact Lewis is a great deal better remembered than either. Any good research library has a couple of shelves of secondary studies on Lewis's fiction. Is that true of Leverson's novels, or Schiff/Hudson's? In a word: no.

(By the way, I am not going to disparage Schiff/Hudson's fiction, which I find not great, but certainly readable. But it has never had much of a critical reputation.)

Let's see. Suppose I were to say, "Jack Rothrock is no better remembered than Pepper Martin or Rogers Hornsby." Makes sense if none of the three are familiar to you. But a baseball historian would know not only that all three played major league baseball in the 1920s, but also that Rothrock was a journeyman, Martin a player with a few moments of glory, and Hornsby a Hall of Famer. They are equally obscure to people who care nothing for baseball in the 1920s, but represent very different levels of accomplishment.

I can understand why Klaidman would be annoyed by the way the Schiffs are portrayed in The Apes of God. It isn't fair. But is fiction supposed to be fair? Was Joyce fair to Oliver St. John Gogarty? No. Does that matter?

Then we have the circumstance that Klaidman is willing to talk about Lewis's book being forgotten and then pops Lewis's name into his subtitle. Come on, man. Give the man his due.