Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Cross-Channel (Transmanche) Modernisms
- Interlude: Translating
- 1 On Unknowing French? Rhythm and Le Rythme on a Cross-Channel Exchange
- 2 Impressions of Translation: Ford Madox Ford’s Cosmopolitan Literary Crossings
- 3 Sydney Schiff and Marcel Proust: Table-talk, Tribute, Translation
- Interlude: Fashioning
- 4 Cross-Channel Modernisms and the Vicissitudes of a Laughing Torso: Nina Hamnett, Artist, Bohemian and Writer in London and Paris
- 5 Jean Rhys’s comédie anglaise
- 6 Betray to Become: Departure in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Interlude: Mediating
- 7 Close Up and Cross-Channel Cinema Culture
- 8 Debussy at the Omega Workshops
- 9 Across the Other Channel: Elizabeth Bowen and Modernist Mediation
- Coda: ‘You, who cross the Channel’: Virginia Woolf, Departures and the Spectro-Aesthetics of Modernism 215
- Index
3 - Sydney Schiff and Marcel Proust: Table-talk, Tribute, Translation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Cross-Channel (Transmanche) Modernisms
- Interlude: Translating
- 1 On Unknowing French? Rhythm and Le Rythme on a Cross-Channel Exchange
- 2 Impressions of Translation: Ford Madox Ford’s Cosmopolitan Literary Crossings
- 3 Sydney Schiff and Marcel Proust: Table-talk, Tribute, Translation
- Interlude: Fashioning
- 4 Cross-Channel Modernisms and the Vicissitudes of a Laughing Torso: Nina Hamnett, Artist, Bohemian and Writer in London and Paris
- 5 Jean Rhys’s comédie anglaise
- 6 Betray to Become: Departure in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Interlude: Mediating
- 7 Close Up and Cross-Channel Cinema Culture
- 8 Debussy at the Omega Workshops
- 9 Across the Other Channel: Elizabeth Bowen and Modernist Mediation
- Coda: ‘You, who cross the Channel’: Virginia Woolf, Departures and the Spectro-Aesthetics of Modernism 215
- Index
Summary
On 18 May 1922, Sydney Schiff and his wife Violet hosted a late-night dinner at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris to celebrate the premiere of Stravinsky's Renard. Among the guests at the party honouring the artists who had created the work – the composer, the dancers of the Ballets Russes and their impresario Diaghilev – were Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. That ‘great modernist dinner party’ (Davenport-Hines 2006) is without doubt the epitome of Sydney Schiff's activity as an international go-between and promoter of culture.
Schiff, the illegitimate son of a beautiful high society lady and a rich Jewish German banker, embodied cosmopolitanism. He was a British writer and patron of the arts with a complex identity: he published under the pen-name Stephen Hudson and created a double self-portrait in his autobiographical works where he was both the fictitious character Richard Kurt and the first-person narrative voice. His second wife, Violet Beddington (1874–1962), was his accomplice in matters social and literary; together they developed a wide, international friendship circle, as T. S. Eliot reports:
In the 1920s the Schiffs’ hospitality, generosity, and encouragement meant much to a number of young artists and writers of whom I was one. The Schiffs’ acquaintance was cosmopolitan, and their interests embraced all the arts. At their house I met, for example, [Frederick] Delius and Arthur Symons, and the first Viscountess Rothermere, who founded The Criterion under my editorship. [John] Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield knew their house, and Wyndham Lewis and Charles Scott Moncrieff, and many others.
Eliot defined the ‘great point in the Schiffs’ favour’ as ‘[their capacity when entertaining] of bringing very diverse people together and making them combine well’ (Eliot 1988: 411). In her presentation of the letters exchanged between Sydney Schiff and Aldous Huxley, Clémentine Robert stressed that Violet and her husband were at the heart of an intellectual and artistic ‘plexus’ (Huxley 1976: 16). They kept an open house favouring cross-Channel exchange which Robert described as the prefiguration of a cultural Common Market:
Cet apolitisme du juger fait de [Schiff] un cosmopolite. L’art est sans frontières et la production littéraire est vue à l’échelle européenne. Autour de lui se crée un marché commun des lectures… . Sydney Schiff est lui-même une véritable ‘circulating library’, et le livre est la monnaie d’échange entre amis. (Huxley 1976: 16)
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- Cross-Channel Modernisms , pp. 69 - 90Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020