Stephen Hudson was a pseudonym of the British novelist Sydney Schiff (1868–1944). He is now better remembered for his place as a piece in the social jigsaw around more celebrated artists.

Scion of an international banking family, he divided his time mostly between London and the south of France.

He was the host at a now-celebrated party in Paris on 18 May 1922, when Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

 met James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

 (without the slightest rapport), and other guests included Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Picasso. The occasion was the first night of Stravinsky's Renard

Renard (Stravinsky)

Renard, Histoire burlesque chantée et jouée is a one-act chamber opera-ballet by Igor Stravinsky, written in 1916. The Russian text by the composer was based on Russian folk tales from the collection by Alexander Afanasyev.The full Russian name of the piece is: Ба́йка про лису́, петуха́, кота́, да...

. Schiff tried to get Picasso to paint a portrait of Proust, again abortively.

At this period in the early 1920s he was in touch with major modernist figures. He was a patron of Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis

Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...

's The Tyro, and bought his paintings, waiting four years for an unfinished portrait of his wife, Violet. Lewis "repaid" the support by satirising Schiff as Lionel Kein in The Apes of God

The Apes of God

The Apes of God is a 1930 novel by the British artist and writer Wyndham Lewis. It is a satire of London's contemporary literary and artistic scene....

 (1930). Schiff also introduced John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry was an English writer. He was prolific, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime...

 to Joyce; though Joyce later gave the impression that Katharine Mansfield, Murry's wife, showed more understanding of Joyce's Ulysses

Ulysses (novel)

Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

. He and Violet also befriended T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 and his wife, Vivienne. Earlier, in 1918, Hudson had helped finance the Osbert Sitwell

Osbert Sitwell

Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell, 5th Baronet, was an English writer. His elder sister was Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell and his younger brother was Sir Sacheverell Sitwell; like them he devoted his life to art and literature....

 publication Art and Letters. Later they knew Edwin Muir

Edwin Muir

Edwin Muir was an Orcadian poet, novelist and translator born on a farm in Deerness on the Orkney Islands. He was remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry in plain language with few stylistic preoccupations....

 and Wilma. He kept up a long correspondence with Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...

, which has been published.

He translated the twelfth volume of Proust,"Time Regained" completing the Scott-Montcrieff version; Sodome et Gomorrhe II was dedicated to him and Violet. Céleste, a story of Schiff's, was published in The Criterion in 1924. In it Proust appears as the character Richard Kurt. Proust reciprocated by helping his novels achieve French translation.

Family

Hudson's siblings included a brother, Sir Ernest Schiff, and three sisters: Marie (Baroness de Marwicz, died 1948), Rose Georgette (Mrs Evelyn Morley, 1874–1962), and Edith (Countess Gautier-Vignal, stepmother of novelist Louis Gautier-Vignal).

His second wife, Violet Beddington (1876–1962), was a daughter of Samuel Beddington, a wealthy Jewish wool merchant and real-estate investor, and his wife, the former Zillah Simon. She was a sister of British novelist Ada Leverson

Ada Leverson

Ada Leverson was a British writer who is now known primarily for her work as a novelist.She began writing during the 1890s, as a contributor to Black and White, Punch, and The Yellow Book. She was a loyal friend to Oscar Wilde, who called her Sphinx...

 (1862–1933) and Sybil Seligman (1868–1936), a mistress of Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire...

.http://theoperacritic.com/tocarticles.php?article=hkseligman0506.htm

Works as Stephen Hudson

• War Time Silhouettes (1916)
• Richard Kurt (1919)
• Elinor Colhouse (1921)
• Prince Hempseed (1923)
• In Sight of Chaos by Hermann Hesse
  Hermann Hesse
  Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature...
  
  (1923) translator
• Tony (1924)
• Myrtle (1925)
• Richard, Myrtle and I (1926)
• A True Story in Three Parts and a Postscript, All of Them Facile Rubbish (1930)
• Celeste and Other Sketches (Blackamore Press, 1930)
• The Other Side (1937)

External links