Stephen Klaidman, SYDNEY AND VIOLET

I'm not sure whether the lives of Sydney and Violet Schiff could ever be the subject of a successful traditional biography, but I am sure that Stephen Klaidman hasn't written one. There's interesting material here, but it would have been better served at different length or with a different focus. There just isn't enough information about the Schiffs to make a full biographical account: after reporting everything he's been able to scrape up, including random bits of trivia, Klaidman still has to go off on various tangents about their acquaintances and the period to get the book to a paltry 236 pages. Their early lives are such a blank that Sydney's autobiographical novel is pressed into service, perhaps inappropriately, as a source of information, and in the better-documented later years "I don't know" and "must have" remain surprisingly persistent. Even given the structural challenge posed by the subject, the prose is spectacularly unfocused, and sometimes peculiarly informal; it's like reading a very long, rambling e-mail from a smart, enthusiastic friend.

Actually, make that smart, enthusiastic, and opinionated. The writers and artists with whom the Schiffs interacted loved to gossip about and abuse each other, and Klaidman feels obliged to offer a nuanced (one might say needlessly elaborate) opinion on the fairness of each salvo. Letters are the primary record of the Schiffs' relationships with the figures mentioned in the subtitle, so a good portion of the book is Klaidman describing each piece of correspondence. It's not that the letters aren't interesting. In fact, they're interesting enough in their emotional and intellectual volatility that I began to wish Klaidman had simply published them, and relevant excerpts from other writings, without his own editorial commentary. For all his small-scale opinion-sharing, Klaidman never manages to make either Sydney or Violet come to life as individuals, or to offer a meaningful overall reading of Sydney's little-known novels. The account of the modernist circle with which the Schiffs were associated is too scattershot to work as anything more than an enticement toward other, better books on the subject. Enthusiasts of the period may find one or two interesting nuggets here, but general readers are likely to get lost in a welter of names, feuds, and opinions. The book ends by quoting a letter T. S. Eliot wrote to accompany Violet's obituary, in which he expressed "the hope that some future chronicler of the history of art and letters in our time may give to [the Schiffs] the place which is their due." I couldn't tell you what that place is, which leaves me pretty confident that Stephen Klaidman, despite obvious effort and enthusiasm, is not that chronicler.