Stephen Hudson

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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. Independently wealthy, he divided his time mostly between London and the south of France.

He was the host at a now-celebrated party in Paris on May 18, 1922, when Marcel Proust met James Joyce (without the slightest rapport), and other guests included Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Picasso. The occasion was the first night of Stravinsky's Renard. 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's The Tyro, and bought his paintings, waiting four years for an unfinished portrait of Violet. Lewis repaid the support by portraying Schiff as Lionel Kein in The Apes of God (1930). Schiff also introduced John Middleton Murry to Joyce; though Joyce later gave the impression that Katharine Mansfield, Murry's wife, has shown more understanding of Ulysses. He and Violet also befriended T. S. Eliot and Vivienne. Earlier, in 1918, he had helped finance the Osbert Sitwell publication Art and Letters. Later they knew Edwin Muir and Wilma. He kept up a long correspondence with Aldous Huxley, which has been published.

He translated Proust, 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 into French translation.

His sister Edith was mother-in-law of the French Proustian Louis Gautier-Vignal. His second wife Violet (nee Beddington, 1868-1944) was the sister of the novelist and friend of Oscar Wilde, Ada Leverson (1862 – 1933).