Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  Lady Ida’s mother, Edith Sitwell’s grandmother, was born Lady Edith Somerset. Her father, the seventh Duke of Beaufort, traced his ancestry back to John of Gaunt. On her mother’s side, she was the niece of the Duke of Wellington and it is said that Napoleon III once wanted to marry her. She loved music, especially opera, and had grown up in a house where great singers and musicians performed, including Franz Liszt who played for her parents in 1840.9 She and Lord Londesborough had four daughters, Ida, Sybil, Mildred and Lilian, and one son, Francis.

  Edith Sitwell grew to hate her grandmother but knew that she was somewhat like her: ‘I had, I regret to say, inherited my grandmother Londesborough’s violent temper – but not her passion for making rows about trivial subjects.’10 Much of Sitwell’s personal style would be modelled on this countess and her distant forebears. Sitwell carved out an authoritative persona, donned medieval gowns and jewellery, and learnt to crush ‘impertinence’: ‘I inherit my appearance from the family of my maternal grandmother. And therefore that same appearance can be seen in the effigies of the Plantagenets in Westminster Abbey.’11 Although she made a stand against conventional standards of beauty, Sitwell lamented that she was ‘plain’. The one part of her body she thought beautiful were her much-photographed hands, an inheritance from her grandmother: ‘She had exceedingly beautiful hands, which remained like those of a young woman until she died; these beauties were nearly always hidden by black suede gloves to preserve their whiteness (which was like that of privet flowers).’12 The Countess required Lady Ida and her other children, including her son, to wear such gloves even indoors. Those gloves became, in Edith’s eyes, a symbol of their way of life – protected, pretty, and useless.

  Lady Ida’s upbringing was at once privileged and curiously disabling. Her youngest child, Sacheverell Sitwell (b. 1897), always known as ‘Sachie’, wrote: ‘Her character, when I first remember her, was [a] compound of natural high spirits and a sort of palace-bred or aristocratic helplessness.’13 She was taught deportment by the eighty-year-old Marie Taglioni, who in her youth had been one of the world’s leading ballerinas.14 She also learnt some French and music, but her education had no rigour. Sacheverell thought her ‘entirely uneducated, having, as I say, left the schoolroom and the nurses and governesses at the age of seventeen when her allowance of pocket money had been eighteen pence a week; she could not add up, could very decidedly not subtract, and I think had only the mistiest notion of who Julius Caesar was, or the meaning of the Napoleonic Wars’.15 As we will see, there were legal reasons to speak in later years of Lady Ida’s lack of brains and her ignorance.

  Although frivolous, Lady Ida was by no means stupid. She was a constant though not a wide reader, and possessed an actress’s gift of mimicry and an amusing, if hurtful, tongue. Osbert maintained that the Londesboroughs were devoted to ‘fun’.16 There were shooting parties at Londesborough Park, the cricket festival at Scarborough, coaching meets where the Earl drove his own team, receptions for politicians, gatherings of actors and actresses. In 1871, the Prince of Wales nearly died of typhus after visiting the Londesboroughs in Scarborough. Another guest, the Earl of Chesterfield, did die of it, along with his groom.17 However, the atmosphere soon revived, and Ida’s childhood passed as a succession of house parties.

  She absorbed her father’s attitude towards money and her mother’s attitude towards her inferiors. Edith remembered,

  My mother was slightly too insistent on her social position – (those were the days when an Earl was regarded as a being on the highest mountain peaks, to be venerated, but not approached, by ordinary mortals). She was in the habit of saying, (no doubt with my father in mind) ‘A Baronet is the lowest thing on God’s earth’ – lower, presumably, than a black beetle. And when she was in a rage with me – this being a constant state with her – she would say to me, ‘I am better-born than you are.’ This puzzled me slightly.18

  Since Lady Ida became an alcoholic, it is possible that these comments fell from her lips after a few drinks, but Edith Sitwell was perfectly capable of merely inventing them or giving them a false context.

  One of Sitwell’s anecdotes demonstrates how unreliable her evidence is: ‘And I remember, too, driving every afternoon with my great grandmother, the very aged Dowager Duchess of Beaufort, the original of the Dowager Queen in my poem “The Sleeping Beauty” and of the old woman in “Colonel Fantock” … She never discovered – nodding into a sleep that would soon be eternal, that we drove on the same route every afternoon.’19 The Duchess died on 2 October 1889, when Edith was barely two. Her brother Osbert gives the story a more likely provenance: ‘my mother used to describe her, a formidable figure still, but rather vague mentally, taking her pet parrot out for a drive in the New Forest. She always wished to go for a new drive, but the coachman invariably took her the same way; she was too old to be aware of the deception. The parrot, too, had long been dead and stuffed so as to give an illusion of life.’20

  In old age, Edith Sitwell would scarcely admit to having received anything from her parents, not even an anecdote; nonetheless, she seems to have recycled a good many of Lady Ida’s stories. Around 1930, she remarked, ‘It has always been one of the pleasures of my life to hear my mother describe her childhood among these splendours.’21 Sitwell’s relationship with her mother was more complicated than she was willing to explain at the end of her life. She seems to have seen her early years through the lens of an appalling adolescence, and to have erased any warmth her mother ever displayed towards her. Indeed, we do not know what particular things Lady Ida did to her daughter in childhood, and it is hard to know when the suffering began. In 1922, Sitwell wrote under a persona:

  Alas, in what remote life of the spirit and the body, I had my home; and these are lost to me. Only sometimes in the heart of music and on the brink of sleep, can I find them now, and become a little child again. Then everything seems familiar to me, yet fresh and sweet and most infinitely beloved. – My mother saying goodnight … her pink gown and her perfume that reminds me of a tune by Mozart … Her fingers that are like honeysuckle. Ah, that was before I had grown wise.22

  Lady Ida was sometimes affectionate towards her daughter, which made her rages all the more bewildering. Sitwell concluded over time that these shows of affection were just a trick – and any sense of her mother’s love wishful thinking.

  As the years passed, Sitwell came to represent her early life in mythic terms. She portrayed herself as a child destined for greatness and a ‘changeling’:

  My parents were strangers to me from the moment of my birth. I do not forget that I must have been a most exasperating child, living with violence each moment of my day. I was rather a fat little girl: my moon-round face, which was surrounded by green-gold curls, had, strangely for so small a child – indeed for any child, the eyes of someone who had witnessed and foretold all the tragedy of the world. Perhaps I, at four years old, knew the incipient anguish of the poet I was to become.23

  She tells of being asked by a friend of her mother’s, ‘What are you going to be when you are grown up, little E?’, to which she replied, ‘A genius.’ She says she was then swept from the drawing room and put to bed. ‘But my disgrace was not forgotten, and was frequently referred to, in after years, in a disgusted whisper.’24 In an earlier version of this story deleted from Osbert’s memoir, Edith was six or seven, and she did not propose to be ‘a genius’ but ‘a Great Woman’.25

  The young Sitwells spent a good deal of time with Lady Ida’s relatives. Edith remembered with some pleasure her childhood visits to Londesborough Park. The 11 a.m. breakfasts with her otherwise difficult grandmother were ‘languid feasts’. They sat in a dining room ‘surrounded by green trees, in which the sun fluttered like a bird, and seemed to be singing’. The table was laid out with cutlets, partridges, peaches, and hot-house grapes. More pleasant still was the time she spent with her grandfather. A very tall man with a glass eye from a shooting accident, he was roguish and good-natured towards the
children, and his oaths were clever. Edith wrote, ‘He was a singularly delightful grandfather and all the children adored him, for he made us seem important, and he turned everything into an adventure.’ They rode with him across the fields in a light carriage pulled by four horses, ‘our small faces just peering over the rugs and the leather apron, and with my grandfather, tall and dark and with a foreign look, talking to us and to the horses’.26 In the spring of 1900, the Earl visited a warehouse full of tropical birds, where he caught psittacosis, a form of pneumonia contracted from parrots.27 Lady Ida was devoted to her father. As she had already lost her sister Lilian in 1897, his death came as a hard blow.

  Lady Ida’s brother Francis Denison succeeded as the second Earl of Londesborough. For several years, the Sitwells came at Christmas to his house at Blankney in Lincolnshire. Edith claimed that although she disliked ‘Ye ancient Boar’s Head kind of jollity’, she enjoyed Christmas in a country house, ‘even if it means quarrelling with all my favourite relations’.28 Among her many cousins Edith found a close friend in Veronica Codrington, a girl close to her own age, the daughter of her mother’s sister Sybil. At much the same time, Edith was compared, disadvantageously, to her charming and beautiful cousin, Irene Denison. The daughter of the new earl, she became, later, Marchioness of Carisbrooke.

  The adults loved practical jokes such as placing a pail of water above a door, tethering a hen beneath a bed, or placing a live lobster between the sheets. Lady Ida’s relatives spent most of their days shooting at birds and animals. If targets ran short, the gamekeepers released rabbits from sacks to be shot or beaten with sticks. In extremis, they would go ‘ratting’ in the house. Sir George Sitwell was bored by these antics and Edith Sitwell actively repulsed. Lady Ida pressed her to join in or at least to watch the hunt. Instead, she came to hate blood sports and campaigned against them throughout her life.29

  If conflict with a charismatic but embittered mother was the key fact of Edith Sitwell’s childhood, another fact was nearly as important: she was ‘in disgrace for being a female’30 – her father would have preferred a boy. Sitwell wrote of her father with anger and contempt, but felt less injured by him: ‘It was my mother, and not my father, who made my childhood and youth a living hell.’31 Sir George Sitwell was of a background and temperament utterly unlike his wife’s. A shrewd businessman, he kept up to date with the latest developments in science, while another part of him lived, quite happily, in the Middle Ages.

  The village of Renishaw, just south of Sheffield, had been the home of the Sitwells, or ‘Cytewels’, since the beginning of the fourteenth century. Renishaw Hall was built by the first George Sitwell, who took up residence in 1625. This H-shaped manor house, with gables and battlements, provided the nucleus for a dwelling that would later be enlarged, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first George Sitwell also took the family into the iron business, and by the end of the seventeenth century the Sitwells were the world’s largest makers of iron nails. However, by the eighteenth century the family consisted mainly of uncles; the male line died out with the merchant and philanthropist William Sitwell in 1776. His nephew, Francis Hurt, inherited an estate valued at about half a million pounds, and decided the surname should be his as well. His son, christened Sitwell Hurt, thus became Sitwell Sitwell (1769–1811).32 In 1961, Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary that the ‘hypersensitive’ Osbert should take back the old name and call himself ‘Sir Hurt Hurt’.33

  Sitwell Sitwell spent recklessly on the house, adding a private race-course and classical stables for his fighting cocks and for his hounds, which chased a tiger that had escaped from a Sheffield menagerie. He built a new dining room, a large drawing room, and a ballroom, where in 1806 he gave a rout for the Prince of Wales, who afterwards made him a baronet.34 The prodigal son of a prodigal father, Sir George Sitwell (1797–1853), succeeded as second Baronet in 1811 with an inheritance half what his father had received; the Napoleonic Wars then wiped out much of the value of his land by driving down farm rents. He lost yet more money in a bank failure and a fraud. In 1846, Renishaw was shut up and many of its contents sold.35 Sir George Sitwell did not return there except for two nights in the winter before he died.36

  Sir Reresby Sitwell (1820–62), third Baronet, having inherited the mess that his grandfather and father had made, also had to provide for many relatives while taking on his father’s debts. An amateur watercolourist and friend of Ruskin, Sir Reresby apparently had a sensitive nature. Once a cornet in the First Life Guards, he was ground down by fatigue and worry, dying at forty-one. He left behind a widow, Louisa Lucy, and two children, Florence (1858–1930) and George (1860–1943), who as a toddler became fourth Baronet. A central figure in Edith’s early life, Lady Sitwell, her paternal grandmother, was one of five daughters of Colonel Henry Hely-Hutchinson of Weston, Northamptonshire. She was careful with money, and the discovery of a large coal deposit at Renishaw allowed her to set things right by the mid-1870s.37

  Lady Sitwell made a home for herself and the children in Scarborough, which was cheaper than Renishaw. In Scarborough she had many friends and relatives, among them her husband’s unmarried sister Blanche, who lived there until about 1896, when she moved to London. A great favourite of the younger Sitwells and a friend of the reforming Rowntrees of Yorkshire, Blanche was an activist for almost any progressive cause. For years, she badgered her old friend and kinsman Archbishop Randall Davidson over penal reform and then the Boer War.38 Some of her political sympathies rubbed off on Edith Sitwell.

  Louisa Sitwell found Scarborough a good place for church work. As a young woman she had been swept up in the religious ferment that followed the Crimean War. Sacheverell would speak of her views as ‘nearly maniacal’,39 and Edith, who had actually been very close to her grandmother, would remark to a friend in the early 1940s: ‘I’ve also had a letter from obviously a very old gentleman enquiring the whereabouts of my grandmother (who died in 1910 [sic]). It is rather difficult to answer, as my idea and hers of her ultimate home didn’t tally!’40

  Louisa Sitwell supported low-church missionaries, and her house was said to be infested with curates. Her main project was a home for ‘Magdalens’ in Scarborough. She and a suffragan bishop would make evening ‘sorties together in her barouche, driven by her old coachman [George] Hill. Encircling the town they would capture any young woman who appeared to them to be unsuitably dressed and in a deplorable “state of joyosity” as John Knox called it.’ The matron, Sister Edith Woods, ‘a bursting woman like an advertisement for tomatoes on a railway station’, would bathe the girls, clothe them in navy-blue uniforms, and set them to work in a laundry. It is said that on one occasion a slim young man with a grudge against the bishop disguised himself as a prostitute, was captured, refused the bath, and then impregnated all the Magdalens.41

  This set-piece Sitwellian anecdote captures the domineering side of Louisa Sitwell’s religious work. However, when viewed from her daughter Florence’s perspective it all looks more sympathetic. Her mother’s collaborator, she remained unmarried, and seems always to have lived on the edge of other, more powerful lives. Osbert, who thought that in another age she would have been a saint, published selections from her journals.42 She describes a conversion experience when she was fifteen: ‘Sunday, May 3 [1874]. A year ago to-day, that Sunday evening on which Kate Swinton and I went to St Martin’s church to hear Mr. Parr preach, and he spoke so beautifully of God’s great love to us! I never knew before how very, very much Christ has loved us. And I remember the quiet time afterwards, when it was nearly dark in my room, and I knelt down and asked Christ to take me for His own.’43

  Florence was a considerable presence in Edith’s imagination, appearing under various guises in poems and autobiographical pieces, as in this scene from around 1905:

  Outside a stuffy bookshop, two maiden ladies were on the pavement lost in speculation. The elder of these wore a long dress which burst into a thousand leaves and waterfalls and branch
es and minor worries. She had hair of the costliest gold thread, bright as the gold in a fourteenth-century missal, and this, when undone, fell in a waterfall till it nearly reached her feet. But at this moment, it was crammed beneath a hat which seemed to have been decorated with all the exports of our colonies – ostrich feathers, fruits, furs, and heaven knows what besides. Her eyes were blue as a saint’s eyes, and were mild as a spring wind.44

  The hat, of course, is telling. Edith herself feared the life of the maiden aunt and believed that the spiritual potential of a woman like Florence was wasted in a modern age obsessed with buying and selling.

  Sir George Sitwell had a holy upbringing, driving him to become an atheist, at least until his later years, when he remarked: ‘no one who has reached the age of reason will be the worse for possessing a second line of defence.’45 His great-uncle Archbishop Tait became his guardian after the death of Sir Reresby. Although Sir George recoiled from his teaching, he remained fond of the Archbishop. Edith described Louisa and Florence as ‘Lambeth Palace lounge-lizards’. Sir George spent most of his holidays at Lambeth until Tait’s death in 1882.46 His son-in-law Randall Davidson, who became Archbishop in 1903, regarded Sir George as a tiresome eccentric, while Sir George regarded him as a meddler.

  After a grim school in Hertfordshire, Sir George went in 1873 to Eton, where he remained until 1878. Information about this portion of his life is surprisingly scant. He played the Field Game (one of Eton’s forms of football) for his house. However, he did not belong to any school teams and won no major prizes.47 Nevertheless, while at Eton he is supposed to have invented a toothbrush that played ‘Annie Laurie’ and a tiny revolver for killing wasps.48