Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in January 1879 and remained there until 1883. Despite extraordinary gifts, his performance was mediocre, and he left without a degree.49 Perhaps he was distracted by coming into his fortune and by some offbeat adventures. In his second year at Oxford, he and a friend attended a seance at the headquarters of the British National Association of Spiritualists.50 They took the precaution of tying up the medium with ropes, as a result of which there were no manifestations. Soon, they returned for another seance, but this time an official of the organisation tied the knots. The shade of a twelve-year-old girl called Marie appeared. Her face was veiled and she was dressed in white, but they saw that under her robes she was wearing stays, and concluded that real ghosts probably do not have underwear. On their third visit, accompanied by two more witnesses, they heard undressing behind a curtain during the seance. When Marie appeared, Sir George seized her wrist. The curtain was pulled back, to reveal the scattered garments the medium had been wearing. The lights were suddenly put out, and the meeting broke up in yelling and abuse. Sir George and his friends appeared in the press as having exposed a fraud.51

  Sir George Sitwell had his own way of contacting ghosts, perhaps trying to substitute many dead fathers for a single living one. As a boy, he had studied ancient documents in the muniment room at Renishaw and taught himself to read black-letter; in time, he became an expert on genealogy and local history. Seeking an outlet for his writings, he purchased the chairmanship of the board of directors of the Saturday Review, while Shaw and Wells were regular contributors, but he fell out with the editor Frank Harris.52 He purchased the Scarborough Post and, with it, the press that printed his first book in 1889. The full title requires at least three breaths: The Barons of Pulford In the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries and Their Descendants The Reresbys of Thrybegh and Ashover, the Ormesbys of South Ormesby, and the Pulfords of Pulford Castle, Being An Historical Account of the Lost Baronies of Pulford and Dodleston in Cheshire, of Seven Knights’ Fees in Lincolnshire Attached to them, and of Many Manors, Townships and Families in Both Counties. Oddly enough, Sir George thought this study of local governance after the Conquest had a modern relevance: ‘Home Rule’ caused these counties ‘to be divorced from national progress and popular reforms, and to be a perpetual danger and menace, first to the Crown, and then, after the Crown had absorbed it, to the liberties of England’.53

  Sir George Sitwell stood, unsuccessfully, for the riding of Scarborough at two by-elections in November and December 1884, and was elected in 1885, holding the seat until the general election of the following year, when he was defeated. He won the seat back in 1892, lost it again in 1895, and was defeated for the last time in 1900. A moderate Conservative and a good constituency man, he served a total of five years in Parliament, during which time he rose to speak on only four occasions.54 For all his gifts, Sir George was an unlikely politician, as he had no instinct for public relations. Towards the end of her life, Edith told Muriel Spark that her father had once received an anonymous letter accusing him of having an affair with a notorious woman in the village; he wanted to find out who had written the letter, so had it displayed in the window of the village post office with the promise of a five-pound reward. Sitwell claimed that she and her brothers delighted in going down to the post office in order to read ‘the salacious letter’ in the window.55

  In the mid-1880s, Sir George was an eligible young man, with a baronetcy, an estate, a large income, a seat in Parliament, and a family connection with Lambeth Palace. In a peculiar phrase, Edith Sitwell described her father in youth as ‘good-looking in an insipid way, the insipidity being largely the result of his blinking with pink eyelids’. She thought that in later years, when he had retired to an estate near Florence, he looked ‘very handsome and noble-looking; with his strange, pale, wild, lonely-looking eyes, and his red beard, he resembled a portrait of one of the Borgias, or some other early Italian tyrant’.56

  Most of what we know of Sir George Sitwell is from Osbert’s memoir Left Hand, Right Hand!, which, though truthful in matters of detail, presents only a sly caricature of a man whom many thought more intelligent than Osbert himself. While extremely funny, Osbert’s memoir is an act of revenge against the father with whom he had always quarrelled about money. Osbert’s problem was that, whereas he wanted a princely life, he was obliged by his father to settle for mere privilege.

  Edith had a much more authentic grievance against Sir George than Osbert ever had, even if what she wrote was incoherent and sometimes deceptive. Pursuing his own scholarly and aesthetic interests, Sir George left Edith to be abused by Lady Ida. He sentimentalised the situation and provided little of the protection to which she was entitled. As an old woman, she could point to few episodes where he had actively done her harm, so she attempted to read perversity or self-delusion into any act of his that she could remember:

  My father had only one comfort. In my earliest childhood, before he had retired into a Trappist seclusion within himself, he had seen himself always as the apex of one of those hierarchical family pyramids favoured by photographers. Then, when I was just able to walk, he saw this imaginary photograph labelled ‘Charming photograph of a young father with his child.’ And under the spell of this fantasy, he would bowl me over with a cushion, pinning my forehead to the iron fender.57

  While this and other attempts to read her father’s inner life (also a favoured approach of Osbert’s) are absurd, the anecdote shows her father as both playful and interested in her. It should be remembered that this particular passage was written in her old age when years of physical pain, depression, and heavy drinking made her an unreliable witness to her own life.

  2

  A SENSE OF PLACE

  Scratch the surface of Edith Sitwell’s poetry and you will find Scarborough and its contradictions. Divided into North and South Bays, the harbour is overhung by a cliff that looks far out into the North Sea. That view could be a terrible one – at least in the days of sail. It is believed that, since 1500, about fifty thousand ships have been wrecked on the Yorkshire coast. Between 1855 and 1880, there are records of 51,841 shipwrecks around the shores of the United Kingdom, a great number of them occurring in the North Sea. In a single gale in late October 1880, there were nine wrecks just outside Scarborough, and many more ships were lost further out. The lifeboat made five forays in that storm, rescuing twenty-eight people, but still the coast was littered with ships and bodies.1 Nature’s menace was openly displayed in Scarborough, and yet this was a popular seaside resort. After the discovery of spa waters in the seventeenth century, people went there for their health as well as for their ease. The railways connected Scarborough to London in the late 1840s, bringing enough visitors to justify the construction of the twelve-storey, turreted Grand Hotel – one of the largest in the world when it opened in 1867. In this seaport, fashion and frivolity formed a thin façade beyond which lay grief and catastrophe.

  In summer, the seafront at Scarborough was filled with minstrels, bathing machines, contortionists, clowns, acrobats, and pierrots. Sitwell remembered having been fearful of Punch and Judy shows, the ‘unconscious cruelty’ in the puppet’s fate, being subject in every way to ‘the mechanical actions of that ragged hunger, the showman’.2 One of her earliest memories, she said, was of seeing ‘jockey carriages’ racing on the sand.

  The carriages were open and held two people; and instead of being driven in the ordinary way, the horses were ridden by persons dressed as jockeys. On they would rush, against the gold-freckled dancing summer seas, in airs that were like great rainbows, with their particoloured clothes, of chattering-white satin striped with all the colours of those rainbows. This was one of the first strange sights that I remember, and often, thinking of those carriages rushing past in the summer weather, I have seen them as a symbol of fleeting fashion, coming from nowhere and going nowhere.3

  These recollections are continually at play in her poetry of the 1910s and 1920s, where she often writ
es of elegant and empty-headed people at the seaside, a world where

  Daisy and Lily,

  Lazy and silly,

  Walk by the shore of the wan grassy sea.4

  This was one face of Scarborough. In autumn, the town resumed a traditional character, which brought with it a different set of impressions. On Martinmas (11 November), ploughmen and maidservants came in from the farms and walked about the market in search of work; it was also a favoured date for weddings among farm people, making processions a common sight. However, agriculture meant less to Scarborough than fishing. Each morning, the fleet returned under sail with holds full of fish to be smoked and dried. The harbour was a swaying thicket of masts and yards, the air thick with smells of fish, salt and tar, the paving stones slick with crushed herring. By December, great storms came in and the lifeboat would make foray after foray into the massive waves. The Sitwell children revered its heroic skipper John Owston, a white-bearded fisherman who taught Osbert to dance the hornpipe.5 There is doubtless a memory of him at the root of Edith Sitwell’s playful poem by that title.

  In the 1890s, the Sitwells occupied Belvoir House, a tall stone structure that backed on an alley frequented by tramps. The children watched them and listened to their conversations from the night nursery. There was Snowball, a black man who dragged his leg and sold flowers; Lousy Peter, mentally disabled and tortured by gangs of boys; and the Cat Man, who mewed to himself on the sands. There were hurdy-gurdy players with their monkeys, to whom the children threw down pennies wrapped in bits of paper. Osbert claimed that his own first words mimicked the cry of a man who pushed a barrow in the alley, ‘Rags and bones, rags and bones!’6

  Edith Sitwell saw poverty in Scarborough. She said she had a friend named Tommy, aged twelve. He sold rides on his donkey Jacko to earn some money for his mother, who sold poisonous lemonade from a booth. They lived in a street of sagging roofs and stinking drains, where drunks lurched from door to door. One day Tommy rushed past his mother, sheltered from her by the donkey. He explained to Edith, ‘The old woman’s been having one. I’ll get the stick.’ Edith asked why his mother was always angry with him, and he answered, ‘Because I’m a bastard, Miss Dish.’ Edith urged him to share her father, but this only made him more unhappy. Then, his mother, ‘breasts shaking in a kind of dreadful bacchic dance, advanced upon him … but seeing me, stopped’.7 Throughout her life, Edith Sitwell was sensitive to the desperation of the slums, but it is not certain whether this anecdote records an actual event, or, like others, serves as a parable to explain something in herself. The story grants to the child Edith, simply by virtue of rank, the opportunity to protect the defenceless. It was a notion of herself and her place in the world that she would cherish as an adult. The story also grants to the child Edith the ability to control a drunken and abusive mother.

  It was in Scarborough that the Sitwells had most contact with their extended family. Louisa Sitwell had closed up Wood End, where Edith had been born, and taken another house, Hay Brow, just outside town. She spent most of the year at Gosden in Surrey, but while in Scarborough she was close to her son and grandchildren, as well as to her sisters who congregated there. Each summer, the Londesboroughs and the Sitwells came together at Scarborough to ‘form a kind of Laocoon group on the shores of the sea, [with] my grandmothers as the serpent’. There were quiet conflicts, especially over religion. The Countess, Edith’s maternal grandmother, looked on heaven as her aristocratic birthright and so did not speak of it, whereas Lady Sitwell was conscious of having to work for salvation. The matriarchs found themselves a little at odds, ‘one lady complaining subtly of lack of breeding, the other lady complaining a little less subtly, of lack of piety’. When the Countess was cross, a common occurrence according to Edith, she would round up the household and head to church and there attempt to intimidate the Almighty with her ‘snarling prayers’. She also found ways to assert rank, and ‘by a kind of freemasonry of the fan’ indicated how little she thought of some of Louisa’s relatives.8

  Just after the turn of the century, Sir George took over the unoccupied Wood End, where Edith would now spend much of her adolescence. Lady Sitwell had bought the house in 1870. It was situated on the Crescent, overlooking on the east the gardens of Londesborough Lodge. She added a large conservatory, which gave to her house a tropical atmosphere, with exotic birds flying among creepers and flowering trees. As a boy, Sir George was enchanted by them: Peking nightingales, zebra finches and a Virginian nightingale: ‘The Whydah Birds are blue-black with silvery breasts and a touch of orange at the throat and have long sheaf-shaped tails. They are attracted by music, and when there was dancing would sometimes fly in and out of the arches to the further end of the drawing-room, passing over the heads of the dancers.’9 Renovated in 2006–8, this house has become the Woodend Creative Workspace, providing offices, conference rooms and artists’ studios. Andrew Clay, the director, reports that the builders disturbed many ghosts, among them Lady Ida’s. It appears that the various spirits now make noises in the kitchens, set off sensor lights, and show up on CCTV.10 Sadly, none of the ghosts has consented to an interview.

  In the summer and early autumn the Sitwells stayed at Renishaw Hall, the other place that shaped Edith Sitwell’s poetry. Like her brothers, she was struck by the darkness of its shuttered rooms and by its antiquity. She described it as seen by a child:

  The house is dark and forgotten and a little precious, like an unopened seventeenth century first edition in a library. I must creep away silently, for the whole of existence in that dark house has the curious, sweet, musty smell and the remoteness of such a book; the great trees outside are motionless and dark and unliving as a library lined with dusty and uncared for meanings, and the sunrays lying upon the floor smile as dimly as the chapel’s smiling cherubim. Here we cease living and the house is filled with other and darker existences; we put on their lives and go clothed in them.11

  The child’s discovery of herself hardly matters among memories of the dead, and the growth of her perceptions counts for little where the very walls are marked with ‘uncared for meanings’. Each of the Sitwell children regarded the house with fascination and sadness. It was, as Sachie put it, ‘the house of tragic memories’.12

  Renishaw Hall was thought to harbour many ghosts – even more than Wood End. Although Sir George forbade such talk, the children soon learnt about them from their mother and from the servants. According to tradition, Sitwell Sitwell had twice been seen after his death, once in the streets of Sheffield, and once at the door of Renishaw while his body was lying in the library.13 He could still be heard, from time to time, calling for his wife. The ghost of a boy who had drowned in 1724 was said to wake sleepers with a cold kiss.14 This curious image made its way into Edith’s later poetry, where the kiss from the grave is an image she returns to almost obsessively. Sacheverell thought it ‘terrifying’ merely to walk through the enormous, unused drawing room and ballroom. In the dining room, the eyes of wigged ancestors followed him from their portraits and their heads seemed to be turned in his direction wherever he stood.15 Osbert remembered that when, as a child, he asked his mother how she had slept, she would often give the answer, ‘Oh, fairly well, but the ghosts were about again.’16 Lady Ida had an easygoing interest in the macabre and kept a piece of hangman’s rope knotted at the head of her bed: ‘Nothing’s so lucky! It cost eight pounds – they’re very difficult to get now.’17

  Although the weight of the past was oppressive, Edith and her brothers found much in the house that was inspiring – above all, the five great panels of Brussels tapestry, purchased by an ancestor from the Philippe Égalité collection in London. Despite being unable to discover who designed them, Sachie believed them ‘some of the most beautiful products of human genius’.18 The tapestries in their setting evoked a rhapsody from Edith in 1929:

  The ballroom at Renishaw is immensely long, and shines like the water of a kingfisher’s lake in the deep afternoon of a dream; the windows are ta
ll as waterfalls. And the dark pomp and splendour of those tapestries which are, to my brothers and myself, more a part of our spiritual and imaginative life than anything else which is material, these hang upon the walls like some mournful and eternal music. Those processions of queens, – blackened with age, beneath their many-coloured plumaged helmets and turbans, those long and mournful red trains, those cascades of crackling pearls, echoed in the mirrors and in many pools, those elephants rearing their trunks in homage to a reed-crowned water-god sitting beside his forest-shadowed waterfalls – (the forest is deep as that in Hyperion) – these blackened nymphs, crowned with strange head-dresses of feathers, gazing at themselves in mirrors beside many fountains, (echoing the long windows of a far-off house that is like our house) – these imaginations, the unheard sound that haunts that silence, is a part of our life.19

  Renishaw had the air of a melancholy dream, but there was also a good deal of building, digging, and planting. About the time of Edith’s birth, Sir George began the landscaping project that became, according to Sachie, his ‘life work’, laying out the full plan in 1895. He was interested in lines and perspectives, and not at all in flowers. Sachie could not remember his ever admiring one and thought he rather resented them because they took attention away from garden design.20 Although Sir George’s attitude became a joke within the family, especially as Lady Ida surrounded herself with cut roses, it is interesting that in this quirky and expensive art form he was a formalist. Had he been a stranger, Edith might have applauded his sensibility. As it was, Osbert teased him by nurturing a rhododendron within sight of his study so that it produced fiery purple blossoms.21