Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  In August 1906 at Renishaw, Sir George announced that Edith’s sojourns in Germany would have to end soon. Disappointed, Helen told him that she would be staying on in Germany to continue her own training as a singer and would support herself as a music teacher, effectively giving in her notice. However, once Edith returned to Germany, Sir George acquiesced and offered to keep paying their costs for at least another four months and perhaps beyond that, if Helen were able to cover more of her own expenses as a music teacher.

  Once Sir George gave way in the autumn of 1906, Helen wrote to him:

  perhaps you will forgive me if I take a little of your time to talk about myself. Mr Griswold, my singing master, told me before I left Berlin last spring, that in three months – studying with him and taking into consideration what I had already learnt – I could learn sufficient to enable me to teach, but that if I could stay for a year or eighteen months I had a career before me as a concert singer. The first is of course useful, but the latter is something more, and means more than anyone but my sisters could realise for it would mean our having a house together. As I have no pupils yet, if I accept your very generous offer it means that I can stay at any rate for four months, and in that fourth month I might perhaps get just the very teaching I need … So if I ever do attain to being a singer, it will be owing to you, who helped me over the first rough ground.43

  Two weeks later, Helen had more to say – her thoughts going back, possibly, to February 1905 when Sir George had disputed the rent in Paris, or perhaps to some more recent quarrel:

  There is something I must tell you because I feel so dreadfully badly about it and you are so good to me. When that unpleasantness happened in Paris I did not say very nice things about you. I was very miserable and very angry, and – oh everything I said seems to rise up and hit me in the face. Of course it does not make any difference to you what I said, but it makes a big difference to me, and it isn’t good to feel as mean as I feel now. I was obliged to confess to you; it is not possible that I should let you be so good to me and pretend I had nothing to be ashamed of. You will probably think very badly of me, but not nearly so badly as I think of myself. I feel so small I hardly like even to thank you, but perhaps someday I shall be able to do something to show how grateful I am.44

  No other letters have come to light that show us so much of Helen’s personality: intensely ambitious, generous, hot-tempered, self-dramatising, honest to a fault. It is conceivable that Helen’s exchange with Sir George actually occurred in 1905, when the rent incident, if that is what she means by the ‘unpleasantness’, was still fresh in her mind. Her letters bear a day and month but no year, while his letters have not come to light. However, letters by Edith Sitwell from the autumn of 1905 are all addressed from Fräulein von Versen’s – whereas these by Helen to Sir George are from the house of Mrs A. V. Reitze in Apostel Paulus Strasse 1, in the Schöneberg district, where she and Sitwell were certainly living in late 1906.

  On 18 October 1906, Sitwell described their accommodation to her father as though it were still a novelty: ‘This is such a charming flat in one of the nicest parts of Berlin, and Mrs Reitze is the happy possessor of some wonderful Chinese embroideries. A relation of hers was in China at the time of Boxer troubles, and took these. The colours and the gold work are gorgeous. There are also some lovely pieces of work in ivory and bronze.’45 As for herself, she wrote shortly afterwards: ‘I am getting on with my voice to a wonderful extent: I don’t want to sing to anyone just yet, because I really think I shall be able to do something at singing, so does Mme. Mara, who is teaching me.’ With Christmas looming, she proposed a medieval feast of swan and noted, ‘There is a very savage swan at Foxton Dam that might well be spared.’46

  5

  BRINGING OUT

  Luckily for the swan, the Sitwells went for Christmas to Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales. This was the home of Sir George’s second cousin Elizabeth Farrer, known as ‘Cousin Bessie’ – a woman as churchified as Louisa or Florence. Edith Sitwell often visited Ingleborough and was close to Bessie’s son Reginald Farrer. A very short man with a cleft palate and a harelip disguised by a moustache, he is described by the ODNB as ‘a rare example of a Yorkshireman with an inferiority complex’. He wrote a number of indifferent plays and novels but became famous as a traveller and a horticulturalist. His book My Rock Garden (1907) was popular for many years. Once, he loaded a shotgun with seeds gathered in his travels and, from a boat, blasted them into a cliff near his home, with the result that Alpine plants bloomed there.

  Farrer had a sceptical turn of mind and disappointed Lady Sitwell, Florence, and his mother by his unbelief. However, their prayers for him were eventually answered in a way that may prove God has a sense of humour: ‘In 1903 Farrer went on his first long journey, reaching Peking, briefly visiting Korea, and spending about eight months in Japan, where he had an affair with a geisha girl and his drift to vegetarianism was hastened by the discovery that he had eaten his pet kitten, served as fricassée of chicken.’1 In time, he became a Buddhist; this horrified most of the family, but Sir George found it entertaining.2 In 1913, Reginald Farrer stood for Parliament in Kent but disbursed the thousand pounds his father gave him for his campaign on the purchase of bulbs.3 On his last journey in 1920, he caught diphtheria and died at the age of forty in a hut in northern Burma, where his gravestone bears the inscription, ‘He died for love and duty in search of rare plants.’4

  A pleasant Christmas with Reginald Farrer probably gave Sitwell a brief respite from a new round of troubles with Lady Ida. For most of the past few years, Sitwell had successfully interposed the North Sea and a considerable landmass between herself and her mother. Sir George always preferred to save money, but he knew that his daughter was prospering in Berlin, and he could be talked into a degree of indulgence. Lady Ida wanted to rein her in, yet did not want to take time away from her own friends to be with her daughter. From Lady Ida’s perspective, this period of finishing was turning into a way of life.

  In mid-November 1906, it was learnt that Lady Ida needed surgery, so Edith dutifully volunteered to make an early return to England. Writing to Sir George, Lady Ida dismissed the suggestion: ‘That tiresome Edith is fussing, she is such a worry, suggests coming home all sorts of nonsense, if she was worried about me she ought not to have gone abroad when she did.’ Lady Ida wrote that she was going from Londesborough to Scarborough, where she would need bedrest. She was expecting a friend to visit and asked Sir George to delay his and Edith’s return by a few days: ‘I hope darling you won’t think I don’t want you, it will be [illegible] having you back. I shall have a miserable winter as am to do nothing.’5

  During that ‘miserable winter’, Lady Ida appears to have insisted upon Edith’s ‘coming out’, but when Edith refused to do it on her mother’s terms, a serious quarrel ensued. On 16 May 1907, Lady Ida wrote to Sir George as ‘My darling Duddy’: ‘Edith is anxious to stay with Miss Lane, I think she might do so, I don’t know her, I should think it would be all right. So cold here.’6 Her handwriting is at times unreadable, and her style in letters is to jump suddenly from thought to thought with just a peppering of commas. In the following week, she wrote: ‘I am so glad you are enjoying yourself. However I do feel it very very much the way you & your Mother allow Edith to treat me, she has never been near my Mother, I think it very unkind, you would feel the same if she did it to your Mother.’ At the bottom of the page for three lines the handwriting degenerates; it seems that Lady Ida is taking comfort in ‘the two darling boys’. On the next page her outburst continues: ‘We can never really be happy together when you allow it as it makes me very very bitter, however I won’t say any more … Is Edith coming home? Or what are you & Lady Sitwell arranging about her. I should simply love an umbrella handle it is so kind of you thinking of me.’7

  It seems that Edith refused to be ‘brought out’ by the autocratic dowager. This letter reveals some of what Edith faced in the early months of 1907 – Lady Ida
sick, depressed, probably drunk, and lashing out. Sir George and Lady Sitwell had decided to do their best for Edith and get her away from Lady Ida. Where Lady Sitwell was concerned, the solution to any significant problem usually had an ecclesiastical dimension. Accordingly, Edith was sent to Adela Lane, a clergyman’s widow who lived in Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. Her house was near Ashridge, the estate of the Earls of Brownlow to whom the Lanes were related. She was bringing out her daughter Constance that year, so Sir George hired her to bring out Edith as well.

  Constance Lane, known as ‘Cooie’, was a talented young woman, about a year younger than Sitwell.8 She became a professional artist, and collaborated on some frescoes with her friend Dora Carrington. In a memoir published sixty years after her death, she describes Edith Sitwell’s arrival at her home around the end of May 1907:

  I went to meet her at Berkhamsted station, and driving up the hill to the common in a one-horse fly Edith said, ‘Are you keen on poetry?’ A tall slender figure, stepping on long narrow feet she had a curiously distinguished and enigmatic air. She wore a floppy hat and pale suede gloves. Soon after her arrival she brought sheets of music down to our drawing room and played, exceedingly well, Chopin, Brahms and Debussy. It was early summer and we used to wander about the fields and watch the wind brushing across the tops of the young barley, and as it whitened the field in waves Edith said, ‘It’s as if these are all people who will come into one’s life.’9

  Sitwell spent much of that summer with Constance Lane, who sketched her in her studio, and with Lane’s cousin, also, somewhat confusingly, named Constance; her last name was Talbot and she was generally called ‘Contie’. She lived at nearby Marchmont House and often came to visit in a dog cart. Sitwell stayed several times subsequently at Marchmont House, and Talbot stayed several times with the Sitwells. She eventually married one of their distant relatives. Under her married name, Constance Sitwell, she became a memoirist and travel writer. By the 1940s, Edith Sitwell felt she was ‘muscling in’ on the family’s fame and that many of her reminiscences were just nasty.10 However, despite an undercurrent of rivalry, she found her ‘perfectly charming’ when they were nineteen.11

  Sir George set up the Lane family for the London season in a house at 6 Sloane Court next door to that of Lord Monteagle. His son Tom Spring-Rice (later third Baron Monteagle) was a diplomat and an expert pianist. He often visited in the evenings and sometimes played Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Handel for them. Reginald Farrer also came by and entertained them with what Constance Lane called his ‘curious humour’. Another family that lived near by – all good-looking and in Constance’s term ‘Londony’ – were baffled by Sitwell: ‘Why does she always read Swinburne? Is she in love?’ they asked.12

  Adela Lane, ‘a mixture of nervousness and ready wit’, held dinner parties for Edith and Constance. They dressed in long full dresses, done up at the back – Adela in black, Constance in pink, and Edith in pale green or white. Edith attended a number of balls, including, as she told her father, one given by a woman named Bowens, whose daughter was spooked beyond the tolerance even of a Sitwell: ‘The daughter is pretty, but is marred by the attraction she has for ghosts!!! Whatever house she lives in, she is followed by ghosts, and quite prosaic people see them.’ Sitwell even confessed to enjoying a garden party held by the Bishop of Southwark, whose family she liked because of their ‘huge sense of humour’. Lady Ida arranged for Edith to attend court on 5 July, though Edith was ‘not the least bit keen on it’.13 She was presented by a ‘Mrs Tom Gurney’,14 apparently a Scarborough friend of Lady Ida’s.

  For Edith Sitwell, entering society was a bit like learning German: she memorised a few declensions and then accepted defeat. She told Sir George: ‘I am studying the heavy art of light conversation. I think the best plan is to try and look terribly interested in everything that is being said to one, and then the other person goes on talking.’15 She used the same strategy for dealing with bores for the next six decades. At Lord’s, Sitwell walked about dreamily, oblivious to the cricket, with a white feather boa flapping in the wind.16

  Sitwell teased Constance Lane as being interested only in ploughed fields and porridge, but begged her to do impressions of cockney accents. Lane wrote:

  We were serious pleasure seekers, Edith and I, Edith reading poetry, Swinburne, Verlaine and Baudelaire, and practising Brahms, and I going to art school in Chelsea … Sometimes one of our relations gave a party to which we went, Edith dressed in white brocade with golden lily woven in it. She generally looked aloof and amused. It might be a musical party at which the fellow guests were not as serious about the music as we could have wished – ‘Philistines,’ Edith called them; I suppose they were.

  Lane understood Sitwell fairly deeply: ‘There was a softness and poignant sympathy in her as well as the strong personal prejudice that sharpened her angle of vision.’17

  Lane’s cousin Talbot wrote about some of the same things in her diary with a good deal less sympathy:

  Later, I went for tea at the Lanes, where Edith Sitwell is staying; she plays the piano all day, very well too, very literary and artistic, of course, but always laughing at the uneducated in her special fashion, – rather boring. The next day was Sunday. A London Sunday … We went to Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, and heard Canon Beeching, who slanged the decadent sort of Swinburne poetry, and this I passed on to Edith without any softening at luncheon, and she was rather angry over it. But later she and I went to St. Paul’s, and heard a sermon about peace and the serious way Christians ought to look on the conference going on at the Hague. It was lovely sitting under the Dome, when thousands of voices sang ‘Oh, happy band of pilgrims’.18

  Back in Hemel Hempstead, there were debates about poetry and religion:

  The protégée, Edith Sitwell, was there – a fine specimen, railing and raging against the smart ‘fast’ set, in the heated middle of which she seems to have passed her days. It poured in torrents the whole afternoon. I sat in the window in the schoolroom, and Cooie painted the blue forget-me-knots [sic], and the blue distance, and Miss Sitwell raved over the Greenery-Yellerys, and kept declaiming Swinburne at us. We replied as staunch Chestertonians, and tried to advance our theory that it is not the beautiful and the wonderful we have to like, but the stupid, the unlovely, and the squalid; that Swinburne and his like did not look at life as a whole, but divided poetry from mankind, instead of having it as a help. We had great and fascinating arguments – very heated and exhilarating.19

  Sitwell’s coming-out had its low moments. There are at least two versions of the story of her biggest disaster. In one she refers to a time when she was ‘seventeen’. Her Aunt Grace, the Countess of Londesborough, held a dinner and carefully seated Edith beside an eligible baronet. Edith talked about Brahms, he complained, and she was sent packing.20 A more plausible version of the story is Osbert’s; he places it c.1908. At a relative’s, presumably the Londesboroughs’, Edith was seated next to the ageing politician and huntsman, Lord Chaplin, whose family had once owned Blankney. She asked whether he preferred Bach to Mozart and was hastily ‘withdrawn from circulation’.21

  Cooie Lane stayed with Louisa Sitwell in London in mid-February 1908, presumably as Edith’s guest. Her mother, Adela Lane, wrote to express thanks and to comment on Edith:

  Last year, after Edith had been with us, I intended – but somehow it never came off – to write to tell you how very glad we were to have had her with us & how really fond of her we became. She has such a good heart & she has noble impulses & a sweet disposition. She was exceedingly nice to me in all ways & very patient under quite a plethora of good advice wch I fear I poured upon her. I feel her intense love of music makes life difficult for her, for it seems to make her unable to really care for anything else & in a way to unsettle her. My girl has rather a healthy way of looking at things & being about Edith’s age can sometimes help her to feel young & amused, wch I think is good for Edith. But I am afraid there will be too much music!22
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  The Sitwells admired musicians – even Lady Ida conducted a correspondence with the singer and composer Lawrence Kellie between 1898 and 1910.23 Although Sir George pressed Edith to play the cello, he was certainly aware of her talent at the keyboard and years later lamented: ‘Such a mistake that Edith gave up her music; at one time she had quite a pretty touch on the pianoforte.’24 By then, of course, she was a knuckledusting modernist poet, and the days of her passion for the keyboard may have seemed idyllic to him. Edith was discouraged from playing, not because the Sitwells and the Denisons despised music, but because young women of her class did not normally pursue a profession. Earning a living was best left to those who had no money. There was also the memory of Mr Tubby: ‘One of the most prolific causes of scoliosis in girls is prolonged piano-practice on the ordinary pattern of music-stool.’25 Thus were the prejudices of class fortified by science.

  While her family nattered about her music, Sitwell lived a quiet and respectable life, surrounded by elderly aunts and cousins and a horde of clerics. In late June 1908, for example, writing from Sloane Gardens, she reported to Florence that she had enjoyed the Lambeth Palace garden party ‘hugely’, and that ‘Cousin Edie Davidson’ (wife of the Archbishop) was anxious to know about Lady Sitwell’s health. The garden itself was ‘positively soaked with memories’. Modern clothing seemed wrong for the Palace, but the bishops who had assembled that month for the immense Pan-Anglican Congress seemed to get it right, especially the blacks and the Japanese. She attended the Chelsea and the Winchester historical pageants and particularly enjoyed the Winchester: ‘Queen Elizabeth didn’t come into it, which was such a boon. I am tired of the good lady, and I don’t care about her gowns.’ She changed her mind, as she later wrote two books about the Virgin Queen, even taking up her style of dress. Sitwell went to the Academy with Constance Lane where she spotted the popular painter Marcus Stone, who specialised in romantic and sentimental scenes: ‘I didn’t shoot him, but I hadn’t thought of bringing a gun.’26 On the whole, it seems a tame existence enlivened chiefly by a tongue growing ever sharper.