In early September 1908, Sir George, an unlikely master of revels, threw a twenty-first birthday party for his daughter at Renishaw. Cars were hired to ferry the thirty house-guests to the St Leger Stakes at Doncaster and, for those who did not trust the new technology, special trains were laid on. There was an invasion of chefs, footmen, and other temporary additions to the staff. Silver plate, unused for many years, was brought out of the bank. Hired for a ten-day engagement, a blue-uniformed band of Hungarian Hussars played at meals. Renishaw Hall had just one bathroom; Osbert recalls the maids and footmen labouring on the stairs with tin baths, hip baths, and cans of hot water. Although the party was in honour of Edith, there were few young guests apart from Veronica Codrington and a solitary young man, an American courting one of Edith’s cousins. Lady Ida had a taste for hubbub in almost any form, and even Sir George, who hated parties and horse races, seems to have had a moderately good time.27 Disliking the races, Edith turned her back to them.28
By 1908 and 1909 Lady Ida was becoming more and more unreasonable. Although Edith spent as much time as possible abroad, Osbert says that she was more often with their parents than was he or Sachie, and so bore the brunt of the quarrels. A wedge had been driven between Sir George and Lady Ida, who believed that he and his mother were encouraging Edith in her rebellion. Moreover, she had seriously outspent her income and Sir George was unwilling to make up the difference. ‘I never hear from Father,’ she wrote to Osbert in October 1908. ‘I suppose he is cross with me. He generally is.’29
The less Lady Ida had to do, the more she spent, gave, or gambled away. Edith’s friends were invited to Renishaw and to Italy, in order to create an air of vitality and to surround Lady Ida with pleasant people who would not take advantage of her. Both Lane and Talbot came away with strong physical impressions of the Sitwells’ world. Lane wrote:
When I went to stay at Renishaw I saw the background that explained [Edith]. The house itself, long, battlemented and brooding, the beautiful terraced garden sloping to the valley below, the Italian fountains and terraces made a strong contrast to its setting, a coal-mining country with blast furnaces that flared up at night. The house was haunted. Inside, it had a solemn luxury about it, but the great ballroom was full of light and held it like a bubble between the high ceiling and the polished parquet floor. Large pieces of Italian and French furniture were beautifully placed in that room. I remember their shadows reflected in the parquet floor; a fine Sargent family group hung up at one end. Edith, in white, swaying slightly, played sometimes Scarlatti and Corelli (to please me), or Brahms and Debussy to please herself, the Indian queens and Roman captains of the tapestries seeming part of the music.30
On one of her visits, Talbot engaged Lady Ida:
I remember feeling rather awkward and out-of-place in Lady Ida’s boudoir, which had a mixed smell of cigarettes and the tube-roses [sic] which she always had there; it was full of novels, magazines, and large photographs of women in Edwardian evening dress, their hair piled on the top of their heads and wearing tiaras, which stood about on little tables in silver photograph frames, as was the fashion then. A bridge table was set out ready for players, and one always felt boredom was just round the corner with her; the day had to be filled up as best it could with bridge, talking, meals, and jokes which were repeated many times in her lazy, rather random fashion. She has an air of great distinction with her height and small dark head held high. She used to wear dark tweeds in those days, with a silk handkerchief knotted round her neck, gypsy-fashion.31
Easily bored himself, Sir George was always casting about for worthy projects, and he was about to do something startling. Around the beginning of October 1909 he was riding in a car from Florence to Siena when the driver took the wrong road. The car broke down beneath the walls of the Castello di Montegufoni. Sir George ambled about in the company of two friends, watching the peasants treading grapes, and inspecting the ancient statues that had been brought there from Greece. He fell in love with the place, writing to Osbert soon afterwards: ‘You will be interested to hear that I am buying in your name the Castle of Acciaiuoli (pronounced Accheeyawly) between Florence and Siena … The castle is split up between many poor families, and has an air of forlorn grandeur … There is a great tower, a picture-gallery with frescoed portraits of the owners, from a very early period, and a chapel full of relics of the Saints … We shall be able to grow our own fruit, wine, oil – even champagne!’32 There was something wild, almost visionary, in the purchase of the castello. He saw a new enterprise lying before him – the restoration of a great piece of a lost world and the building of a garden. Perhaps there was a glint in his eye.
6
BECOMING A POET
According to Osbert, the clergymen who sprang up around Lady Sitwell like ‘inedible fungi’ thought there was something wicked in his sister’s taste for Swinburne. According to Edith herself, her grandmother, under the advice of a Reverend Losey, burnt her copy of the poems. In retaliation, Edith rose early on a September morning and boarded the boat that connected Bournemouth and Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. She took with her a disapproving lady’s maid of about thirty whose face turned green during the crossing. They went to the churchyard at Bonchurch, where, after an argument with the sexton, Sitwell poured a jug of milk and placed bay leaves, honeycomb and red roses on Swinburne’s grave. They returned to Bournemouth, where, according to Osbert, ‘An appalling storm broke and long raged round her head, alternating with calm patches of religious resignation.’1
As usual, Sitwell herself assigned this episode to her seventeenth year2 – which would be September 1904 when she was actually in Paris. Moreover, Lady Sitwell was living mainly in Surrey until 23 January 1907, when she gave up Gosden House.3 It was only later that she made her home in Bournemouth. However, the really awkward point is that Swinburne did not actually occupy his grave until 15 April 1909. The most likely date, then, is September 1909, when Edith Sitwell was twenty-two. In the preceding months there was a controversy over whether the rector of Bonchurch had defied Swinburne’s wishes by reading parts of the Anglican service at his burial. Though Christian herself, Sitwell was providing classical obsequies for the poet who wrote so warily of the ‘pale Galilean’. Half a century later she wrote in her selection of his work: ‘It is my firm belief that Swinburne, for all his defiance, for all his raging blasphemies, was born a believer. It was his tragedy that he dreamed mankind had been abandoned.’4
As with many of Sitwell’s stories of her youth, the visit to Bonchurch may be invented or embellished as part of a personal myth. Swinburne was at the foundation of her sense of poetry and of a poetic vocation. In her introduction to his poems she quotes his remarks on Blake: ‘Now on his own ground, no man was ever more sane or more reverent. His outcries on various matters of art or morals were in effect the mere expression, not of reasonable dissent, but of violent belief … Indifference was impossible to him.’5 She says that this might have served as Swinburne’s own epitaph, but she was probably thinking of herself.
Some of Sitwell’s behaviour was like another generation’s Beatlemania. She said that in her ‘adolescence’ she had a passion for Yeats: ‘I once left red roses on his doorstep. I ran away quickly before anyone opened the door but I think he knew who had left them.’6 If he could guess who had left the roses, then she had done things like it before. Twenty years on, she would count Yeats among her friends, and his extravagant behaviour would cause mild embarrassment to her.
Sitwell’s real introduction to the artistic and literary scene in London came through her ‘cousin-by-marriage’ Elsie Swinton, née Ebsworth (1874–1966), who had a celebrated career as a singer beginning in 1906 but lasting only about a decade when her husband and mother pressured her to retire.7 She had been brought up in St Petersburg and later wrote vividly about the Russia she had known as a child. She was an attractive and charismatic woman, of whom Sitwell wrote: ‘Elsie Swinton turned all days to glamour: in her presence the thought of dul
lness could not exist: all the lights and colours and excitement of summer entered a room with her.’8 Elsie was the subject of one of the most famous of John Singer Sargent’s portraits, and it was she who recommended him to Sir George for the commission of his family portrait. Sitwell described the Swintons:
Elsie was married to my father’s first cousin, George Swinton, a member of one of the most ancient untitled Scottish families, a magnificent looking being, immensely tall, and with a 15th century type of face. He was Lion King of Arms, and looked as if he should be wearing, always, Herald’s costume. George was interested in things, Elsie in vital people, in life. She took no interest in things, and regarded dull people as furniture. There they were in a room, and were, perhaps, necessary … she did as much to awaken my mind as anyone in my youth. She introduced me to Dostoievsky, to Balzac, and to Russian Songs.9
In such a passage, Sitwell is glossing over trouble in Elsie’s life. On 30 April 1895, she had married Captain George Swinton; the eight-year-old Sitwell was a bridesmaid.10 Though pleasant and handsome, Captain Swinton was fifteen years older than Elsie. He shared Sir George Sitwell’s fascination with genealogy and was a talented painter; otherwise, he had little to do after retiring from the army and lived off Elsie’s rich family. When she became a professional singer in 1906, it reinforced the impression that she was the provider and he the dependent spouse. He did become an important figure in the London County Council, and also worked with Lutyens on the design of the new imperial capital in Delhi, but he was generally outshone by his wife.11
The passion of Elsie’s life was the British Impressionist painter Walter Sickert. In February 1905, Sickert took part in a retrospective of the works of his teacher James McNeill Whistler. Rodin made the trip to London to open the exhibition, and a large reception was held for him by Mrs Mary Hunter, a flamboyant hostess who was the model for another of Sargent’s best-known portraits; she was also a distant cousin of the Sitwells. Among those who performed at the reception was Elsie Swinton; her mezzo-soprano rendition of Russian songs caught Sickert’s attention: ‘I must know that superb Russian,’ he said to Mary Hunter. Though not actually Russian, Elsie Swinton’s mastery of the language was such that once, when she forgot the words to a song, she merely listed with great emphasis what she expected to eat at supper – to the amusement of one Russian speaker in the audience. She sat for Sickert on many occasions and a relationship developed.12 Their biographers are not certain whether it was a sexual affair, though it is likely. Sickert got on well with George Swinton and their children, often visiting their house in Pont Street. When Elsie said she was prepared to leave her husband for him, Sickert asked what George had done to deserve such treatment.13
Edith Sitwell described her introduction to Sickert: ‘When Elsie took me to his studio, I was an unimaginably shy young girl. Elsie said to him “This woman admires your La Vecchia” (a picture being shown at that time in a London gallery). “Well, then, she must be a very intelligent woman, or else she is mad. Which are you?” turning on me suddenly. I was almost too awed to reply. “Mad” I said. Enchanted by this answer, he gave me a drawing of the Bedford Music Hall.’14
There are several versions of this story, some set in Elsie’s house, some in Sickert’s studio. As ever, Sitwell says that it occurred when she was seventeen. That date, 1904, is apparently confirmed by her saying that Sickert (1860–1942) was forty-four at the time, but he was mainly living in Dieppe until 1905.15 Osbert recalls that he was on holiday from Eton when Edith acquired the picture and brought it to Renishaw. Since he first went to the school in autumn 1905,16 the meeting with Sickert could not have happened before the summer of 1906. In the last version of Taken Care Of, Sitwell drops the title La Vecchia and has Elsie say merely, ‘This woman admires your pictures.’17 Presumably between drafts she had checked and discovered that La Vecchia was not exhibited until the summer of 1907.18 She evidently wanted to continue to portray her seventeenth year as the time of her rebellions and illuminations, so made the necessary adjustments.
Sickert’s gift did not go down well in Bournemouth. Edith wrote to Osbert: ‘I want you to see the drawing Mr. Sickert has given me … Aunt Floss is such a fool about it. She doesn’t think it “pretty”. And she doesn’t think it quite “Right” to draw four women watching at a music-hall. Church of England Saints are the only really suitable subjects for art. She says one ought not to have any character or individuality. It is the devil trying to get hold of one.’19 Perhaps Florence had heard that the Byronic Sickert had got hold of Elsie Swinton. Like his sister, Osbert became devoted to Sickert, eventually editing a volume of his essays and writing about their long friendship in Left Hand, Right Hand!.
Elsie Swinton belonged to a professional community somewhat different from Sickert’s although they overlapped. At her house, Edith Sitwell met singers, musicians, composers, and writers. From the late 1890s Gabriel Fauré often visited, and he conducted an effusive correspondence with Swinton, describing himself, with a pun on his name, as her ‘fallen archangel’. Among the other composers who visited were Ethel Smyth (Mary Hunter’s sister), Maude Valérie White, Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott, and Roger Quilter. The harpsichordist Violet Gordon Woodhouse and the tenor Gervase Elwes were both guests, as were George Moore and Max Beerbohm. One night in early 1913, with the composer Karol Szymanowski listening, Sergei Prokofiev and Arthur Rubinstein played the piano, Paul Kochanski performed on the violin, and Ruth Draper acted out one of her monologues, while Igor Stravinsky lay on the hearthrug.20
We cannot know precisely whom Sitwell met through Elsie Swinton or when the introductions occurred, but she did meet some of these people, and she seems to have been taken seriously by Swinton’s circle. For example, Roger Quilter.
A writer of songs and stage musicals, he was, with Grainger and Scott, a member of the Frankfurt Group of composers.21 He was working on an opera, apparently never performed, based on a Chinese story in which the emperor is obliged to have a woman strangled to prevent an uprising among his troops. In September 1910, Sitwell wrote to Quilter from Ingleborough, where she and Reginald Farrer had been discussing A Lute of Jade (L. Cranmer-Byng’s anthology of classical Chinese poetry), and the work of Lafcadio Hearn, a translator and scholar of Oriental literature. She passed on Farrer’s observations on the poems from which the story of the strangling is drawn. Quilter later showed her a draft of his opera, and on 16 May 1911 she wrote a more assured letter, suggesting revisions and even proposing some poetic images to Quilter:
I have just been seized with an expression to describe the peach-blossoms; it is rather unmeaning, but I have never, from being a child, seen very delicate flowers, without thinking of it: ‘like blown spray from the fountain of dreams’. I suppose peach-blossoms would be very faint-coloured by moon-light. What a bore it is that everyone reads Sappho, for how lovely it would be if you could use ‘And round about, the breeze murmurs cool through apple-branches, and sleep flows down upon us in the rustling leaves.’ One of the most divinely beautiful things in the world, and I think the feeling would be just right for your opera.
Sitwell was at this time reading Henry Wharton’s very popular Sappho (1885), containing a biography and translations by himself and other hands. She has improved Wharton’s version of Fragment 4, substituting ‘branches’ for ‘boughs’, ‘sleep’ for ‘slumber’, and ‘rustling’ for ‘quivering’.22 Probably based on another translation by Palgrave also included in the book, these choices pull the English towards common speech. She goes on to remark to Quilter how difficult it must be to keep the words subdued enough for music: ‘it is a great temptation to over-elaborate’ and, rather revealingly, she says that she envies him for having this subject to write about.
Elsie Swinton’s career, and her role in Sitwell’s life, ended around the beginning of the First World War as rumours of another affair reached her mother and husband. It was said that she was sleeping with her accompanist, Hamilton Harty, later famous as a conductor and c
omposer. Swinton and her husband left London, and she eventually became a follower of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, dedicating her life to mysticism and good works.23 However, between 1907 and 1914 her influence on Edith Sitwell was pivotal. She was an example of a woman who defied expectation and became a serious artist.
Walter Sickert was an enormously influential figure, who in 1910 urged artists ‘to avoid the drawing-room and stick to the kitchen’.24 The student of Whistler, he was first famous for his music-hall drawings, which reflect the influence of Degas. His gift to Sitwell was from this series which he revived after his return to England.25 He had worked for a time on paintings of Venetian prostitutes, including nudes and seminudes in a seedy bedroom. Back in London (as Sitwell came to know him), his career took a new turn with his Camden Town paintings of fleshy naked women lying on iron bedsteads with clothed male figures near by. Several bear the title The Camden Town Murder, of which the best known portrays a man sitting in despair on the edge of the bed with the corpse of a woman behind him. Patricia Cornwell used the paintings as evidence that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Her argument involved a failed hunt for DNA samples on stamps and envelopes, and an assumption that an artistic interest in violence indicates guilt. Muriel Spark once remarked of this kind of argument, ‘There’s a lot of people think they can take my books and analyse me from them. On that principle Agatha Christie would be a serial killer.’26 Sitwell shared Sickert’s interest in the Ripper murders. Many years later, she also went to look at 10 Rillington Place where the serial killer John Christie committed his crimes and decided that it must be haunted.27
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