Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  The dead were everywhere that year, and the sudden ramping-up of concern about spirits reflects that anxiety. Osbert was back at the front from August 1915, and took part in the Battle of Loos, which began on 25 September. This especially tragic battle – it came very close to a war-ending breakthrough – produced sixty thousand casualties, most on the first day.35 Among the dead were the poet Charles Sorley, Rudyard Kipling’s son John, and Fergus Bowes-Lyon, brother of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen Consort. When the fighting began, Osbert’s battalion was held in reserve, but was eventually called forward to occupy a portion of the former German front line, coming under heavy fire as the Germans tried to take it back.36 On the first day of the battle, Osbert spoke to an old friend from Eton, Peter Lycett Green, who within a few hours took a wound that cost him his leg. Another friend, Ivo Charteris, the younger brother of Lady Cynthia Asquith, was killed in action in the aftermath of the main battle.37 In total, Osbert spent about ten months at or near the trenches, during which time he saw many men shot. As Philip Ziegler observes, there were at least a dozen occasions when Osbert might himself have been killed.

  Upon the death of another officer, he was promoted acting captain and given a company to command. Enlisted men liked him for his courage and intelligence, and because he made sure they were well fed. At Christmas he paid for them to have a good turkey dinner. An infected cut sent him back to England in May 1916. He was hospitalised and underwent a further convalescence in Renishaw before returning to the regiment in the late summer. To Edith’s relief, he was not sent back to the Front and instead spent much of the rest of the war in London. When diagnosed with a heart ailment in 1943, he wondered whether the doctors had known about it during the First World War, since after the summer of 1916 his requests for service abroad were consistently refused.38 It is just as likely that, because of the scandal, his superiors decided that doubts about his character outweighed his record of service.

  For many years, the poetry of the Great War was seen as a closed shop – women need not apply. Indeed, the one woman poet most likely to be remembered earned her reputation the hard way. Jesse Pope, a regular contributor of patriotic verse to the Daily Mail and author of Jesse Pope’s War Poems (1915), was blasted in some of Wilfred Owen’s best-known lines:

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –

  My friend you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  Soldier poets in the second half of the war often insisted that civilians had no idea what was being suffered in the trenches. Siegfried Sassoon could imagine in ‘Blighters’ a tank rolling into a music hall, where ‘prancing ranks / Of harlots shrill the chorus’. The anger against the Home Front was, partly, an anger against women as the stupid accomplices of the politicians, bishops, and journalists who sent young men to their deaths. In the face of such rage, it was difficult for women poets to be taken seriously when they wrote about the war. Until the 1990s, women poets of the First World War were overlooked, something feminist scholars and anthologists have tried to set right.39

  Edith Sitwell knew that the entertainments of civilian life could offer a terrible insult to the men in uniform. Her poem ‘The Dancers’ was written ‘During a great battle, 1916’ – that is, the Battle of the Somme, which stretched from 1 July – the worst day in the history of the British Expeditionary Force with fifty-seven thousand dead, wounded, and missing – into November, when the number reached 420,000:

  The floors are slippery with blood:

  The world gyrates too. God is good

  That while His wind blows out the light

  For those who hourly die for us –

  We still can dance, each night.

  The music has grown numb with death –

  But we will suck their dying breath,

  The whispered name they breathed to chance,

  To swell our music, make it loud

  That we may dance, – may dance.

  We are the dull blind carrion-fly

  That dance and batten. Though God die

  Mad from the horror of the light –

  The light is mad, too, flecked with blood, –

  We dance, we dance, each night.40

  Through Osbert, Edith met many soldier poets. Among the first was Edward Wyndham Tennant, known as ‘Bimbo’. Eldest brother of the aesthete Stephen Tennant (a bright young thing and favoured subject of Cecil Beaton), Bimbo Tennant was Osbert’s closest friend and a first cousin of Ivo Charteris, with whom he joined the Grenadiers. He was killed in action in September 1916, leaving behind a number of poems that showed promise. His death came as a blow to the Sitwells and their circle, especially to Osbert for whom it was one of the most terrible events of his life.

  In June 1916, Edith and Osbert put out a twenty-eight-page volume of verses, which took its title from one of Osbert’s contributions, ‘Twentieth Century Harlequinade’. Watching the slaughter in France, Osbert had begun to think of himself as a poet. Never in Edith’s or Sachie’s league, Osbert was competent in verse but discovered in time that his greater talent lay in prose. In 1915 and 1916 he wrote a number of satires against the war, which capture the sense of waste and disgust to which his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen gave a finer voice. Edith’s contributions to Twentieth Century Harlequinade are considerably more important than her brother’s. She was, however, uncertain how the book would be received, writing to Richard Jennings: ‘I am trembling with fright: I am sure that the poem called “The Spider” will infuriate everyone. When I brought out my last book, an old lady said to me: she hoped I wouldn’t mind, but would I tell her, was it meant to be Poetry?’41 ‘The Spider’ was another horror: in an unspecified way, a father forces his will on his son, just as a spider ropes a fly. The son turns into a drunkard and his personality is erased. Whether an allegory of Osbert and Sir George, or of the conflict of generations that supposedly produced the war, the poem had the potential to make someone angry. Sir George was soon complaining, ‘Edith’s poems make me look ridiculous!’42

  Edith had been mulling over one poem in the volume for at least a year. She had described ‘The Fair’ to Joan Wake as ‘bosh’ since the subject did not possess her.43 Nevertheless, she could not walk away from it easily; she revised and renamed it ‘Clowns’ Houses’. A departure from the ‘horrors’, it was the most important of all her early works. Here she discovered the kinds of images – fragmented, synaesthetic, fantastical, macabre, jangling – that became her trademark in the 1920s:

  Beneath the flat and paper sky,

  The sun, a demon’s eye,

  Glowed through the air, that mask of glass;

  All wand’ring sounds that pass

  Seemed out of tune, as if the light

  Were fiddle-strings pulled tight.

  The market square with spire and bell

  Clanged out the hour in Hell […]44

  Over the next seven or eight years Edith Sitwell would enlarge on such images in dozens of poems. The culmination of that impulse was the sequence Façade (1922), which incorporates ‘Clowns’ Houses’ and had a much longer genesis than is commonly understood. As early as 1914, she had struck upon one of the central themes of her life’s work: that the self we know is a mask or puppet, and that our normal reality is a false floor over hell:

  Then underneath the veilèd eyes

  Of houses, darkness lies.

  Tall houses; like a hopeless prayer

  They cleave the sly dumb air;

  Blind are those houses, paper-thin;

  Old shadows hid therein

  With sly and crazy movements creep

  Like marionettes, and weep.

  It is easy and useful to think of Si
twell’s career as dividing into an early satiric phase and a later visionary one. However, most of her early satires are visionary in the manner of Pope’s Dunciad, which in its last lines speaks of the triumph of Dulness as ‘Universal Darkness buries all’. She was propounding a vision of hell as camouflaged by the accustomed surfaces of life, describing how Time the Clown conjures

  … star-bright masks for youth to wear,

  Lest any dream that fare

  – Bright pilgrim – past our ken, should see

  Hints of Reality.

  The poet’s work, to her mind, was to unsettle or subvert the lethal normalcy of our perceptions and to clear a path for such ‘hints’. She said a few years later that a poet must ‘show this dwindling world in all its triviality. He can speak of nobility, also, but he would not be doing his duty if he spoke only of nobility. He must show how, through fear of life, some souls have become part of the stocks and stones.’45

  Edith Sitwell was becoming increasingly well known to artists and poets, who often gathered at Oscar Wilde’s old haunt in the Café Royal and at the Eiffel Tower – a restaurant at 1 Percy Street decorated by Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist murals. By 1915, she was sought out by artists and portrait painters. She sat to the ebullient Nina Hamnett several times, most famously for a portrait, now lost, in which she was given ‘kaleidoscopic breasts’.46 She admired Hamnett’s free spirit and identified with her open-handedness: ‘If she had money she invited her friends to share it with her. If she had no money she had no food, unless friends were equally generous towards her.’47

  Nina Hamnett’s portrait of Edith Sitwell, 1915

  Sitwell sat to Roger Fry on a number of occasions, perhaps with Nina Hamnett in attendance,48 but only two portraits survive. For one of these Sitwell wore a green evening dress; after sitting to him in the mornings, she and Fry, whose long grey hair floated out from under a sombrero, walked through Fitzroy Square from his studio to his house for lunch. The local children asked, ‘perhaps not unnaturally’, whether their mothers knew they were out. Sitwell found Fry delightful but absent-minded. She says that once when they went for lunch he could not find his slippers – ‘a game of hunt-the-slipper ensued’. A crash interrupted them and a hoarse voice announcing, ‘“Coal, sir!” “Put it my good man,” said Mr. Fry, whirling round and round like a kitten chasing its tail, losing his spectacles, and speaking in a voice weak from fatigue – “Oh, well, put it on the bed.” At this point I found the slippers in the milk-jug and the fun stopped.’49

  Cecil Beaton’s sketch of the three Sitwells in a characteristic mock-gothic pose, c.1931

  Sitwell adopted Walter Sickert’s practice of ‘at homes’. On Saturdays she held a literary gathering, and on Wednesdays Helen held one for musicians. The Saturdays were by far the more important. They had begun by 1916 and continued until about 1932. In the dinginess of Pembridge Mansions, Sitwell found herself presiding over one of the most important literary salons of the time. William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Robert Graves, Gertrude Stein, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, and dozens of others made the long ascent to her flat, where they read poems and stories, exchanged compliments and insults, sipped strong tea, and ate halfpenny buns. The crowds that gathered in the flat were sometimes ill-assorted; apart from the writers, musicians and artists, there were Londesborough relatives, who regarded the other guests as something of a mystery.50 Sitwell invited some people simply because she felt sorry for them.

  One of the earliest regulars at Moscow Road was the Welsh poet W. H. Davies, who had spent his youth as a tramp and fruit-picker in the United States. On his way to the Klondike, he lost a leg jumping on a freight train in Ontario. Undaunted, he went on walking tours back in Britain, peddling laces, pins and needles. At times, he preached on street corners. With his wooden leg and angelic demeanour, he came across as a sanctified Long John Silver. When Sitwell met him in early 1917 he was living on a civil-list pension in a room in Great Russell Street overrun with mice. His neighbour was a Belgian prostitute with whom he conducted a feud through the wall that separated them; she tried to wake him at night with her national anthem and he retaliated with ‘The Men of Harlech’.51 He often appeared at Pembridge Mansions unexpectedly and, despite his wooden leg, would leap from behind the door to surprise Sitwell when she opened it. During the ‘at homes’, relatives found their worst suspicions of the company confirmed when Davies showed up. On one occasion he apologised for his lateness with the comment that ‘there were a lot of police about’. When Sitwell failed to grasp his point, he repeated what to a former vagabond seemed a perfectly reasonable decision: ‘You see, Oxford Street was full of them, so I had to come here by side streets.’52

  Davies’s Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) was often reprinted, but serious writers admired his poetry even more. In the early 1920s Sitwell named him as one of the five greatest poets of the age, along with Ralph Hodgson, Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, and W. B. Yeats.53 Davies’s reputation has diminished over the years, but Sitwell’s view of him was not unique – Davies’s poetry was fervently admired by George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, and Arnold Bennett. Edward Thomas promoted his work, and for a time paid for his rent, coal and light.54 He was prolific and uneven, but his finest works stand up very well, among them ‘The Inquest’, about an infanticide, and ‘My Old Acquaintance’ about a ninety-year-old who believes that when she dies her elderly daughters will fight over her false teeth, which cost her five pounds. Davies had a great affection for the Sitwells, and once remarked, ‘Edith is always as fine as a queen.’55

  Osbert’s social connections brought him into the orbit of Maud (later called Emerald) Cunard, the American who had married Sir Bache Cunard, grandson of the shipping magnate. Their daughter Nancy was beautiful and charismatic, and had no difficulty persuading people that she was a poet. She struck up a brief friendship with the Sitwells, having in common with them the loss of Bimbo Tennant, who had been a close friend of hers. She and Edith Sitwell conceived a new anthology, which would put an elbow in the ribs of Edward Marsh’s staid but immensely popular Georgian Poetry series that had dominated the literary scene since 1912. At first, Sitwell overrated Cunard’s talents and allowed a strikingly bad poem to become the signature work of the new anthology:

  Now in the scented gardens of the night,

  Where we are scattered like a pack of cards,

  Our words are turned to spokes that thoughts may roll

  And form a jangling chain around the world,

  (Itself a fabulous wheel controlled by Time

  Over the slow incline of centuries).

  [...]56

  Cunard had little to do with the editing of the anthology as she was getting married in November 1916,57 but as a darling of the gossip columnists she brought publicity to the project that even the Sitwells could not match at that time. The first ‘Cycle’ of Wheels appeared on 13 December 1916,58 an eighty-four-page production in yellow boards illustrated with a line-drawing of a woman pushing a pram. There were ten poems by Osbert, and one by Sacheverell, the first of his ever to be published, ‘Li-Tai-Pé Drinks and Drowns’, a polished short poem reminiscent of Pound’s Rihaku phase. Giving pride of place to Nancy Cunard’s work created an impression of flippancy, but this was contrasted by the work of her friend Iris Tree, a daughter of the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree, whose poems were unremittingly glum: ‘The long road unto nothing I will sing, / Sing on one note, monotonous and dry.’59 In fact, the tone of the volume was, with a few exceptions, sorrowful. There were three poems by Bimbo Tennant, as well as Helen’s poem on his death. Edith Sitwell contributed nine of her own works, including ‘The Mother’, ‘The Drunkard’, and ‘A Lamentation’.

  Geoffrey Gunther’s cartoon (1918) portrays Osbert as both a Grenadier Guard and a contributor to Edith’s anthology Wheels

  Wheels brought together work of different kinds that ranged from Helen Rootham’s translations of Rim
baud to Osbert’s ‘The Lament of the Mole-Catcher’, a poem very much in the Georgian manner. Reviewers were divided. The Pall Mall Gazette said it was ‘conceived in morbid eccentricity and executed in fierce factitious gloom’. The Morning Post predicted that in fifty years this publication would be ‘remembered as a notable event in the inner history of English Literature’.60 The latter judgment is closer to the mark. In the six ‘Cycles’ of the anthology, Sitwell brought forward works by Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and Wilfred Owen, none of whom was at that time well known. It was the beginning of her heroic efforts to promote the work of rising talents; she was still doing it on her deathbed. At the same time, the anthology gave Sitwell a new heft in the literary world. Henceforth, she would be known as ‘The Editor of Wheels’.

  9

  THE TANGO

  Álvaro de Guevara (1894–1951) was a man of extremes. Described in the ODNB as an ‘artist and boxer’, he hated quarrels and loved fist-fights.1 His childhood in Chile was divided between a house in Valparaiso that was flattened in an earthquake and a country estate that sat peacefully beside a volcano in Arauca. His father made a great deal of money in the woollen trade and was an Anglophile even though one of his sons had gone mad in England in 1902: convinced of a plot against King Edward VII, the young man had stabbed himself repeatedly, then leapt to his death from a house in South Kensington, clutching an umbrella as a parachute.2 In 1910, Álvaro de Guevara was sent to Bradford Technical College to prepare to enter the family business. He was desolate there, but Albert and William Rothenstein, whose family was in the same business, spotted his artistic gifts and encouraged him to get training. He won a scholarship to the Slade School in London in 1912 and stood out in a group that included Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul and John Nash, and Stanley and Gilbert Spencer. Known as ‘Chile’, he soon came to the notice of Walter Sickert, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Augustus John. His most admired early works included a series of paintings of swimming baths in the manner of Matisse. He also produced impressive restaurant and theatre scenes. In 1917, he had his first one-man exhibition at the Chenil Galleries.