Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  After the armistice, Edith Sitwell headed north to Scarborough, where Osbert, then an admirer of the Bolsheviks, was standing as an Asquith Liberal in his father’s old constituency in the general election of 14 December. Edith wrote to Robert Nichols:

  The horror of Scarborough has, however, acted like electricity upon me. What a strange place – partly a clownish bright-coloured tragic hell, partly a flatness where streets crawl sluggishly, and one drop of rain (no more) drops on one’s face half way down the street, and there are no inhabitants, or so it seems, but boys so indistinguishable in their worm-white faces that they have to wear coloured caps with initials that one may be known from another. Osbert didn’t ‘get in’. I suppose they found out he is a poet.

  It can be assumed that on the hustings Edith Sitwell lacked the common touch.

  Back in London, she described for Nichols a ‘very depressing evening’ organised by Alida Klemantaski, ‘a very nice girl’ later married to Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop. She brought together at the beginning of 1919 a group of women poets with a particular view to introducing Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew, who, though she had published only one collection by that time, was probably the leading woman poet in Britain. Poems like ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ and ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’ continue today to hold a deserved place in anthologies. Sitwell admired Mew’s writings, but found her reserve and her state of mind impenetrable: ‘What a grey tragic woman – about sixty in point of age, and sucked dry of blood (though not of spirit) by poverty and an arachnoid mother. I tried to get her to come and see me, but she is a hermit, inhabited by a terrible bitterness, and though she was very nice to me, she wouldn’t come.’5 Two years later, Sitwell wrote of an expanded edition of Mew’s poems: ‘she is utterly unselfconscious, and she never spares herself; there is no self-protective weakness in her.’6 Sitwell wrote several more times in praise of Charlotte Mew, whose personal life grew ever more sorrowful. Following the death of a beloved sister, she committed suicide in 1928 by drinking Lysol. By the 1950s, Sitwell changed her mind about Mew and said she had been ‘trying to be nice’ when she praised her.7 Sitwell’s tastes in poetry became much more definite in later years, but she also became more defensive of her own position as Britain’s leading woman poet of the twentieth century.

  The pre-eminent woman novelist of Sitwell’s generation was, of course, Virginia Woolf. She wrote a review of Clowns’ Houses, complimenting Sitwell for the honesty of her images and for not caring if they seemed outlandish, but she also criticised her for repeating favourite adjectives and similes. Woolf remarked: ‘Miss Sitwell owes a great deal to modern painters and until her optic nerve has ceased to be dazzled it is difficult to say how interesting her vision is.’ The review appeared, unsigned, in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 October 1918. By chance, Woolf had just met Osbert and Sachie, and they invited her to a dinner party at Osbert’s house at Swan Walk on the very day the review appeared. It is not certain whether Edith knew she had written it, but this seems to be their first meeting.

  Woolf noted in her diary: ‘Edith Sitwell is a very tall young woman, wearing a permanently startled expression, and curiously finished off with a high green silk head-dress, concealing her hair, so that it is not known whether she has any.’8 At the end of her life, Sitwell recalled Woolf’s appearance more poetically: ‘Virginia Woolf had a moonlit transparent beauty. She was exquisitely carved, with large thoughtful eyes that held no foreshadowing of that tragic end which was a grief to everyone who had ever known her. To be in her company was delightful. She enjoyed each butterfly aspect of the world and of the moment, and would chase the lovely creatures, but without damaging the dust on their wings.’9

  On the evening they met, Woolf got straight to the point: ‘“Why do you live where you do?” “Because I have not much money.” “How much money a year have you?” I told her. “Oh well, I think we can do better for you than that.”’10 Woolf thought Sitwell interesting enough to deserve the sort of project that eventually lifted T. S. Eliot out of Lloyd’s Bank and into the job of poetry editor at Faber & Faber. Nothing like that happened for Edith Sitwell, but she did establish a complicated friendship with Woolf, at once intimate and competitive.

  Few of Sitwell’s statements have been so widely quoted as one to the critic Geoffrey Singleton in 1955: ‘Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her “a beautiful little knitter”’11 – an odd expression to the effect that Woolf’s fiction was precious and on a small scale. Sitwell once boasted of herself to Robert Graves: ‘though I shouldn’t say so, I’m a very good knitter.’12 It was the one domestic task she mastered – so perhaps the term had other resonances for her. Nonetheless, in the description of Woolf’s ‘moonlit’ beauty quoted above she makes no comment on her fiction. In 1930, Sitwell had written: ‘you are one of the only living writers whom I can read with joy and perpetual astonishment and satisfaction, and the fact that you like my poems makes me proud and happy’.13 In the mid-1930s she wrote in a newspaper article: ‘The fool is out of fashion, and now we have women succeeding in practically every profession … We have numerous admirable, witty, and incisive novelists, headed by that great stylist, Mrs. Virginia Woolf.’14 On another occasion, she wrote, ‘It is silly … to underrate Mrs. Woolf because she does not bellow like a bull.’15 It is possible that throughout the earlier years she had been trying to make herself believe in a friend’s gifts and finally gave up on the effort in old age. She may even have been influenced in this by her younger friends Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene who thought little of Woolf. Yet as seems also to have happened with her views of Charlotte Mew, Sitwell probably grew tired of sharing honours. As we shall see, there were changes in Sitwell’s outlook in her last decade that force us to take her opinions and recollections with an extra grain of salt.

  In late 1918, Osbert Sitwell became co-editor, with Herbert Read, of the short-lived quarterly Arts and Letters, a venture in which he had the backing of Arnold Bennett and Sydney Schiff, a wealthy translator and novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson. Herbert Read was a poet, an art critic, and a socialist. Edith Sitwell was charmed by him. A frequent visitor to Moscow Road, Read remembered making omelettes for her.16 It is suggested that Sitwell had a crush on Read and that she received the news of his marriage in August 1919 with stony silence – perhaps. Yet a close friendship with Read was probably never on the cards. Although he was much loved by his male friends, his biographer says that he ‘saw women as controlling and punitive’.17 The sculptor and painter John Skeaping, who made some of Sitwell’s amber jewellery, described a conversation with her in the late 1920s: ‘about intellectualism in art, one of my pet hates, I mentioned the name of Herbert Read. “That crashing bore,” she said, and went on, “Sachie and I went to dinner with him some weeks ago, passing a long and tiresome evening. Finally, I said to Herbert, ‘We really must be going now, our last bus goes at 12.30 and we daren’t miss it’, whereupon Herbert looked at his watch and said: ‘But Edith, it’s only 9.15’”.’18 A few years later, Read managed to irritate Sitwell with his book reviews at much the same time as she was tangling with F. R. Leavis, prompting her to write: ‘The attitude shown by some of the newer critics of poetry towards that art is deeply reminiscent of a dear old country clergyman preaching a sermon on the Woman Taken in Adultery. Now Professor Herbert Read will never be a dear old clergyman, but I do perceive ominous signs that he may, if he is not very careful, become a young curate.’19 Nevertheless, over many years she maintained an affection and respect for him.

  From the beginning of 1919, Edith Sitwell spent a great deal of time with Marguerite Bennett (née Soulié), the wife of Arnold Bennett. Born in Paris in 1874, and thus close in age to Helen Rootham, she had carved out an odd niche in literary London as a professional reciter of French poetry. Sitwell was enthralled by her performances and invited her to a musical evening at Pembridge Mansions on 11 February – one of Helen’s Wednesda
ys. Sitwell said that Helen would be singing ‘some marvellous Van Dieren songs, also some by a new (and very good) composer called de Mérey. It would be such a great pleasure if you and Mr. Bennett would come.’20

  Sitwell received an invitation to give a lecture on 17 March to the ‘Lend a Hand Guild’ at Lady Baring’s House in Cadogan Square. She proposed to speak on modern English poetry and the influence on it of French poetry. She asked Marguerite Bennett to recite in illustration of the lecture, and so began a three-year collaboration. Soon they established the Anglo-French Poetry Society. Arnold Bennett was the nominal president, and the managing committee consisted of Marguerite Bennett, Edith Sitwell, and Helen Rootham. The plan was to hold meetings about once a month in whatever drawing room Edith could lay hold of and from time to time to rent a large hall. A form letter declared their intention to ‘combine recitals of poetry (both English and French) and causeries, which will be varied by music of the period. There will be occasional readings at which poets will read their own verses.’ An indication of how seriously Bennett and Sitwell took the art of recitation is found in this statement: ‘All reciters will be trained, as the object of the Society is to make the recital of poetry a pleasure both to the reciter and to the audience.’21

  An inaugural meeting was held at Bennett’s house at 12B George Street, Hanover Square, and a preliminary list of members included Siegfried Sassoon, Mrs Bernard Shaw, H. Granville Barker, Gordon Bottomley, Marie Belloc Lowndes, W. H. Davies, Frederick Delius, André Gide, John Galsworthy, Ralph Hodgson, Gustav Holst, Valery Larbaud, Walter de la Mare, Vita Sackville-West, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, and Hugh Walpole.22 Doubtless some of these paid their guinea’s subscription and lent their names just to help a good cause. However, for a time the Society was a going concern. Sitwell and Bennett found several young women, mainly actresses, willing to declaim in the approved manner. Meanwhile, they simply bore with the unimproved reading styles of Robert Graves and W. H. Davies, who were among the poets invited to read their own works.

  Sitwell and Bennett became a double act. Sitwell said in one of her lectures to the Society:

  Whenever I am asked to speak about English poetry, I have to speak about French poetry too, so that I can worry Mrs. Arnold Bennett to recite. When I first met Mrs. Bennett I was under the impression (quite well-founded) that I was absolutely steeped in the magic of French poetry. So I was … But … well the things Mrs. Bennett’s recitations have taught me about rhythm, to speak only of the technical side of her wonderful art; the things I have learnt about the elasticity of dactylic measures, (the Alexandrine, for instance). This measure can spread itself like a peacock’s tail, can have the deadly suavity and curl of [a] rattlesnake, or can move with the pomp of a wave that is just going to break into spray. I believe if Mrs. Bennett were English instead of French and were to recite Byron’s poor old ‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold’ we might even find out there was something to be said for the poem.23

  The Fifth Cycle of Wheels appeared in October 1920, dedicated to Mrs Arnold Bennett, ‘Poetry’s Greatest Interpretative Artist’. The friendship continued happily through 1921. In August, Sitwell invited the Bennetts to join her family and Siegfried Sassoon at Renishaw: ‘This is a lovely house, (and what a perfect place to hear you recite in: it is absolutely made for Samain’s “Silence”); we have got rid of the ghosts; since Helen’s encounter with them, we’ve not heard a sound or seen anything of them.’ The Bennetts could not come, so in December Sitwell proposed that she and Marguerite travel to Paris at Easter, closing the letter, ‘Je vous embrasse.’

  A caricature of Edith Sitwell by Siegfried Sassoon. They had a close friendship in the 1920s and 1930s, and the critic Sir Edmund Gosse suggested they should marry

  By April, however, the tone had changed. One of the reciters chosen by Bennett, Marjorie Gabain of the Old Vic, had complained about a programme that included some of Helen’s translations of Rimbaud. Sitwell wrote to Bennett that Gabain had made herself ‘ridiculous’. Bennett then complained about Rootham’s notions of art. Sitwell retorted: ‘I don’t know why you thought you dared write such a letter about Helen to me. Your spiteful impertinence merely throws a most unpleasant light upon yourself. Conceit about any form of art is really the last thing Helen can be accused of! As for her art, I do not choose to discuss Helen’s art with you.’

  Things were patched up enough for the Society to limp on for a few more meetings, but it was soon disbanded. From time to time Edith Sitwell was genuinely reconciled to friends with whom she quarrelled, but on this occasion the circumstances were against it. Marguerite and Arnold Bennett had recently separated, and Marguerite passed out of the Sitwells’ world. Though Edith Sitwell saw much less of him, Arnold Bennett was unshaken in his view of her poetry. He wrote in April 1922: ‘Valery Larbaud once astonished and delighted me by stating, quite on his own, that the most accomplished of all the younger British poets was Edith Sitwell; a true saying, though I had said it before him.’24 In 1930, Bennett grouped Edith Sitwell with James Joyce and William Faulkner as ‘originators’ in literature (Evening Standard, 12 June 1930).

  Domestic life was taking a sad turn in the last years of the decade. In 1914, Helen Rootham had pulled Sitwell out of the water. However, by the end of the war it was harder for them to live together. As an old woman (and, we have to remember, a cantankerous one), Sitwell recalled that ‘suddenly, life rotted. Helen, a wonderful friend to me when I was a child and young girl, seemed to become semi-poisoned by the smell of money, and a silly wish to “get into society”.’ She wrote a pen-portrait of Helen, then tore the pages from a draft of her memoir, but she missed one telling phrase intended as an insertion: ‘as she always believed, (she used to cry when any coarse person said she had been my governess.)’25 If true, this makes it easier to understand Helen’s position. Among aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals, she was touchy because she did not want to be thought of as a servant. But Sitwell felt that Rootham actually became ‘more and more the governess and less and less of a friend’. She criticised Sitwell for being untidy – a reasonable complaint since her music students came to the flat – and she policed Sitwell’s dealings with men.

  Part of the problem was that Helen never fulfilled her great ambitions as a singer. On 1 April 1914, she appeared at Steinway Hall in a programme sponsored by the Society of Women Musicians.26 On 9 November 1916, she sang pieces by Ravel, Duparc, and Debussy at the Aeolian Hall, as well as old English tunes arranged by Cyril Scott, which a critic thought over-elaborated: ‘But some people enjoy the unexpected; in fact, they seem to be prepared to stand anything by way of harmonic combination. It is a mark of superiority.’27 On 13 November 1917, she sang a programme of songs by Roger Quilter and her cousin Cyril Rootham at the Aeolian Hall; The Times (14 November 1917) remarked on her ‘stately style of singing’. In October 1918, she was to sing Serbian folk songs in a benefit for the Serbian Red Cross; this may be the occasion when she had a bout of nerves and could not perform, leaving the pianist to carry the whole concert.28 On 21 April 1920 she appeared in Nottingham with the pianist Eric Paul May; she sang traditional airs such as ‘O Death, Rock Me to Sleep’ and won the reviewer’s faint praise: ‘An appropriate simplicity of style distinguished the vocalist’s contributions.’29 There were doubtless other performances, but this was not the level of success she had once hoped for. It is likely that she was frustrated.

  The unravelling of a close friendship can be every bit as complicated as a divorce, and in this case most of the evidence comes from one side, with the effect that Helen Rootham is always seen as a pill. She was unpopular among Sitwell’s friends. When Richard Aldington asked T. S. Eliot in November 1921 whether Sitwell could help start his sister’s musical career, he responded that the only way to get that help would be for his sister to take lessons from Rootham, ‘an appalling woman who trains and launches young singers’.30 Aldington decided to give it a try. Sitwell wrote to Robert Graves not long after,
‘Richard Aldington’s sister is shouting scales at the top of her voice next door. It is a lovely voice, and she has got a small part in the Rosenkavalier, (she is a pupil of Helen’s).’31

  When Harold Acton spoke to the biographer John Pearson, he tried to do justice to Helen Rootham’s memory: ‘True she was rather dreary and intense – the essential hysterical intellectual spinster, don’t you know, – but she was something of a rebel. She believed in the modern movement. She had read Verlaine and Rimbaud, and she was just what Edith needed to be able to make the break from Renishaw. She’d never, never have done it on her own.’32 Yet this places the benefit to Sitwell in the early period of the relationship, leaving just dreariness for the later years. And his notions of hysteria and spinsterhood still muddy the waters.

  Even by Sitwellian standards of eccentricity Helen was an odd person. The exorcism she performed at Renishaw was part of a deepening involvement with spirits. Sitwell recalled Rootham being obsessed by dreams and visions: ‘There was one that interested her profoundly. She saw two Beings, lying side by side. Suddenly, out of one Being, issued something that might have been a huge leaf, or might have been a great flame of fire, and this deliberately entered the other Being.’ She thought it must have a meaning, so she described it to ‘all the young males of my acquaintance, and enquired, “Do you know what it means?” They said they did.’

  Although Catholic, Helen Rootham was drawn to esoteric religion, especially anthroposophy. A movement led by Rudolf Steiner, it had recently broken with the main Theosophical movement largely over the role of the young Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbetter were grooming as a ‘world teacher’. Years later, Sitwell described Rootham’s interest in anthroposophy to, of all people, Marilyn Monroe: