Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  We talked mainly, as far as I remember, about Rudolf Steiner, whose works [Monroe] had just been reading. At one time Helen Rootham was most interested in Steiner, with the result that I found myself, one evening, watching what I believe was known as a Nature-Dance (something uniting one, I expect, with Mother Earth) in which ladies of only too certain an age galloped with large bare dusty feet over an uncarpeted floor. I do not know that this exhibition could be ascribed to Dr. Steiner, but it seemed to have something to do with Higher Thought, and I am afraid that Miss Monroe and I could not resist laughing about it.33

  Presumably, Sitwell had attended a session of eurythmy, the movement art promoted by Steiner for its spiritual, educational, and curative powers. Although she mocks this dance, she avoids mocking Steiner himself, whose ideas had some impact on her poetry.

  Towards the end of the war Rootham made friends with some refugees from what was later known as Yugoslavia. According to Sitwell, they convinced her that in a former life she had been their Princess Yelena ‘who, singlehanded, had thrown the Turks out of wherever they happened to be at the moment’. Rootham became absorbed with the plight of the South Slavs, as many people were. Readers of Brideshead Revisited will recall that Charles Ryder’s mother went as a nurse to Bosnia and died there. Helen Rootham translated traditional ballads describing the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 in which Serbia lost its freedom. The poems present the heroic figures of Tsar Lazar and Jug Bogdan, and his nine sons the Jugovitch, all slaughtered in the name of Christ and Serbia in an epic struggle against the Turks. In the 1990s, these same poems were seized upon by some Serbian nationalists to justify a programme of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

  Rootham’s interest in them likely derived from the Croat Ivan Meštrovi, a friend of Rodin. His monumental carvings of warriors from the Kosovo cycle appeared in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the summer of 1915. Although criticised by Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Meštrovi’s work won many admirers, including Robert Ross, who nonetheless remarked that one carving added ‘incest to injury’.34 There were other exhibitions of his work at the Grafton Gallery, Twenty-One Gallery, and the City Art Gallery in Leeds.35 The sculptures created a demand for a new English version of the ballads. Helen Rootham was probably guided by Janko Lavrin, a Slovene who became Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. Lavrin provided a historical preface for the volume that appeared from Blackwell’s in 1920.36

  Rootham also came under the influence of the poet and pseudomystic Dimitrije Mitrinovi, who, his friend Lavrin thought, had ‘a home-made messiah-complex’ and relished the role of saviour.37 The poet Edwin Muir described him as ‘a tall, dark, bullet-headed Serbian with the lips of a Roman soldier and an erratic, soaring mind’.38 Indeed, he may well have been the religious teacher to whom Helen was engaged from about 1920, but no document confirms this. He appeared in England at the right time and was unmarried. Sitwell described the fiancé as a friend of the poet Alan Porter, a stalwart of the Adler Society for the promotion of individual psychology, an outfit actually founded by Mitrinovi in the mid-1920s. Sitwell also called him a ‘bad painter’; while there is no record of Mitrinovi being a painter, he was constantly in the company of artists and probably dabbled. He certainly wrote about painting.39 Although he was primarily Helen’s find, Edith Sitwell too fell under his sway, although she later thought him a fraud. She inscribed a copy of her Bucolic Comedies (1923): ‘For Mr. D. Mitrinovi with hommage [sic] and with unending gratitude from his pupil Edith Sitwell.’40

  Before the war, Mitrinovi had inspired and organised South Slav nationalists in their struggles against the Austro-Hungarian empire. It is claimed that he opposed violence, but his ideas contributed materially to the outbreak of war. In 1910, one of his associates proposed to assassinate Emperor Franz Josef; a second tried to kill General Marijan Varesanin and had to shoot himself with his last bullet. In 1912, a soon-to-be-famous man enthusiastically endorsed Mitrinovi’s revolutionary programme: Gavrilo Princeps, who killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on 28 June 1914.41

  In 1913, Mitrinovi went as a student to Munich where he befriended the painter Wassily Kandinski, who theorised on abstract art. They both became part of the ‘Blutbund’ or blood brotherhood, a short-lived organisation of cultural leaders, among them the philosopher Martin Buber and the novelist Upton Sinclair. Their modest objective was to unify the human race and to lift it out of materialism. When war broke out, Mitrinovi hurried to London and took a position in the Serbian legation. He championed the work of Meštrovi, and came to be regarded as a fashionable guru. His chief British disciple and collaborator was Philippe Mairet, the draughtsman and critic to whom Eliot dedicated ‘Notes towards the Definition of Culture’ (1948).42 Mairet was also a friend of Rootham’s.43 In the mid-1920s, Mitrinovi founded the Adler Society, and at different times advocated Social Credit, guild socialism, and communal living.44

  Mitrinovi’s ways of thinking were messy by choice, and his obsession was to show synthesis, a spiritual unity underlying all reality: ‘We require only a philosophy that sings its own system, a science that wishes us good, a plasticity that is symphony, a portrait that is a novel; and we need a great music that is a performed religion, a poetry that is metaphysics, a dancing that is a philosophical thesis, and an acting that is social revolution … For whoever has anything to say to us moderns must speak not with the intellect but with song, with symbol, with paradox and intuition. To think in concepts is altogether too academic.’45 He happily collapses one category into another on his way to Utopia.

  By early 1916, Rootham was working on a translation of Rimbaud that she hoped to have published as a book in the autumn of that year. It did not appear in its entirety until 1932, although selections appeared before that. It is believed by some that Sitwell collaborated on this work without taking credit.46 In addition to her contributions to Wheels and the translations of Serbian ballads, Rootham tried her hand at short fiction, producing a glum tale about a puppet-like woman dying on a park bench.47 In December 1918, she contributed a poem, ‘The Two Old Beggars of Bayswater Road’, to the New Age, a journal that featured most of the important modernist writers at one time or another. Its editor, the charismatic A. R. Orage, was a Nietzschean, a socialist, and (like Ezra Pound) an advocate for Social Credit. He published essays by Steiner and Mitrinovi, and was himself influenced, at different times, by P. D. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. Though cranky, the journal was receptive to new ideas, and it suited Helen Rootham perfectly.

  Orage published some of her Serbian translations, including five poems by the contemporary Symbolist poet Jovan Dui.48 In late 1921, she became the journal’s music critic. Apart from displaying her expertise, these columns are the only evidence that she had a sense of humour. She remarked that ‘the Albert Hall is not a place calculated to inspire noble feelings on any subject whatsoever.’49 Of Stravinsky’s bleak Symphonies d’instruments à vent, intended to be played without expression or inflection, she wrote: ‘The result is a cold, acrid blare of sound, with edges as jagged as a split iceberg, and a rhythm which is as comfortable and reassuring as the swaying of a polar bear. Indeed, Monday’s performance rather resembled an attempt to brighten up the North Pole with a very big megaphone and a gas fire.’50

  Edith Sitwell followed Rootham into the New Age as the result of a row. In a review of the Fifth Cycle of Wheels in April 1921, Edwin Muir described Osbert’s poems as the work of a craftsman but not an artist, and Sacheverell’s as those of an artist but not a craftsman – actually an astute judgment. Osbert’s poems are always ably cobbled together – and forgettable. Sacheverell, at his best, is luminous, but he is uneven to a startling degree. As Muir put it, Sacheverell’s poems can alternate between ‘incompetence’ and ‘the grace of nature itself’. That judgment remained true. Over a long career, Sacheverell Sitwell failed to select among his work, so that a superb talent lies unnoticed among the rubble of many poems – a situation that might yet be remedi
ed by a short selected volume of his best work.

  Muir wrote: ‘Miss Edith Sitwell is more tantalising and more prolific in good lines than ever. Her apparent perversity of expression is really a form of wit; a cross between Meredith and the Queen of Spades. She appears to be writing more and more a sort of “Alice in Hell”.’51 However, he preferred her ‘limpid and crystalline images’ to those he thought ‘overcharged’. Unable to see Edwin Muir as a plain-spoken friend to their work, the three Sitwells appeared at Orage’s office, Edith threatening a libel suit. Orage countered that she should write for him. The libel suit evaporated, and by June she was contributing prose and verse to the magazine.52 Muir remained the poetry reviewer, and continued to speak his mind, especially about Sacheverell, whom he later called ‘the poet most gifted by nature and by art that has appeared since Mr. W. B. Yeats’.53

  Helen Rootham left the New Age in August 1923. She continued to write about music, but never again with humour. In her lethal book, Fundamentals of Music and their Relation to Modern Life (1925), she offered theories about ‘That Something, the spiritual and convincing Something – the touch, the breath, the quality of psychic presence, of divinity, in the works of genuine art’. As an anthroposophist, she attempted to show a literal convergence of art, science and the sacred. She could also collapse categories just as Mitrinovi did in his quest for synthesis: ‘I feel intuitively certain that the impression of sound upon the heart – and the heart is the psychic receiver and judge within all human beings – is an impression equivalent to the calorific impression … of heat and cold upon the sense of feeling.’54 Edith Sitwell, always a synaesthetic poet, later absorbed some of Rootham’s ideas into ‘The Song of the Cold’ and other works. Whereas Rootham sees heat and cold as literally connected to spiritual states, Sitwell makes them into symbols and manages them with an elegance her friend could not approach:

  But the great sins and fires break out of me

  Like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring …

  I am a walking fire, I am all leaves –

  I will cry to the Spring to give me the birds’ and the serpents’ speech

  That I may weep for those who die of the cold –

  The ultimate cold within the heart of man.55

  11

  TOO FANTASTIC FOR FAT-HEADS

  The world grows furry, grunts with sleep …

  But I must on the surface keep.

  The jolting of the train to me

  Seems some primeval vertebrae

  Attached by life-nerves to my brain –

  Reactionary once again,

  So that I see shapes crude and new

  And ordered, – with some end in view,

  No longer with the horny eyes

  Of other people’s memories.

  Through highly varnished yellow heat,

  As through a lens that does not fit,

  The faces jolt in cubes, and I

  Perceive their odd solidity

  And lack of meaning absolute […]1

  Published by Basil Blackwell on 26 June 1920, The Wooden Pegasus, a collection of poems mainly from the preceding two years but with some earlier pieces, was a pivotal book for Edith Sitwell. By now, she had sharply defined the theme of her poetry: deceived by customary or inherited ways of seeing the world, most of us have no identity at all and live, rather, in a hellish puppet show. Human beings and landscapes are repeatedly described as ‘wooden’ to emphasise their role in the ‘Comedy for Marionettes’. Her poetry is centred on a puppeteer’s booth on the Scarborough sands – a world made with hammer and nails:

  I, painted like the wooden sun,

  Must hand-in-hand with angels run –

  The tinsel angels of the booth.2

  Jules Laforgue wrote about puppets, and his work is one of the inspirations for this phase of Sitwell’s poetry. Stock characters of commedia dell’arte also appear frequently in the collection, among them, the farcical Scaramouche who figures also in Punch and Judy shows, the miser Pantalone and the pedantic Il Dottore, both vecchi or old ones who stand opposed to the happiness of the young lovers or innamorati. The image of a generation frustrated or betrayed by its elders captured Sitwell’s sense of the Great War and of her own family’s disasters. The power of the elders lay in shaping the perceptions of the young, making them see the world as they do. For Sitwell, the object is to disorganise these inherited perceptions, so in two poems she writes from the perspective of one of the fairground animals – an observant ape. A sequence of ‘Seven Nursery Songs’ attempts, however ironically, to capture the spiritual vitality of the child and oppose it to the notions of the elders. Among these poems is one of her most popular:

  The King of China’s daughter,

  She never would love me

  Though I hung my cap and bells upon

  Her nutmeg tree.

  For oranges and lemons,

  The stars in bright blue air,

  (I stole them long ago, my dear)

  Were dangling there.

  The Moon did give me silver pence,

  The Sun did give me gold,

  And both together softly blew

  And made my porridge cold;

  But the King of China’s daughter

  Pretended not to see

  When I hung my cap and bells upon

  Her nutmeg tree.3

  Given the drift of the whole collection, it would be a mistake to regard this poem as merely ‘pretty’ – a condescending term that Geoffrey Grigson applied to Sitwell’s early work, having dismissed all the later poems.4 The point Sitwell is making about youth, age, and culture needs at times to be shouted – as in ‘Solo for Ear-Trumpet’, where she visits a rich relation who remains impervious even to the Second Coming:

  Down the horn

  Of her ear-trumpet I convey

  The news that: ‘It is Judgment Day!’

  ‘Speak louder; I don’t catch, my dear.’

  I roared: ‘It is the Trump we hear!’

  ‘The What?’ – ‘The TRUMP!’ … ‘I shall complain –

  The boy-scouts practising again!’5

  Aldous Huxley was thrilled by The Wooden Pegasus. He wrote in the Athenæum (9 July 1920): ‘Fixedly, intently she focuses the figures on the stage until they assume a peculiar significance, not their own, but derived from the very intentness with which they are viewed. Reality takes on the strange nightmarish qualities of hallucination.’ He believed that her methods produced ‘interesting and often fantastically beautiful results’.

  As she was writing some of the poems that appeared in this book, Edith Sitwell became swept up in Sacheverell’s devotion to the Ballets Russes, which had returned to London in September 1918. He became a friend of Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario who commissioned works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky, and was the close friend of Nijinsky through his best years until they had a falling-out in 1913. When she was old, Edith Sitwell claimed that ballet bored the pants off her,6 but that was not always the case.

  Her short book Children’s Tales (From the Russian Ballet) appeared in November 1920, hailing the arrival of Russian ballet in England, but it also took readers, incidentally, on a tour of the imagery of her recent poems. Her rhapsodic introduction remarks on how the British had been galvanised by music halls: ‘we move somnambulantly through this mirror-bright world, and cling into some mournful patterning; while the harsh mordant music strips off our flesh and shows us, marionettes that we are, clothed only in our primal lust. Performing animals mimic our tricks, our poor impertinences against the Infinite, much as we mimic those of a higher order of being.’7

  The Russian ballet offers something different, which Sitwell calls a ‘philosophy’: ‘Seen with the clearness of a dream, these bright magical movements have, now the intense vitality of the heart of life, now the rigidity of death; and for speech they have the more universal and larger language of music, interpreting still more clearly these strange beings whose li
fe is so intense, yet to whom living, seen from the outside, is but a brief and tragic happiness upon the greenest grass, in some unknown flashing summer weather.’ Above all, she is absorbed in Petrouchka (1911), the ballet Igor Stravinsky wrote for the Ballets Russes about a puppet that comes to life: here ‘in the loneliness of identity’ we watch the images and ideas of Laforgue acted out ‘as the puppets move somnambulantly through the dark of our hearts. For this ballet, alone among them all, shatters our glass house about our ears and leaves us terrified, haunted by its tragedy. The music, harsh crackling rags of laughter, shrieks at us like some brightly painted Punch and Judy show.’8

  Following the British debut of Le Sacre du Printemps at the Queen’s Hall on 7 June 1921, Sitwell returned to these ideas in an essay about Igor Stravinsky for the New Age: ‘He is, I honestly believe, the most important living artist of any kind whatsoever … he knows that every sight, touch, sound, smell, of the world we live in, has its meaning – is the result of a spiritual state (as a great philosopher said to me), is, in short, a kind of psycho-analysis. And he can interpret those meanings to us.’ The great philosopher is Mitrinovi and Sitwell is praising Stravinsky for his approach to ‘synthesis’. She describes Petrouchka in language that anticipates her poetry after 1940, as ‘a warning of the ultimate darkness. How well this piercing and undeceivable genius knows that the modern world is but a thin matchboard flooring spread over a shallow hell. For to him Dante’s hell has faded, and Lucifer, son of the morning, is dead. Hell is no vastness; there are no more devils who weep, or who laugh – only the maimed dwarfs of this life, terrible straining mechanisms, crouching in trivial sands, and laughing at the giants’ crumbling.’9

  Though ten years younger than Edith, Sachie was her guide to the ballet. Even as a young man, he was extraordinarily perceptive about the arts. Demobbed, he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in early 1919 and stayed for just two terms among serious-minded ex-soldiers. While there, he made the friendship of the sixteen-year-old William Walton and became convinced of his genius. Before long, Walton, who kept failing examinations at Oxford, became a regular visitor at the brothers’ house at Swan Walk. Osbert and Sacheverell brought him to Italy in the spring of 1920, after which he settled in as a kind of third brother in a house in Carlyle Square that Osbert took on a long lease. The Sitwells fended off all advice that Walton should study at the Royal Conservatory. Instead, he made his own way as a composer, and in late 1921 became Edith’s collaborator.