Edith Sitwell
Page 18
As she recalled, Façade began as a dare: ‘Willie gave me certain rhythms and said, “There you are, Edith, see what you can do with that.”’ Walton’s recollection was somewhat different. He told John Pearson that the idea for a collaboration came entirely from Edith. Although her poems cried out to be set, he did not want to take them on. Osbert and Sacheverell said they would bring in Constant Lambert, then a student at the Royal College of Music, to do the job if he refused, so of course he capitulated. As he recalled, Edith had already written a good number of the poems, including ‘Hornpipe’; ‘Popular Song’ was the only one he could remember having started her on. It is commonly thought that most of Façade was written between 1921 and 1923. In fact, the first performed version contained sixteen poems, of which ten had already been published. Façade grew not just by the addition of new poems, but by the inclusion of old ones, among them ‘Clowns’ Houses’, of which she wrote the first version in 1914. By the time her Collected Poems of 1930 came out, the sequence had twenty-seven poems, and she continued to fold early poems into the sequence. A version from 1950 has thirty-three, and another, in her final Collected Poems of 1957, thirty-seven. Sitwell’s work on Façade went on for more than forty years.10
Nevertheless, the years 1921–23 were an extraordinary time for Edith Sitwell’s poetry. When he was himself about to turn eighty, Sacheverell remembered those days:
How Max Beerbohm saw Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell in 1923
Let me hear the barrel-organ
that played on Saturday afternoons in Moscow Road,
It matters not how banal the tune:
Let it be ‘When Irish eyes are smiling’,
and I am back with you
On a blazing June evening in 1921 or 1922.
There seemed to be a new poem of yours
to read to us,
Almost every time we came to see you,
And climbed the four double-flights of stone stairs
up to your flat: –
Poems in a vein of fantasy
invented for yourself,
And all your own,
like nothing before or since.
[…]
They make for themselves a little niche in time
that I have tried to halt for a moment
On a hot June evening in Bayswater all those years ago,
So that you can hear her happy laughter in her poems,
and see her as I have often written of her,
Long and thin and tall and aquiline,
like no one we will ever see again: –
Before we throw down a coin
from the window
And the barrel-organ moves on
into receding time11
When she came to explain the poems she wrote in this period, Edith Sitwell spoke of them as a musician would, as ‘virtuoso exercises in technique of an extreme difficulty’. She had little to say about the meaning of the marionettes, the fairgrounds, the glimpses of hell, but she did want to explain that the poems in Façade were ‘abstract’ in that they were ‘patterns of sound’ – her comments lean in the direction of pure formalism. The rhythms of poetry had gone dead in the preceding generation and needed reviving: ‘My experiments in Façade consist of inquiries into the effect on rhythm and on speed of the use of rhymes, assonances, and dissonances, placed at the beginning and in the middle of lines, as well as at the end, and in most elaborate patterns. I experimented, too, with the effect upon speed of the use of equivalent syllables – a system that produces great variation.’12 What she was talking about is perhaps best seen in the concluding poem of the sequence:
When
Sir
Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell
Where Proserpine first fell,
Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea,
(Rocking and shocking the bar-maid).
Nobody comes to give him his rum but the
Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum
Enhances the chances to bless with a benison
Alfred Lord Tennyson crossing the bar laid
With cold vegetation from pale deputations
Of temperance workers (all signed In Memoriam)
Hoping with glory to trip up the Laureate’s feet,
(Moving in classical metres) …
Like Balaclava, the lava came down from the
Roof, and the sea’s blue wooden gendarmerie
Took them in charge while Beelzebub roared for his rum.
… None of them come!
This glimpse of hell in a hotel and Beelzebub in a baronet takes up the imagery of The Wooden Pegasus and adds a comical slap at Georgian poets, who in their devotion to Tennyson have become literary teetotallers, signing In Memoriam like a pledge against modern excess – but they are led off, presumably in cuffs, for making a tangle of Tennyson’s feet. In this deliberate tour de force, Sitwell is showing off as she treats prosody like a keyboard. She is aiming for an effect that Sachie wrote of in one of his biographies: ‘The secret of the power and the spell of Liszt lay in the new system that he had invented. His attack and brilliance, his speed and his exquisite arpeggios and runs, together with the extraordinary quality of his touch, these things gave him an unfair advantage over pianists of the old classical school.’13 Edith Sitwell was not Liszt, but in poems like this she was making her claim to a new kind of virtuosity.
Osbert recalls that Edith and Willie would work together in sessions of two or three hours, reading carefully over the poems. Walton would make note of stresses and points of special emphasis, as well as inflections. His score drew on music halls, jazz, cabaret tunes, foxtrots, the Charleston and other popular music; he produced instrumental parodies and pastiches that matched the strange ironies of Sitwell’s verse.
Osbert arranged for Frank Dobson to paint a curtain, behind which Edith would stand while reciting. It depicted three arches, and in the centre arch was a formalised mask with fair hair and an open mouth for the sound to pass through. There was a smaller black mask in the left arch for Osbert, the master of ceremonies, to speak through. Since the curtain would still muffle Edith’s voice, Sachie contacted an ageing opera singer named Senger who had patented a megaphone which, since it was made of compressed grass, had more resonance than metal versions; it covered the nose and mouth, making it responsive to techniques of voice production. In performance, Edith would bury her face in the Sengerphone and poems would emerge out of the cone that protruded beyond Dobson’s curtain. Osbert explained that the object was to eliminate the personalities of the speaker and the musicians, as well as any ‘constricting self-consciousness … We had, in short, discovered an abstract method of presenting poetry to an audience.’14 Eventually, the availability of microphones allowed productions of Façade to forgo this comic touch.
‘It was Edith’s char-lady who gave it the name Façade,’ Walton remembered. ‘She said to Edith one day – all this carry on is just one big façade, isn’t it? And Edith liked it so much that she used it.’15 Osbert put a similar comment in the mouth of a painter. In any event, as a title it captured Edith’s characteristic view that our normal reality is not much more than a veneer. Moreover, the title reminded the audience, just as the curtain did, that a poem is a thing of irony and does not offer easy access to the poet’s soul.
The first performance took place at Carlyle Square on the evening of 24 January 1922. As a conductor, William Walton resembled, in Osbert’s eyes, a boxing kangaroo then popular in the music halls. When they saw the music on the day before, the musicians were irate. One asked in rehearsal, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Walton, has a clarinet player ever done you an injury?’16 Osbert recalled in 1949 that there had been six instruments, but he must have been thinking of the public performances of 1923. In 1976, Walton told John Pearson that the work was originally scored for three instruments, but a year later he said on the BBC that the number was four. As Neil Ritchie points out, Edith Sitwell’s letters from early 1922 say that
the band consisted of trumpet, clarinet, flute, drum, and cello.17 Eighteen numbers (including the overture and interlude) were performed, of which only six were included in Walton’s definitive score of 1951; however, five more re appeared in his Façade Revived (1977) or Façade 2 (1979).18
The musicians sat under windows that reflected a world of snow outside, while the room itself was filled with light thrown back from mirrors and from the many glass objects that Osbert collected. The curtain was placed in front of a set of double doors. The audience sat tightly packed in rows of narrow gold chairs. In this small space, the sound was overwhelming. Osbert recalls that the poets and artists received the new work enthusiastically but the more orthodox guests were ‘perturbed’ – they settled down when the rum punch was served. Eva Mathias, a patron of the Ballets Russes, was excited by the whole performance and invited them to give another at her house in Montagu Square on 7 February; the music was less daunting in the larger space, but it is likely that few of those present grasped what Edith Sitwell and William Walton were up to. When she had finished her reciting at Mathias’s house, Sitwell, overcome by nerves, nearly fainted.19
A volume of the poems was printed by the Favril Press in February, and won a war-whoop from Siegfried Sassoon, who reviewed it in the Daily Herald (24 May 1922) under the title, ‘Too Fantastic for Fat-Heads’: ‘As a composer of fantastical verse Miss Sitwell is fully aware of her own limitations. This is only another way of saying that she is a first-class writer.’ Sassoon then took a shot at cowardly anthologists:
If after reading the following lines [‘Herodiade’] you disagree with me, I recommend you to wait thirty years and peruse the poem in Sir Joshua Jebb’s Anthology [published in 1951]. You will then be safe to enjoy it automatically, unless you have passed into coffin or crematorium … All fantastic art is ‘nonsense’ until we have got over our astonishment. Miss Sitwell’s originality has affinities with Aubrey Beardsley. ‘But Beardsley was an obscene artist!’ shrieks some fat-headed critic of Miss Sitwell’s ‘asylum poetry.’ The answer is that Aubrey Beardsley was a great artist, and, as such, has triumphed over all the fat-heads of his day. Miss Sitwell will do the same.
There was still a great deal of work to do on Façade, and Sitwell was short of time and money. The Anglo-French Poetry Society was about to disintegrate, and Wheels had made its last turn in November 1921. The first four Cycles had been published by Blackwell, and the fifth by Leonard Parsons. However, at the beginning of August, Parsons dropped the anthology. Working through an agent named Moore (probably Leonard Moore, who later represented George Orwell), she was able to get C. W. Daniel to publish the Sixth.20 She blamed J. C. Squire, a Georgian poet and the editor of the London Mercury, for Wheels’ ultimate demise. She wrote to the French poet and translator Valery Larbaud on 10 March 1922: ‘I have been having a terrible time, what with the boycott on the part of the Squire-controlled press, and the insults on the part of the press which is not so controlled. Publishers will no longer take my work unless I pay for it; and I shall be obliged to discontinue “Wheels.” It is so irritating for I know Squire is no good as a writer; one has only to compare him with the poets whom he imitates. Meanwhile, he is preventing any new work obtaining a hearing in England!’21 It is worth noting that Sitwell, who admired W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, W. H. Davies, and Ralph Hodgson, was not against Squire on the grounds that he was a traditional poet, but because he was a bad one. He is best known nowadays for his dismissal of The Waste Land. It has become normal for scholars to strut their fair-mindedness by defending Squire on various small points – for example, to say that he was a good parodist – but his obtuseness and partisanship are amply demonstrated by his anthology A Book of Women’s Verse (1921), in which there is no poem by Edith Sitwell.
Squire was only an opponent. The year 1921 saw the arrival of a proper Enemy – Percy Wyndham Lewis, whom Sitwell called ‘Perks’. She had already met him casually among the artists of the Slade School, the Camden Town Group, and the Omega Workshop, and was present with her brothers at a dinner at Verrey’s restaurant in Regent Street in the summer of 1919 when Lewis, with a cigarette butt hanging from his upper lip, squinted in the drifting smoke, pencilled some numbers on a matchbox, then issued his command: ‘I’m thirty-seven till I pass the word round! D’you understand?’ A biographer suggests that since Lewis felt the war had ripped at least two years out of his life, he was declaring a moratorium on birthdays and planned to make his thirty-seventh the last for some time.22 Thinking Lewis took himself a bit seriously, Sitwell wrote: ‘This got on my nerves to such an extent that when told by a doctor to say “ninety-nine” I responded, invariably, “thirty-seven”.’ To calculate his age properly, she believed that you had to count the rings on his collar.23
Unstable and hard-up, Lewis counted on handouts from the Sitwells, the Schiffs, and other patrons, and was usually dodging creditors. At some point, Lewis was invited to Renishaw, where he appeared with no suitcase and his clothes in a bundle. Lady Ida remarked to Osbert: ‘Your friend is a charming man, but he will have to have a pill.’24 At the end of 1921, Lewis took a very cheap studio, with an exterior of corrugated iron, in Adam and Eve Mews in Kensington. Edith Sitwell sat to him there for several drawings and a painting. She remembered it as situated in waste ground ‘haunted by pallid hens squawking desolately and prophetically’. The floor of the studio was hidden under newspapers, books, pots, pans, kettles, a teapot, tins of milk, and Lewis’s discarded underwear.25 Sitwell recalled that he believed Roger Fry and Clive Bell were always perched on the roof watching him and that there were rats lurking in the mess.
‘D’you mind rats?’ he asked her one day.
She said she did.
‘Well, they’re here all right … Night and day. Day and night. But I’ll try to keep them off.’
He then brandished his brush and returned to the canvas. Sitwell suggested that a Gargantuism in his way of thinking caused him to see rats where there were only mice – in fact, there were so many mice that he would strike a gong in front of their hole to make them retreat. Sitwell says that she sat to him every day except Sundays for ten months. More likely their sessions drew to an end around May, but Lewis continued to work on the painting from time to time until about 1935. The canvas shared some of his escapades; one night in 1923, he carried it down Adam and Eve Mews, following a route that would avoid his landlady’s window as he skipped out on the rent for his studio.26
In an emerald jacket and cap, Sitwell, eyelids almost closed, sits beside a shelf of books in the picture. Regarded as a central work of modern portraiture, it now hangs in the Tate Gallery. However, it was never finished: ‘he was, unfortunately, seized with a kind of Schwärmerei [mad enthusiasm, literally a swarming as of bees] for me. I did not respond. It did not get very far, but was a nuisance as he would follow me about, staring in a most trying manner and telling our acquaintances about the Schwärmerei. So, eventually, I stopped sitting to him (the reason why the portrait has no hands).’27 In Taken Care Of, Sitwell refers to his ‘threatening behaviour’ during sittings as the reason for her ending them. It seems that he became demanding and that she feared a sexual assault. While ostensibly still a friend, Lewis now had a grudge against Sitwell and her brothers, and he would take his revenge.
Though it seems she spent much of her time sitting for Lewis and other artists, Sitwell was actually working hard at her writing. Probably through a connection of Helen’s, Sitwell began to review poetry for the musical journal, the Sackbut. In December 1921, she wrote of Marianne Moore’s Poems, published by ‘H.D.’ at the Egoist Press: ‘These curious and difficult poems are almost invariably interesting, being, as they are, the product of a real and individual intellect … The poems are thick and uncouth, blocks of meaning; they have the unconscious gait of that elephant who is the protagonist of “Black Earth.” They are strange and I believe them to be entirely new; I can see no trace of any influence.’ Not unreasonably, she complained of some of Moore’
s ‘tricks’ such as ending a line in the middle of a word: ‘Miss Moore is too good a poet to do that kind of thing. This book should be studied; for certainly she is among the most interesting American poets of the day.’28 Sitwell’s admiration would grow over the years, and among women poets of her own generation Marianne Moore was the one she most consistently praised.
In the summer of 1922, Edith Sitwell took on the ‘Readers and Writers’ column of the New Age, formerly written by Orage himself, who had given it for a time to Herbert Read. Although she was not paid, the column gave her a much better platform to discuss new works, among them the poems of Isaac Rosenberg: ‘strong and rank as marvellous jungle animals, they terrify by their crouch and spring; the fire in them is acrid and terrible.’29 Although she had not yet laid hands on a copy of Joyce’s newly published Ulysses, she ragged on those who accused him of indecency by offering a mock review of the Song of Solomon: ‘A mass of senseless and obscure sensuality … far-fetched images.’ And the Book of Job got the same notice once given to Wheels: ‘Conceived in morbid eccentricity and executed in fierce factitious gloom.’ At the end of that piece, she baited her detractors: ‘In spite of the general belief that I am a woman of incalculable savagery, with only one end in view, that of burning the Library of the British Museum, it is a fact that I have read and know intimately practically all the poetry written in the English tongue since the time of Chaucer.’30 Given that she means to provoke, this is still a striking statement as she always downplayed her education when talking to her male contemporaries who had studied Latin and Greek. Yet she knew the English literary tradition as well as any of them and her knowledge of French literature was, in most instances, better.