Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  Greed was no part of Edith’s character, and she could hope only for small inheritances – so she remained on the edges of these quarrels. In later years she privately took Osbert’s side when there was trouble with Sachie and Georgia, assuming (unwisely) that he knew best about money, yet she managed to stay on good terms with all three. In July 1925, she wrote to Georgia about the engagement: ‘I am so glad, dear, about this. It is lovely to think somebody is coming into the family whom one can care for, instead of somebody whom, quite possibly, one couldn’t bear, – which is what so often happens. Congratulations sound such cold things. “I hope you will be very happy” is formal and silly. But we understand each other, you and I.’59

  Edith nearly missed the wedding in Paris on 12 October. Coutts Bank demanded that she immediately repay sixty-eight pounds that she had run up in excess of her guaranteed overdraft; her arrangement with the bank left her no means of buying a ticket from London or clothes for the wedding. The best she could do was promise a phonograph as a wedding present.60 Then, she tripped and fell in front of a bus and was lucky to escape with just a sprained ankle and some torn muscles. Nevertheless, money was found for a ticket and she was well enough to travel. At the last minute, Sir George and Lady Ida begged off, remaining in Florence. After the wedding, Edith and Osbert went on to Montegufoni. From there, Edith wrote to Georgia: ‘your nature is just as lovely as your appearance, and it would be beyond words if one didn’t value you at your real worth. Trust me implicitly. You can, you know.’61

  The Gingers were always a trial. When someone left the house suddenly, Lady Ida told Edith: ‘In future I shall think of myself. I shall be selfish in future. And see how people like that.’62 The beauties of the castle had to be balanced against the uncongenial company. Edith wrote to Sydney Schiff: ‘This is a most lovely and romantic place, at once grandiose and peaceful, in spite of a warlike history, with huge walls, plants growing in them, gigantic coats of arms, and a 13th century tower. The only disadvantage is a constant incursion of tarantulas, scorpions, Mrs. Hwfa Williams, and Mrs. George Keppel, these ancient and malevolent women are always here.’63 At other times, Sitwell had kind words for Mrs Keppel, the former mistress of King Edward and the great-grandmother of the Duchess of Cornwall. Mrs Keppel was about Lady Ida’s age, and they had a long friendship; on occasion she spoke up for Edith. Mrs Hwfa Williams was an Edwardian hostess and memoirist; there is no sign Edith Sitwell ever thought of her except as a tarantula or scorpion.

  On her return to London at the beginning of November, she found waiting for her a copy of the French edition of Gertrude Stein’s novel, The Making of Americans, which she described to Robert Graves as ‘a most portentous book, so huge [925 pages] that it defies competition as to size. I haven’t read it yet. It looks shrewd and rich in life, but not queer like “Geography and Plays,” my favourite work of hers.’64 Still, she wrote a warm review of it that Eliot published in the New Criterion in April – all part of her ‘propaganda’ for Stein.65

  For the most part, winter in London was dreary, and conversation in the flat a bit earnest, as she told Georgia: ‘Helen went away to lecture and came back suffering from diarrhoea and Sacred Glyphs and metaphysics.’ The arrival of a clever young admirer offered relief from the weather and the anthroposophists. Allanah Harper was a ‘bright young thing’, a friend of Zita and Baby Jungman and of the future novelist Lady Eleanor Smith. Harper attended a poetry reading and fell a little in love with Sitwell: ‘Here was the beauty of Pierro [sic] della Francesca. Her flat hair like that of a naiad, her hands as white as alabaster. On her long gothic fingers she wore huge rings, lumps of topaz and turquoise, on her wrists were coral and jet bracelets. She began to recite and a window opened on an enchanted world. Never had I heard a more beautifully modulated voice. Each vowel and consonant flowed, she seemed to weave poetry in the air.’66

  At the end of the year Harper published an article on the three Sitwells, and Edith was happy to have won a new partisan, though she did question a reference in the article to Nancy Cunard, whose work was just ‘a bad parody of Mr. Eliot’.67 The twenty-one-year-old Harper was immediately invited to Pembridge Mansions, the poverty of which surprised her, and she was tempted to bring as a present for Sitwell a shade for the dangling bulb. Harper heard cross voices on the stairs. Sitwell said, ‘That must be Tom.’ When Eliot came in with Vivienne, Harper thought he looked like a young curate who would eventually become a bishop. Eliot sat next to Harper on the sofa and reached for a magazine containing an article in which Harper had complained of his obscurity. Harper grabbed it and sat on it. He tried to get at it, but Harper won the tussle. Vivienne’s reaction is not recorded.

  The following week, Harper returned and found among the guests Virginia Woolf, Edmund Blunden, William Walton, Arthur Waley, and Humbert Wolfe. Sitwell and Woolf were discussing Vita Sackville-West’s new poem, The Land, later awarded the Hawthornden Prize. ‘“It is not poetry,” Sitwell said, “it would be entirely suitable for the use of farmers to help them to count the ticks on their sheep.”’ Woolf asked: ‘“Edith, must one always tell the truth?”’ Harper had spotted Woolf enjoying Edith’s triumphs over Vita. In June, Woolf noted in her diary how at a dinner party Edith was ‘tremulously pleased by Morgan’s [E. M. Forster’s] compliments (& he never praised Vita, who sat hurt, modest, silent, like a snubbed schoolboy).’68

  Allanah Harper’s devotion to Edith Sitwell amused her madcap friends. When they heard that Sitwell was coming to visit Harper’s mother in St Leonard’s Terrace, Lady Eleanor Smith and Enid Raphael (now remembered for the remark, ‘I don’t know why people talk about their private parts. Mine aren’t private’69) laid an ambush. They enlarged a newspaper image of Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of Sitwell to life size and nailed it above the mantelpiece in the sitting room. Harper found it just before Sitwell arrived and pried it off using an old sword of her father’s. She covered up the nail holes by hanging a painting on the spot. Sitwell had no knowledge of the stunt; instead, she complimented Harper on her sense of poetry, then picked up a seashell from the mantelpiece and began reciting verses from John Keats.70

  In the spring of 1926, Edith Sitwell and William Walton were again hard at work on Façade. The six-piece orchestra went through careful rehearsals. The performances of a version with seven new poems on 27 and 29 April at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea71 were exactly what they had hoped for. Ernest Newman, the biographer of Wagner and an influential critic, wrote in the Sunday Times: ‘How much I enjoyed the fun may be estimated from the fact that I – a critic! – actually not only stayed to the end but added my voice and my umbrella to the clamour for encores of the best “items” long after the official proceedings were finished.’ Sitwell herself read only a few of the slower poems. Constant Lambert seems to have recited some of the pieces, but most were performed by Neil Porter of the Old Vic.72 Much as Sitwell prided herself on her reciting, this was a good decision. Newman wrote: ‘The curious thing was the happiness of the correspondence between all factors of the affair; the music, the words, the megaphone, and the piquant phrasing of the lines by the reciter were as much bone of each other’s bone and flesh of each other’s flesh as the words and the music are of each other in “Tristan” or “Pelléas”. At its best, “Façade” was the jolliest entertainment of the season.’

  Newman’s review appeared on 2 May, the day before the Trades Union Congress began a general strike in support of the coal miners, who were fighting against wage reductions and poor working conditions. Osbert felt that by giving no ground to workers the upper classes had brought a disaster upon themselves. Taking matters into their own hands, he and an overwrought Siegfried Sassoon met with the editor of the Daily Express, Beverley Baxter, and agreed, after some shouting, on a set of principles that might secure an agreement. Osbert then persuaded Alice Wimborne to press her husband, a former Cabinet minister and a cousin of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, to hold a meeting of labour leaders, politicians, an
d employers. This group had no influence on Stanley Baldwin’s government – indeed, the strike collapsed by 12 May.73 Nonetheless, the Wimborne House effort was an honourable one and might have taken on significance, had the strike continued.

  Edith Sitwell’s political views are difficult to tease out. In early 1924, she had encouraged Robert Graves to edit a political anthology: ‘we’ll show them what the Left Wing can produce.’74 In 1926, Sitwell, though worn out by the inconvenience of the strike, took the side of the strikers. She wrote to Freeman: ‘As for the strike, I feel we are assisting at a great landmark in history, a really great inner event, – but don’t feel worthy of it, or anything but debilitated, harassed, and, if the truth were known, slightly bored.’75

  Around the beginning of the General Strike, both Edith and Osbert received rambling letters from Vivienne Eliot, then in Rome, to the effect that they would soon hear of a scandal in which she had become involved. She felt that if she returned to Tom, he would be disgraced. She told them that she would remain abroad unless she heard from them by letter or cable and not to let Tom know she had written to them. They had no idea what to do. Osbert wrote later: ‘Eventually, as it seemed to us that very probably he might not want her to go back to him, we decided not to answer her – in any case, from a practical point of view, owing to the General Strike, no letter or telegram from us could reach her.’ Vivienne returned on her own and told her husband that when she had turned to the Sitwells for advice, they had ignored her. Relations with Tom Eliot turned cold and stayed so for a long time.76

  Edith Sitwell had been trying for months to bring Gertrude Stein to England as a lecturer. The end of the strike allowed her to go ahead. According to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein wrote her lecture in a garage while waiting for repairs to her Ford, called ‘Godiva’ as it came to her stripped. She was terrified of lecturing, and sought advice from a professor of history who told her to read quickly and to keep her eyes fastened on her paper; this contradicted earlier advice to go slowly and never to look down. First came a party at Pembridge Mansions on 1 June, which Virginia Woolf described, snarlingly, to Vanessa Bell: ‘a good deal of misery was endured. Jews swarmed. It was in honour of Miss Gertrude Stein who was throned on a broken settee (all Edith’s furniture is derelict, to make up for which she is stuck about with jewels like a drowned mer-maiden). This resolute old lady inflicted great damage on all the youth.’77 Then came the lectures on successive days at Jesus College, Cambridge, and at the Ordinary in Oxford (a literary society of which Harold Acton was president). Osbert helped Stein get past her nervousness by holding forth on all the kinds of stage fright it was possible to experience. She wrote of Osbert: ‘He had that pleasant kindly irresponsible agitated calm that an uncle of an english king must always have.’78

  Stein put on a show at the universities, and for weeks afterwards Sachie chuckled at her crushing replies to silly questions. One of Edith’s protégés, the young poet (later politician and memoirist) Tom Driberg, appealed to Virginia Woolf to publish the lecture,79 which eventually appeared as Composition as Explanation in the Hogarth Essays series.

  Through the early 1920s, Edith Sitwell’s friendship with Siegfried Sassoon lagged a little behind Osbert’s rows and reconciliations with him – even though Sassoon thought her the more interesting writer. On 1 May 1926, she thanked him for the gift of a book, but with faint praise. After working with Osbert on the Wimborne House talks, he came to Edith’s party for Stein and afterwards wrote a warm letter. She responded on 4 June: ‘You know what I’ve always felt about your poetry; it cuts right down to the bone, – the most rare and unusual thing in this muffled stifled age, – and moves one most profoundly.’80 Before long Sassoon sent her manuscripts of Wilfred Owen that she had not known about, and she and Sassoon were often seen in company.

  Edmund Gosse put it bluntly to Sassoon at dinner on 20 January 1927, ‘Would you like to marry Edith Sitwell?’

  Sassoon responded, ‘I don’t think poets ought to marry one another.’

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked you that question. But don’t let it deter you if you are really fond of her.’81

  The problem for Sassoon was not that Sitwell was a poet, but that she was a woman. There were also differences of temperament; he always urged her to avoid publicity. He was both right and wrong: in her later career Sitwell probably damaged her reputation as a poet by seeking the limelight too much, while Sassoon damaged his by becoming a recluse.

  From 1926, Sitwell began to rely chiefly on Sassoon for criticism of her new work. When he praised one of her poems, she wrote back: ‘I was so particularly anxious that you should, because I’ve worked so frightfully hard digging for my poetry, – if you know what I mean, – and at last it seems to me as if, providing I dig hard enough, one of these days I may find something. One never knows.’82 That kind of humility was not often on display, and she sometimes took Sassoon’s remarks the wrong way. In March 1927, she wrote: ‘My word, if it had been anyone but you who had told me to “consider and reconsider”, and “sift” my poems, I should have taken that person on a one-way journey! Luckily, it was you. But the escape has been narrow … Do you suppose I write poems instead of singing in my bath? Or what? Do you suppose I toss these things off lightly, like yodelling? Or what?’83 The diatribe ended in an invitation to tea.

  Edith Sitwell bridled at criticism, but she did pay attention. As the years passed, she did sift her early work, folding some pieces into Façade and scrapping others entirely. She rejected one common criticism of her work, that she repeated lines and images, as a failure to understand the musical structure of her poems.

  On 7 December 1926, Allanah Harper brought Edith Sitwell to meet Cecil Beaton, who had left Cambridge the year before, at his mother’s house. On the strength of soft-focus pictures he had taken of her friends, Harper was urging him to become a professional photographer. Hugo Vickers observes that Beaton’s originality lay in his use of unusual props or backgrounds. On this particular afternoon, Beaton was struck by Sitwell’s Pre-Raphaelite garb and her medieval hands. He persuaded her to pose for photographs, among them one in which she appeared asphyxiated under a Victorian glass dome. Light got into the camera and ruined the film, but this was just the start of his experiments.84

  Beaton had a range of interests, and in the late winter helped the memorably named director Widgey R. Newman to make two ‘phono-films’, now lost, of Edith Sitwell reading poems at Clapham Studios. He conducted a number of sessions with the three Sitwells, taking photographs that were among the highlights of his exhibition at Coolings Galleries in November 1927. Beaton’s best-known photograph from that year is of Edith Sitwell laid out as a regal corpse in a glittering fabric under a spray of lilies, with wooden cherubim on either side of her head.

  His photographs of the Sitwells launched his career, and he always maintained that Edith was his favourite subject. There were times (for example, the 1940s) when she found Beaton annoying, but somehow they remained friends. Beaton told John Pearson: ‘I was terribly impressed by Edith almost from the start. I loved her and thought her really beautiful. I wasn’t interested in poetry, and hardly knew what to do with her poems which she used to insist on writing out for me. I found her sympathetic, sweet, loveable. Mind you, I was terribly shy at the time.’85

  A friendship with D. H. Lawrence did not turn out so well. Sitwell admired his works, especially ‘The Snake’ and ‘The Mountain Lion’, which she called ‘two beautiful and most moving poems’.86 Osbert had grown very interested in him and made an effort to meet with him in Italy in 1926, but Lawrence and his wife went to Montegufoni at a time when only Sir George and Lady Ida were there. Lady Ida wrote to Osbert: ‘A Mr. D. H. Lawrence came over the other day, a funny little petit-maitre of a man with flat features and a beard. He says he is a writer, and seems to know all of you. His wife is a large German. She went round the house with your father, and when he showed her anything, would look at him, lean against one of
the gilded beds, and breathe heavily.’87 Whatever Frieda’s breathing signified, Lady Ida doubtless had a good time teasing her husband about it. In Sir George’s version of the story, Frieda Lawrence jumped on all the mattresses to see if they were soft.88 The Lawrences stopped at Renishaw in July, missing Edith and Osbert again.

  Finally, at the end of May 1927, Edith and Osbert visited the Lawrences at Villa Merenda near Florence. Edith recalled that Lawrence looked like ‘a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden’. The two-hour visit passed amicably and courteously, but Lawrence could not figure them out: ‘Osbert and Edith Sitwell came to tea the other day. They were really very nice, not a bit affected or bouncing: only absorbed in themselves and their parents. I never in my life saw such a strong, strange family complex: as if they were marooned on a desert island, and nobody in the world but their lost selves. Queer!’89

  Edith Sitwell never forgave what happened next. There is no question that Lady Chatterley’s Lover owes something to Lawrence’s observation of the Sitwells. Clifford Chatterley, a writer of fiction, lives in an estate resembling Renishaw. He has an aunt like Lady Ida, and a sister, Emma, like Edith. Most importantly, Edith believed that, in the crippled and unsexed Clifford Chatterley, Lawrence had attempted a portrait of Osbert – all the crueller because Lawrence was delving into a hushed-up topic, Osbert’s sexuality. John Pearson, however, points out that Lawrence’s work on the novel was well advanced by the time the Sitwells made their visit. Chatterley’s impotence is most likely modelled on Lawrence’s own failures with Frieda. Nevertheless, when Lawrence wrote what was, in fact, the third version of the novel, he added the characteristics that led Sitwell to think the whole work modelled on her brother.90 To the end of her days, Edith Sitwell regarded the novel as pornographic trash, and said she could describe it only ‘with a five-letter word which, until Mr. Lawrence made a pet of it, was only allowed by our cricket-loving, golf-loving, tennis-loving compatriots to be used in connection with those games – not in connection with the game that interested Mr. Lawrence’.91