Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  The ‘strong, strange family complex’ Lawrence wrote of was to take on a new dimension. On 15 April 1927, Georgia gave birth to her first child, Reresby. He eventually succeeded as seventh Baronet, after Osbert and Sachie, and he died just short of his eighty-second birthday in 2009. Predictably, Sir George became obsessed with his grandson. For her part, Edith made a fuss about the sensitive minds of children when she was talking about poetry, but otherwise they were, with the exception of her nephew, just noise-makers. After a visit to Weston she wrote to Georgia:

  The journey back was hell. Three children (travelling by themselves) got into my carriage and shrieked like parrots the whole way. They shrieked so loudly that it ‘set off’ the children in the next carriage, rather like something catching fire. The children in the next carriage started others in neighbouring carriages, and soon the whole train was a shrieking yelling hooting whistling mass of infant imbeciles. As you know, I haven’t the unnatural love of children that afflicts some women (always excepting Reresby, for whom I have a real passion) and by the time I arrived I was longing for another Herod.92

  With her fortieth birthday approaching, Edith seemed settled in her own way of life. No one could know, but she had reached a watershed when Virginia Woolf described her as

  transparent like some white bone one picks up on a moor, with sea water stones on her long frail hands which slide into yours much narrower than one expects like a folded fan. She has pale gemlike eyes; & is dressed, on a windy March day, in three decker skirts of red spotted cotton. She half shuts her eyes; coos an odd little laugh … All is very tapering & pointed, the nose running on like a mole … She is a curious product, likable to me: sensitive, etiolated, affectionate, lonely, having to thread her way (there is something ghostlike & angular about her) home to Bayswater to help cook dinner. She said she would like to attach great bags & balloons of psychology, people having dinner, &c, to her poems, but has no knowledge of human nature, only these sudden intense poems – which by the way she has sent me. In other ages she would have been a cloistered nun; or an eccentric secluded country old maid. It is the oddity of our time that has set her on the music hall stage.93

  13

  YOU ARE RUSSIAN, ARE YOU NOT?

  ‘If I present Pavlik to you, it’s your responsibility because his character is not my affair,’ warned Gertrude Stein. ‘Take care … find him customers.’1 Edith Sitwell first glimpsed the painter Pavel Tchelitchew on 27 June 1927 at the opening in Paris of The Triumph of Neptune, the Diaghilev ballet for which Sacheverell wrote the scenario. Tchelitchew seemed to be looking for her: ‘In the interval, I saw a very thin, desperately anxious looking young man staring straight at me as if he were staring at a ghost. I turned away, but in the second entr’acte, the same thing happened. Four days afterwards, I met him at a teaparty at Gertrude Stein’s in the Rue Fleurus.’2 Stein called him one of the greatest discoveries of the age.

  Tchelitchew displayed a curious style of flirtation: ‘Staring at me again as if he had seen a ghost, he said to me, “You are Russian, are you not?” “No, I am English.” “But I am sure you are Russian.” He then told me that I bore such an extraordinary resemblance to Father Zosimov, the saint in “The Brothers Karamazov,” (who was his father’s confessor and one of his greatest friends) that, hearing that Zosimov’s granddaughter had escaped from Russia and was living in Paris, he was convinced that I was the woman in question.’3

  Pavel Tchelitchew was born in 1898 to an aristocratic Russian family; he even boasted that his great-great-grandfather was the Sultan of Turkey. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, his family left Moscow for their estate in the village of Dubrovka. When they were expelled from it, they travelled by caravan to Ukraine, where at an art academy Tchelitchew became a Cubist. He served as a cartographer in a regiment of Uhlans during the Russo-Polish War, but caught typhus and was cut off from the White Army. Once he recovered, he made his way to Constantinople. By 1922, he was working in Berlin, where he had an exhibition, enjoyed his first success as a set painter, and made the acquaintance of Diaghilev and Stravinsky. A bisexual, he took up with a young pianist from Chicago, Allen Tanner, who shared his fanatical devotion to horoscopes and lucky numbers. In August 1923, they moved to Paris, and from 1924 they lived with Tchelitchew’s tubercular sister, Choura, in a flat at 150 Boulevard Montparnasse.4 Later, the three moved to 2 rue Jacques-Mawas.

  During 1924, Tchelitchew shrugged off Cubism on the grounds that it was disrespectful of human anatomy,5 and in the following years he became the leader of a fractious group that included Christian Bérard, Eugene and Leonid Berman, Kristian Tonny, and others. Calling themselves ‘neo-romantics’, they eschewed not only Cubism but abstraction. They produced sorrowfully figurative or allegorical work, owing its inspiration partly to classical and Renaissance art, as well as to nineteenth-century Symbolism. Most of the neo-romantics were set designers too, so their work has a theatrical quality.6 Tchelitchew, in particular, was influenced by Doré and sought a visionary effect in his images. Although they distrusted psychoanalysis, they had affinities with the Surrealists; Tchelitchew, for example, often blended images of bodies and landscapes. Their reputation faded once Abstract Expressionism became fashionable. A travelling exhibition in 2005–6 sought to revive interest in what one critic called ‘the extraordinary achievement of this until now woefully neglected group’.7 Tchelitchew himself remained just in view over the years, owing to the presence of his large canvas Hide and Seek (1940–2) and many smaller pieces at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2008–9, a group of his works, including Hide and Seek, was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.8

  In 1925, Gertrude Stein discovered his work and bought up a group of his canvases, one of which she hung on the wall of her dining room, mischievously seating Picasso where he would have to stare at it.9 Having broken with Hemingway, she took on Tchelitchew as her new protégé, giving him and Tanner the run of her house. Stein’s companion, Alice B. Toklas, immediately decided Tchelitchew was a piece of work – malicious and ready to use Stein for his advantage. Although Toklas’s view of Tchelitchew cannot be taken at face value, others thought much the same. The American novelist Glenway Wescott who knew the painter for thirty years spoke of ‘his craziness – he has always been in a certain way insane, non-sane, psychopathological’ – and he told John Pearson that the painter was ‘a really terrible person’.10 A reading of Tchelitchew’s immense correspondence with Edith Sitwell reveals him as extravagant, visionary, superstitious, mad, and selfish.

  That, however, was not how Edith Sitwell saw him. She fell wildly in love, and the two embarked on a mysterious and passionate relationship. It is unknown whether they slept together. Pavel, known to his friends as Pavlik, was mostly, but not strictly, interested in men. The painter’s close friend and biographer, Parker Tyler – a man as dotty as himself – talks of the relationship with Sitwell as virginal, and of Tchelitchew feeling that every woman was a potential Circe against whom he must prepare counter-magic: ‘Edith Sitwell (in his imagination) is the virgin who wishes to be deflowered and for this quasi-sacred purpose, he, Pavel Tchelitchew, has been irrevocably elected [Tyler’s emphases]. His work is surely cut out for him. This Sibyl is just virginal enough, just erotic enough, to be (like any witch for that matter) subjugated – held in masculine thrall.’ Whatever passed between them, he had, by around 1929, physically recoiled from Sitwell. As he exclaimed to Tanner, ‘What – alone with Sitvouka? Non, mon cher! What do you want? I should be raped!’11

  In the years that followed, Tchelitchew toyed with her expectations when he wanted her to buy a picture, to arrange exhibitions, or to find him commissions. He once remarked to Wescott: ‘People like me who are sex-mad have absolutely no obligation to their lovers.’12 There is no confirmation of it in their letters, but it is just possible that he and Sitwell had a brief sexual liaison, and that she remained hopeful ever after of it starting up again or resolving in marriage. This would make sens
e of her clinging to him and of her jealousy of his lovers. Her comments to Elizabeth Salter about never having had a passionate relationship do not exclude the possibility of a very brief sexual experience. It looked to others like an affair. Helen Rootham saw, or guessed, or feared that something was going on, so scolded Sitwell over the damage to her reputation. When Tchelitchew died thirty years later, Sitwell remained protective of his memory and pleaded with Tyler: ‘Don’t hand him over to the wolves.’13

  What did she see in him? He could be affectionate and entertaining. Allanah Harper recalled him leaping and turning pirouettes for Sitwell’s amusement outside Stein’s house.14 He had a knack of mimicry: apart from voices, he would imitate the sound of wind in an aspen tree or of paper blown from a table, and run through the subtle noises supposedly made by egrets, mice, butterflies in flight, mosquitoes, and fleas.15 What Sitwell did not want was someone remote like her father or a brutish hunter like her mother’s relatives. She looked for sensitive men and, perhaps naively, fell for bisexuals like Guevara, Sassoon, and Tchelitchew.

  It is not certain that Sitwell really understood much about homosexuality, at least before 1932, when she asked her friend the art collector and author Edward James to explain some of the sex acts to her; he refused. Or perhaps she would not admit what she did know. For many years, she said nothing (at least in surviving letters) about Osbert’s relationship, begun a few years earlier and amounting to marriage, with the socialite and occasional author David Horner. In the late 1920s she was jealous of Tanner’s role in Tchelitchew’s life and became sympathetic to him only when he was supplanted by the American poet Charles Henri Ford c.1933. Sitwell’s perpetual complaint was that Tchelitchew could not tell who his real friends were, by which she meant he ought to see that she was the one who truly loved him. There was trouble here that had nothing to do with orientation. Tchelitchew was what we now call a child abuser. Charles Henri Ford’s unpublished journals recount his own many seductions of pubescent boys – it is not at all unusual to read of him sleeping with fifteen-year-olds even when he himself was almost forty. He and Tchelitchew shared partners, and often engaged in threesomes. He described Tchelitchew as preferring sex with boys to sex with his male peers. On at least one occasion, Ford expected to be arrested along with Tchelitchew and another friend over their dealings with a minor, and wrote in his journal: ‘Anyone who has sexual dalliance of any sort with children is looked upon, or at least called, a “degenerate” by the newspapers. Quelle Cauchemar!’16 A nightmare indeed. Sitwell had no idea what she was involved in. Though she suffered on account of the rejection, she was probably never so fortunate as to be spared a marriage or a lengthy sexual relationship with Tchelitchew.

  Still, her sexual frustration fuelled rows with Tchelitchew, who had a cruel temper. After the painter died of heart failure in 1957, his friend and supporter Lincoln Kirstein (founder of the New York City Ballet) claimed that Pavlik had died of anger.17 In Taken Care Of, Sitwell describes sitting to Tchelitchew at a studio in London, with the door locked and the key in his pocket: ‘he took to hurtling the armchair in which I sat across the slippery floor as if it were a perambulator, at the same time uttering shrieks of rage, and, at moments, hurling bare canvasses [sic] past my head, being careful, however, that they did not hurt that organ.’ She puts a comic though unconvincing spin on his death threats: ‘“Yes, yes, I choos” (just) “keel you, you know! I choos keel you.” “Very well old boy … if you must, you must! But kindly respect my amber!”’ Eventually, Cecil Beaton appeared, heard the commotion, demanded that Pavlik open the door, and then joined them at tea. That was her story, and she stuck to it – Beaton was on the wrong side of the door to witness what actually happened.

  Sitwell was forced, at least superficially, into the role of close friend or sister to Tchelitchew – she never made peace with this. She could, however, claim a role in his art. After meeting Tchelitchew briefly in June 1927, Sitwell returned to England. In October, she wrote to Tom Balston that she was going to be painted by a Russian: ‘I tried to escape, but Gertrude put her sandal on me and pinned me to the ground, saying firmly: “He is going to be a very great man. I found Picasso, and I found Matisse (which is true) and I’ve never been deceived.” – But oh, my poor face.’ This portrait in gouache was followed almost immediately by another, finished before July 1928, when he held a one-man show at the Claridge Gallery in London.18 He subsequently executed four more portraits and a wax sculpture of Sitwell. While he set great store by his large allegorical works Phenomena (1936–8) and Hide and Seek (1940–2), some of his most arresting images were portraits of Edith Sitwell, especially one done in pastel in 1935. Although she entered his opaque Symbolic system as a ‘Sibyl’, she wanted something more concrete: to be his wife.

  A beginning with Tchelitchew was matched by an ending with Robert Graves. Although she had known of the plan for Graves to take a teaching job in Egypt, she was surprised when he, Nancy, and Laura Riding headed off in January 1926 without saying goodbye. Then, in June 1927, she discovered an article by Riding in the journal Transitions, referring to a ‘general flaw’ in recent poetry, and claiming that Eliot, Sitwell, and other poets felt the need to caricature a tainted, ordinary language before they could communicate directly. Sitwell wrote to Sassoon: ‘I don’t quite know what poem Miss Riding has written which puts her in a position to be impertinent to Poe, Rimbaud, Eliot, or myself. The mere fact of having pinched Nancy’s husband is not sufficient.’ Since Sassoon had been urging her not to fight with critics, she promised to leave Riding alone if there was nothing further: ‘I’m doing this not out of consideration for Robert’s feelings, (he should have kept her in her place) – but simply because you have asked me not to.’19

  The same criticism was made in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, published in November, in which Robert Graves now appeared as co-author. The book did observe that much of what she (and Eliot and cummings, but not William Carlos Williams) wrote was ‘genuine poetry’, but she sensed a defection. The publication of Goodbye to All That, with its distorted accounts of the soldiering of Sassoon and others, sealed the matter. Robert Graves was no longer considered a friend. When Sitwell found that Graves had sold a copy of her book The Sleeping Beauty that she had inscribed ‘For Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson in admiration from Edith Sitwell’, she bought and resold it with a further note: ‘I wrote this dedication at a time when Robert Graves was a tentative English nightingale and not an American loon or screech-owl. Though poor, I am happy to buy this book (from the shop to which he sold it) for the sum of 15s so that no one can accuse me of being a hoot-fan. Edith Sitwell.’20

  In early October 1927, Edith Sitwell met Pablo Picasso at 27 rue de Fleurus. She liked him straight away: ‘At the moment, he was extremely excited and over-joyed because his mother-in-law had just died. Also he was looking forward to the funeral, because, according to Gertrude, all Spaniards prefer funerals to circuses any day.’21 Stein later remarked on something in Picasso’s sensibility that became a touchstone for Sitwell. According to Stein, as a young man he had once rounded on ‘the French version of the Bloomsburys’: ‘Yes, yes … your taste and intellect is so wonderful. But who does the work? Stupid, tasteless people like me.’22

  Geniuses were sometimes difficult to manage. Around the end of 1927, Edith Sitwell invited Cecil Beaton to a tea party, where he would likely find Forster and the Eliots, along with W. B. Yeats: ‘Oh bother, [Yeats] wants me to be a Rosicrucian. Such a strain, and so bad for the clothes, as it seems to lead to sandals and blue veils.’23 On another occasion she told Sassoon about a lunch with Yeats at the Ivy, a restaurant surrounded by theatres:

  The Manager, overcome with awe, practically threw away all the theatrical managers and originals and copies of Miss Tallulah Bankhead, and devoted himself, most respectfully, to Yeats, thereby calling the attention of the whole restaurant to us. I did not bless him, as Yeats … boomed out, in a bittern-like poet’s voice, every now and then ‘Come to
Rapallo, and my wife and I will Lay Hands Upon You’ … and ‘Every time my wife and I put our hands in our pockets, we bring them out filled with the perfume of violets and lilies, – by purely mystical means.’ And (archly) ‘a friend of ours has a mother who might well be called a bit of a Witch’ (shades of George Robey) and ‘[the composer Edmund] Dulac lit the candles with his fingers.’ – The actor managers and the originals and copies of Miss Tallulah Bankhead couldn’t get over it. Nor could I.24

  Christmas came as a Sitwellian set-piece. Sir George and Lady Ida summoned Edith to the Curzon Hotel. She could not find a bus or taxi, so got soaked through her clothes and had to remain in them all day, most of it spent in conversation with the son and daughter of the Parsee High Priest of Bombay, who lobbed questions at her: ‘What do you think about the New English Prayer Book, Miss Sitwell? Naturally, we are very interested.’ Gnashing of teeth led to the breaking of a molar. When a dentist pulled it out a few days later, it came in three pieces. The procedure took an hour and ten minutes, by which time the novocaine had worn off: ‘it made me wonder what sort of things are happening in China, if that kind of thing can happen here, – to somebody who hasn’t even been particularly annoying.’25