Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  Much worse things were on the horizon. Once a servant of the Londesboroughs, Edith Powell was Osbert’s much loved cook.26 Early in 1928, she was taken to the Royal Free Hospital for what she understood to be preventive surgery, though she was really suffering from breast cancer and had only two years to live. Part of her care fell to Edith, who made the long bus ride to the hospital almost every day for more than two months. There she saw a little girl of nine who had lost a leg to tuberculosis. Coming from a family of seven children, the girl was surprised at being given anything other than what she called ‘bread and grease’ to eat. She owned no warm clothes, so Sitwell and the nurses knitted some for her. Sitwell told Sassoon that she had started writing an outraged letter to ‘Somebody’ (she hadn’t decided whether this should be a politician or a newspaper) about children lacking necessities: ‘it is no good expecting anybody to understand anything – excepting just a few people, – I tore the letter up. It isn’t heartlessness, just stupidity.’27

  Some months later, she made a scene at Arnold Bennett’s house. Lord Berners, a composer and polymath, ‘giggled’ about Mrs Powell’s condition: ‘I should prefer a cook who didn’t suffer from malignant diseases.’ Sitwell said as gently as she could: ‘I suppose humanity has got a dreadful way of cropping up in one, even if one is only a cook.’ Afterwards, Christabel Aberconway chided her for not being ‘a woman of the world’. Sitwell described all this later for Sassoon: ‘I find being a woman of the world so incompatible with being a lady – half the time, – I mean what I consider a lady.’28

  Illness was about to strike closer. Around the beginning of February 1928, Helen Rootham, then fifty-three, was exhausted, and she had two suspicious lumps. Under local anaesthetic, a surgeon removed a gland from under her arm; she waited, very ill, at Moscow Road, for the pathology report, which showed that it was malignant and that more surgery was necessary. Forbidding Sitwell to come because she would ‘fuss’, she hurried to Paris where Professor Henri Albert Hartmann, who had treated Sitwell in 1905, removed the second lump, which may have been in her breast. Once Sitwell received word from Paris, she wrote to Gertrude Stein: ‘Poor thing. She was really so wonderfully brave, and behaved as though it were nothing.’29

  Rootham’s fiancé also behaved as though it were nothing. Sitwell called Sassoon in to advise her on whether to confront ‘one of the most dangerous blackguards in London’;30 she was afraid of stirring up Helen’s feelings about a man who had effectively dumped her. On Sassoon’s advice, she summoned the fiancé, then reported back: ‘It has been perfectly awful, because the whole thing was simply brought on by misery over the cad to whom she has been engaged for the last eight or nine years … he didn’t even enquire if it was malignant or not, and she had to go to Paris, looking a dying woman, without one word from him. I sent for him, and had an interview with him which I imagine he didn’t enjoy.’ Edith compared him as a religious teacher to the recently deceased J. H. Smyth-Pigott – a defrocked clergyman who had led a sect called ‘Agapemones’ in Somerset; in 1902 he claimed to be the Messiah and over the years had bedded many of his female followers as ‘soul-brides’.31 She went on: ‘I told H’s fiancé that I had had to lie and say he had been ill, and that was why he had not been to see her. He replied “Mystically you were speaking the truth, Miss Sitwell.” Gosh! “Mystically” is now going to be a catchword with me … If I don’t want to do a thing, I shall say: “Mystically, I will do it.”’32

  Sitwell made an impression on him: ‘the little darling whisked over to Paris like a frightened rabbit. So now I suppose poor H. will be satisfied. It is something to know he can be frightened.’33 Rootham wrote sad letters to Sitwell, remarking that her fiancé did everything late and that she felt like a ghost talking to Jack Straw.34 Sitwell told Tom Balston that she was going to break up one of the man’s meetings and expose him: ‘I know a thing or two about him which would get him turned out of England if only I could tell the police.’ What she knew about the man is hard to guess, but if he could be deported he must have been a foreigner – further evidence that the fiancé was indeed Dimitrije Mitrinovi.

  Helen’s sister Evelyn, whose marriage to Truels Wiel was now over, had had nursing experience during the war, so Helen looked to her for care. However, in the year following Helen’s surgery Evelyn required what Sitwell called, somewhat vaguely, ‘the most appalling operation known’, though it was not for cancer. Evelyn suffered from varicose veins, which made it difficult for her to walk. Both women turned to Sitwell as their protector.35 Sitwell took the devastated Helen for a short holiday at a hotel in Bournemouth after Easter. Yet another blow came: they heard that Sir Edmund Gosse had undergone surgery. He died on 16 May 1928.36 Sassoon, who had been particularly close to Gosse, was stricken.

  For Edith Sitwell to get out of a funk, it was usually necessary for her to pick a fight. This happened in the pages of the Daily Mail, to which she had been contributing tart columns. A letter to the editor (23 June 1928) denounced her ‘acid disposition and disagreeable mind’. Two days later Sitwell wrote that the letter-writer ‘has taught me the value of birth-control for the masses’. The newspaper was then flooded with letters, so the editors sought the opinion of George Bernard Shaw, which was all for Sitwell: ‘if a man hits Gene Tunney in the street he must put up with what he gets in return’ (30 June 1928).37

  Sitwell was happy to annoy other people, not many of whom took it as Shaw thought they should. A few months later, she told Sassoon: ‘The Representative of the Gas Light and Coke Company is in a black passion with me. He could hardly speak, he was so annoyed. All because he brought me a document to sign, at the top of which was the heading, Maker and Description. And I wrote: God. Tall. Fair-haired. Not at all bad-looking. Grey eyes. He broke into a fury and said it was a legal document and I had defaced it!’

  Her own face was a matter of concern to her, so she went to the Herbalists Association, asking for ‘a message of hope for my dewlaps’. ‘Yis, Modom,’ said the assistant, and they consulted for some time over her dewlaps. Then Sitwell burst out, ‘Do you realise that God has only relented about my hands and my ankles, and that if the joints in them enlarge, it will be the River for me?’ ‘Yis Modom.’ The assistant paused. ‘For craggy joints, use …’ After this conversation, Edith put it to her sister-in-law, Georgia, ‘Craggy joints … Now have I craggy joints?’

  After 1928, Edith Sitwell wrote fewer and fewer playful poems. Her sense of humour ranged anarchically through her letters (she is one of her century’s great letter writers) and through works like The English Eccentrics (1933). The poem ‘Metamorphosis’, first published in 1928, introduces images that are central to her work after 1940: Lazarus, the Arctic cold, transformations of the body out of death. These capture Sitwell’s private sense – confided whimsically to herbalists – of a body growing older. The poem was largely completed before Helen’s illness and so does not reflect the anxieties of the late winter of 1928.

  She explained the origins of her next major poem,‘Gold Coast Customs’, to the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark (later Lord Clark):

  In the two years before I wrote the poem – I can’t remember the exact date – there were terrible processions of Hunger-marchers, – the real thing, not a political demonstration. Three times I saw a figure walking beside these, as it were producing their music. I think he was mad. He was skeleton-thin, wore nothing but a suit, as shapeless and thin and shiny as mud – it looked as if it were made of mud. He had rouged the whole of his face as red as blood, and carried an empty food-tin, which he banged rhythmically with a large bone.38

  This drummer is heard in the poem’s pounding metres, which also owe something to ‘The Congo’ (1914), Vachel Lindsay’s clumsy experiment with a drumming beat. In 1919, Sitwell told Robert Nichols that she admired Lindsay,39 but later decided that Lindsay was a ‘horrible’ poet and ‘The Congo’ his most awful work.40

  Sitwell learned of a ‘freak’ party on a barge, at which the guests were dressed
as beggars and had to step over the homeless people sleeping on the Embankment. In a newspaper article at the time, she described an Irish harvester who had recently died of starvation, a fearful contrast to the ‘exceedingly vulgar and boring freak parties which have been held for the last year or two … These forms of modern behaviour create in me a violent passion for Queen Victoria, for the deans of the Victorian era, and for laws of conduct laid down by Lord Tennyson. I would rather have a dean than a divorcée any day, though I have been bored by specimens of both species; but at any rate deans are not vulgar.’41

  What she saw seemed as cruel as cannibalism. To her, London was not unlike Ashantee in West Africa a hundred years earlier, where ‘the death of any rich or important person was followed by several days of national ceremonies, during which the utmost licence prevailed, and slaves and poor persons were killed that the bones of the deceased might be washed with human blood. These ceremonies were called Customs.’ Sitwell’s poem, written in the summer and autumn of 1928, was titled in early drafts ‘The Best Party’, then ‘Gold Coast Customs’, and it reads as if a party in Vile Bodies had been crashed by Jonathan Swift:

  One house like a rat-skin

  Mask flaps fleet

  In the sailor’s tall

  Ventriloquist street

  Where the rag houses flap –

  Hiding a gap.

  Here tier on tier

  Like a black box rear

  In the flapping slum

  Beside Death’s docks.

  I did not know this meaner Death

  Meant this: that the bunches of nerves still dance

  And caper among these slums, and prance.

  ‘Mariners, put your bones to bed!’

  But at Lady Bamburgher’s parties each head,

  Grinning, knew it had left its bones

  In the mud with the white skulls … only the grin

  Is left, strings of nerves, and the drum-taut skin.42

  Sitwell explained to Allanah Harper: ‘the 1¼ syllabled words “rear” and “tier” make you feel that the houses are toppling over.’ Elsewhere, she relies on double rhymes for extra emphasis, and on assonance to achieve a ‘worm-like turning movement’. Underlining words for emphasis, she said that moral chaos is suggested by lines made deliberately ‘tuneless’: ‘… dead / Grass creaks like a carrion-bird’s voice, rattles, / Squeaks like a wooden shuttle, battles …’ Elsewhere, she allows lines to ‘lengthen themselves out, rear up, and come down with a crash on one’s head’.43

  In an early draft of the poem, she tried to versify Hegel’s now derided observation in The Philosophy of History: ‘What we properly understand by Africa, is Unhistorical Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.’44 As published, the poem includes a long note from Hegel on ‘the devouring of human flesh’ among Africans. Realising that this could be offensive, she commented in later editions: ‘It is needless to add that this refers only to a past age, and that, in quoting this passage, I intend no reflection whatever upon the African races of our time. This passage no more casts a reflection upon them than a passage referring to the cruelties of the Tudor age casts a reflection upon the English of our present age.’45

  In 1951, Sitwell got into a row with the poet David Lutyens over whether the name Bamburgher in the poem is anti-Semitic.46 About the same time, she defended the name to another correspondent as not anti-Semitic but international, as is the character of the crime the poem describes.47 Geoffrey Elborn shrewdly proposes that the model for Lady Bamburgher is the Irish-American Emerald Cunard.48 In early versions of the poem the hostess was named Hamburgher; the name was then changed to Bamburgher, which still served as a dactyl (a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed) but fitted in more tightly with the poem’s patterns of alliteration and the underlying drumbeat. Either name would be Jewish. Lady Cunard’s maiden name, Burke, is recognisable in both names. Still, in giving Jewish names to someone who represents amoral wealth, Sitwell does rely on a stereotype.

  ‘Gold Coast Customs is my real joy, if you can call it a joy,’49 Sitwell told Sassoon, who admired it and thought it frightening. Sitwell herself called it ‘an absolute terror’50 and said that writing it had left her ‘shattered’.51 The poem provided the title-piece of a new collection published on 24 January 1929, which included a Tchelitchew portrait of Sitwell as a frontispiece. In Osbert’s view, Edith had ‘broken through’ in ‘Gold Coast Customs’ and fulfilled a prophecy made by Sir Edmund Gosse in 1926: ‘I feel that she is a sort of chrysalis, in a silken web of imperfect expression, with great talents to display if only she can break out into a clear music of her own. There is no one I watch with more interest.’52 Yeats himself was fascinated by the direction Sitwell’s poetry had taken: ‘Her language is the traditional language of literature, but twisted, torn, complicated, jerked here and there by strained resemblances, unnatural contacts, forced upon it by terror or by some violence beating in her blood, some primitive obsession that civilization can no longer exorcise.’53

  After months of medical crises and the writing of such a violent work, Sitwell’s visit to Renishaw in August 1928 was thankfully calm. She felt that her mother had forgiven her for existing – but only after an extended period of badgering her about her morals (perhaps Lady Ida had heard gossip about Edith and Pavel Tchelitchew). During a visit to Renishaw, Lady Ida called out in the night to her daughter, whose room was next door: ‘Edith, have you ever been happy?’

  ‘Yes, Mother. Haven’t you?’

  ‘Never bird-happy. Still, I have three very nice children.’

  After this, she sighed and went to sleep again.54

  Lady Ida was seldom well, and it often fell to the visiting Edith to entertain her. At some point she even suffered from aphasia, a brain disorder causing impairment of the ability to produce or comprehend language; it is hard to imagine a more difficult circumstance in which to make conversation.55 In any event, the peace of the summer of 1928 was broken only when the two-year-old daughter of Osbert’s servant John Robins pointed her finger at Lady Ida and told her to ‘Bugger off.’56 From Renishaw, the Sitwells moved straight on to Montegufoni. Edith was preparing for two performances of Façade at the International Festival of Modern Music at Siena on 14 September. Among their guests at the castello were Constant Lambert, Willie Walton, Christabel Aberconway, Arthur Waley, and Beryl de Zoete (Waley’s companion and an expert on traditional dances). Lady Aberconway recalled that they stayed together for about three weeks and that on one evening the guests for dinner filled eight buses. A day or so before the performances, they watched the horse race, Il Palio, and then realised that Walton had contrived a small disaster. He had given Gino Severini’s design for the new curtain to a set painter and had not asked his name or address. With the performance scheduled for the next day, they worked out that the painter’s name might be Barone, so Lady Ida began canvassing all the Barones in the vicinity, saying enigmatically to each, ‘Your son has done a curtain for my daughter.’ Aberconway went to a restaurant the painter was thought to frequent, found him, and claimed the curtain.

  By all accounts, the performances were a success.57 Walton conducted and Lambert recited a version with twenty-two numbers, including for the first time ‘Black Mrs Behemoth’ and ‘Popular Song’, which were the last of a total of forty-three settings that Walton wrote for Façade.58 However, the day was soured when Sassoon and his lover Stephen Tennant (the tubercular brother of Bimbo Tennant, who had been killed in the war)59 arrived too late to see Façade. Even though he too was staying at Montegufoni, Sitwell avoided Sassoon for three days. They finally met, by arrangement, in her bedroom, where she was reclining under a mosquito net; he presented lilies, apologised, and was forgiven. He recorded that it took seven minutes to win her over again completely.60

  Edith Sitwell’s male friends tended to leave jilted women of their acquaintance on her doorstep. In Ma
rch, Sassoon and Blunden had done just this with Aki Hayashi, who came to London after an affair with Edmund Blunden in Japan.61 Now Tchelitchew followed their example. Stella Bowen was an Australian painter who lived with Ford Madox Ford and had a daughter with him. In 1927, she set up Tchelitchew and his ménage in two furnished houses at Guermantes, a farming village east of Paris, where they stayed, paying little rent, in the summers from 1927 to 1934.62 When Ford and Bowen separated in 1928, Tchelitchew asked Sitwell to take her up. In a thoroughly characteristic sequence of events, Sitwell listened carefully to Bowen’s troubles, and wrote many compassionate and encouraging letters: ‘you can say anything to me without it hurting you. Because I see grief on a large scale, and not on a small scale, it can never mean any loss of pride on your part, if you show me that you are suffering. I only see you finer.’63 She also tried to find buyers for Bowen’s art. However, she wrote to Tom Balston: ‘Why is it I have always to look after every female bore who has got herself into a state of unpopularity? Siegfried’s Japanese and Pavlik’s Australian, all in one year.’64 Thus, she tried to dismiss what had become for her a very important friendship and a serious emotional involvement.

  In fact, the friendship flourished. Bowen, who was herself much loved by a wide circle of friends, recalled nothing but kindness from Sitwell: ‘The English aristocrat, six feet tall, aquiline, haughty, dressed in long robes and wearing barbaric ornaments, was a strange sight in happy-go-lucky Montparnasse. But the sweet voice, the almost exaggerated courtesy and the extreme sensitiveness to other people’s feelings, were so immediately winning.’ Bowen also observed Sitwell’s relationship with Tchelitchew: ‘they were each of them a packet of nerves, infusing therefrom a palpitating and sensuous life into their respective work. The shape and texture of Edith’s words were like surfaces felt with the fingertips, and Pavlick’s [sic] sombre paintings had the organic, breathing kind of life, stilled but vital, of a fish whose gills are just kept moving.’65