Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  About two years later she decided to tell Pavlik about Lewis’s grudge: he had wanted ‘un “succès” avec moi (un succès de la sorte qu’il comprend) et je lui ai mis à sa place. Alas, il se venge en disant des mensonges de moi, d’une sorte très grossier.’6 It is important to note that, in these letters about Lewis to the Schiffs and to Tchelitchew she denies that she is a lesbian. While Sitwell may have dissembled about certain matters, there is no substantial evidence to set against these denials.

  Handling Wyndham Lewis carefully, W. B. Yeats wrapped a rebuke in high praise: ‘Somebody tells me that you have satirized Edith Sitwell. If that is so, visionary excitement has in part benumbed your senses. When I read her Gold Coast Customs a year ago, I felt, as on first reading The Apes of God, that something absent from all literature for a generation was back again, and in a form rare in the literature of all generations, passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom. We had it in one man once [Swift]. He lies in St. Patrick’s now under the greatest epitaph in history.’7 Sitwell was comforted by ‘this noble and unforgettable tribute … I’ve never been prouder of anything.’8 Afterwards, Yeats lost interest in Lewis and his work, while continuing to admire Edith Sitwell.9

  In August 1930, Cecil Beaton brought his tripod and lenses to Renishaw and took group portraits of the family. This provided Sitwell with an idea of how to tackle Lewis. Three months later she told the young poet Terence Fytton Armstrong (whose pseudonym was John Gawsworth) that she had begun a memoir, which she hoped would be ‘rather good, excepting that everything of the most interest in my life will have to be left out till I’m dead!’10 By this she meant chapters pertaining to Lady Ida, and to Osbert’s ‘sacrifice’ in not testifying at her trial. Most of that memoir can be traced in Sitwell’s manuscript notebooks, and a finished copy of the first chapter survives.11

  In that first chapter, the family assembles for photographs in the ballroom. Sitwell says that her mother is as beautiful as an ‘eternal statue’ but moves with difficulty, and that ‘little things, little waterdrops, or bee-wings, fret her away, and make her bitterly unhappy’. However, her conversation flashes with ‘brilliance and insight’. Sir George is described as living partly in the Middle Ages, ‘but his heart is invariably deeply warm and affectionate’. Her brothers are lovingly rendered, along with Georgia and the three-year-old Reresby.

  Sitwell is unusually humble: she is ‘plain’ and learns things (apart from poetic technique) slowly. She recounts an incident in which she spoke dismissively of John Middleton Murry to Arnold Bennett, who responded with a short laugh: ‘“Spiritual pride is an awful thing – an awful thing,” Pause, “and there’s another awful thing! Remember this, Edith! God sees you, and me, and Middleton Murry as just the same. He sees no difference between us.”’ Poor Bennett was about to test the truth of this saying, as he died unexpectedly of typhoid at the end of March 1931.12

  Sitwell decided to be ‘charming’ to almost every writer she described, apart from Lewis and Coward13 – but this was by no means a work ‘recollected in tranquillity’. Her treatment of Lewis was especially comical, dwelling on his lack of personal hygiene and his filthy living conditions. Yet as she wrote, often between fifteen hundred and two thousand words per day, she brooded on all the troubles of her early life, her frustration with Pavlik, her debts, and her fears for Helen. Sitwell was still bothered by the effects of the concussion at least until the end of October 1930. She also suffered from poisoned glands and received oxygen injections in her shoulder during the autumn.14 In November, she fired off two letters to Sassoon, accusing him of deserting their friendship. He made the same accusation in return, and the two finally made peace again at the beginning of December. There were some pleasures – she went to Paris in November and spent time with Gertrude Stein. Tchelitchew designed some clothes for her and began another portrait: ‘Very like a Piero della Francesca, though entirely personal to him. It has a strange eternity and peace about it; and by daylight the colour is luminous like mother of pearl. I am wearing a red dress. It is only a head and shoulders portrait, but is almost over life size.’15

  Nevertheless, she was in a troubled state of mind. Earlier chapters of this book have quoted sections from the memoir – for example, the Bastille episode – that show her in a frenzy of rage against her family. At the end of December, an event occurred that, more than any other, explains this rage.

  Her aunt, Florence Sitwell, died at seventy-two, and a legacy long promised to Edith was given to someone else. Florence had heard how Edith had handled an earlier bequest of three thousand pounds from the estate of a great-aunt, giving Helen a thousand pounds and Evelyn a hundred, then buying fur coats for them. Helen, for her part, squandered the money on her fiancé.16

  Apparently at a time when her wits were diminished following cancer surgery, Florence Sitwell changed her will in favour of Louisa Sitwell’s old retainer Sister Edith Woods, who had been describing Edith Sitwell as ‘undutiful’ since she moved to Moscow Road. Indeed, around 1914, Woods had urged Sir George to reduce Edith’s allowance and had had many years to work on Florence’s feelings. Florence left five thousand pounds to Woods for her lifetime, after which, reduced by death duties, what remained would pass to Edith Sitwell.17 When she finally received her inheritance after Woods’s death in 1953, it brought her an annual sum of just £124.18

  Around 1957, Raleigh Trevelyan was writing a biography of the Essex hermit Jimmy Mason, a distant relative of Woods. He asked Edith Sitwell to comment on Woods’s death certificate, describing her as ‘a spinster of independent means’. Sitwell replied: ‘She was indeed a spinster of independent means – my independent means … It was, of course, right that she should be provided for, but I was deprived of it all.’ In any event, Woods was happy with the bequest, and, according to Trevelyan, she claimed until the end of her days that Sitwell blood ran in her veins.19

  The memoir was finished around March 1931, when it was to be serialised in the Daily Express. At a breakfast with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, Geoffrey Gorer warned Sitwell that the newspaper would drag up the story of Lady’s Ida’s trial to advertise the memoir.20 In the summer she received a legal opinion that her book libelled Wyndham Lewis and should not be published. In the 1960s, when she was in an even deeper depression, she incorporated some episodes into Taken Care Of.

  Helen was now a different woman. Although she still taught music, she was less able to fend for herself and made many demands. In June, Sitwell wrote to Sassoon, commiserating over how two years of his life had been spent caring for the tubercular Stephen Tennant:

  Invalids, poor things, don’t realise how constant their claims on one’s time become; they get immersed in a world of their own, and become (through no actual fault of their own) terribly selfish, – exerting, quite unconsciously, a kind of moral blackmail. One mustn’t contradict them, or tell them the truth, or stop them doing anything they oughtn’t to do, or have any existence of one’s own, nor must one even have any worries, or look pale if one has had a sleepless night. And any joys one may feel impact on their nerves, and give them a shock, and make them worse. It’s a grand life!21

  Nothing could help in this dark year but courage. Following one of Sitwell’s returns from France, Sir George’s butler, Henry Moat, came to Moscow Road. He heard that she had been ill and demanded, ‘Miss Edith, it wasn’t the Sea?!’ She replied that it was not. ‘Well that’s all right then.’ This was a standing joke between them, as she explained to Tchelitchew: ‘He would have been so ashamed of me if it had been, I don’t know what he would have done. When I was thirteen, I was on the sea with Henry in a violent storm, and had to lie down. Henry came up to me and said, roaring above the wind, “Miss Edith. If you lie there people will think the Sea is making you sick!! You must stand up to the Sea!” with which he hauled me to my feet and, with a proper sailor’s roll, taught me my sea-legs.’22

  Sitwell did have to rely on her sea legs in these months, but some good things happ
ened too. For five years, there had been awkwardness between the Sitwells and T. S. Eliot – although it seems he did come to Moscow Road on occasion. Osbert finally spoke to Eliot about their decision not to respond to Vivienne’s letters from Rome during the General Strike of 1926. Eliot was satisfied, and Osbert was invited ‘in token of reconciliation’ to a dinner party on 3 July 1931 at the Eliots’ flat in Clarence Gate Gardens, intended as a celebration of Vivienne’s completion of a course of treatment at a nursing home. Also present were Geoffrey and Enid Faber, as well as James and Nora Joyce who, Osbert noted, were to be married at a register office in the morning – an important detail, as one biographer placed this dinner in the early summer of 1927, when Joyce was in Holland and France, but not in England.23 When Vivienne came in, Osbert said, ‘It is splendid to see you again, Vivienne.’ Looking him in the eye, she replied slowly, ‘I don’t know about splendid: but it is strange, very strange.’

  Renewed friendship with Vivienne produced difficult moments for Edith. Osbert recalled:

  One day towards the end of Vivienne’s life with Tom, an intimate friend of both of theirs met Vivienne walking in Oxford Street.

  ‘Hullo Vivienne!’, she called to her.

  Vivienne looked at her suspiciously and sadly, and replied ‘Who do you think you’re addressing? I don’t know you.’

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Vivienne: you know quite well who I am.’

  Vivienne regarded her with profound melancholy for a moment, and then said ‘No, no: you don’t know me. You have mistaken me again for that terrible woman who is so like me … She is always getting me into trouble.’24

  T. S. Eliot was by now well established as a director at Faber & Faber, which had published Sitwell’s biography of Pope. However, most of her dealings at the firm were with another director, Richard de la Mare, the son of Walter de la Mare. At about this time she took on a new commission from the firm to write a popular history of Bath. At the end of August 1931, Sitwell wrote to Terence Fytton Armstrong from Paris that she was having an awful time with the book. She was working six hours a day ‘at constructing it, writing it. I just hate writing it, – it bores me, but I must, because of money.’25 What she produced was a pleasant, if decidedly minor, work.

  Before the eighteenth century, the attractions of Bath were medical: its waters were believed to help the scrofulous, the leprous, and the gouty. As the book opens, in the reign of Queen Anne, the city is being elevated into one of England’s most fashionable resorts. At the centre of the changes is Richard Nash, the city’s uncrowned king; he came in 1702 as a gamester but soon rose to become Master of the Ceremonies and the arbiter of manners and fashion. In the supporting cast are Alexander Pope, Ralph Allen (the model for Fielding’s Squire Allworthy), and Philip Thicknesse (a memoirist and man of quarrels who bequeathed his right hand to an estranged son as a reminder of duty).

  Sitwell has no time for Pope’s enemy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but evinces an odd respect for Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who made trouble for Nash by spreading Methodism in Bath. It is a lost world, embodied in Beau Nash, who grows old and impoverished, becoming a Colonel Fantock in the coffee houses, retelling anecdotes. At his death, his portrait is hung in the town hall, poems are written, and fifty guineas is spent on his funeral: ‘In this manner was the light, glittering and warm dust that had been Beau Nash, blown away, out of the memories of men, to the sound of trumpets, eulogies, and lamentations.’26 When the book came out in May 1932, she was proud of it but joked with Tchelitchew about what she called its horrible charm.27

  While working on Bath, Sitwell was often in Paris, as was Allanah Harper who was usually in the company of the Anglo-Syrian painter Amy Nimr, with whom she shared a house and who was thought to be her lover. In 1932, Nimr married the diplomat Walter Smart and went on to establish a salon in Cairo, which attracted many British writers. Harper brought Sitwell to meet the Cubist Louis Marcoussis, but the two had an argument right away about the technical skills of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and whenever they met thereafter, the debate started up again. Sitwell refused to sit in the disreputable cafés where she might come across avant garde poets, but was willing to go with Harper to literary salons, such as that of the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, where she met Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. She discovered that his one unfailing topic of conversation was the complexity, dirt, and danger of the Paris Métro. Things went better with Paul Valéry, whom she also met at Rochefoucauld’s house. Sitwell complained that no one cared for pure poetry any more, preferring poems to contain crude political or philosophical messages bundled up with displays of private emotion and messy love affairs. Laughing, Valéry remarked that thought in a poem should stay hidden like the nutritional qualities of fruit. He also claimed that form in verse was linked to repetition – a stance Sitwell had been taking for years in her arguments with British critics. At another salon, that of the Comtesse Marthe de Fels, she met Saint-John Perse, the French poet who would win the Nobel prize in 1960. Sitwell knew Eliot’s translation of Anabase and delighted Saint-John Perse by quoting from memory lines on his childhood from Éloges.28

  Harper often went with Sitwell to visit Tchelitchew. On one of their visits to his Paris residence and studio at 2 rue Jacques-Mawas, he was too busy to let them in and just closed the door. She describes a much happier visit to the painter at Guermantes, when they spent a Sunday afternoon lounging in hammocks hung between apple trees; Tchelitchew painted the scene in watercolours. The journey back to Paris took a sad twist. An Alsatian dog, dazzled by Harper’s head-lamps, ran into her path. She struck him with a jolt that she compared to running over a tree trunk, but the dog was still alive. Amy Nimr ran to get a butcher to finish him off while Sitwell sat white-faced in the car. Harper said she could not forgive herself for killing such a beautiful animal, but Sitwell insisted that the accident was not Harper’s fault. When they got under way again, Sitwell spoke with great animation about poets and composers, and she invited Harper to hear the Ninth Symphony with her. When she got out at rue Saint-Dominique, she told Nimr she had been trying to get Allanah’s mind off the dog. ‘Do you not think that my heart was not torn by what happened?’29

  In England from October to December 1931, she worked to meet her deadline on the ‘nightmare book’,30 but had time to see a little of John Collier and to hear William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, which she described to Tchelitchew as ‘énorme et superbe, terrible et rugissant’.31 Meanwhile, Sachie was writing what turned out to be his masterpiece, the long sequence Canons of Giant Art – including ‘Agamemnon’s Tomb’, a piece particularly admired by Yeats. Sachie, who felt that he had been badly underrated by critics, was tempted not to publish the work at all. Edith praised the poems as some of the best in a century: ‘I think it will be madness if you do not publish the Canons of Giant Art. Please do so, immediately.’32 For the time being, he was willing to be ruled by her. It came out from Faber & Faber, with Eliot’s implicit endorsement, in 1933, but Sachie persevered in the view that he was unappreciated. Though gloomy about his own situation, Sachie could be helpful to others. On 14 December he lent Edith eight hundred pounds that he had obtained from Sassoon, on which she repaid twenty pounds twice a year until May 1943, when she paid it off altogether.33 She must have been in deep trouble with Coutts & Co. at the time, for she told him ‘it has made, is making, and will make, the whole difference to my life’.34

  Back in Paris in January, Sitwell asked Allanah Harper to bring her to meet Adrienne Monnier, the owner of La Maison des Amis des Livres, and Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company on the opposite side of rue de l’Odéon. Beach had become famous as the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. Looking through the window of her shop, Monnier saw them approaching and hurried out: ‘I recognized you, Miss Sitwell, from T. S. Eliot’s description. He also told me that you were the greatest living poetess and that your gift for recitation and the beauty of your voice are out of this world.’35 Monnier dashed across
the street to get Beach, who immediately invited Sitwell to give what Noel Riley Fitch says was the first poetry reading held at Shakespeare and Company.36

  That reading led to a rift with Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach left the event out of her history of the bookshop. Up to that point, Sitwell and Stein had had just one important quarrel that we know of: Stein once claimed that Stella Bowen had left Ford Madox Ford for another man, and Sitwell angrily insisted that it was a lie.37 As late as November 1930, Sitwell was speaking of the pleasure she took in Stein’s company. The real problem was Tchelitchew.

  Early on, Alice B. Toklas had judged him an opportunist rather than a friend. Stein thought better of him for a while, but by the time she introduced him to Sitwell in 1927, she had come round to Toklas’s view, so warned Sitwell about his character. Also, Stein decided she had at first overrated his talent. When Tchelitchew grumbled that his sister Choura was a poor hostess and refused to wear clothes of his choosing, Stein refused to comment until she heard the other side of the story. This led Tchelitchew to believe that Stein was meddling in his domestic affairs.38 By August 1928, Tchelitchew was complaining to Sitwell of Stein’s fickleness. In November, he claimed that Stein and Toklas were snakes, and that Stein especially was a creature of the devil who liked to torture people. On 31 December, he said that if he had lost a friend in Stein, he had gained one in Sitwell.39 For the next three years, Sitwell was caught between Stein and Tchelitchew.

  On short notice, Sylvia Beach rented chairs and printed invitations to the reading, while fearing no one would come. As it turned out, on 7 January 1932 most of literary Paris squeezed into Shakespeare and Company, including Valery Larbaud, Henri Michaux, Jules Romain, Stuart Gilbert, Jean Prévost, and Louis Gillet. James Joyce, declaring himself ‘all ears for Edith’,40 could get only a chair in the back row. Tchelitchew must have been at least on speaking terms with Stein, as the two arrived in a group with Tanner and Bowen, and, according to the seating plan, were together in the front row.41 Sitwell also wanted Harper there, as she was very nervous and planned to start by looking at her for encouragement.42