Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  What happened next is a bit of a mystery. Sitwell read some passages of Shakespeare and other Elizabethans, and then began reading her own poetry. At least some of the audience expected Sitwell to read passages from Stein’s work and discuss them. According to Natalie Barney, an American writer who lived for many years on the Left Bank and conducted a weekly salon, Stein ‘sat bolt-upright, meditating, in spite of a twitch of her hands, a more gentlemanly reprisal than immediate exposure’.43 This is just silly: all that Barney could see of Stein in a crowded room was the back of her head and no one knows what she was ‘meditating’. She does not quote either Stein or Sitwell on their views of the reading. It is possible that Sitwell intended to snub Stein out of loyalty to Tchelitchew, but on that evening there was a cease-fire between Tchelitchew and Stein. It is more likely that in the rush to organise the reading, wires were crossed. Sitwell later resented Beach for letting the misunderstanding occur.44 Immediately after the reading, Sitwell gave no sign of enjoying a malicious triumph, as Barney suggested, but was afraid that she had simply given a bad performance.45 Sylvia Beach had no idea, at first, that anything was wrong. Sitwell signed books, gave Beach a copy of the Beaton photograph of her as an Angevin corpse, and inspected her collection of Whitman manuscripts.46

  Allen Tanner said that some time later Stein sent a note to Sitwell, complaining obliquely about what had happened.47 Sitwell wrote back, explaining her choices, and received a further note: ‘You were so right not to read anything of mine the other night as Sylvia was your hostess. Thanks so much and love to you.’48 Nevertheless, the two were never close again. Sitwell always wrote generously of her old friend, except in a few mildly ironic letters to Tchelitchew. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein wrote: ‘This friendship like all friendships has had its difficulties but I am convinced that fundamentally Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell are friends and enjoy being friends.’49 Years later Alice B. Toklas spoke of Sitwell with no sign of a grudge.50 However, Tchelitchew’s opinion of Stein and Toklas was worked into Phenomena (1938), a large canvas that presents his own autobiography in the light of Dante’s Inferno. Here, Stein and Toklas become ‘Sitting Bull’ and ‘The Knitting Maniac’; they are seated on a collection of canvases all turned face-down.51

  Sitwell returned to London for an exhibition of Tchelitchew’s work at Tooth’s Gallery in February. Since Osbert had come to an understanding with Eliot, Edith saw a good deal more of Vivienne. It was a mixed blessing. She wrote to Sassoon on 16 March:

  The Eliots are coming to tea with me today, and I am terrified. Vivienne gets more and more possibilities into her conversation. Did you hear the story about the bees? – Smutch Hutchinson was having tea with her, in June, and Vivienne enquired if she was enjoying the honey, – (there being no honey). On Smutch replying, nervously, that she was enjoying it very much, Vivienne asked if she kept bees. Smutch said no. Whereupon V. replied, very dreamily: ‘Neither do I. I keep hornets. In my bed!’ Sensation. Curtain.52

  There is a problem with the dating of letters, but there seems to have been another tea party the following week, to which Vivienne came without Tom. Sitwell also invited Georgia and her mother (Georgie Hyde Doble). When Vivienne entered, Sitwell (as she claimed) thought she smelt methylated spirits. Her servant at the time, named Nelly, knew better. She had been an attendant in a ward for drug addicts, and could detect a barbiturate. She called Sitwell out of the room and warned her, ‘That’s paraldehyde … They only give the Patients that if they are so violent nothing else has any effect. Don’t you let her get near the windows or the mirror, and don’t let her get near Mrs Doble! I can see she is going for her! If she tries anything on, don’t wait to see what she is going to do! Knock her down, and sit on her face! … Often, it has taken six of us to hold one down.’53 Going back into the sitting room, Sitwell braced herself for the sad duty of sitting on Vivienne Eliot’s face, but it did not come to that: ‘I found that Mrs. Doble had offered the lady a cigarette, and had been told that the lady never accepted anything from strangers. It was too dangerous. Poor Mrs D. was terrified, as she thought that the Patient was going to spring at her throat. Georgia was terrified too, and tea was undiluted hell.’54

  Visitors, however, were not always hell. In April, she invited Ralph Hodgson to Moscow Road, describing him to Pavlik as ‘très simple, excessivement gentil et modeste, très laid’. She was impressed by his once having been a milkman; his colourful background also included time as a fair-ground boxer. He was a friend of Sassoon’s and had gone to teach in Japan in 1924, at much the same time as Edmund Blunden did. From the beginning of her career, Sitwell venerated Hodgson’s work, particularly ‘The Song of Honour’, and was glad to have his name associated with the Anglo-French Poetry Society while it lasted. Looking forward to this visit, she explained to Pavlik that Hodgson was one of the four superb poets in English, along with Yeats, Davies, and Eliot. In the same letter to Tchelitchew, she said that she had heard from Sassoon, who was coming to London after six months in the country. He wanted some gaiety and hoped she would go out with him. Perhaps trying to provoke jealousy, she added: ‘je l’aime beaucoup’.55

  These were among the last visitors to the shabby salon in Moscow Road. Sitwell could no longer afford the rent. There was no concierge and the outside doors were left unlocked at night. Twice she encountered suspicious men in the stairwells. The local pub, she said, had a criminal clientele, and police often combed it for wanted men, including murderers. It was a dangerous spot and she had to go. In May 1932, she told Pavlik that from the autumn she would live in Evelyn Wiel’s flat in Paris, but he was to tell no one. Indeed, once Lady Ida worked out in November that her daughter was settling in Paris rather than at Montegufoni, her reaction was, according to Edith, to write daily letters of abuse.

  Her new home was at 129 rue Saint-Dominique between the Avenue Bosquet and the Avenue de la Bourdonnais, not far from the Eiffel Tower. The flat, the top right-hand one, was five flights up from a bistro.56 According to Allanah Harper, the apartment was dark and dingy, and much worse than Pembridge Mansions.57 Sitwell described her bedroom as a ‘box’.58 As at Pembridge Mansions, there were a number of naked light bulbs. She could not possibly re-establish her salon here in Paris, where she had only a small sitting room, set aside for her exclusive use just once a week, if plans did not go awry. For three women, two of them ill, to squeeze into these cramped, dismal quarters was a recipe for depression and rows. What began as a plan for Sitwell to stay only two years stretched out finally to a miserable seven.

  For the time being, Sitwell was unlikely to find fault with the flat while she had the hope of a new bolt-hole in England. She handed in the key to 22 Pembridge Mansions at the end of July and went with Sachie, Georgia, Sir George, and Lady Ida to visit the small house at Long Itchington, near Rugby, where Florence Sitwell had lived at the end of her life. She described it for Allen Tanner: ‘This is a most exquisite, very tiny Elizabethan house, with a long low front, very pale timbers, and whitewash, and latticed windows, and the front of the house covered with jasmine, great hedges of sweetbriar, and everything exquisite.’ Although Edith thought she would be living in the house ‘soonish’, the hope evaporated as the family launched into new tussles over money.59

  Through the summer of 1932 Sitwell had worked on Tchelitchew’s behalf, organising a small exhibition at Gerald Duckworth’s on 19 July, which led to the sale of ten drawings. Among the buyers were Sam Courtauld, Rebecca West’s husband Henry Adams, Peter Watson (the patron of the arts who later backed Horizon), and Inez Chandos-Pole. The next day Sitwell sent Tchelitchew a cheque for eighty-one pounds.60 Shortly after, she was involved in a much larger plan for the poet and art collector Edward James, best known as Salvador Dalí’s patron, to buy six paintings for five hundred pounds: ‘I respect him more than I can say, and am becoming really fond of him.’61 However, Sitwell’s plan to move to Paris alarmed Tchelitchew, who thought she would make romantic demands of him. When he f
irst heard, he waited six days before writing back to her. Then in October, when she had actually settled in at rue Saint-Dominique, he claimed that a letter about her arrival had been lost for a week. Sitwell found all this ‘curieux’ it showed where things stood.62 Not wanting to alienate her, he invited her to stay at the farmhouse in Guermantes.

  In the autumn, Sitwell had a chance to train her guns on Wyndham Lewis’s new novel, The Snooty Baronet: ‘Mr. Percy Wyndham Lewis’s new book disappoints me, and I think must disappoint the admirers of his earlier books.’ In her comments on the main character, Sir Michael Kill-Imrie, she passes a private note to the author:

  Sir Michael is … bitter about the ladies, who are not attracted by him, and, to revenge himself, (though he does not admit the cause), he becomes a ‘gossip-writer’ of the Novel … Poor Sir Michael! He has, evidently, an uneasy vanity and a sad unrealized craving for affection. He must not be surprised, however, that ladies do not reply to his attacks upon them. He seems to have become rather déclassé, and he does not know, probably, that these unattainable beings do not take any action if a gutter-snipe spits in their faces, whilst the fact that he has escaped being horse-whipped proves only, that he is too dirty to touch.63

  Lewis had made a fool of himself with his book Hitler (1931), praising the Führer-in-waiting. The Sitwells saw this as an opportunity for them to try to drive him mad. They sent him postcards in nonsensical German: ‘Once I pricked my big toe and planted the mark on the p.c. and wrote “Rache” [revenge] on it.’ And some of the mischief was more elaborate: ‘L. hates being thought to be a Jew, and Osbert’s secretary, finding out that a man called Sieff is organising an exhibition of Jewish artists, has written in the unfortunate Sieff’s name to Lewis, asking him to exhibit, with the result that Lewis and Sieff are having a fearful row, and all the Jewish artists are vowing vengeance on Lewis for insulting their race.’64

  Sitwell came to England early in 1933, spending most of February with Sachie and Georgia at Weston Hall. She cajoled Tchelitchew into staying there for a weekend, which appears to have been the occasion of an odd tantrum. Someone had left a book about Moscow in his bedroom, and he assumed the Sitwells were trying to upset him.65

  Tchelitchew was in England for what were becoming regular shows at Tooth’s Gallery, which Edith promoted. Most of the eleven buyers were his regular supporters, Rée Gorer, Peter Watson, Sir Edward Marsh, and, as always, Edward James, who bought three.66 Through much of 1932, Sitwell had been engrossed in The English Eccentrics, which came out in May 1933. She had written Bath relying chiefly on volumes borrowed from the London Library, concentrating not on the architecture of Bath but on the extraordinary careers of Beau Nash and other eighteenth-century worthies. It was less a travel work than a book of characters.

  In fact, both books belong to a once-popular genre; James Gregory tells us that between 1790 and 1901 there were more than sixty works of eccentric biography published in England. These ranged from magazine articles to such encyclopedias of quirks as Cyrus Reddings’s Memoirs of Remarkable Misers (1863), John Timbs’s English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (1866), and William Russell’s Eccentric Personages (1868).67 The passion for eccentrics can be seen in the novels of Dickens, and it is at work in Left Hand, Right Hand!, where Sir George Sitwell is presented as the sum of his oddities.

  In 1932, Edith Sitwell decided that the Victorian books about eccentricity could be reworked into a smart, amusing volume, which made no claim to original research; she opens with an acknowledgment: ‘The author would like to express her indebtedness to the biographers of her Eccentrics, and to those other collectors of Eccentricity whose works she has had an opportunity of consulting. Acknowledgments to the many titles have been made in the text wherever possible.’68 Sitwell produced a hauntingly beautiful and amusing work that is so much better written than its sources that it belongs to a different order of literature.

  Sitwell reaches behind the eccentric biographers to Isaac Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1791–1823) and, more importantly, to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), of which there were new editions in 1929 and 1932. The opening chapter of her book is called ‘Goose Weather’ – a time when spirits are low and winter clouds seem to her like battered stage properties: ‘I thought of those medicines that were advised for Melancholy, in the Anatomy of this disease, of mummies made medicine, and of the profits of Dust-sifting.’69 Relying on Pink’s History of Clerkenwell (1865),70 she goes on to describe the Battle Bridge Dust and Cinder Heap that covered many acres near what is now King’s Cross from the time of the Great Fire of 1666 until the early nineteenth century, when it was shipped to Moscow and used in rebuilding the city after the French invasion. In this dust-heap, outcast dust-sifters found treasures and became wealthy: ‘To go further in our search for some antidote against melancholy, we may seek in our dust-heap for some rigid, and even splendid, attitude of Death, some exaggeration of the attitudes common to Life. This attitude, rigidity, protest, or explanation, has been called eccentricity by those whose bones are too pliant.’

  Like many of the earlier writers, Sitwell sees eccentricity as a very English phenomenon, ‘because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation’.71 Sitwell saluted the refusal to conform of even the zaniest persons she described, among them the Countess of Desmond ‘whose death at the age of one hundred and forty years, seems to have been … the result of climbing an apple tree – a strange occupation for a lady of her rank and years – and falling from this amidst a shower of glistening apples’, and the hard-drinking Squire Jack Mytton who set fire to his nightshirt with a candle in order to scare himself out of the hiccups. There are sections on ‘Caraboo’, who posed as a princess from the South Seas and contributed to peace among nations by inducing Napoleon on St Helena to fall in love with her, and on Lord Rokeby, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as an ornamental hermit whose ‘amphibious’ life was spent primarily in the bath.72

  Some reviewers were dismissive, but D. L. Murray in the TLS (18 May 1933) called English Eccentrics ‘an amazing pell-mell, an entire D.U.B. or Dictionary of Unimportant Biography, most of it extremely entertaining’. E. M. Forster wrote in the Spectator (19 May 1933):

  Where else in England, and where but in England, could one meet such an adorable display of eccentricity? … Where, except in the pages of Miss Sitwell? Not in the grand annual displays at Chelsea, where the fashionable world turns out. Not in the full-dress documented surveys of literature and life. But in pages such as hers, where erudition is controlled by fantasy, and a slight wave of the parasol performs a minor magic … The lesson to be drawn from it – if so heavy a draught as a lesson be required – is that eccentricity ranks as a national asset, and that so long as it is respected there is some hope that our country will not go mad as a whole.’

  Forster’s opinion has been generally shared by three generations of readers.

  Good as it was, Sitwell wrote this book only because she needed money to sustain her friends. In September 1931 Helen Rootham told Sitwell that she thought the disease was returning, but her remission continued until 1933. Recognising the day and the time as a landmark, Sitwell told Pavlik on Thursday, 13 July, ‘Mon cher, je suis accablée [overwhelmed] de misère. Aujourd’hui, à 2 ½, Helen a vue le grand chirurgier Hartmann – Elle doit avoir une nouvelle operation.’ Surgery was set for Monday morning and Sitwell begged Pavlik to come, without fail, to the flat for breakfast as she would be alone and desolate as she waited for news. It appears that at this time the cancer was in Rootham’s spine – it certainly reached there later. It is possible that Helen’s primary cancer was actually in the breast and that it metastasised to the spine (a frequent occurrence), but Sitwell gives few details about the illness. Rootham survived the surgery, spent some days in a nursing home, and then returned to the flat exhausted and feeble. Henceforth, Sitwell usually referred to her in her letters as ‘poor He
len’ or ‘pauvre Helen’.

  For the next two or three weeks, Sitwell nursed her, and took care of the house and the cooking, while Evelyn spent most of her days at an office job, which she continued to hold despite being an ‘invalid’ herself.73 In mid-August, Helen was well enough to be left alone, so Sitwell set out for England, where her mother met her at customs. Only sixty-four, Lady Ida was now relying on a cane. Having just one lung, she was lucky to have survived pneumonia and pleurisy eight months earlier.74 Sitwell always marvelled at her mother’s beauty. In an undated letter to Pavlik, she told him to enjoy Italy, which she saw as her country as much as England, and to seek out the treasures of the Uffizi, especially a series of Michelangelo’s drawings of a young woman, ‘superb with the kind of proud magnificent beauty that my mother had, more than any woman I’ve ever seen – staring at her image in old age, – equally beautiful in its own way, but with the immortality of the bone, not with the pride of summer’.75

  Sitwell noticed now that her mother’s memory was poor, and that she repeated herself as she described new troubles between Osbert, Sachie, and Sir George. When Lady Ida spoke of the boys’ attempts to get money out of their father, she soon raised her own difficulties, and seemed to be lining up Edith as an ally in the troubles awaiting them in Derbyshire, while showing no interest in what her daughter had endured in the preceding month with Helen Rootham. Edith told Pavlik that she saw for the first time, ‘complètement’, to what degree her family had exploited her, and with what complete cynicism they accepted the difference between her financial state and their own.76