At Renishaw, Edith entered a maelstrom of accusations and complaints. Around 1925, Sir George had taken his capital from England to Switzerland and made over Renishaw to Osbert for life, after which it would pass down the male line. Sir George and Lady Ida planned to live out the rest of their lives at Montegufoni. Although Renishaw more or less supported itself, Osbert needed cash, so, according to one of the family solicitors, he obtained a ten-thousand-pound mortgage.77 Sachie, too, was living far beyond his means and wanted to use capital to pay his debts. This was intolerable to Sir George, who believed that debts had killed his own father. Part of the dispute was whether provision should be made for Georgia, if she outlived Sachie and Reresby, or whether the money should pass only down the male line.78 Apart from nasty scenes, the chief quality of these weeks was sheer boredom: ‘Life is also enlivened by my father walking up and down the lawn, just outside the windows, dictating letters to his secretary: “Messrs. Humdinger, Humdinger and Humdinger. As I remarked in my last letter: Worm. Worm. Worm. Read what you’ve got.”’
Edith was glad to leave Renishaw to spend a few days with Inez Chandos-Pole at Radburne Hall near by. She went on to visit her cousins the Beauforts at Badminton in Gloucestershire: ‘The park has a strange Tchaikowsky-like quality, with a mock-gothic gamekeeper’s house called Ragged Castle, and a pleasure house surrounded by avenues, called Swan Park, and a walled orchard called Cherry Gardens. The Beauforts are fearfully poor, so most of the house is shut up.’79
After that, she stayed at nearby Nether Lypiatt, the house of the virtuoso harpsichordist, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, a modern English Eccentric who had for a time lived happily with her husband and three lovers in a ‘ménage à cinq’. Her husband lost a good deal of money during the Great War, so Violet became a professional musician. In 1926, her husband’s two unmarried sisters were murdered by their butler; they had intended to leave their money to a cousin but had not signed their wills, so Violet’s husband, as next of kin, inherited the lot.80 This freakish windfall allowed Violet to give up the concert circuit and to perform only at home for friends, such as the Sitwells. Another ‘old and reverenced friend’, the poet W. H. Davies, came to see Sitwell at Nether Lypiatt; they stayed up talking until 2 a.m. and exhausted their hostess. Sitwell returned to London for dental surgery, and rather than listen to Lady Ida’s whining at a hotel, she retreated, once it was done, to Renishaw, where she could nurse her four abscesses in peace.81
A very characteristic shift was going on in Sitwell’s sympathies. Having once regarded Allen Tanner as her competition, and indeed a crook, she now saw that he was being squeezed out of Tchelitchew’s life. In the midst of a family row, she wrote to Tanner:
My poor dear friend, I know what you have been through. You are the most loyal and devoted of friends. But I beg of you not to do anything rash. You cannot part company – you can’t do it. He is absolutely devoted to you, and you are absolutely devoted to him. You have great wisdom, and your wisdom will carry you through. I too have known great sadness and bitterness, but I think I know it no longer. Neither of you, Allen dearest, would be able, as I see it, to endure life apart. Your lives have been too closely knit together, in a great and noble friendship.82
Tchelitchew was involved with the twenty-five-year-old American writer, Charles Henri Ford, who had recently collaborated with Parker Tyler (Tchelitchew’s future biographer) on a homoerotic novel, The Young and Evil. Sitwell was called upon to offer an opinion on the book. Trying to be objective, she asked Edward James to explain what exactly the men in the story were doing to each other; he said he thought the book indecent and would not explain the sexual acts because she would be shocked.83 Apparently, Sitwell then assisted him in burning a copy of it.84 She wrote to Ford: ‘I think that there is much good writing, and that you have a strong visual sense, but I do get tired of the perpetual pillow fights. Frankly, don’t either of you young men know anybody who is capable of getting into his own bed and stopping there? If you do, for goodness sake cultivate his acquaintance, and write about him next time for a change. Also, calling a spade a spade never made the spade interesting yet. Take my advice, leave spades alone, or if you must mention them, then mention the garden too.’85
Perhaps encouraged by Ford, Tchelitchew was considering a move to New York. On 21 September, his birthday, Sitwell sent him a horoscope clipped from a British newspaper, which included the warning: ‘Guard against transport accidents.’86 A true-believer in astrology, Tchelitchew was furious, convinced that Sitwell had hijacked the stars in her efforts to cling to him. Osbert proposed that Tchelitchew instead of Matisse do the sets for a Massine ballet; this, too, for some reason, Tchelitchew took as an insult. Edith responded that she had given him ‘une grande amitie. Ne jetez pas cela!’ She stood her ground, to a degree, and told Tchelitchew there was no money in America at the moment.87 The row subsided and soon she was referring to him again, as she often did, as ‘mon très aimé crosspatch’.88 In another exchange of letters at about this time, Tchelitchew complained that he did not like visiting rue Saint-Dominique, because of ‘l’influence et les lamentations’ of the Roothams, but Edith could not afford her own flat, so she told him she had to stay where she was.89 Tchelitchew’s close friend Lincoln Kirstein told John Pearson that in 1933 the painter decided Sitwell had no real feeling for his work, and claimed he wanted to break with her altogether because of her possessiveness; in the end, he decided such a move would be bad for his career.90
In early November, Duckworth released Five Variations on a Theme, a slim volume of poems, some previously published. Taken together, they seem an oblique commentary on her love for the painter. The theme of the book is passion, death, and transformation. She had been working on the poem ‘Romance’ since 1931; it incorporates a poem published then as ‘Epithalamium’ (a poem written for a bride). Early drafts bore the title ‘Dark Serenade’.91 Towards the end, the poem becomes more erotic, hinting at a deflowering:
When the green century of summer rains
Lay on the leaves, then like the rose I wept.
For I had dwelt in sorrow as the rose
In the deep heaven of her leaves lies close.
Then you, my gardener, with green fingers stroked my leaves
Till all the gold drops turned to honey. Grieves
This empire of green shade when honeyed rains
And amber blood flush all the sharp green veins
Of the rich rose?
So doth my rose-shaped heart
Feel the first flush of summer; love’s first smart
Seemed no more sorrowful than the deep tears
The rose wept in that green and honeyed clime.92
We cannot be sure whether Sitwell remembered such an experience or imagined it – her letters to Tchelitchew do not answer the question. Regardless, she was very proud of this poem. She told Balston in September: ‘The joy of writing poetry again is almost too much for me.’93 In fact, she did not complete another substantial poem to her satisfaction for six years. Most of the difficulty was that her poetry was choked by the circumstances of her daily life. It is also possible that having revealed so much of her secret life in this poem, she was fearful of what the next might require of her and so remained at an impasse.
Sitwell received a cheering letter about the book of poems from the novelist Charlotte Franken Haldane, who was then married to the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane. She remarked on the traditional character of the verse. Sitwell agreed: ‘I myself think it traditional poetry, descended from Spenser, Milton, Marvell, and Dryden, and completely unrelated to the later poets. It is descended, too (as far as English poetry could be descended from French poetry) from Baudelaire.’94 In another letter to her shortly after, Sitwell wrote:
Someone, an owl called Philip Henderson, who has always been rude to me in the papers, wrote, the other day, saying that nothing roused any real feeling in me, as far as my poetry was concerned, but Love, Age, and Death! Can you beat it? And he went on to say
that nobody knew who were the two people in love, in my ‘Romance!’ – Had I not received your letter and your essay on my poetry this morning, I should most certainly have written and said that the lady’s name is Miss Perkins, but that I am pledged not, for the moment, to reveal that of the gentleman, because he is employed in a department of one of the West-London Stores! But I decided, after reading what you had written, to keep silence and my temper.95
Comical as this is, Sitwell was able to create in her later poetry a kind of tragic serenity that eluded her completely in her day-to-day life, which was tossed about on rip-tides of bad temper. She wanted her poetry not merely to record the frailties and trivialities of the world, but to oppose them and to remake them. Though a poet, Sitwell often couched her most important ideas about art in terms of music; she told Franken: ‘I love Bach, too. But though I admire Mozart, I love him less, which is my fault, – preferring infinitely, Gluck, because he is less sweet. Bach is my god. He seems to have created a perfect world, in which there is no sin, and in which sorrow is holy and not ugly.’96
Sitwell’s correspondence with Franken took another revealing turn on 5 December, when she wrote: ‘I’ve been feeling terribly unhappy lately, and our correspondence is one thing which I look forward to. I’ve seen people behaving in such a dreadfully ugly way just lately. And I never can get used to it. I mean, in my personal life it has been very bad, oh very bad. And outside, these horrible lynchings in America, and the departure last week of the French convict ship for Devil’s Island, have upset me terribly. – Nineteen hundred and thirty three years after Christ, and the “righteous” are still behaving like this!’97 The phrasing, of course, anticipates her poem on the Blitz, ‘Still Falls the Rain’ (1940); her reaction to injustice was, as always, visceral rather than ideological and systematic. Lynchings in the American South were widely reported in the British press in 1933, and Sitwell may have known of Arthur Raper’s recently published book The Tragedy of Lynching, which tracked 3724 lynchings from 1889 to 1930.98 Departures of convict ships for Devil’s Island were a normal part of French life, even though most of those sent there would die. The penal colony had grown notorious after the publication in 1923 of Albert Londres’s report Au bagne, which was followed by a series of books and articles revealing the brutality of the place.
Haldane responded that what terrified her personally was the emergence of Hitler, as she was Jewish. Sitwell wrote:
My former letter to you was so inexpressive. Indeed you are right in speaking of the primal horror of Germany at present. It makes my blood boil. I did not know that you are a Jewess, but with the exception of one person, all my dearest friends (I have very few) are either Jewish or in part Jewish. So apart from the rage and horror I feel in the cruelty of the Nazis, I understand the crétinism of it. To ill-treat and turn out a gentle and faithful people, – certainly the most faithful of any I have ever known! But do not fear, dear Charlotte, that such outrages against decency and sense will ever occur in England. We know too well what our Jewish citizens have done for us. But I know the anguish you must feel in contemplating Germany.99
Revulsion against the Nazis was, sadly, not a universal sentiment in England or France in the early 1930s, Wyndham Lewis being an obvious example of someone praising their leader. Amazingly, Gertrude Stein did too: ‘I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace’ (New York Times, 6 May 1934). As Sitwell and Stein had disagreed about the First World War, it is likely that if their close friendship had continued through the 1930s, they would have argued over Hitler. Although Sachie and Osbert had some sympathy with Italian Fascism and were both for a time supportive of Oswald Mosley, there is no indication that Edith shared their views.
Her friendship with Franken was brief. Spending so much time in Paris meant that her other important friendships in England would also wind down. Sitwell still cared about Sassoon and felt that she owed him a professional debt; she said that with the exception of Yeats’s comments at the time of the publication of The Apes of God, ‘you are the only person who has ever done anything at all for my poetry.’100 He was certainly her best critic. When, around November, she learnt that Sassoon had become engaged to Hester Gatty, she wrote a letter of congratulation, but was privately jealous, and her contact with him would become rarer as he seldom emerged from his home at Heytesbury House in Wiltshire. Nevertheless, he and other friends continued to stand up for her work. Yeats threatened to withdraw from the Royal Society of Literature if Sitwell was not awarded its medal. He had his way.101 Sitwell told Georgia in December that ‘The Royal Society of Literature is behaving about the giving of the medal, as if they were Catherine of Braganza [the wife of Charles II] being “forced to receive” Lady Castlemaine [one of his mistresses].’102 Sassoon delayed his honey moon to serve as chairman103 when Henry Newbolt presented the medal on 24 January 1934.
There was no letter or cable from Pavlik, Choura or Tanner, in honour of the day. Having leapt back and forth across the Channel to promote Pavlik’s exhibitions, assumed unmanageable debts for him, and generally devoted herself to his happiness, Sitwell was upset. Switching (permanently, as it turned out) to English, she wrote: ‘I know that you are very busy being “the cream in Miss [Djuna] Barnes’ coffee” and Mr. Ford’s Sugar Daddy; but I should have thought that you might have found a moment to spare from these people – so important intellectually, so important socially, – in which to remember me … I’ve been very poor and desperately unhappy for the last eighteen months, and during that time I have seen some strange spectacles. I am obliged to tell you this, otherwise I could not write to you, I am too hurt.’104 Pavlik raged right back at her. Writing from Weston, she tried to close the subject around 12 February 1934: ‘Pavlik dear, I think it is now time that you stopped quarrelling with me. It would be foolish for us to lose each other. I should miss you terribly, and I think, perhaps, one day, when you are able to see a little more clearly than you see at present, that you may miss me.’105 She returned to Paris on 22 February and was soon trying to pick up the pieces:
Dearest Pavlik,
Forgive me. For I am so unhappy, what should I do without you? I have made myself ill, and now I am in bed.
Please write me a little word.
With my love,
Edith
I have my poem for you.
I’ll try never to show jealousy or pain again.106
15
LET THE DEVILS HAVE IT
Just before Christmas 1933, Helen Rootham went through a crisis that Sitwell feared might kill her. She survived but was very weak. In the hope of building her strength up, Sitwell arranged to spend the late spring and early summer at the village of Levanto, south-west of Genoa. She wrote across the top of her letter of 5 May 1934 to Osbert, who was then travelling in China: ‘Do not let the Gingers know I am here.’ Sir George and Lady Ida were, of course, lurking at Montegufoni. ‘I came here a few days ago, because poor Helen has to have some sun. The sea is lovely, but the town is a triumph of ugliness, rather like the outskirts of Nottingham. However, the hotel is nice, the English people haven’t found out who I am, – or if they have, they don’t care, and I can work quietly. I am at work at (besides that bloody [biography of Queen] Victoria) a small book on modern poetry, in which I am simply going to “let the devils have it.”’1
In the last two years, she had acquired significant new enemies. The Cambridge don, F. R. Leavis, senior editor of the journal Scrutiny, famously remarked in his New Bearings in English Poetry (1932): ‘the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry’2 – a toxic quip with a long half-life. It is commonly observed that Leavis’s idea of cultural centrality tended to boil down the literature of an age to a few names, an exclusive canon. In short, he was unable to deal with the strangeness and difference of
literary accomplishments even within the same generation of writers.3 His wisecrack helped to ensure that the one British woman of his time who briefly enjoyed status as a major poet was not merely pushed back into the second rank, but dismissed by many as a fraud. While he certainly promoted the understanding of some authors, notably D. H. Lawrence, his seriousness of mind concealed a Mariana Trench of priggishness. Sitwell was not far wrong when she said that summer to Balston: ‘in his criticism he is like an ardent, tenderly ruthless young dentist probing a decayed molar.’4
Geoffrey Grigson, a Cornish poet who specialised in vituperative book reviews, was the editor of New Verse, an important journal that published and promoted the work of younger poets, especially W. H. Auden. With a decided preference for a poetry of close observation, Grigson distrusted the large rhetoric to which Sitwell, as an admirer of Whitman and Swinburne, aspired. This honest difference of opinion was inflamed by loyalty to his good friend Wyndham Lewis, who, with obvious cynicism, encouraged him to see the Sitwells as ‘useful enemies’.5 A belligerent reviewer herself, Sitwell invited rough treatment from those who disagreed with her, but this point can be a distraction – it does not get us to a fair reading and valuation of her poetry.
In 1934, however, she was not worried about herself but about Sachie, who wilted in the face of hostile reviews. Writing in Leavis’s Scrutiny, Grigson savaged Canons of Giant Art and reiterated a theme from The Apes of God: ‘The Sitwells, in fact, reflect a society where dilettante art-worship is synonymous with culture.’ He dismissed Sachie’s language as ‘bogus’ and described his rhythms as vying with Hiawatha for monotony. ‘Best leave these minimal creatures, these contemptible elvers, wriggling away in their dull habitat.’6 Edith Sitwell had no idea how to wriggle away.
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