Having signed on with Faber & Faber to write a biography of Queen Victoria, she quietly asked Thomas Balston whether she could put out another volume of her Pleasures of Poetry anthology with an introduction answering her critics. He thought that the permissions would cost too much, so she decided instead to write Aspects of Modern Poetry, a book of criticism to be ready by the end of July 1934. It was her last chance to work with a much loved editor. Balston’s junior colleague, the novelist Anthony Powell, described an ‘upheaval’ at Duckworth’s that summer:
At a meeting of the firm’s directors to reconsider the still rickety condition of the business, there was a sudden explosion … Gerald Duckworth’s barely pent up rage over the years on the subject of the Sitwells, Waugh, Beaton, other modern abominations forced on him by Balston, broke out; while at the same instant Balston gave voice to his equally powerful resentment of what he had long regarded as Gerald Duckworth’s obstruction and inertia.
Balston resigned.7 Sitwell wrote from Paris: ‘I cannot tell you what a frightful shock it has been, – actually I simply can’t believe it, and only hope you will be able to reconsider it. Nothing will ever be the same for us, if we don’t have you there. It was you who made the place.’8 Balston, however, was finished as a publisher and, according to Powell, suffered a nervous breakdown upon leaving the firm. Sitwell had occasional contact with him in the years to come, when he led a scholar’s life and haunted the Garrick Club.9
Research for the book took her in a new direction, as she explained to Tchelitchew: ‘I have been reading some of the surréaliste manifestos, which are at once incredibly silly and very self-revealing. But on the whole, silly as these people are, they are not so hopelessly bad as most of the younger English and American poets, – none of whom have any sense of texture whatever.’10 For a poet immersed in the Symbolists, there was some appeal in the Surrealists, though she objected, among other things, to their refusal to sift impressions and images. What to make of the movement was already an urgent question for Tchelitchew. Parker Tyler says: ‘Though in a sense tangent to Surrealism, Neo-Romanticism crosses its territory wherever magical or metaphysical effects are suggested – both schools coalesce in (or rather out of) Chirico.’11 Tchelitchew had in him something of the icon-painter’s devotion to the other-worldly, which set him apart from Surrealists generally, although at the level of technique it is hard to make out a difference. Sitwell was cautiously absorbing this influence, too, in the mid-1930s, but since she was writing few poems the effects were not seen until 1940, when she reappeared as a religious poet who juxtaposed images, some culled directly from dreams, in a mysterious and occasionally shocking manner.
Apart from their ‘silliness’, Sitwell probably held back from a closer involvement with the Surrealist movement because of Tchelitchew’s professional rivalries; he was always distressed when Edward James bought one of Dalí’s pictures. Another barrier between Tchelitchew and the Surrealists may have been that André Breton had little time for homosexuals, with the exception of the novelist René Crevel,12 who became Stein’s friend and one of Tchelitchew’s lovers. Indeed, he also seems to have had a love affair with Choura Tchelitchew when the two of them were treated for tuberculosis at the same sanatorium.13 Through Allanah Harper, Sitwell had at least a passing acquaintance with the painter Max Ernst and the poet Tristan Tzara.14 Visiting Spain in June 1936, she missed the International Surrealist Exhibition at London’s New Burlington Gallery, which featured Dalí lecturing from inside a diving suit and nearly suffocating. Over the years, however, she responded readily to the works of individual Surrealists, among them the poet David Gascoyne, whom she grouped in the 1940s with Dylan Thomas and George Barker as the best of the younger poets.15 In the 1930s, Sitwell was somewhat irritated by Herbert Read, but she probably watched his involvement with Surrealism from a distance. Sitwell had no theoretical interest in Freud, telling Henry Treece of the New Apocalypse movement in 1942 that he was wrong to think that ‘the poet should show in his images psychological symbols, his own disease, and by uncovering them effect his cure’ as this led to young people equating malady with poetry. ‘Oh, why won’t people realise that poetry is a specialist’s job!’16
In the spring of 1934, Sitwell read a book that she found at once impressive and annoying – John Sparrow’s Sense and Poetry. Only twenty-seven, Sparrow was a barrister, a prize-fellow (and future warden) of All Souls College, Oxford, the editor of several seventeenth-century texts, and the author of a critical work on Virgil.17 Sitwell drafted and redrafted a letter to him, dated 14 May 1934, editing out anger and adding praise, while disputing his claim that her most pleasing poetry was ‘purely decorative’. She urged him to consider not only her early poems, but ‘Gold Coast Customs’, which could hardly be described in such terms. She scolded him for misquotations: ‘My dear Sir, should you blame me for making an ugly sound when you have made it for me?’ In one case, the sense of a line as well as the sound was altered: ‘By the way, I didn’t write “Emily-coloured hands”, I said “Emily-coloured primulas”, to convey that they were like pink cheeks of a country girl, – Emily being a country-sounding name.’18
Her own misquotations would soon be a problem. In August, Sitwell went to Brides-les-Bains near the Swiss border with Osbert, and Sparrow came to see her. The two sat and happily discussed prosody, cementing an alliance that Edith would need before the year was out.
Having missed her deadline, she was writing up to four thousand words per day (this likely included simple copying),19 while trying to fend off bores. She told Pavlik that the Swiss ‘have all the worst German faults: faithfulness when you don’t want them to be faithful, stoutness, philoprogenitiveness, love of cakes, culture. Osbert is very angry because I have told one persistent lady that he is really Clemence Dane … She said, Are you not an actress? You look like one? I said I am. I act under the name of Sarah Siddons.’20 But she couldn’t laugh off her exhaustion, writing to Pavlik at the end of August: ‘I had such a terrible dream last night. I dreamt I was in a low shallow grave, that I had had to dig with my own nails, and that I couldn’t lie down because there were still a few drops of blood left in my heart, and so I wasn’t allowed to be dead.’21
At the beginning of September, she had finished her essays on Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Sacheverell Sitwell, then discovered at the last minute that Duckworth had advertised the book as containing an essay on W. H. Davies too, so she had to write one in just three days. The short volume that she intended ballooned to 264 printed pages. She had the first proofs back at the end of September but was too tired to inspect them properly.22 The book, which came out on 15 November 1934, was bound to start a fight, if not the one she intended. It had real strengths, such as her discussion of Yeats’s technique. Roy Foster writes in his biography of Yeats: ‘Edith Sitwell noted that the early and late lyrics are united by the unearthly ability to fuse sound and sense, and perceptively analyzed WBY’s vowel schemes, their relationship to the rhythmic plan of his poetry, and how they created a passionate and moving effect.’23 It is hard to find before Sitwell’s book so lucid and informative an account of the technical aspects of the poetry of Ezra Pound.24 The volume is as entertaining as criticism can be: she proves early on, with crushing examples, that F. R. Leavis is often unable to hear the poetry he writes about.
However, G. W. Stonier, reviewing the book for the New Statesman (24 November), observed that, even as she dismissed Leavis, she made some arguments extraordinarily like his. In her defence, it should be noted that she makes many explicit references to Leavis’s book, some dismissing his views, sometimes agreeing heartily with them. The verbal echoes that Stonier noticed were hardly the result of wilful theft of ideas; the reader knows from the outset that Sitwell has Leavis beside her as she writes. Over the next four issues, there were two letters from Grigson, one from Wyndham Lewis, and one from H. Sidney Pickering, asserting that aspects of the book were plagiarised. Edith wrote two letters and Osbert and John Spar
row one each in defence of it.
The dispute spilt over into other magazines. In a review not only unsigned but deliberately disguised to put off guesses as to its authorship, Sparrow wrote in the TLS (13 December 1934), ‘If ridicule can kill, Miss Sitwell has certainly achieved a handsome massacre.’ He disputed her more extreme comments on Matthew Arnold and A. E. Housman, writing that some of her conclusions about the sound of lines were overworked, and perhaps imaginary, although on the whole the notice was favourable. Grigson dashed off another letter, published on 20 December, accusing the reviewer of being ‘superficial, ill-informed and prejudiced’, and listing many misquotations and mis-attributions as evidence that Sitwell was hardly doing justice to the texture of poetry. He quoted some phrases on the history of sprung rhythm from Herbert Read’s Form in Modern Poetry that are similar to ones in Sitwell’s chapter on Hopkins; he also pointed out that she quoted some of the same passages of Hopkins and of Coleridge that Read had cited.
Sparrow responded to Grigson’s list of errors by saying that he had seen them too, but that they were incidental to the main argument and the result of careless proofreading. As for the alleged plagiarism, he had a simple response: ‘It would have been for the most part impossible to omit mention of these matters or to express them very differently.’
A long letter from Sitwell appeared in January, asserting (truthfully) that she had been quoting the passages from Coleridge in her lectures for over a decade, and that she did not need Herbert Read’s book to tell her about the history of sprung rhythm. This was a reasonable claim, since Hopkins’s ideas on prosody had been widely known and discussed among poets and critics since Robert Bridges’s edition of his works in 1918. As for Grigson’s remarks on her ‘queer debt’ to Leavis, she said that in writing of Yeats and Eliot it was impossible not to refer to certain facts of common knowledge: ‘I am unable to see why the fact that Dr. Leavis has read Mr. Yeats’s Autobiographies and Essays should have made it incumbent upon me not to. And to take two passages from The Waste Land, I did not need Dr. Leavis’s book to tell me that the title of this poem was taken from Miss Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, or to tell me that a passage in The Burial of the Dead refers to the Tarot pack. Mr. Eliot’s notes to the poem establish both these facts.’25
Sitwell had done herself no favours. Aspects of Modern Poetry was a sloppy production; her reputation as a critic who cared about the texture of poetry was undermined by her misquotations. Although she had a general defence against the charge of plagiarism, she could have signalled more clearly where her book overlapped with others in the field. She failed to give proper attribution and was technically guilty of a degree of plagiarism. The whole episode gave encouragement to the view that the Sitwells were not writers of greater or lesser merit, but ‘apes’ and mountebanks. Oddly enough, sixteen years later, F. R. Leavis claimed Geoffrey Grigson had plagiarised his book The Great Tradition for a series of radio talks on the English novel.26 Had she known of it, Sitwell would have been gleeful to see her accuser accused.
Aspects of Modern Poetry revealed her discomfort with the younger poets. In 1933, she had dismissed Stephen Spender as ‘over-rated’ and impertinent for his negative comments on Sachie’s work, though she thought Auden respectful and gifted.27 In her book, she compared Britain’s younger poets to the Surrealists in their wish to become recording machines and never to filter impressions, and she argued, in effect, that their words remain abstract: the sense of sight is almost ‘non-existent’ and the words never become incarnate, things of flesh and blood: ‘We find in several of these young men, in Mr. Auden and Mr. Bottrall especially, considerable technical achievement, as far as rhythmical impetus and the suitability of the rhythm to the theme is concerned, but no tactile sense whatever. The line, in consequence, has neither height nor depth. An intellectual apprehension of words, this they have, but no sensual feeling, no tactile apprehension of them.’ In 1934, Auden had not yet written the poetry that would make a nonsense of these claims. In fact, Sitwell was not far off in another observation: ‘All, or nearly all, of these poets present surface difficulties, because they suppress intermediary processes of thought, or else they give so many that the reader is bewildered. This surface difficulty gives the impression that the poems conceal great depths. This is rarely so.’28 Sitwell excluded C. Day Lewis from her strictures, as a poet who is ‘truthful, bare and austere’,29 but she could summon up little of the encouragement she had usually lavished on rising talents and, in general, treated them to a lecture from the headmistress. She was threatened by their sudden prominence, and she did not like that Auden and his friends were, as she put it in a letter, ‘being taken up by the Communists’.30 She was, after all, in love with a man made homeless by Lenin.
Sitwell was blind-sided by Sachie’s reaction to the book. Her chapter on him contained ample praise, but it dwelt more on his sequence Dr Donne and Gargantua than on the Canons of Giant Art, and so, in his view, compounded the neglect of his best poetry. Worse still, she had actually identified defects in his work. In reference to one passage, she wrote: ’Mr. Sitwell suddenly changes his scale, dwarfs it, and allows artificialities of an unreal kind, the sort that were used by the minor Elizabethans, to creep in (these two habits are amongst his worst dangers).’31 She wrote to him:
I cannot conceive how you can so have misunderstood my essay on you. The book was largely written so as to include that essay … I could not call you a poet of genius because you are my brother, and it would have let loose a million little hounds at your throat. But I think I have proved you to be a poet of genius … I picked two points of contention with you, because I was determined that nobody should say ‘here is a sister carried away by the fact of the poet being her brother’. I have, I think, combated and absolutely disproved all the charges which fools may bring against you.32
Sachie apologised and withdrew his complaint.
In late November 1934, Sitwell went back to Levanto to work on her ‘suetty book’ about Queen Victoria, which was supposed to be finished by May.33 Having spent the summer in Spain painting bullfighters, Pavlik sailed in November with Ford and Tanner to New York. They went on to Chicago, where Tanner stayed when the others returned to New York; this marked their final separation. Sitwell missed having Christmas dinner with Pavlik, as they had done for several years. She wrote: ‘the sensations of being in a new country must be wonderful, – the feeling of an entirely new air, an entirely new civilisation.’34 Pavlik’s exhibitions in Chicago and New York won good reviews, but he was disappointed with the country, so Sitwell suggested he come back and henceforth regard France as his home and England as his market: ‘I believe most truthfully that in a way Fortune is like a bird in a wood. If we know how to whistle to her, as a bird-fowler whistles, she will come to us. One must not lose faith in that power, for if one loses faith, the power goes.’ She went on: ‘Your letter has made me terribly sad. I always think of you really, you know, as if you were rather a sad little boy, not as if you were grown up at all. And that is one way in which I love you, amongst other ways. You are not only a great painter, you are a little boy. I long to have you safe home again.’35
In Levanto, she was struck by the beauty of the sunsets and the sense of physical space. She told Pavlik that her room in Paris was just large enough to hold a bed, her books, and a chair: ‘I feel cramped and shut in there.’ By January 1935, she had changed her mind about Victoria, which she now believed would be a ‘really satisfactory’ book,36 especially as it allowed her to write on topics dear to her heart, such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, but, needing money, she broke off to write several articles and reviews, among them ‘Some Notes on my Own Poetry’ for the London Mercury (March 1935). This essay can reasonably be seen as a fugitive chapter from Aspects of Modern Poetry. She describes the kind of sound she was trying to create in her poetry, and the techniques she used to achieve it, including her management of vowels and consonants, assonance, dissonance, end-rhyme, and internal rhyme to af
fect the speed at which a line can be read. Since her biography of Pope, she had pulled the language of prosody in new directions, but she seemed not to have grasped the limits of explanation: at some level, what happened in her ear was idiosyncratic and inexplicable, just as the reader’s ability to share that experience was also mysterious. A good deal of what she presented as objective and certain was rooted in the impressions of an unusually refined sensibility. W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender thought Sitwell no intellectual, although Auden thought she wrote ravishing lines, and Spender said to John Pearson that her work was ‘very very beautiful’ and her forms were ‘wholly original – and very good’.37 Others went further. Denise Levertov wrote at the time of Sitwell’s death (New York Times, 10 December 1964): ‘Perhaps no one has ever lived who had a more highly developed understanding of the relation in poetry of meaning and aural values’ – a wild claim, but a sign of how Sitwell’s technique could excite other poets. However, the essay Sitwell produced in 1935 sets up to reveal things about her own work and about poetry in general that may remain out of reach. The essay underwent great revisions and was used as an introduction to her Selected Poems (1936) as well as some later volumes, including her Collected Poems (1957), where it assumes an unhelpful importance; its one certain effect is to leave new readers in a muddle.
‘I’m literally dead of overwork,’ she wrote to Cecil Beaton when she got back to Paris in March. ‘By May, I shall have written 130,000 words in one year.’38 Even so, she was planning another book – again, for the sake of the advance. She was convinced that Faber & Faber was not promoting her prose works as they deserved, so she took a commission from Victor Gollancz to write an eighty-thousand-word novel based on the life of Jonathan Swift to be delivered in the autumn of 1936.39 With the biography to be finished in the early summer, she would have no rest between projects. Some months later, she wrote to Pavlik: ‘The truth is, that nobody, – and certainly no woman, – can write one book a year, of the sort of size I have to produce. It is like having a baby every nine months.’40 Now forty-seven, Sitwell had passed the age at which she could hope ever to have a child, and her letters contain occasional hints of sadness on this point.
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