Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  In March 1935, Edith Sitwell discovered the novels of Walter Greenwood, a young writer who captured the scrabbling life of a slum in Salford. Sitwell read Love on the Dole (1933) and His Worship the Mayor (1934), declaring him ‘a Dickens of our Time’ in the Sunday Referee (24 March 1935). She then sent him what amounts to a fan letter: ‘I feel impelled to tell you that I know you to be, not only a born writer, but a great writer (and I never use the word great lightly). I do not know when I have been so deeply, so terribly moved and so strongly impressed as I have been by these two superb novels.’41

  With Pavlik set to arrive in Paris around 11 May, Sitwell took up an old theme: ‘Rabbits are naturally flattered at being accepted on terms of equality by tigers – but in the long run this does not lead to their happiness. They would be much happier with rabbits.’42 He was no sooner in Paris than her jealousy of his friends and lovers boiled over again, reducing her to an apology and a promise to be his devoted friend. Nevertheless, tensions remained for some time. On 18 June, René Crevel, faced with worsening tuberculosis and embroiled in a dispute at a literary congress, gassed himself. Sitwell was heading off to London and her letter of consolation to Tchelitchew got lost in a manuscript book, or so she said; almost a month passed before she realised her mistake. She apologised abjectly and begged him not to cut her off.43 It is just possible that she could not bring herself to console him for the death of one of his lovers.

  That July, Sitwell stayed at the Sesame, Imperial and Pioneer Club at 49 Grosvenor Street in Mayfair, one of a small number of ‘cock-andhen’ clubs where women could entertain men. An amalgamation of three clubs founded in the late nineteenth century, it had a background in the suffragist movement, with low subscriptions originally intended to appeal to teachers and other professional women.44 This club served as her residence in London for twenty-six years, and her dinner parties, luncheons, and cocktail parties there attracted writers, musicians and artists, much as her old tea parties had at Pembridge Mansions. She found much to complain of at the club – busybodies, meddlers, ‘old trouts’, and people who spread their colds – but she became a fixture there.

  She went to Renishaw in August, where among the guests was the crime novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes, elder sister of Hilaire Belloc. Sitwell wrote to her afterwards: ‘I, too, very rarely make friends now; I have only made two new ones in the last ten years or so, and when you came to stay here, I felt, indeed knew, that I had found a third one. It is the rarest and the happiest thing.’45 They continued a friendly correspondence for several years. Later, during a visit to Renishaw, Belloc Lowndes described Edith and Osbert to her daughter as ‘kind-hearted, but extremely censorious, with violent feelings of hate against many writers, and especially “poets who are puffed”. I understand that, for she is really very, very good. Were she a man, this would be recognised.’46

  In honour of Pavlik’s opening at Tooth’s Gallery on 23 October, Sitwell hosted a small cocktail party at the Sesame. Among those invited was Stephen Spender, with whom she had already had at least one pleasant meeting. She had avoided discussing his work in Aspects of Modern Poetry, as it seemed to belong to a different genre than that of most of the other young poets. Spender had admired Sitwell’s poetry when he was a schoolboy and, at sixteen, published a sonnet dedicated to her in his school magazine, but in the early 1930s he had recoiled somewhat from the Sitwell phenomenon. By the mid-1930s he had returned to a cautious admiration, which grew warmer in the 1940s.

  Noise was Sitwell’s great enemy. In search of quiet in which she could work, she went at the end of the year to Gerona on the coast of Catalonia. ‘The sea is just opposite my window, and makes a noise like the sound of a bible being opened, and quantities of pages being turned over all at once,’ she wrote to Pavlik, who was setting out again for the United States. The Spanish city was lovely, but Sitwell had to contend with voices from a café beneath her bedroom: ‘Male Spaniards seem never to go to bed – females sometimes, but, if one may judge from appearances, only in order to give birth to children.’47

  While in Gerona, she wrote an important review for the London Mercury (February 1936) of four younger poets, Ronald Bottrall, Archibald MacLeish, William Empson, and Dylan Thomas. Bottrall, who disliked Grigson and was not a member of Auden’s circle, had written Sitwell a ‘charming’ letter about Aspects of Modern Poetry, but he made clear how unhappy he was with her comments. She promised to clarify them in a review of his next book.48 She was much more generous in the London Mercury, and also found a good deal to praise in Empson: ‘His language is full, intense and charged with meaning.’ She thought MacLeish capable of good lines and passages, but added that in him ‘the great British Public have been sold another pup’. Dylan Thomas proved a revelation to her. She had scorned ‘Our eunuch dreams’ without naming its author in Aspects of Modern Poetry, a book Thomas characterised as her ‘latest piece of virgin dung’.49 Now, however, in ‘A grief ago’ and Eighteen Poems, she found what she had been hoping for in a young poet: ‘He has very great gifts, though they are not as yet completely resolved. He is, at moments, a prey to his subconscious self, and consequently to obscurity; but from that subconscious self rise, time after time, lines which are transmuted by his conscious self into really great poetry.’

  T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender had already encouraged Thomas, but it is generally agreed that Edith Sitwell was the chief architect of his fame. For the next few years, she wrote to him and about him, found money for his family, and bore with his drunken pranks. Her attitude was proprietorial. She wrote to Pavlik on 10 February that she was travelling from Paris to London, partly to meet Dylan Thomas:

  It is absolutely beyond doubt that that boy is going to be a very great poet indeed: his poems are on a huge scale, are ferociously individual, and very strange, – his form is miraculous. And, being very young, his poems have not the awful glibness one fears in the young. They are like rock matrix, or else are enclosed, like young buds. His is certainly the one genius for poetry that has arisen in the younger generation. And I’ll thank all the silly people there are about, waiting to ruin genius, to keep their hands off him.50

  Although for Dylan Thomas a trip to London usually meant a bender, he arrived sober at the Sesame Club on 20 February and made a great impression on Edith Sitwell, who remembered that he behaved ‘Beautifully … He always behaved with me like a son with his mother.’ Thomas characterised the party as ‘more dukes than drinks’ and went out afterwards to get properly tight.51

  The other reason for Sitwell’s visit to London was the release of Victoria of England on 13 February. Intended for a popular market, this book played to some of her strengths – the ability to evoke atmosphere and to render the character of an autocratic woman (she had inside information on that subject). Relying on Engels, she vividly recounted the horrors of poverty and labour in the mid-nineteenth century. The book had few claims to originality, and Sitwell acknowledged a considerable debt to Lytton Strachey. Still, it was very readable. She wrote to Osbert from Weston on 5 March: ‘Victoria is having a violent success; I couldn’t have believed it possible, but there we are! When I left London a week today, it was selling at the rate of 150 copies a day, and ten days after publication, although the 1st edition had been a very big one, (4,500 copies) they started printing a second edition. America is printing separately, too, so with any sort of luck, I may perhaps make some money.’52 While writing the book, she seems to have been briefly swept up in her subject, rhapsodising over Victoria’s ‘eagle’-like greatness in old age. However, once the book was out, she moderated her opinion, as she told Sassoon: ‘It was of course a great time, owing to social reform, etc, but she was not a great woman, and it is no use anybody telling me she was.’53 In November, one of her agents, Nancy Pearn, suggested that she write a poem about Victoria, but Sitwell refused: ‘I’ve had enough of the old girl to last me.’54

  Edith Sitwell loved being celebrated, but she did not care to be taken up and dropped and then
taken up again. At some point, apparently in the 1930s, she composed a letter to a woman whom Osbert names ‘Mrs Almer’ in Left Hand, Right Hand!:

  Dear Mrs. Almer,

  After five years, you have again been kind enough to ask me to luncheon. The reason for this is that I have just published a successful book: the reason I have had a successful book is that I do not go out and waste my time and energy, but work hard, morning and afternoon. If I accept your kind invitation, I shall have to leave off earlier in the morning, and shall be too tired to work in the afternoon. Then my next book will not be such a success, and you will not ask me to luncheon; or, at best, less often. So that, under these circumstances, I am sure you will agree it is wiser for me not to accept your present kind invitation.

  Yours sincerely,

  Edith Sitwell55

  It is possible that there was no Mrs Almer and that this letter was written as a party-piece.

  Fame brought other queer demands on Sitwell’s time. In 1935, her friend John Beevers, a religious writer, and his wife Marjorie had asked her to help find work as a publisher’s reader for ‘a wretched deformed semi-dwarf’ named Douglas Burton, whom she met and tried to help. On 14 February 1936, Burton struck an author named Douglas Bose on the head with a sculptor’s hammer, angry because Bose had recently thrown a brazil nut at a woman, giving her a black eye. Having a thin skull, Bose died of his injuries. The Beevers urged Sitwell to go into the witness box and describe Burton as mad, while Burton’s brother wanted her to raise a thousand pounds for a defence against the murder charge. Though afraid of scandal, Sitwell was willing to testify if it would save the man, but John Sparrow, after consulting another barrister and Burton’s solicitor, advised her to stay away from the trial; it would be squalid and her testimony could not affect the outcome. As it was, the medical evidence was sufficient, and Burton was found ‘guilty but insane’ on 30 April.56

  Meanwhile, a very different kind of insanity was suddenly abroad in Europe, and Tchelitchew, still in New York, had to decide where his future lay. On 7 March 1936, Hitler overthrew the Locarno Pact and sent forces into the demilitarised Rhineland, confident that the French and the British lacked either the money or the stomach to drive him out of it. He was right, but Europe was brought near to war. Tchelitchew did not want to go back into uniform, and as a Russian refugee he had no idea what might become of him if France was overrun. Sitwell returned to Paris on 30 March and wrote to him the next day: ‘Do not worry about war, dear. I am told by everybody in England that there will not be one. Nobody wants one, and unless the French land us in one through sheer fright, I am sure – at least I hope to God – there will be peace. If war should break out, you must be a conscientious objector. On no account must you fight. The thought is too dreadful for anything.’57 Two weeks later, she suggested that in the event of conflict England would be safe for him. Nevertheless, she believed that unless ‘that pin-head Eden’ did something new about Italy, there was no immediate danger of war. ‘I know the English don’t want it, and I do not believe that the Germans do. But you must run no risks.’58

  At that moment, the threat of war was not her main worry. She wrote to Georgia: ‘I am feeling dreadfully sad. Poor Helen, poor poor thing. She has started something under her other arm, – and Hartmann has found something under the skin of her neck on the side on which she was operated. He says the thing under the arm is a little better, and so he is not going to operate yet, because both the places may go down.’59 As she recalled later, Helen’s piety made her absent-minded: ‘Poor darling, knowing she had had cancer, she yet would not look where she was going, because she was thinking about some silly mystical book, some ridiculous old priest’s helpless sermon – and would fall downstairs! She would go out in the pouring rain to Communion at 6 in the morning! It was impossible to look after her.’60

  At the beginning of May, she took Helen and Evelyn to Gerona for another holiday, hoping that sunlight and fresh air might help. This time she avoided the hotel and rented a small house with ‘palms, a nutmeg tree, a pomegranate tree, a medlar tree, crowds of the most beautiful roses I have ever seen, and nightingales and a pair of crested grebes, who are nesting here. There are also swarms of frogs.’61

  She came to Gerona intending to work on her novel about Jonathan Swift:

  I have crowds of notes for it, but it is not actually started yet. The principal theme is the story of Swift and Stella, but put into modern clothes. And then there is the secondary theme of the girl who loves the unfortunate man who killed her lover [in war], – because it gives me the chance of showing the wickedness and blindness of hatred between nations. I have done, – though I say it as shouldn’t – a really terrific description of the dead man’s mother receiving the news of his death in battle. And I am going to have huge street scenes, with hunger-marchers, etc. It is all very difficult, as I have never done anything of the sort before.62

  While Sitwell was conjuring street scenes on the page, real ones were taking place in France, where the election of a leftist government under Léon Blum had set off a wave of strikes involving about two million workers hopeful of winning better wages and hours. Sitwell read of this in Spain and wrote to Pavlik on 9 June: ‘I think everything looks very dangerous everywhere except in England, at present. I sympathise very strongly with the strikers in their demands. The shop-people, for instance, work for far too long hours. In a dairy where we buy butter, the women arrive at 6 in the morning, and do not leave before 10 at night, – but I do hope there will not be riots, which always terrify me. I do implore you to keep away from any places where there is likely to be trouble.’63

  Spain was more unstable than France. On 16 February, the Popular Front won a national election. In June, the country was convulsed with strikes, and by 18 July there were insurrections in Spanish Morocco and Seville; the Civil War had begun. Fortunately, Edith Sitwell had left Catalonia around 15 July, but Helen and Evelyn stayed on. The small house had a plate-glass window, giving anyone on the hill opposite a good view of what was going on inside. When the killing started, Helen, in a superbly courageous act, hid a priest there, disguised as a countryman: ‘the Reds came and dragged him out, and he would have been shot then and there, if the local doctor hadn’t saved him by saying he was mad. Which terrified her.’64

  ‘To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder,’65 wrote W. H. Auden about the war when it still seemed a pure cause; he later came to regret his glibness. During the war, the Nationalists’ acts of repression were more numerous, although there were large-scale atrocities on both sides. Particularly offensive to Sitwell and Helen Rootham was the Loyalist assault on the Catholic Church – the murders of 4184 secular priests, 2365 monks, and 283 nuns – most of them occurring in these first weeks of the conflict.66 Until disillusionment set in about such massacres and about the role of the Soviet Union in the war, the Loyalists were a fashionable cause, but Edith Sitwell wanted nothing to do with it.

  It took her some time to get word of Helen and Evelyn. On her way to Renishaw around the beginning of August, she wrote to Pavlik:

  I have received news at last – (all the postal arrangements have broken down) – a letter from a patient but very irritated Lieutenant of an English Man-of-War, saying the Man-of-War had called at San Feliu to rescue British [subjects], and H. and E. had refused to leave (although told by the captain they ought to do so) because they say they feel perfectly safe. They always have known better than everybody about everything, and I expect this chance of being a really thorough nuisance is too much of a temptation to be resisted.67

  It is possible that Helen delayed because she was still trying to provide shelter for the priest. She failed to register with the consul, putting herself in danger of being stranded. With the assistance of the same doctor who had protected the priest, the two women managed, at short notice, to get passage on a steamer. Sitwell wrote to Christabel Aberconway on 21 August: ‘[Hel
en] was marooned for four days in Cadiz harbour, on an English ship; and whilst there was told by a man (who was no. 5 on the list) that the British Consul at Cadiz was no. 36 on a list of 137 put down by the Communists to be hanged and burned if they got possession of the town. She says the terror of their last six days before she and her sister got on to the British boat had to be endured to be believed.’68 In a similar account for Pavlik, Sitwell added, ‘You who know the horrors of revolution will understand all this.’69

  16

  TWO NATIONS

  ‘Pavlik is painting a new portrait of me,’ Sitwell wrote to David Horner from Paris on 26 October 1936. ‘When I sat to him last he uttered a long plaint, and for some time I was unable to discover the gist of it. But when boiled down, it transpired to be the fact that he cannot work properly in Paris, on account of his brother-in-law’s pince-nez. These flash, when he comes in to meals, tired from working; and they are, in addition, very large and round as to the lens, very thick, too, which gives him an owl-like appearance disturbing to a painter.’ This is one of the rare times that Sitwell made fun of Tchelitchew behind his back, but she was pleased with the painting. In this portrait of her as a sibyl, she wears a plain dress; her hair is almost unkempt and her broad forehead exposed; in the background is a blue curtain. She holds a quill pen and a sheet of paper, and the veins in her long hands are emphasised. On a board hanging beside her are two hands forming E and S in sign language.