For months there had been trouble between Tchelitchew and Edward James over Salvador Dalí. That summer James had entered a contract to pay Dalí a regular sum and to assume ownership of the art works he produced during a two-year period. Dalí blithely cheated on their arrangements, and James could not get all the works he was owed. Tchelitchew felt neglected, and in the background there was another odd situation: James had fallen unrequitedly in love with Ruth Ford, the sister of Charles Henri whom he thought despicable and depraved.1 Sitwell had urged Tchelitchew not to throw away real friends like Edward James (and, by implication, herself) for people like ‘little bamboo tables, very dry and strengthless on which you can place no reliance. You did do that you know, and this is the result.’2 Happily, Edward James bought the ‘Sibyl’ portrait, and Tchelitchew was able to sail to the United States in November with money in his pocket and no further need to worry about his brother-in-law’s pince-nez. Meanwhile, James came to read his poetry to Edith Sitwell, who grew ‘fonder and fonder’ of him.3
W. B. Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse came out in November 1936 – a strange selection, in which the most represented poet was Oliver St John Gogarty, with a huge amount of space given to Yeats’s Irish friends. He left out Owen and Rosenberg altogether, allotting just two pages to Sassoon. Eliot was there but represented by minor work. However, the Sitwells had no reason to complain: Sachie’s poem ‘Agamemnon’s Tomb’ was included, as was an eighteen-page selection of Edith’s works. Roy Foster observes that, for Yeats, Edith Sitwell’s intensity of vision made up for a technique he did not admire. Yeats’s introduction with its salute to her ‘high style of “perpetual metamorphosis”, with “a nightmare vision like that of Webster” coiled beneath, is a compelling and intelligent defence of a writer already dividing critical opinion down the middle’.4 Michael Roberts’s The Faber Book of Modern Verse, published in the same year, offered a more sensible representation especially to younger poets, but Edith Sitwell was allowed just four pages. Sachie was permitted ten for ‘The Farnese Hercules’ – an excellent choice as that poem is both well wrought and representative of him. However, as the editor of anthologies that had to compete with Roberts’s book, Edith Sitwell regarded it as ‘one of the worst anthologies I have ever seen’,5 although almost no one agreed with her.
Helen Rootham returned from Spain in August in a dire condition: ‘Poor soul, I am so sorry for her, sorry with all my heart.’6 She revived enough to go to England and deal with a family crisis – a nephew was himself dying of cancer, and her sister Ethel had relapsed into mental illness. Helen was trying to translate ‘Of the Doctrine of Divine Love’ by the Abbé Coste and needed a publisher, so Marie Belloc Lowndes, a Catholic, gave her an introduction to Burns, Oates & Washbourne. However, morphia made it impossible for her to finish the manuscript.7 In February, she underwent a light-ray treatment in Paris,8 after which Sitwell took her in the first week of March to Levanto for another extended holiday. By the end of the month, however, she was immobilised with back pain. On one of the few occasions she was able to leave the hotel, they were nearly killed; Sitwell wrote: ‘It was up in the mountains, and another motor dashed round a corner, straight into us, and as nearly as possible pushed us over a ravine.’ They were saved by their chauffeur, an ex-racing driver, who managed to keep the car on the road.9
While in Levanto, Sitwell was finishing her novel, but with distractions, as she told Richard Jennings: ‘most awful people with legs like flies, who come in to lunch in bathing costume, flies, centipedes, an idiot boy who has been given charge of the church bell, which he rings literally all day on Sundays, barking dogs, people who bang doors, and an incessant wireless. They also tore up the road just outside our bedroom windows.’ She told Jennings that Dylan Thomas was ‘rapidly heading for having his ears boxed. I can feel the tips of my fingers tingling to come into contact with the lobes of his ears. And it would do him a lot of good, for he was evidently insufficiently corrected as a child. What a tiresome boy that is, though a very gifted one.’10
She had followed up her earlier praise with a review of Twenty-Five Poems, claiming that he ‘showed every promise of greatness’ (Sunday Times, 15 November 1936). This was the review that launched his fame. She set him up with her own agent and gave him introductions to various writers, editors, and publishers. When he missed the appointments, these people wrote reproachfully to Sitwell. Later in the summer, when Thomas was working on a fishing boat, she sent money from an anonymous donor that allowed Dylan and Caitlin to buy knives and towels, to go to a Garbo film, and to pay off the ‘clamourers’. She was trying to find him suitable work, and he asked her help in getting him into the BBC, where, among other things, he would like to broadcast Sachie’s poems: ‘it’s great and grand aloud, isn’t it? pillars and columns and great striding figures through a microphone’.11 However, Dylan Thomas’s speciality was a disappearing act, driving Sitwell to the observation that he should join Maskelyne and Devant, the magicians, illusionists and plate-spinners.12 Finally exasperated at his failure to answer letters, she stopped writing. When The Map of Love came out in August 1939, she thought it ‘ghastly’, but continued to hope that in time he would make something of an incomparable talent.13
In Levanto, Sitwell generally got up at 5.30 a.m. when it was certain to be quiet, and she would write up to four thousand words per day (some of it copying). Helen was not fit to travel until the end of June, and when they reached Paris she immediately took to her bed in pain. Sitwell wrote to Christabel Aberconway: ‘Life has been hell for four months, excepting that I’m under the impression that I’ve written the book I’ve been waiting twenty years to write. It’s nearly, but not quite, finished.’14 She told Pavlik that she thought it ‘a second Gold Coast Customs’.15
In a letter of 8 July 1937 from the Sesame Club, she remarks almost as an aside: ‘Everything is very tiresome here. My mother is supposed to be dying. It won’t, I imagine, be immediately. I am sorry for her, but she has always been terribly unkind to me, and I can’t pretend to feel anything personally, that I don’t feel.’16 Lady Ida had travelled to London from Montegufoni a week earlier in fair health but was soon taken to a nursing home in London with pneumonia. She died there on 12 July. Her obituary in The Times (13 July 1937) called her ‘A Great Lady of Yorkshire’, described her beauty and her ability to talk to fishermen about their problems, and just hinted at her scandal: ‘she was unversed in practical affairs’. Her funeral took place at Lois Weedon church near Weston Hall two days later. According to The Times (15 July 1937), Edith attended the funeral, along with Osbert, Sachie, and Georgia, but ‘Sir George Sitwell was unable to be present through illness’ – he was distraught.
Edith remained in England until October for a joint presentation with Osbert and Sachie of the University of London’s Northcliffe Lectures, published the following year as Trio. They attracted crowds of thirteen hundred per lecture, a reassuring sign that the Sitwells still mattered in the literary world, as Edith waited for the reviews of I Live Under a Black Sun. The novel was dedicated to John Sparrow, which seems to have irked Tchelitchew. She addressed him in the third person: ‘I have a very great friend, one who has my most devoted and tender affection. I did not dedicate my book “I Live Under a Black Sun” to him, because the book is about a man of genius who lived in darkness, – and he is a man of genius. I felt that if I had, it would have drawn down darkness of one kind or another upon our world.’17 That Tchelitchew might expect a dedication goes to the heart of the story. Only Jonathan Hare, Sitwell’s twentieth-century Swift, possesses the genius to describe in tales of big men and small men, in the conversation of wise horses, and in modest proposals for the eating of flesh the madness that Sitwell’s generation had lived through. Yet Hare is himself touched by a selfishness that grows to insanity: ‘I must have someone who believes in me, who is ready to give up her will to me.’18 He destroys the lives of three women who love him, each of whom seems to represent a mood of Sitwell’s spur
ned devotion to Tchelitchew, although her main interest is in Anna, a character based on Swift’s ‘Stella’. Not dedicating the book to Tchelitchew was either superstitious (a fear that he would end up like Swift) or a small gesture of independence.
The novel is as strange as any later work of Magic Realism, as it collapses the boundaries between one age and another. The poet Richard Church wrote in the Christian Science Monitor (17 November 1937) that the novel needed a more restrictive intellectual frame, prompting Sitwell to explain to him: ‘I took Swift and those two [three?] women and put them into the present time, because they don’t live in time, they live in eternity and theirs is a story which recurs and recurs again (I’ve seen it happen in my own experience), and because I wanted to show the individual madness against the universal madness.’ About a year later, she wrote to the journalist Raymond Marriott: ‘It is an allegory, in a sense, as you will see. The reason I put Swift into modern clothes is because the spirit of the modern world is power gone mad. And Swift is power gone mad. I have tried to show the futility and barrenness of hatred. It is a terrible book, I think. I felt as if I had been through an earthquake, after I had written it.’19 The book is extremely hard-minded: the only artist able to represent the insanity of the age is at the same time the embodiment of the private madness. The path to redemption (or revolution) winds back on itself, and the novel specifically defies the hope of moral progress. It is a work of Christian belief insofar as it gazes into hell.
I Live Under a Black Sun is Sitwell’s answer to the Marxism of the 1930s. One of the epigraphs is taken from Nadezhda Krupskaya’s memoir of her husband Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (a work Allanah Harper introduced her to): ‘And observing these howling contrasts in richness and poverty, Ilyich would mutter through clenched teeth … “Two nations.”’ Early in the novel, a revolutionary’s bomb succeeds in killing a governor, but it also kills a child and sparks a war:
the fronds of his hair were all dabbled and stiff as if they had lain in some dreadful rain. His body was so broken that, little as he was, his mother could scarcely gather him in her arms. Yet sitting there through many hours, huddled ape-like with her long maternal arms sheltering her ruins, in the broken sunlight, she could feel his small hands squeezing her heart, knocking at it as he had done in the long months of waiting before he was born … And far away in the cities, the newspapers of Europe contained the news of the murder, all the newsboys in the capitals were shouting it along the streets: ‘Murder of a Governor! Bomb thrown at a procession!’ – a sensation, but unimportant and to be discussed idly for a moment and then forgotten. For there were plans to be made for to-morrow and the days to follow, houses and big businesses to be built, credits to be established, schemes to be begun, marriages to be celebrated. But in the darkness under the trees in the great cities, the young girls held the hands of dead men, pressed lips to lips that were already cold. For the two nations that alone inhabit the earth, the rich and the poor, walking to their death in opposed hordes, had found the only force that could bind them together, a cannibalistic greed, hatred, and fear. No longer need they fear each other, for both nations will be swept away.20
While Sitwell thought Lenin right to ‘howl’ at poverty, at the same time the promises of his revolution were debunked by mothers and widows in their grief.
Sitwell said to Tchelitchew that the book ‘varies between lyricism and savagery’ – that is, between a private lament for lost love and the ‘howl’ of the battlefield, as well as that of the penniless migrants whom she had observed for so many years in Bayswater. As always in her work, much of her meaning is worked out in the sounds of language. Different sections of the book operate in different rhetorical registers – a quality that discourages most readers until they have got through about fifty pages. Much of the book, of course, is written in a middle register, satirising domestic life and courtship. However, other sections attempt to render extreme emotional states. When she writes of longing, there are echoes of Swinburne, and when she describes beggars huddling in the cold, or battle scenes, or Swift’s mind finally collapsing, her prose becomes, as above, rhapsodic, even visionary.
Sitwell expected to take a battering with this book – and some critics did believe she was overreaching; the reviewer in the New Statesman (2 October 1937) remarked: ‘Miss Sitwell is a delightful poet, but she is decidedly not a novelist.’ At first the reviews bothered her; ‘all the Pipsqueakery are after me in full squeak’.21 Nevertheless, the good reviews took her by surprise, as she told Tchelitchew: ‘The News Chronicle – a very important paper, – published a review by Ellis Roberts, – a very important critic, – saying it could only have been written by a spiritual child of Turgenieff and Emily Bronte, that it is a book of almost unbearable beauty and terrific power. The Manchester Guardian [Wilfrid Gibson] is half off its head about it, and says only “Wuthering Heights” compares with it.’
In fact, Gibson went further: ‘I hesitate to use that much bandied and shop-soiled word “genius”; it would be so much more politic, so much safer, to apply the inevitable epithet “brilliant”; yet if this novel has not a touch of genius I must admit that I do not know what genius is’ (5 October 1937). William Soskin in the New York Herald Tribune (27 February 1938) remarked: ‘There are no adjectives to describe the darkness of this novel, its pity and its terror. Miss Sitwell proves that her icy delicacy can achieve more than the violent onslaughts, the tumult and shouting of the large-scale propaganda novelists.’ Evelyn Waugh remarked that Sitwell, always good at such things, could easily have provided background detail and atmosphere for an ordinary historical novel:
But the tragedy and the mystery of Swift were too potent for such a treatment; she seems to have seen deep into his tortured soul, to horror lurking beneath horror, into a world where costume and decor become meaningless. It is a terrifying book … Miss Sitwell’s book, or so it seems to me, is like a magnesium flame in a cavern, immediately and abundantly beautiful at first sight, provoking further boundless investigation. It is a book that must be read patiently, more than once and it must be read.22
I Live Under a Black Sun is indeed a masterpiece, one of the great novels of its time, yet until Peter Owen republished it in 2007 it had been out of print for almost fifty years.
Writing on an ostensibly historical subject allowed Sitwell to cast a veil over autobiography. Tchelitchew apparently did not guess that Jonathan Hare was based partly on him. She was not sued by Wyndham Lewis, though he was the model for a villain named Debenham.23 Evidently, Sir George did not notice that he was the model for the gloomy and introverted Sir Henry Rotherham, or that aspects of Lady Ida are to be found in Mrs Linden. The Rootham sisters are reflected in the character of Becky Mintley – a woman of stocky appearance, like Evelyn, and inclined, like Helen, to both charity and scolding.
In the autumn of 1937, Sitwell wrote to Pavlik from Paris:
I returned back here to unspeakable sadness, – to find that – as we now fear – the cancer has attacked the poor unhappy Helen’s spine and one hip. She has such pain as is unimaginable, and sometimes moans and weeps all day. When she is not doing that, she lies with her wretched discoloured face thrown back over her pillow, her eyes shut, her mouth pinched. Her face, when she is asleep, has the terrible owl-like wisdom that people’s faces have when they are dying. They are giving her increased doses of morphia and that is all she looks forward to. She says terrible things: ‘I suppose this day will pass like all the other days I have to bear.’ And it may go on for ages. Yes. Ages.24
Sitwell was thinking about a new novel to be called ‘To the Dark Tower Came’; although she assembled notes and made newspaper clippings about circuses, flea circuses, animal cruelty, and stupid bishops, she was not ready to start on it.25 Instead, she wrote a radio play about Beau Brummel called The Last Party, broadcast on the BBC on 3 April.26 Work became a secondary consideration as Helen’s condition worsened. In February 1938, Edith wrote to Sachie: ‘No news excepting that Helen seems a li
ttle stronger. But she is absolutely helpless. She can’t move one leg at all. And she has to have morphia twice a day. She cried this morning when I took her in her early morning tea, because she said she wondered if she would ever walk again. And I said of course she would. But the doctor told Evelyn he thought she would never walk again. We have to keep that from her at all costs. He says the poor thing is not dying. Life here is absolute hell, and that is all there is about it.’27
Now that music lessons and translations were out of the question, Helen had almost no money of her own. Some years earlier Evelyn had been making about ninety pounds per year from office work,28 barely enough to cover her expenses. Now, at sixty-one, she was hobbled by varicose veins, and her annual earnings, it seems, were reduced to about sixty pounds.29 The cost of the household and of Helen’s care fell squarely on Sitwell. In December 1935, her overdraft had stood at £516. On 27 February 1937, Percy Haddock of Coutts & Co. sent a chivvying letter – her overdraft was £935 and he looked forward to it being reduced.30 By June 1938, it had reached £1031. Sitwell’s investments returned about five to six hundred pounds per year, out of which she paid Helen an annual allowance of £270 (divided into quarterly payments).31 Nursing care alone, Sitwell told Pavlik, cost three hundred pounds per year. Between March and June 1938, Sitwell cashed an unusual series of fifteen cheques totalling £138. She had one place to turn for help, but she knew there was a trap. She wrote to Pavlik on 14 March: ‘That sunny-natured old cannibal (Ginger) is trying to get me to go to Florence. Apparently he thinks I am going to spend my life between the horrors of this flat, and looking after him! It is utterly impossible, of course, to do any serious work, because I feel nothing: I am utterly numb.’32 While she harboured resentments, Sitwell seldom quarrelled with her father, and she was probably correct in thinking that he wanted her to be the prop of his old age.
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