Edith had already borrowed £150 from Sir George, and he sent a separate cheque for some champagne to cheer Helen, but the doctor forbade her to drink it; she was allowed only a teaspoon of brandy in a tisane. Edith thanked her father, then added: ‘But the dreadful thing is, darling, that I am forced to beg you to lend me, as an advance from mother’s money which you are so generously handing over to us, another £150. I know only too well what a large sum it is to borrow, and how much it is asking of you. But that wretched woman now has to have three injections of heroin a day. The morphia no longer works, and she has to have the stronger drug.’33 Sir George sent the cheque by 24 March, when he remarked in a letter to Georgia that Edith ‘never came down on me before’.34 However, accepting money from Sir George meant that she could not avoid him, so on 5 April she went to Montegufoni intent on getting more help.
Ten days later she wrote to Helen: ‘I had a long talk with Father yesterday, who fully understands how very ill you have been, and will need building up for ages. He says I am never to hesitate to ask him for more money the moment it is needed for you. And that you are on no account to spare expenses … So please, dear, bear that in mind. There is no conceivable money worry for you, and anything you could possibly want, you are to have at once.’ At the same time, she found a small gift for Helen: ‘Oh, how I do hope you will like the Crucifix I am bringing to you. It really does seem to me to be lovely. One of the arms of the Cross is, unhappily, damaged, but it is so ancient one can’t wonder.’35 It was the sort of gift you might give to someone who is losing everything.
Sitwell returned around 25 April to find Helen often delirious. Even an intended kindness added to her sorrow: ‘Three days before she died, some good religious friend of hers came and sat beside her, and called her. She seemed to be dying at the moment. But she revived, because of that. Afterwards, she said to me, with a frightful despair, with infinite bitterness: “You know, Edith, I was in such peace. I was just going. And that poor good fool brought me back.”’36 On the following day Helen went ‘raving mad’ with pain and would shriek when lifted because the drugs were failing.37 She died, at last, on Sunday, 8 May 1938,38 and was buried in Paris.
After Helen Rootham’s death, Sitwell fell silent. It appears that she went to Weston on 19 May and then to the Sesame. She returned to Paris in July, moving on to Renishaw in August. Her financial records show one significant item. In June, she made her first quarterly payment of £67 10s to Evelyn Wiel – the amount she had given to Rootham over the years – representing about half her income apart from writing.39 On her deathbed, Rootham had pleaded with Sitwell to take care of her sister and to continue to live in the flat with her. Sitwell made the promise.
After almost a year’s stay in the United States, Pavlik was in London that summer to design a ballet, as well as for an exhibition at Tooth’s Gallery of Phenomena and other works. He made little time to see the distraught Sitwell, although at some point he remarked of her mourning dress: ‘It makes you look like a giant orphan.’40 He visited many friends but seemed to be dodging her. Even in Paris, he held back, and on 25 July she received a pneumatique from him that he was leaving again. She congratulated him on his successes but then spoke her mind:
This year, two friends have left me. One, a most noble-minded woman, loyal, invincibly, to her beliefs, invincibly loyal in her friendships, left me against her will. She left me because she had to die. She suffered during six months, – an illness which was one ghastly nightmare, not only for her, but for her sister and me. Then she died, a death which was so unspeakably frightful, so appalling, that I am now, after my long self-control, completely broken down by it, and am ill. The other friend left me, utterly heartlessly, utterly callously, because he wished to. For no reason. Or for a reason so base, so mean, and so petty that it is completely unworthy of the great artist that he is, and I am ashamed for him.
They exchanged a few more letters and met amicably in Paris on 3 September. ‘Let us forget our silly trouble this summer,’ she wrote shortly after. Pavlik sailed for New York in the middle of September, but she did not write to him again for six months.
For a long time her attention had been fixed on a private world, but in September 1938, with Hitler demanding the Sudetenland, she could see Paris preparing for war. She wrote to David Horner: ‘In the future (if things go on like this) I should think children will grow gas-shelters on their backs as snails grow shells. Sometimes, I suppose, a head will peer out, as it does with snails. Otherwise, all you will see will be gas-shelter. I don’t know why one doesn’t go quite mad.’ She was gradually reviving from her ordeal, and her sense of humour was coming back:
Just as, in England, no one must beg a dog not to bark, or breathe a word against an aspidistra, so, here, no one must ask a child not to be every qualified little kind of nuisance. The darling little children of the district have chosen this moment, when we are all nearly crazy with worry, and they are on holiday, to whirl round and round the fountain which is just underneath the windows, on four wooden sledges which seem to have as many iron wheels as a centipede has legs, – shrieking at the tops of their voices as they go. At least most of them shriek. Others have whistles. They do this practically all day. And nobody must ask them not to.41
In the autumn of 1938, Sitwell settled down to work on an anthology for Victor Gollancz, which she hoped to have ready by Christmas. It took until the next summer. She also wrote a radio play about Romeo Coates, one of her English Eccentrics, which was broadcast on 23 February 1939.42 She submitted a dutiful review (Sunday Times, 2 October 1938) of David Horner’s travel book Through French Windows, attributing to it ‘charm and wit and perception’ and ‘admirable writing’.43 However, she was tired and ill. Her physician in England was Lord Dawson of Penn (physician-in-ordinary to the King, he is now remembered for the technically treasonous act of hastening the death of George V in 1936 with an injection of morphine and cocaine44). During the summer he told Sitwell that she was exhausted, and he later performed a gynaecological procedure: ‘I became like the Woman in the Bible, and remained like it for a whole month.’45 Then she caught a chill at the end of October visiting Helen’s grave. She arrived at the Sesame on 12 November with Evelyn in tow, and appears to have stayed on in England until after Christmas.
Largely to get away from Evelyn, Sitwell decided to act on a suggestion Tchelitchew had made before his departure. She tried to set up an American lecture tour, in which she expected to be able to read from a script, while the agent thought she should work from memory. She wrote to Rée Gorer: ‘I am having a protracted argument with the agent, Mr. Colston Leigh, on the subject of whether I am, or alternatively am not, a trick cyclist. As far as I can make out, he would like me to bicycle round and round the platform on the tip of my nose, with my feet in the air, intoning at the same time on the effect that texture has on the caesura.’46 Leigh wanted to bring her to the United States, but with war on the horizon, their plans fell through and she would not cross the ocean for another decade.
Around March 1939, Tchelitchew reappeared in Paris for a vernissage, as Sitwell told Gorer: ‘He is looking very thin and ill. He is furious with me for not having written to him for six months, and hints that I have broken his faith in human nature by deserting him when he was ill. He will never be the same again, he says, never. Either to me, or in general. I think he must have forgotten last summer.’ She added, as an afterthought: ‘Pavlik says the doctors tested him to see if he was getting cancer, which upset me horribly.’47 Unable to hold out any longer, she finally wrote to him:
My dearest Pavlik,
This is only a little note, just to send you my unchanged affection, and my unchanged friendship. It made me terribly unhappy seeing you so white and thin. Everything made me terribly unhappy.
I had to recover from the pain I had been caused last year, before I could write. But never for one moment did I mean to leave you for always. I couldn’t.
When shall I see you?
Best love
Your friend
Edith
She intended to go to Montegufoni in early April to spend a fortnight with Sachie and Georgia and to check on Sir George who had suffered internal bleeding. That trip was cancelled when Mussolini, trying to match Hitler’s territorial gains in the Sudetenland and Austria, marched his troops into Albania on 7 April. As it turned out, she would never see Sir George again. Edith went instead to London, where she needed to correct proofs against a 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare.
On 18 May, Tchelitchew thanked her for her help at a vernissage in Paris; he was unhappy that the critics took no notice of his work, and he knew who the culprits were: ‘But the Jews are very very against me, and I feel and know it! What an awful race after all.’48 The remark was not just harsh but obtuse. Since Kristallnacht on 9–10 November 1938 most of the world had been aware of the persecution of Jews under Hitler. Some refugee ships had already sailed, notably the St Louis from Hamburg on 13 May; its voyage soon caused a furore when Cuba and then the United States refused to accept its 937 refugees. The ship returned to Europe, some of its passengers finding safety in England, but 532 were trapped on the continent during the war and 254 eventually died in the Holocaust.49
Yeats had died in January so was spared the summer of 1939 when, indeed, the worst were full of passionate intensity. Edith Sitwell, like everyone else in Europe, watched as war came nearer. In mid-August, she received a telegram from Osbert, urging her to get back to England. She left behind books, paintings, manuscripts, and a beloved cat at rue Saint-Dominique, arriving in London on the 18th. Evelyn Wiel hunkered down in Paris and hoped that the trouble would pass. Tchelitchew had been staying at Saint-Jorioz on Lac d’Annecy; luckier than most of the Jewish refugees, he got himself on the SS Champlain to the United States on 29 August,50 where he remained in safety for the duration of the war.
On 27 August, Sitwell wrote Tchelitchew a letter from Renishaw, sending copies of it to Paris, Guermantes, and Saint-Jorioz: ‘I think now nothing but a miracle can save us. If it does break, it may be years before we meet again. But no matter how long the years may be, you will always be in my heart, held warm there, and in my thoughts. I shall write to you every week, unless some accident happens to prevent it, and I beg of you to write to me, when you have time … I am too sad, too wretched, too horror-stricken to write more.’51
17
AND WITH THE APE THOU ART ALONE
Joseph Goebbels was the right opponent for Edith Sitwell. For twenty years she had been climbing into the ring with the likes of Squire, Lewis, Leavis, and Grigson, and she often wound up punching shadows. Through the summer of 1939, Stephen King-Hall, a naval officer who became a successful dramatist, journalist, and politician, produced five newsletters that were at first mailed, then smuggled, into Germany in an attempt to counter the ‘encirclement’ theory that the Nazis were using to persuade the German public of the need for more territory. Goebbels railed against these newsletters in his ‘Antwort an England’ (Völkischer Beobachter, 14 July 1939), and he quoted from Victoria of England about Britain’s colonial interference with other races and nations.
Sitwell was having none of that. She composed a letter, which was vetted by Rab Butler, then Under-Minister for Foreign Affairs, and it appeared in The Times (11 October 1939):
Sir,
Some weeks before the present war broke out Dr. Goebbels, in a diatribe against Britain addressed to Commander King-Hall, was good enough to drag in my name as a witness to the truth of his accusations.
Dr. Goebbels quotes me as having written: ‘Unhappily, side by side with this increasing enlightenment on the part of the governing classes, grew a wish to interfere with all nations possessing a different pigmentation of the skin – purely, of course, for their own good, and because Britain had been appointed to this work by Heaven.’ This quotation is correct; but he omits to say that I was writing of the years between 1833 and 1843.
It is understandable that Dr. Goebbels finds it difficult to believe that a nation can improve, and can become more humane, in 100 years. But it is a fact. All nations have, I am afraid, been guilty of great cruelties and injustices in the past (some of the deeds in the years of which I wrote are indefensible): but I am unable to agree with Dr. Goebbels that this makes it right and advisable that any nation should commit cruelties and injustices in this age.
Dr. Goebbels is shocked, I presume (one can do no more than guess at his meaning owing to his rather turgid and over-emotional style of expression), at the idea that, in the benighted years of which I wrote, the British should have wished to ‘interfere’ with other nations. Let me point out to him that side by side with this ‘interference’ has come a great amelioration of conditions among the people interfered with. Can the German Minister of Propaganda claim that the German ‘interference’ with people of another race, the wretched, stricken Jews, has resulted in any amelioration of their conditions?
It must astonish Dr. Goebbels that when this war was forced upon us, the Indian native rulers, without one exception, made offers of help and of treasure to the King Emperor. It must astonish Dr. Goebbels that the whole of the Empire, and the Dominions, have declared themselves as standing by our side. But this may no doubt be the result of the horrible cruelties and persecutions to which they are subjected by Britain. Just as the rising of the valiant Czecho-Slovak nation against their German ‘protectors’ may be a tribute to one year’s experience of the gentle loving kindness of these.
I am, Sir, yours faithfully,
Edith Sitwell
P.S. This letter will, of course, be represented as part of a new Jewish plot, although I am 100 per cent Aryan; or else as an attempt to encircle Dr. Goebbels and the Beloved Leader.1
In later years, Edith Sitwell would be quick to remind people that this letter would have been her death warrant, had the Germans crossed the Channel, but at the time she enjoyed slapping down Goebbels as another pipsqueak with a bad prose style.
‘It is a bore having no home,’ Sitwell wrote to Tchelitchew.2 At the end of August 1940, she went as Osbert’s guest to Renishaw, but told Tchelitchew that she could not stay there indefinitely nor could she go back to France: ‘Everything is going wrong with all my affairs, but then it is so with everybody.’3 At the end of November, she still thought she would have to rent a room somewhere. In fact, she spent four months with Sachie and Georgia at Weston in 1940, in addition to other shorter visits there, and made some brief trips to London, but otherwise remained at Renishaw for the duration of the war. She continued to regard it as her home until about 1960, when poor health and quarrels made it impossible to stay longer. For generations, the Sitwells had used the house only in the summer, yet it made no sense to remain in London and become, as she had put it for Sir Edmund Gosse twenty years earlier, an ‘Aunt Sally for the Germans’.
At Renishaw, Edith generally had the company of Osbert, his secretary Lorna Andrade, the cantankerous butler John Robins, and his wife Susan, and whichever servants John Robins had not driven away. In August 1940, David Horner joined the RAF but was at first posted near by.4 Through the war years, many of their friends came north to what must have seemed an island of safety and comfort, at least in contrast to London. Still the house was cold, and there was no electricity. Andrade told John Pearson that it was lighted by kerosene-burning ‘Aladdin’s Lamps’, and at night they would all pick up candles in the hall to light their way to bed. The Duke’s Landing and other ghostly parts of the house remained shut off.5 In due course, Osbert provided billets for ten officers at Renishaw Hall and for their batmen in an adjoining cottage.6
Tchelitchew settled in Weston, Connecticut, and he and Sitwell exchanged weekly letters, though they were often delayed and some disappeared in transit. Tchelitchew’s early reports were glum: ‘I am sad all inside me. I have no pleasure of seeing people, talk to them and be forced to listen to their [illegible] of egoism and dullness. I am dull myself. I can hardly do any work.’ Ye
t for the most part through these years he was effusive, encouraging and generous towards her. He even offered an oblique apology for abandoning her after Helen’s death, claiming he had been ill and mad at the time.7 He was soon supplying gossip from the art world, observing that Dalí was borrowing ideas from Buñuel, and, more importantly, from himself: ‘I know that Dalí has stolen plenty of my ideas, but I don’t care. One day I will say it in print, in papers, but not now.’8 He even sent back word of a small triumph for Sitwell: Wyndham Lewis had praised Tchelitchew’s work to both Peter Watson and Edward James, and had asked James whether they had any common friend. James said his great friend was Lewis’s great enemy, Miss Edith Sitwell. ‘Mr. Lewis looked rather confused after this.’9 Sitwell wrote back that one should ‘never underrate one’s enemies’; he should remember that Wyndham Lewis has a ‘really great brain’ and that he was bound to admire Tchelitchew ‘in his secret heart’ – but she was surprised that Lewis, who was not generous, admitted the quality of Pavlik’s work.10
The troubles of the war brought one great compensation – Sitwell was able to work all the time. In the autumn of 1939, she was briefly distracted and embarrassed when it was discovered that Evelyn, in typing up the anthology some months earlier, had left out whole pages.11 The book had to be reset and publication was delayed until the end of January 1940. On 2 October, Sitwell told Tchelitchew that she had an idea for a two-part poem inspired by an odd phrase from Ben Jonson’s Epigram CXXX ‘To Mime’: ‘Out dance the babioun’. She had a sense that her long drought in poetry was ending, ‘But first I must practice my technique like a pianist.’12 On 29 November, she wrote: ‘One must find a mental refuge somewhere, so I am beginning, or trying to begin, to write poetry. It has a completely new winter atmosphere, is very cold and, I think, strange. I am helped, tremendously, by listening, on the gramophone, to a strangely beautiful symphony of Prokofiev’s.’13 At about the same time she was studying what she called discords in the speeches of Lady Macbeth. By the end of December 1939 she had produced two poems, ‘Lullaby’ and the closely linked ‘Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman’; these are among her best poems and among the best poems written in English during the war.
Edith Sitwell Page 31
