Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  LULLABY

  Though the world has slipped and gone,

  Sounds my loud discordant cry

  Like the steel birds’ song on high:

  ‘Still one thing is left – the Bone!’

  Then out danced the Babioun.

  She sat in the hollow of the sea –

  A socket whence the eye’s put out –

  She sang to the child a lullaby

  (The steel birds’ nest was thereabout.)

  Do, do, do, do –

  Thy mother’s hied to the vaster race:

  The Pterodactyl made its nest

  And laid a steel egg in her breast –

  Under the Judas-coloured sun.

  She’ll work no more, nor dance, nor moan,

  And I am come to take her place.

  Do, do.

  There’s nothing left but earth’s low bed –

  (The pterodactyl fouls its nest):

  But steel wings fan thee to thy rest,

  And wingless truth and larvae lie

  And eyeless hope and handless fear –

  All these for thee as toys are spread,

  Do – do –

  Red is the bed of Poland, Spain,

  And thy mother’s breast, who has grown wise

  In that fouled nest. If she could rise,

  Give birth again,

  In wolfish pelt she’d hide thy bones

  To shield thee from the world’s long cold,

  And down on all fours shouldst thou crawl

  For thus from no height canst thou fall –

  Do, do.

  She’d give no hands: there’s naught to hold

  And naught to make: there’s dust to sift,

  But no food for the hands to lift.

  Do, do.

  Heed my ragged lullaby,

  Fear not living, fear not chance,

  All is equal – blindness, sight,

  There is no depth, there is no height:

  Do, do.

  The Judas-coloured sun is gone,

  And with the Ape thou art alone –

  Do, do.14

  Sitwell later said that in this poem one hears ‘the voice of materialism from the heart of despair, singing a lullaby for the dying world’.15 She had written an ironic lullaby in The Sleeping Beauty,16 and the image of sifting dust takes her back to the opening of The English Eccentrics. However, as with many of her war poems, the imagery here has most of its roots in I Live Under a Black Sun, where the grief of a mother stands as a rebuttal to bombs, but here the mother dies and a beast mimes motherhood. The war returns humanity to a state where it has no moral advantages over the ape, and humanity becomes the steel-winged pterodactyl. The lines are short and the rhymes closely spaced to hint at a lullaby, but in fact the rhythms refuse to settle into a soothing pattern. The ambiguously consoling ‘Do – do’ doubles for a ‘discordant cry’ and finally beckons one to nightmare.

  The companion poem, ‘Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman’, dissolves another natural love into a battlefield. Even in late drafts Sitwell indicates that she was writing about the siege of Warsaw,17 but the poem was finally altered to refer to all of Europe:

  Dark angel who art clear and straight

  As cannon shining in the air,

  Your blackness doth invade my mind

  And thunderous as the armoured wind

  That rained on Europe is your hair;

  And so I love you till I die –

  (Unfaithful I, the cannon’s mate):

  Forgive my love such brief span,

  But fickle is the flesh of man,

  And death’s cold puts the passion out.

  I’ll woo you with a serenade –

  The wolfish howls the starving made;

  And lies shall be your canopy

  To shield you from the freezing sky.

  Yet when I clasp you in my arms –

  Who are my sleep, the zero hour

  That clothes instead of flesh, my heart, –

  You in my heaven have no part,

  For you, my mirage broken in flower,

  Can never see what dead men know!

  Then die with me and be my love:

  The grave shall be your shady grove

  And in your pleasaunce rivers flow

  (To ripen this new Paradise)

  From a more universal Flood

  Than Noah knew: but yours is blood.

  Yet still you will imperfect be

  That in my heart like death’s chill grows,

  – A rainbow shining in the night,

  Born of my tears … your lips, the bright

  Summer-old folly of the rose.

  Not many serenades involve wolfish howls, starvation, and cities burning like rainbows – and yet Sitwell thought of these poems as providing ‘mental refuge’. She told Tchelitchew on 1 January 1940, ‘I am still tinkering about with them. They are extremely direct, and have a hard shrieking sound, very discordant in the lullaby.’18 Sitwell was immersed in the poetry of the First World War, but when she writes, however ironically, of death in war as an embrace, she may be thinking more of Walt Whitman, in whose Civil War poems the deaths of soldiers are treated many times as an erotic desolation, as in his ‘Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding).’19 However, Sitwell’s metaphors are more savage than Whitman’s. As well, ‘Lullaby’ and ‘Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman’ are plainly written in response to the prophecies of Yeats and Eliot about the destruction of Europe; she treats those prophecies as fulfilled in the events of 1939.

  In the second half of the Great War, there had been a common belief, however flawed it now appears, that the men in the trenches were betrayed, that the conflict was being prolonged by politicians and profiteers – Sassoon and others raged against the whole enterprise. In 1939, there could be no doubt that Chamberlain’s government wanted peace and that the war was brought on by Hitler. Sitwell applauded, for example, how British planes dropped pamphlets on Germany rather than explosives in the early days of the war, but she could see that it was necessary to fight. As she put it to Tchelitchew on 29 November 1940:

  It is terribly difficult to work here, in the centre, as it were, of the misery and menace. It is terrible for a convinced pacifist like myself. But I do not see what else we could have done. The menace was unceasing, the bullying and lying shameless. The English are an extraordinary people. Nothing could surpass the calm and resolution of the general behaviour, and (with the exception of one paper) there is none of the undignified and blatant yelling of threats and abuse that disfigured the last war. The Germans, on the other hand, are indefatigable in their abuse.20

  Sitwell accepted that for the British this was an honourable war.

  Sitwell made a foray to London in December, and at the end of January she spent another ten days there, but found the city deserted. In January, she read Cecil Beaton’s My Royal Past (1939), a fictitious memoir of Baroness von Bülop; she found it vulgar and effeminate and thought that Beaton would do better if he enlisted: ‘That young man, together with certain others, ought to hang out his chiffons on the Maginot Line.’21 Back at Renishaw, she settled in to a reading of Wagner’s prose works, which she found dull, but she was struck by his comments on the effects of consonants on vowels, and thought that something he said of music in his book on Beethoven, a comment derived from Schopenhauer, was true of all the arts: ‘Music is not an image of phenomena, or more correctly, of the adequate objectivity of the will, but an immediate image of the will itself, and represents accordingly the metaphysics of all that is physical in the world, the thing per se, which lies beyond all appearance.’22 It was a key point for her: whether poetry was obliged to render the details of the physical world or whether it must reach after more elusive realities – a point that would put her at odds with the next two generations, who generally preferred poetry that was ‘closely observed’.

  Sitwell told Tchelitchew that he might find Renishaw a calm place to work:
‘Also, I am more peaceable now, the war having taught me a terrible lesson. I am peaceable and placid.’23 With the Phoney War stretching out, she thought that he might be able to visit. She decided also that she should herself go to Paris to check on Evelyn and to recover some of her possessions.

  Sitwell went first to Weston on 20 April and came down with measles, so she postponed her trip. On 10 May, the Nazis began their Western offensive. Within a matter of days, the French position was desperate. Sitwell wrote on 6 June, immediately after the evacuation of three hundred thousand troops from Dunkirk: ‘The last fortnight has been on such a gigantic scale, that everything in history since the Crucifixion seems dwarfed – only Shakespeare could do justice to it. First, that monstrous betrayal by the King of the Belgians, – that unspeakably disgraced eternally shamed traitor, – then the wonderful heroism of the allied armies, – and their saving by the sea … that description of the ships, the small boats, everyone belonging to the sea going down to save our men, the French, the English.’24 On 14 June, Paris fell. Sitwell remarked afterwards: ‘if I hadn’t had measles, I should have been in Paris now!!! And I should probably have been shot, as I imagine the Gestapo are after me, – I teased Hitler and Goebbels most horribly, in the Times, just after war started.’25

  Sitwell and Tchelitchew had a common anxiety after the fall of France. Sitwell lost touch with Evelyn Wiel, and Tchelitchew with his sister Choura. At the same time, Sir George was stranded in Italy; he was eighty-one and had recently had an operation. Through the Board of Trade, Osbert was able to send him just thirteen pounds per month,26 and with letters routed through Portugal contact became sporadic.

  Edith stayed at Weston Hall until the end of July. She made trips to London, and at one point remarked to David Horner how active cross-dressers were at the Sesame Club. The actress and romantic novelist Naomi Jacob appeared uniformed as a major and became ‘the centre of one Lizzie scene after another. (I wonder why they make such appalling scenes?)’ Whenever Jacob approached her, Sitwell pretended to have lost her voice, and she refused to have anything to do with another lesbian member of the club who was raging against Jacob to the porter.27 Sitwell grew tolerant of Jacob: upon meeting her in the 1950s she would address her as ‘Field-Marshall’, and Jacob, having stood to attention, would ceremoniously bow and kiss her hand.28

  At Weston, things were tamer. Sitwell was knitting for the troops and declared herself ‘the Pull-Over Queen’.29 She received as a visitor Alec Guinness, whose wife Merula was a very distant cousin of the Sitwells through Joan Wake’s family.30 Sitwell had seen him performing in December at a small London theatre with Martita Hunt and decided he was the ‘greatest Hamlet’ she had ever seen.31 At Weston, they read poetry to each other. She thought of writing a play for him, and in the following year he made a private recording for her of ‘Lullaby’ and ‘Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman’. It was, however, a gruelling time for Sachie and Georgia as they sent their younger son, Francis (b.1935), to Georgia’s relatives in Montreal on 25 June. Sachie was now serving, resignedly, as an officer in the Home Guard.32 Tchelitchew begged Edith to come to America and earn her living as a lecturer, but she refused, since regulations forbade women under sixty to leave, and in any event she felt she must remain in England while it was threatened. She thought that the Germans had forgotten what the English were like: ‘I pity them if they do come over. We have got our teeth and jaws well set, and our fists clenched.’33 Henry V was ringing in her ears.

  Sitwell thought the departure of Auden and Isherwood for America at the beginning of the war cowardly, yet she admired Auden’s poetry more and more. She wrote in August about his collection Another Time, which contained ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘September 1, 1939’, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, and ‘Dover’: ‘Auden’s new book has some really fine poetry in it. He has been grossly over-praised, and for all the wrong reasons, by people who know nothing about verse, but in this book he really has produced some beautiful poetry.’34

  Sitwell’s ‘Lullaby’ had appeared in the TLS (16 March 1940) and ‘Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman’ in Life and Letters To-day (April 1940), where they created a sensation. T.S. Eliot published her Poems New and Old in October, and the volume was immediately acclaimed. For example, when Harold Hannyngton Child reviewed her career in the TLS (16 November 1940), he declared that she could not help but create beauty. He found in ‘Romance’ lines ‘positively Tennysonian in their pure beauty of sound’ and in the new poems ‘a sad or a terrible beauty’. Sitwell wrote to Tchelitchew: ‘It is the first time I have been really judged as the kind of poet I, in reality, am.’35

  In the autumn of 1940, the back pain that had afflicted her on and off since childhood became constant. She told Tchelitchew on 27 September: ‘I had very bad curvature as a child, and indeed, spent most of my childhood encased in surgical instruments, or on my back. I am now in almost perpetual pain with my spine and right hip, and can hardly walk.’36 She received daily massage and heat treatments in Chesterfield, and told Tchelitchew on 4 December that after her treatments she could only go to bed and stay there until dinner: ‘I am still very lame indeed, and am still in a good deal of pain, but not in frightful pain. It used to come on in waves of an hour at a time, like toothache when a nerve is exposed!’ In the midst of a February blizzard, she wrote again of sciatica and neuralgia of the spine, ‘these are like a pack of wolves eating me alive’. Among the terrible experiences of that year, the question of Sitwell’s health may seem minor, but it becomes a crucial theme in her story. From 1940 to 1964, Edith Sitwell was almost always in physical pain, sometimes immobilised by it, and for the last few years of her life she was restricted to a wheelchair. A bad temper was made infinitely worse. Her obsession with Grigson, Leavis, and other reviewers would take on mind-filling proportions as she lay, curled and wretched, on her bed. It is not known whether she received strong medications for the pain, but she came to rely on large martinis and white wine for comfort, and was undoubtedly an alcoholic by the mid-1940s.

  Nevertheless, she tried to bear up, as she told Tchelitchew: ‘in the face of the gigantic heroism one sees round one every day, one must not think of oneself at all. I would like, if possible, to be worthy of my noble and heroic race. The English are maddening in many ways, but by God, they are brave!’37 On 7 September 1940, the Germans began their run of fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing London. Sitwell was struck by the steadiness shown by people like her agents, Pearn, Pollinger and Higham, whose office in Covent Garden was hit in one of the early raids yet they were up and running three days later. Robert Herring operated Life and Letters Today from an office just below Higham’s. It was demolished at the same time, so he came as a refugee to Renishaw and continued publishing the magazine from a house in Station Road almost without interruption.38

  Herring’s backer was the historical novelist ‘Bryher’, Winifred Ellerman, who had inherited a shipping fortune. At the end of September, she made a perilous journey from Switzerland to England via Portugal, after which she too came for a brief visit to Renishaw. Although Sitwell had met Bryher on two earlier occasions, and had long been acquainted with her lover the Imagist poet ‘H.D.’ (Hilda Doolittle), this was the beginning of a very important friendship. Bryher became, in effect, Sitwell’s patron and the ‘anonymous donor’ behind many of the gifts to writers and artists that Sitwell arranged. On this visit, she offered to attempt to contact Evelyn Wiel. Sitwell wrote: ‘I can’t even begin to say what I think of your great kindness, and I can’t even begin to thank you.’39

  After the initial battering of London, bombing spread to other ports and industrial cities, including Coventry, devastated on 14 November. Sheffield was an obvious target. On 21 August, Osbert wrote to David Horner: ‘The night before last there was a tremendous raid, though only by one airplane, at 11.15 and at midnight – I thought every window in the house would be blown in. And the rooms shook as though in an earthquake. The bomb fell abou
t 1½ miles away.’40 Eight days later, he wrote that Sheffield had been badly hit and that several bombs had fallen on the Sitwells’ property.41 By early November, the village began to receive refugees.42 On the night of 12 December 1940 came the terrible raid in which the Marples Hotel and many other buildings were destroyed. Other raids followed, and although Renishaw was on the outskirts of Sheffield, Edith Sitwell could hear the explosions and see distant flames.

  As seen in the opening paragraphs of this book, the raids on Sheffield made a deep impression on Sitwell. She ventured into the city, saw the wreckage, the scenes of death, the suffering and gallantry of the survivors. There was nothing she could do but write about it. Robert Herring published a group of her new poems in January 1941, among them ‘Street Song’, with its arresting final phrase ‘the burden of Atlas falling?’43 This poem, which took up again the imagery of the separate nations of rich and poor, was part of a draft composition first titled ‘I Walk in City Ways’ and later ‘The Crucified’. This same piece also contained the early workings of ‘Still Falls the Rain’, which took somewhat longer to complete.44 These poems arose from a sense that she had looked directly at evil. She wrote during the summer of 1941: ‘I used not to believe in hell, but how, now, can one believe that there is not a hell awaiting the ghastly monster who has inaugurated this world-wide ruin?’45