Edith Sitwell
Page 33
While the war seemed to fill her imagination, Sitwell became involved in an odd literary fracas. For about a year, she and Osbert had been pursuing the journalist Hamilton Fyfe over a review in Reynolds News (18 February 1940) of Edith Sitwell’s Anthology, in which he claimed that the Sitwells’ pursuit of publicity in the 1920s had won them a position beyond their merits: ‘Now oblivion has claimed them, and they are remembered with a kindly, if slightly cynical, smile.’ As for the anthology itself, his main observation was that it was a bit heavy to hold. Most authors would regard a snide and lazy review as an occupational hazard. Osbert and Edith believed that it was time to set an example to malicious reviewers. Their pugnacious solicitor Philip Frere consulted expert counsel and brought back news that the passage was indeed libellous. Sachie was doubtful but was eventually cajoled into joining the action. The newspaper tried to settle for fifty pounds, but the Sitwells held out for five hundred each.
With the trial approaching, Edith spent almost three weeks in London getting ready for her testimony, which was carefully scripted; she prepared written answers defending her own harshest comments as a reviewer. For example, if asked whether her statement that Rupert Brooke had been ‘eclipsed’ did not amount to much the same thing as Fyfe’s comment about ‘oblivion’, she was prepared to say ‘eclipse is not oblivion. It is, of its nature, temporary. And a temporary eclipse frequently follows about five years after the death of an author. Then, in time, he regains his position in the hearts of the public.’46 Under cross-examination, she fended off a question on whether she had once said Alfred Noyes’s poetry was like cheap linoleum by saying she thought cheap linoleum very useful and that she admired Noyes for the fact that his work sold well. The judge interjected, ‘So does cheap linoleum.’ She said that she had not sued Wyndham Lewis because he was an old acquaintance and nobody paid attention to his comments on other people’s work anyway. Osbert was pressed on whether the case was a publicity stunt – a possibility suggested by the Sitwells posing outside the court for a press photograph – but he maintained that they were merely looking for a taxi. They called as witnesses the publisher Daniel Macmillan, the novelist Charles Morgan, and others to testify that the Sitwells were still important writers. The defendants called no witnesses but argued fair comment. On 10 February 1941 the Sitwells won £350 each in damages.47
Stephen Spender thought the Reynolds case came close to censoring reviewers, just as George Bernard Shaw and Sir Hugh Walpole applauded the Sitwells’ actions. For all her rancour and paranoia, Edith Sitwell thought she had no choice but to stand up for her work. She said once to Lorna Andrade: ‘If you want to make yourself a name you must dig and dig and never let up.’48 And in fairness, a woman writer faced the problem of prejudiced or malicious reviewing disproportionately – the idea of suffering it in silence did not appeal to Edith Sitwell.
The Sitwells were not the only authors or artists of their time to rely on legal action or the threat of it. In 1932, J. B. Priestley had threatened Graham Greene and the publisher William Heinemann with a libel suit over a thinly disguised portrait of himself appearing in Stamboul Train. As a result, thirteen thousand copies already printed and bound had to be unstitched and new pages inserted. Greene was successfully sued by Shirley Temple’s managers in 1938 over a review in Night and Day in which he claimed that her little body was being peddled to the pederastic tastes of middle-aged men and the clergy. In 1956, Greene got himself on the other side of a statement of claim when he joined Evelyn Waugh in a successful suit against Rebecca West and the Beaverbrook press over West’s book The Meaning of Treason. The Observer later settled a case with Greene out of court.49 In a year when she lost three-quarters of her income, the Reynolds News case brought Edith Sitwell about as much money as she was used to getting for a book advance, just as the satisfaction of trouncing a critic made up for a good deal of back pain. But it lacked the dignity and usefulness of lashing Goebbels.
And strange new griefs were at hand. On 28 March 1941, Virginia Woolf put a large rock in her pocket and drowned herself in the River Ouse at Rodmell in Sussex. Although her body was not found for three weeks, she was presumed dead. Through her years in Paris, Sitwell had drifted away from Virginia Woolf, but on 4 April she wrote to Leonard Woolf: ‘No words can express our feelings at this dreadful heartrending thing. We are absolutely overcome. All our thoughts are with you. What can you, and Mrs. [Vanessa] Bell, be enduring, with the pain and the grief and the shock … But all my life I shall remember the feeling of light, and of happiness, that she gave one. As a person, as well as in her art. Everything seemed worthwhile, important, and beautiful.’50
The death of Virginia Woolf was a sign that the world Sitwell had once inhabited was disappearing. Another came on 17–18 April, when a parachute landmine carrying a ton of explosives came down in Moscow Road. Pembridge Mansions was destroyed, and twelve people killed.51 Sitwell wrote about a year later: ‘the flat exists no more … Everyone is dead. I am told the horror was unendurable. It seems strange to think of those poor, commonplace people. The people in the flat next mine, the old Jewess [Emily Hirsch?] and the fortune teller on the bottom floor. The Jewess was never found.’52
Once in a while, Sitwell laid aside her resentments and learnt to like a foe. She had written to Edward James in 1939: ‘Any mention of any member of the Ford family gives me severe intestinal disturbances. The son ought never to have been introduced to me, – but he was. As for the mother and the daughter, when I want a sponge, I’ll buy one. In any case, I don’t propose to make sponges part of my social life.’53 Nevertheless, as had once happened with Allen Tanner, Edith Sitwell came, by 1941, to regard Charles Henri Ford as a friend. She admired his most recent book of poems, and, for his part, he promoted Sitwell’s work in New York. Tchelitchew wrote to her: ‘Yes my dear, we going to do everything we can to make your name more and more well known here, because you are a great poet and a great person and I do hope that no bomb will ever destroy the portrait I painted of you, because it is yourself in every sens [sic] but unseen by eyes of saps. You going [sic] to be a legendary person, don’t worry you will be and I know that, I don’t know why I know things like that, but I know.’54 Ford had set up the avant-garde View magazine, but his work on it was delayed by enlistment in the army in 1942; some of Sitwell’s works appeared there from 1943.
It was also a good time for Sitwell’s friendship with Tchelitchew himself. There were occasional eruptions when Edith expressed jealousy over his friends in New York or when letters got lost and he believed she was ignoring him. In spite of this, Tchelitchew made great claims for their friendship: ‘I miss you too very very very much, but strangely to say I feel your presence more than any one. I think because of your thoughts and your work – our thoughts work like wireless all the time.’55 Tchelitchew believed in telepathy and clairvoyance, and when he claimed mental connection with Sitwell, he probably meant it literally – though this does make it difficult to fathom his rage over lost letters. About a year later, Sitwell explained her views on this subject to him: ‘I am not in the least surprised, psychologically, that you often hear people asking you questions. It sounds a strange thing to say, but I think there is a leakage in time. Both you, and Osbert, Sachie and I are, not exactly clairvoyant, but the kind of “sensitives” that make clairvoyants. Osbert and I both dream things, – though they are only minor things, that come true.’56 It is possible that Edith Sitwell (or Helen Rootham) had read not only Steiner on the spiritual possibilities of sleep, but J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927), a popular book that convinced Graham Greene and many others that the sleeping mind may travel through time.57
In the early years of the war, Sitwell suffered frequent nightmares about Helen’s death, the flat in Paris, the dangers faced by Evelyn, and even the privations of the cat she had left behind. In April 1941 she told Tchelitchew: ‘My letters must seem unreal, because I feel as if I were walking in some sad dream, bound hand and foot, so that I can only wa
lk at a very slow pace, and with no sense of direction.’ Since only beauty and truth were, at the moment, beyond the touch of beasts, she took ‘unearthly comfort’ in reading Chaucer.58 On 22 May, she wrote: ‘I have been near death, and I have seen terrible things. I saw what the human body can come to, when I nursed Helen. I have seen wrecked streets, with the houses broken down to the ground like broken teeth, and a few rags of what were once beds, where people lay who now are dead, broken into pieces, like the houses.’59
On 9 June, she wrote again of the ruined houses of Sheffield and added, ‘I never pray now, excepting mutely, but my thoughts are full of anxiety and of hope for you, and of will that all may be better. When I say that I do not pray, I do not mean that I do not believe in God. It is only that I have been too numb.’60 On 18 July, almost a month after the invasion of the Soviet Union, she wrote: ‘When I think of those monsters who have brought this horror upon the world, announcing, as if it was something to be proud of, that nine million men are now engaged in battle, I think heaven protects one by numbing one’s imagination at such a time, or one would never sleep or eat again. But why should one be protected when those nine million men are undergoing this unspeakable ghastly horror. I do not dare to dream.’61
18
AN ABBESS
‘My vinegary spinster aunt’ was how Vita Sackville-West described Amalia Martin.1 Edith Sitwell had known Martin all her life as one of Lady Ida’s more pleasant friends. The bloodlines in the Sackville family are more complicated even than those of the Sitwells. Martin was one of five illegitimate children of the diplomat Lionel Sackville-West (second Baron Sackville) and Josefa Durán, a Spanish dancer known as Pepita. Vita Sackville-West’s Pepita, a book about their family history, came out in 1937. In a family riven by litigation, Martin took offence. She wanted her own story told and asked Edith Sitwell to do it. Sitwell signed a contract for a novel with Gollancz and offered Martin a share of the proceeds. The heart of the book would be a revelation of who had murdered Pepita’s first husband in Granada.2
As early as December 1938, Sitwell saw that the story, however fictionalised, could set off lawsuits, but she went on to write a good deal of it under the working title ‘Spring Torrents’.3 In the summer of 1941, she consulted the solicitor Philip Frere about the risk of libel. His answer was that the book could not be published. Martin was furious, insisting that a contract existed between them for the completion of the book. She wanted Sitwell to consult another lawyer, or, failing that, to hand over the manuscript. Sitwell remained conciliatory as letters and cables multiplied in the autumn but eventually told Martin in December to direct her letters on the subject to Frere.4 Sitwell herself was upset at abandoning the work, and marked on one draft, ‘Retain in Jewel Box. Notes for novel. Very Important.’5
In one of the novel’s plot-lines, Sitwell describes her own life and draws portraits of Sir George and Lady Ida. There is also a description of a boarding house, which was eventually incorporated into Taken Care Of as a scene from her childhood. Notes in her manuscript books identify the owner of the boarding house, Madame Baker, as Evelyn Wiel.6 This supposed recollection of childhood is, in fact, an expertly turned short story based on life with the Roothams in the 1920s and 1930s. Armoured against her sorrows by make-up, Madame Baker is a big woman, full of conceit about a past in which she moved in diplomatic circles and drank champagne from a slipper, but now she bears up to poverty and solitude. Another character in the boarding house is the falsely humble ‘oracle’, who announces he is going to turn his back on the world. Dicky Wilkins in Taken Care Of, he is called ‘Mytton Dicksee’ or ‘Mitty’ in a draft7 – a name that suggests Dimitrije Mitrinovi. He encourages a new generation towards war and annihilation, while he drinks tea. At the end, he is terrified at night by a mouse biting through the wainscot and scampering to its hole.
For the war effort, Sitwell took on a short, morale-boosting book, English Women, with character sketches of notables from Elizabeth Tudor to Virginia Woolf. Part of the beautifully produced ‘Britain in Pictures’ series, edited by W. J. Turner and published by Collins, it appeared in June 1942 and marked the beginning of her research for Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946). She was disappointed with Gollancz’s delays over Look! The Sun, an anthology of poems that she had assembled for children, as well as with the firm’s failure to publicise her works. On the other side, Victor Gollancz cannot have been happy with Sitwell’s failure to produce her second novel. The Canadian Rache Lovat Dickson was courting her for Macmillan, of which he was a director and general editor. He stayed at Renishaw in July 1941 and reached an agreement with Sitwell to publish a volume of her new poems. As she told Pavlik, ‘They are written, purposely, with the utmost simplicity, and are almost devoid of images.’8
Street Songs came out on 20 January 1942. The book opened with ‘Still Falls the Rain’, which had already created a stir when published in the Times Literary Supplement (6 September 1941). The editor, D. L. Murray, had written to David Higham: ‘It is a really great poem: such it must be called.’9 The book closed with the hitherto unpublished ‘An Old Woman’, which now claimed almost as much attention from reviewers. The poem is easily misread as Sitwell presenting herself as a seer – the sort of misreading that led to later claims that her visionary images are ‘unearned’. The old woman is not Sitwell herself although she ‘has seen too much, looked on too many sorrows’. Sitwell imagines a growth, which she herself has not achieved, from grief into benediction. The labouring woman would be no stranger to the kitchen gardens of Sitwell’s poetry in the 1920s. She is also that mythic figure in her work, the bereft mother, ‘nurse of the unreturning’. Sitwell gestures to W. B. Yeats when she writes of the woman’s body as ‘mortal dress’. The poem is a spiritual experiment – Sitwell proposes a hypothetical state of heart in which suffering opens into vision and forgiveness:
… creeds grow old
And change, – man’s heart, that sun,
Outlives all terrors shaking the old night:
The world’s huge fevers burn and shine, turn cold,
Yet the heavenly bodies and young lovers burn and shine,
The golden lovers walk in the holy fields
Where the Abraham-bearded sun, the father of all things,
Is shouting of ripeness, and the whole world of dews and splendours are singing
To the cradles of earth, of men, beasts, harvests, swinging
In the peace of God’s heart. And I, the primeval clay
That has known earth’s grief and harvest’s happiness,
Seeing mankind’s dark seed-time, come to bless,
Forgive and bless all men like the holy light.10
In a TLS review (7 February 1942), Harold Hannyngton Child (who had reviewed Poems New and Old) observed that in this new collection Sitwell placed enormous strains on her technique as she moved suddenly from terrifying images of war to passages of pure beauty about the grief of love, but that her risk-taking paid off in poem after poem. As a critic, he too was engaged in risk-taking, as he now embarked on the sort of claims that a critic may make only once or twice in a lifetime:
Her ‘Old Woman’ absorbs and surpasses Villon’s Heaulmière and Ronsard’s old spinner by candlelight. She is ‘an old woman in the light of the sun’. She has known the whole of life; and she affirms her faith in the ‘holy’ light of the sun. Comfort ye my people – perhaps comfort is not a bad name for this majestic assurance. It is not argument; it offers no proof; it is an act of faith. It lives entirely by the poetry in it. And if we are not carried away by its poetic beauty, this poet, so brilliant, so wilful, so capricious, has here achieved a poem in which manifold strains of thought and feeling are woven in a noble and unassailable simplicity. Bits of it are unmistakably Miss Sitwell’s. The whole shows her poetic art in its true greatness.
The book received many rave reviews, but one of the most interesting responses was unpublished. Marianne Moore wrote to Bryher:
I have been carrying it round
with me since I came and forcing people to listen. I do not know which I like best for I like each one as I read it – they are rich and various, and deep. And act on many levels (that is something I miss in much modern poetry – it seems flat, one-dimensional, a painted scene.) But this is first a beautiful rich design, rich and heavy with gold and embroidery, and one can stay there and just taste the words and follow the design, and then you realize that this design lives and breathes and speaks as a living being might, and you are penetrated with the meaning – as if Yeats’ golden bird of Byzance suddenly actually sang, stood in the middle of his poem and sang.11
At the same time, Sitwell’s earlier work was still holding public attention. For William Walton, as much as for Sitwell, Façade kept evolving. At the Aeolian Hall on 29 May 1942, Walton conducted a twenty-one-piece version, which, in a different order, became the one usually associated with the title.12 In 1977, eight unpublished numbers were brought forward at a concert in honour of Walton’s seventy-fifth birthday, but while reading proofs a few months later Walton dropped three numbers and replaced them with three others, then substantially reworked and reordered the music in what became known as Façade 2.13
At the Aeolian performance of 1942, Constant Lambert recited, and the orchestra consisted of flute (and piccolo), clarinet (and bass clarinet), trumpet, alto saxophone, cello, and percussion.14 Sitwell went to London for the concert and basked in the reviews: ‘I am told it has every virtue of a gay kind, – beauty, wit, brilliance, light-heartedness, technical virtuosity, etc. The people have now discovered that I was not pretending in that work to put forward a new theory of the universe, but was just doing technical feats of an extreme difficulty, making technical experiments, and having fun!’15