Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  While in London, she met Stephen Spender’s new wife Natasha (née Litvin), a pianist. They came to the Sesame Club on a day when Grosvenor Street was full of military officers. Stephen Spender was wearing the blue uniform of the Fire Brigade and had just come off two full days of duty. With the younger members involved in the war effort, the club was left to the elderly, with Edith Sitwell a conspicuous presence. Once the three of them were seated, Sitwell began to giggle and asked what it might be like to cast Macbeth from the old ladies at the other tables. Then she and Stephen Spender launched into an intense discussion of poetry.

  Natasha Spender became one of Edith Sitwell’s most loyal and understanding friends. In her opinion, the image of Edith as a queen, ever ready to slap down impertinence, obscured how ‘her soul was fired by devotion to friends and to unfortunates: her famous solitude was less that of a queen than of an abbess, even, at times, a hermit’. In her sketch of Sitwell (Telegraph, 20 June 2008) she recounts as an example of her kindness a luncheon at the Sesame with the mentally ill David Gascoyne, who was being persecuted by imaginary beings behind his chair. Sitwell asked what was the matter; he explained; and she urged him to ignore them as they were only trying to annoy him. A psychiatrist would hardly see this as a treatment for hallucinations, but her words bought Gascoyne a few minutes of peace and he rejoined the conversation.

  At fifty-four, Edith Sitwell had cast a good deal of bread on the water. At the end of 1941, some of it returned to her. ‘Out of The Blue’ in December, as Osbert put it, Bryher gave Edith, David Horner and himself each a cheque for five hundred pounds.16 From her new money, Edith bought two Ascot hats, and when Georgia showed up in uniform, Osbert told the two women that they looked like ‘Diligence and Dissipation’.17 A little later, Osbert wrote to David: ‘Edith has bought a new fur coat, and then cried, poor darling, because she thought it so awful to be extravagant at this time. I told her she was the only one of the family who had ever let a thing like that worry her.’18

  This was early days for Bryher’s kindness. In the spring of 1942 she gave Edith about three thousand pounds to buy a house at 8 Gay Street in Bath, which Violet Gordon Woodhouse had recommended.19 It had once been owned by Samuel Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale. Sitwell rented it out, believing she would inherit enough money upon Sir George’s death to set up a small household. However, Bath was the wrong city for her work, broadcasting and lecturing, after the war. Bryher helpfully bought the house back from her in 1949 – so that Sitwell kept the original sum.20

  ‘Renishaw is just as you saw it,’ wrote Evelyn to Laura Waugh on 20 June 1942.

  Shabbier outside with the lawns grown long & the hedges ragged so that you might think the house deserted till you come inside. There everything is open; no evacuees or billeted soldiers; no dust sheets except in the ball room. Banks of potted plants & bowls of roses; piles of new & old books & delicious cooking … There is an extremely charming artist called Piper staying here making a series of drawings of the house. Osbert bland & genial; Edith alternating between extremes of venom and compassion. They have done what I most hoped they would do – left me alone for the afternoon.21

  This was probably a good weekend for the English novel. Spending time with John Piper undoubtedly gave Waugh ideas for the character of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, whose métier was the painting of great houses as they awaited demolition. Indeed, Piper was the only architectural painter that Waugh knew, and he later drew the illustrations for the novel but did not submit them to Waugh because he was not satisfied with them.22 That same weekend Waugh handed over to Osbert a short character-sketch of Sir George Sitwell, later included as an appendix to Laughter in the Next Room (the fourth volume of Left Hand, Right Hand). It was based on a single meeting with Sir George at Renishaw in the late 1920s: ‘I had noted with fascination during my stay how his beard would assume new shapes with his change of mood, like the supple felt hat on an impersonator. Sometimes he would appear as King Lear on Dover cliffs, sometimes as Edward Lear on Athos, sometimes as Mr. Pooter at Margate. Tonight he was Robinson Crusoe.’23 That is a great deal to deduce from a single meeting, but Osbert and Edith had treated Waugh to many anecdotes about ‘Ginger’. Waugh often combined the features of several real people to create a fictional character, so there is a possibility that Charles Ryder’s father owes some characteristics to Sir George. An aloof collector of antiquities and a leg-puller, his power of mind is revealed in sly jokes. Most importantly, Ned Ryder sees his son’s debts as an occasion for irony rather than assistance: ‘In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that.’24

  In English literature from 1920 to 1950, Sir George Sitwell is rather like Woody Allen’s Zelig, in that he appears unexpectedly at historic moments. Huxley, Lewis, and Edith herself inserted him into novels – Waugh can probably be added to that list. Since early 1941, Osbert had been working on memoirs in which the centrepiece is a sprawling caricature of his father. The confused remnants of the actual man had appealed to Osbert in 1941 to come and get him out of Italy; according to Edith, he believed that Osbert’s failure to do so was a kind of revenge.25 In fact, despite the mockery and rancour, the Sitwells were anxious that their father should be safe and comfortable. In April 1942, he had crossed the border into Switzerland with his nurse and moved in with distant relatives, Olga and Bernard Woog, at the Villa Fontanelle in Porto Ronco near Locarno. Osbert wrote to David Horner: ‘Edith and I expect him to arrive here any day now in a glider, as a sort of footnote to invasion.’26

  Letters from his hosts suggested Sir George was being pampered. In December, Edith described the situation to Rée Gorer:

  The wife is the daughter of that world-scourge, Inez Chandos-Pole, the husband is a charming, practical, quiet Swiss. The old gentleman simply descended on them like a blight. He inhabits their house; he has changed all their modes of existence. He won’t let them go to bed at night, because he wishes them to sit up with him; he insists on having a hot meal of roast chicken at 4 o’clock in the morning, so that the cook has to sit up too; and when he wants anything expensive and they say that they have no money, he makes a clucking sound, puts his head on one side, tossing it irritably, and says, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help that!’.27

  Inez had died in 1941; however, Edith had known Olga ‘intimately’ for years and trusted her.28 Sir George wanted to marry his German nurse, and, even worse, from Osbert’s point of view, to give her an annuity of five hundred pounds. Bernard Woog managed to get rid of her, so Sir George transferred his love to another nurse.29 Through all of this, Edith’s and Osbert’s sympathy was with the Woogs, but that would change as events unfolded.

  With no sign of the war ending, Edith wanted to put her own affairs in order. In 1932, Helen Rootham had placed most of the contents of the Moscow Road flat in a warehouse under her own name, and Edith could not get at them until her will was proved. The will made in 1931 was simple – Helen’s few assets were left to Evelyn for her lifetime with the remainder to Edith. The estate was handled by the Roothams’ brother Ernest, a seventy-eight-year-old solicitor in Barnstaple; Edith found the effort of making him do anything ‘like poking a dead mule’.30 In June 1942, the boxes reached her: ‘Things belonging to poor Helen, records of her past terrible sadness while she was gradually facing the fact that her engagement was drifting into nothing, that the man had drifted away. Records of the beginning of my career as a poet. All these, and books that I had once liked and that now I am going to give for salvage. – Oh dear! It is very strange to look in the glass afterwards.’31 Through that summer she was haunted by memories of rue Saint-Dominique, and she told Pavlik she could never live there again: ‘It is a horror to me. When I think of all that has happened there.’32

  Evelyn was still out of touch. At the beginning of 1941, Edith had received permission from the Board of Trade to send her ten pounds per month – the maximum permitted for a person of sixty-five under rules for trade with the enemy. In August, a tel
egram about Evelyn signed by a stranger named Herlain reached Coutts Bank: ‘Tell Edith Sitwell send money situation désespérée.’33 Osbert was in the bank when it arrived and, as Edith reports it, he burst into tears. In late October 1942, one of Evelyn’s letters finally got through to England. No money had reached her, and she was supporting herself by knitting. Edith was horrified: ‘Darling, I never would desert you. Never. I cannot conceive why the monthly allowance has not reached you … I think of you unceasingly, and long to see you. I think of you going about your daily life with such noble-mindedness. How well I see the rooms in the flat. I dream, continually, sometimes every night, for weeks on end, that I am back in the flat. And then I wake up in an agony of mind, wondering how you are, and how my darling little angel [the cat], whom you did not mention, is.’ Shortly afterwards, the Foreign Office mistakenly cancelled Sitwell’s permission to send funds, and she was forced to plague the Red Cross for assistance, but when she was allowed to send money again, it, too, went astray.

  Sitwell had not seen her old friend Walter Sickert in a long time when he died in January 1942, but her memories of him were revived by the young Denton Welch’s article ‘A Visit to Sickert at St Peter’s’, in the September number of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon. In his last years, Sickert was standing on the outer ramparts of eccentricity. Welch wrote of his own terror and amusement at the painter’s singing, dancing, and other shenanigans at a tea party where they met. Sitwell wrote to Welch: ‘I cannot tell you how much my brother Osbert, with whom I am staying, and I, enjoyed your alarming experience with Mr. Sickert. We laughed till we cried – though really in some ways it was no laughing matter. But one thing came out very clearly, and that is, that you are a born writer!’34 Welch had wanted to become a painter, but while he was attending Goldsmith’s College School of Art, a car struck him as he rode his bicycle. His spine was fractured and he suffered other terrible injuries that led to his death in 1948 at the age of thirty-three. When he received her letter, Welch wrote in his diary how thrilling it was to have praise from ‘a great genius’,35 but Edith Sitwell went further than praise: she provided a foreword to his autobiographical novel Maiden Voyage, which he dedicated to her.

  In the autumn of 1942, Pavlik managed to get some news of his family on the continent. Even though her husband had recently died of tuberculosis and she was herself very ill, his sister Choura gave shelter to a woman and her Jewish husband, an act Edith described as ‘Wonderful, brave, and really holy’.36 In December, there were many press reports about the persecution of Jews. The Polish government in exile sent a note to the Allied governments, confirming that the Germans had now killed about a third of Poland’s 3,130,000 Jews (The Times, 11 December 1942). Edith wrote: ‘Oh Pavlik, I am sick with horror when I read what is happening to the Polish Jews. One’s heart bursts to read it. What can the souls be of the men who have ordered such things to be? … We shall punish them, of course. But as I say, no earthly punishment could suffice.’37 In March, she spoke of the Jews as ‘a warm-hearted, fundamentally good people! It makes me literally ill to think what is happening to them under this monstrous reign of terror and cruelty.’38

  In the early months of 1943, Osbert was often ill with what was diagnosed as a form of heart disease. Then, around the beginning of April, David Horner’s brother was murdered in London. Horner seldom saw his brother but was nonetheless devastated.39 These concerns naturally took Osbert’s attention away from a poetry reading that he and Edith were organising for the ‘French in Great Britain Fund’, sponsored by the Marchioness of Crewe, so Edith took care of most of the details. Held on 14 April at the Aeolian Hall, it was attended by the Queen and both princesses. After a rehearsal, Edith wrote to Pavlik: ‘Tom Eliot is reading the last section of The Waste Land at our reading … I cannot tell you what an impression it makes on one, hearing that great – that very great – poet read that work of fire and passion and prophecy. I felt choked, and could hardly speak after he had finished. I had not seen him for years. Like myself, he looks much older after the terrible experiences we have been through, but he has still that look of a tiger or puma that he used to have when he was a young man.’40

  The glory of the rehearsal gave way on the night to backstage farce. The performance opened smoothly. D. L. Murray gave an address. The Poet Laureate, John Masefield, paid tribute to the recently deceased Laurence Binyon, reading some of Binyon’s poems as well as some of his own. The other readers, apart from Eliot and Sitwell, were Edmund Blunden, Gordon Bottomley, ‘H.D.’, Wilfrid Gibson, Walter de la Mare, Vita Sackville-West, W. J. Turner, and Arthur Waley.41 Dorothy Wellesley (Lady Gerald Wellesley) was expected to read but when she did not appear on stage, Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson hurried out to track her down. They found her in a stupor. Later, Wellesley telephoned Sackville-West repeatedly, denying that she had been drunk and threatening to commit suicide. For once, Edith saluted Vita unreservedly: ‘Osbert and I will never cease being grateful to you both for averting a frightful scene. (It was pretty bad, as it was … but my goodness, what it might have been – if the platform had been reached! …) It was you and your husband who saved any situation that could be saved; you both were really wonderful in dealing with it.’42

  This visit to London gave Sitwell a chance to have luncheon with Denton Welch, who came to the Sesame on 19 April. It was a tame affair but Welch wrote a hypnotic sketch about it that gave an edge even to the maid’s comment, ‘The tongue is very good today, madam.’ He described Sitwell herself: ‘Black hat, black cloak and black dress to the ground. The draft from the floor swept the folds of the cloak against her, and a powder white hand held the hem at her throat. Two enormous rings glittered on her fingers. The lovely palest reservoir blue stones reached from the first to the second joints. They flashed and flashed again.’ Sitwell urged him to try something ‘violent and vulgar’ next in his writing: ‘I will tell you what your danger is; it is, as it were, your ingrowing toenail. Everything in, in, in.’43 Sitwell gestured as though pulling on a rope. Good advice, but with only five years left to him, Welch hardly had time to broaden his range or turn his gaze outward.

  For years, Sitwell had been collecting aphorisms about poetry, art and music. Now she assembled them, with her own remarks interspersed, in A Poet’s Notebook, published by Macmillan on 30 April 1943 (a different collection with the same title came out in the United States in 1950). It was a characteristic sort of book for her; she preferred pithy utterances to sequential arguments. Heavily represented were Plato, Blake, Wagner, Emerson, Whitman, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Cocteau. There were sections on Chaucer and his contemporaries, on Ben Jonson, and on Christopher Smart and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book ended with two of Sitwell’s new poems, ‘A Mother to her Dead Child’ and ‘Green Song’ – practical demonstrations of how she tried to live up to the values of her masters. In the following year, she put out a similar commonplace book, entitled Planet and Glow-Worm, which was intended to soothe the minds of the sleepless and the anxious. This quirky anthology eventually became a favourite of the young Bruce Chatwin, and when, towards the end of his life, he was trying to assemble his many notebooks on travel through Australia into a single book, he relied, at least to a degree, on Sitwell’s book as a model for organisation. The book that resulted, The Songlines (1987), is generally taken to be his masterpiece.44

  Stephen Spender seemed to be under Sitwell’s influence when in May 1943 he sent her his ‘Sketches for Sonnets’, exalted meditations on time and mortality with the stripped-down imagery that Sitwell favoured. She wrote to him: ‘The identity of the sonnets is grave and splendid, and the poems have the magnificence that a sonnet should have, – and they have a deep life that is one with the sonority. Thank God the small way, “the close and observant small kind of poetry,” will never be your way.’45 In a draft of his review of Street Songs, Spender had said that ‘religious poetry is literal statement’ and that ‘the poems of the mystics are reportage o
f poetically experienced lives’. He was obliquely asking a complicated question. Modern poetry is expected to be ironic, or, in William Empson’s term, ambiguous, but religious poetry affirms a single order or meaning in human experience. How, then, was Sitwell’s most recent poetry properly modern? Spender was probably exaggerating the role of ‘literal statement’ in Sitwell’s poetry, much of which was written on the borders of Surrealism, as she told another new friend, the Oxford don Maurice Bowra: ‘It is a dangerous thing to say, but I can say it to you. Sometimes, when I begin a poem, it is almost like automatic writing. Then I use my mind on it afterwards. It was so here [‘Street Song’]. For that reason, partly, it means several things to me, whilst being deeply experienced.’46 And given Sitwell’s immersion in Symbolist poetry, she counted on suggestions or overtones to complicate any literal statement she might make.

  Sitwell was moving towards a sacramental sense of art, believing that the change rendered by craft upon the raw material of life is analogous to the change of bread and wine in the Eucharist. This was a helpful way for a Christian poet to address the expectation that the language of poetry should hold meanings in tension. Sitwell dedicated to Spender the poem ‘Harvest’ (of which an earlier version had been published as ‘Bread of Angels’). It draws on Aquinas’s ‘Sermon of the Body of Our Lord’ and suggests how the body of a poem becomes joined to its meaning in ‘The universal language of the Bread’.47

  Oddly enough, Sitwell’s poetry was converted to Rome long before she was. At this time, she avoided churches, and while in Renishaw attended the ‘sleepy’ Anglican services only because the tenants expected to see her there.48 When Georgia’s father died in January 1942, Edith’s letter of consolation gave a glimpse of her underlying religious beliefs and her view of the afterlife: ‘I am sure, when people die, they do just feel they want to rest; and they know, which we don’t, until we too come to die, that it is only for a time. They feel that, of that I am as certain as I can be of anything, and I don’t mean that it applies only to people who are religious.’49 However, she felt the churches had missed the point of recent history, as she told Pavlik in 1945: