Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  It was the suffering of Capetanakis that cemented the bond between Sitwell and Lehmann. Himself an able poet and a friend of George Seferis, Capetanakis was doing propaganda work for the Greek government in exile when he was found to have leukaemia. He died on 9 March 1944 at the age of thirty-two, and Lehmann was crushed. Sitwell wrote to Lehmann at great length about grief – lessons she had learnt after Helen’s Rootham’s death:

  How well I know that feeling that one must deaden the pain somehow, temporarily. I think you are an extremely courageous person – otherwise I would warn you: ‘don’t try to deaden it: for if you do, you will never be the same person again: for if one deadens anguish, some part of one remains numb.’ But I do not think that will be so with you: I do not dread it for you, in the very least. How thankful I am that you were spared that last afternoon: it would only have been an anguishing memory for you. Osbert, who has seen a great many men die, says he believes all people want, at that moment, is, not to be surrounded. No human contact can appear to them real, and it is only an added cruelty.13

  At Lehmann’s request, Sitwell wrote an essay on Demetrios Capetanakis for New Writing and Daylight (Autumn 1944), reprinted in 1947 in Lehmann’s commemorative volume Demetrios Capetanakis: A Greek Poet in England. From 1944, John Lehmann became Sitwell’s main literary adviser (apart from Osbert and Sachie) and one of her most trusted friends. The Sitwell name added lustre to his publications, even if their tastes sometimes differed. On one of her appearances at his office, she asked the secretary, ‘Has Mr Lehmann found some more mousy geniuses for me to approve?’14

  That Sitwell should be friends with Spender, Lehmann, and, soon, Louis MacNeice, indicated a softening in her views – at least towards individual writers – but her beliefs about the relation of politics to poetry were unchanged. She wrote to Pavlik:

  a poet is not made great or otherwise by his politics. Naturally the spirit of a poet could be shown by certain adherences. I mean, a poet who cringed to the Germans would be a mean skunk, and worse than a mean skunk. But it does not make a poet great or otherwise, to be left-wing or right-wing. Yeats was not left-wing. He wasted a lot of time by such politics as he did indulge in. I remember once, in my presence, someone asked Mr. Shaw if Yeats had a great deal of influence over the Irish. ‘Immense’ replied G.B.S. ‘He has only to say a thing should be done, for the Irish to do the exact opposite.’15

  Sitwell’s remarks amplify an earlier comment on her old friend: ‘Yeats? A very great poet, but not always wise otherwise. He could be, and was, deceived in life, but never in poetry. That happens.’16

  There was no lasting improvement in Sitwell’s health. In the autumn a doctor had remarked on her low pulse rate. Back pain continued, and in the spring of 1944 she was receiving daily treatments from a masseur who tried to entertain her with riddles about Donald Duck.17 Her own problems, however, were eclipsed by those of the people around her. She wrote to Lehmann in June:

  My young maid (a village girl from here), who came when she was 16, and left at 21 to go into the WRNS, got married here, three days after Demetrios [Capetanakis] died, to a boy of her own age in the Air Force. They had three weeks leave for their wedding and honeymoon, and a week after they went back to duty, he was posted missing. It is simply frightful to see that poor child, to whom I am devoted, and who is devoted to me. She was given compassionate leave, most of which she spent in my room, not speaking excepting to say from time to time, ‘Oh Miss Edith, Miss Edith.’18

  Sitwell received the news of the D-Day invasion with a mixture of rejoicing and pity, as she told Pavlik: ‘I was going to write to you yesterday; but the tremendous event which is in everybody’s mind and heart, made it impossible to do anything, to settle to anything. Oh, the feeling of pride, and the deep sadness for the young lives that must go. Both are overwhelming. And I feel my eyes filling with tears, at all moments of the day.’19 As the Allies approached Paris in August, Lieutenant David Gilliat, only son of Edith’s favourite cousin Veronica, was killed in action on the day before his twenty-third birthday: ‘She is exactly the kind of mother who may die or go mad.’20 Even though Paris was liberated on 25 August, many more weeks passed before Sitwell could contact Evelyn Wiel. Since 1940, Sitwell’s love of the French had evaporated: ‘I am rejoiced that France is free. But I shall find it extremely difficult ever to speak to a Frenchman again. We have died in hundreds and thousands because of their shameful cowardice … I can pity cowards, but I do not like them when they boast.’21

  Sitwell’s Green Song came out from Macmillan on 15 August 1944. At forty pages, it was a slim volume, but it contained a number of important poems. In ‘Invocation’ and ‘Harvest’ she added depth to the persona of the old labouring woman – now connecting her with a ‘corn goddess’. Throughout the book images of emeralds multiply, partly from her reading of Jacob Boehme and even John Donne’s sermons, but more in an effort to evoke the imaginative world of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: ‘And ice, mast-high, came floating by, / As green as emerald.’ At the heart of the volume is a dream of peace:

  On this great holiday

  Dives and Lazarus are brothers again:

  They seem of gold as they come up from the city

  Casting aside the grave-clothes of their lives

  Where the ragged dust is nobly born as the Sun.

  Now Atlas lays aside his dying world,

  The clerk, the papers in his dusty office …22

  In a period when much of her verse was inspired by the war, it is striking that (arguably) the most impressive single poem in the collection is ‘Heart and Mind’ – a piece devoted to the ‘timeless’ themes of love, Eros and mortality:

  Said the Lion to the Lioness – ‘When you are amber dust, –

  No more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun

  (No liking but all lust) –

  Remember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone,

  The rippling of bright muscles like a sea,

  Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws

  Though we shall mate no more

  Till the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-cold bone are one.’

  Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time –

  ‘The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun

  Is greater than all gold, more powerful

  Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes

  Like all that grows or leaps … so is the heart

  More powerful than all dust. Once I was Hercules

  Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas:

  But the flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind

  Is but a foolish wind.’

  Said the Sun to the Moon – ‘When you are but a lone white crone,

  And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,

  Remember only this of our hopeless love

  That never till Time is done

  Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.’

  With several lines approaching fifteen syllables and one stretching to seventeen, Sitwell was here declaring herself Whitman’s daughter.

  Her engagement with the literary traditions of the United States was deeper than that of any British-born poet of her generation, and the fragility of her posthumous reputation owes partly to her work being difficult to assimilate within a British literary tradition. This poem is a farewell to erotic love, and it doubtless draws, at some level, from her disappointments with Tchelitchew. Yet because she relies on allegorical figures – the lion and lioness, the skeleton, the sun and moon – the poem preserves its secrets. Gordon Bottomley wrote of ‘Heart and Mind’: ‘I have more than once cast back my mind over the poetic achievement of the century, and each time I realize more surely – in my conception – that no other poem so fine has appeared in our country throughout this period.’23

  At the TLS, Edith Sitwell was the property of Harold Hannyngton Child, who wrote yet another adulatory r
eview (2 September 1944): ‘The reader who adventures for himself may find, perhaps, that the spirit of Abt Vogler is not altogether a Victorian affectation.’ In the reference to ‘Abt Vogler’, Robert Browning’s poem about organ music, Child was saying that in Sitwell’s poetry he could hear the voice of God. This was fortunate for him, as he died the following year.24

  While most reviews were full of praise, a few were negative, including one by Julian Symons, a young poet (now remembered as a crime writer) and friend of Wyndham Lewis, who gave her a savaging in Our Time. She wrote to Pavlik: ‘There is a sort of tug-of-war going on here. The principal poets and men of letters saying I am now where Yeats was as an old man, – the dregs of the literary population insulting me for all they are worth. I have no heart, I know nothing of life, I am a damned aristo, etc. The damned aristo, like the damned aristo to whom she is writing, knows more about life and has a stronger vision of it than any of which they could conceive.’25

  More flattering than the best review, the Spenders asked Edith Sitwell to be a godmother to the child they were expecting – their first, Matthew, born in March 1945: ‘I shall love the little creature, with warmth and tenderness. It will be most wonderful to see it grow in mind and spirit and body. I shall feel it a great responsibility of love, on my side, never to fail the child, and to help bring it to its own vision of the greatness of life, to help open its eyes and let it see for itself.’ Employing the phrase she would later apply to Virginia Woolf, she asked: ‘would you like me to knit for the baby? I may tell you that I am the Knitting Queen … (“a beautiful little knitter,” I am told by experts. Why “little”? I think it is an expression of approbation.)’26

  Paradoxically, Edith Sitwell could be distressed by the threat of an ‘impertinent’ review or terrified by a bank manager, but in the face of real danger she was unflappable. She described for Pavlik a reading she and her brothers gave at the Churchill Club in London on 25 October 1944, in the days of the V-1 rockets:

  There were a great many officers of the various services. Suddenly, the air-raid warning went. I had just stood up to read my poem about the Raids, ‘Still Falls the Rain’. I waited till the noise of the warning had stopped, and then began the poem. No sooner had I begun the poem, than the whistle went. That means ‘Imminent Danger’ – that the doodle-bug is coming down!!!! I continued to read, with the doodle-bug flying immediately over our heads, very low over the roof. I hope and think I showed no sign of fright. The thing was over our heads, immediately over, the whole time, until I came to the last three lines. Then it went over, and some other poor miserable wretches got it. Sir Kenneth Clark was in the audience. One is supposed to fall on one’s face when the whistle goes, but I remained standing and reading, and the audience with great courage remained in their seats.

  Lady Spender recalled that the buzz-bomb cut out right overhead – a sign that they would be hit. When praised for her courage, Edith said that no one saw her knees knocking under her long skirt (Telegraph, 20 June 2008). Of course, Sitwell was not always reckless during raids. On Christmas Eve, seven V-1s flew over Renishaw, landing near enough to blow open the back door, while she sat, very sensibly, under the kitchen table.27

  In October 1944, Sitwell received the first collected edition in England of Four Quartets. She wrote to Eliot in October 1944: ‘I thought I knew each of the Four Quartets as well as it would be possible for anyone excepting yourself to know them. I have often read them together. But seeing them together in a book is a very great experience. At this time when horror has taken the place of awe, – I feel awe return to me, with this work.’28 Like Sitwell (though he suffered less criticism for it), Eliot had become an intensely visionary and theological poet. She was certain that, of all her contemporaries, he was the one who could enlarge her technique and deepen her vision, so her reading of his works was more or less constant.

  It appears that Eliot came to the Sesame on 24 October and that he then helped mend some fences. His close friend, the editor and critic John Hayward, with whom he shared a flat in Chelsea from the following year, had once had a pleasant acquaintance with Edith Sitwell. However, in 1935 he had written what she called a ‘cheap and unworthy’ article on Aspects of Modern Poetry for an American newspaper (presumably he had not reckoned on her ‘Argus-eyed press cuttings agency’29), so she had broken with him.30 In November 1944, Hayward wrote a conciliatory letter, which Eliot had probably encouraged, and Sitwell was delighted to see him again.31 Muscular dystrophy kept the acerbic Hayward in a wheelchair, and, like Sitwell, he remained ‘a little outside life’. Within a few years, she was closer to him than she was to Eliot, and when the friendship between the two men splintered over Eliot’s marriage to Valerie Fletcher in 1957, she unquestioningly took Hayward’s side.

  At last, a letter from Evelyn Wiel dated 12 November 1944 reached Renishaw on 15 December. It was Sitwell’s first contact with her in more than two years, and her letter contained, or implied, a reproach. Sitwell wrote: ‘it just made me feel like crying. If you ever talk again, as you talked in this letter, about money, I do not know what I shall do. I simply can’t bear it.’ She told Evelyn that fifty pounds had already been sent, that her allowance would be paid as soon as the bank could arrange it, and that she hoped to be allowed to send sixteen pounds per month. Then she described her unceasing efforts to send money since the fall of Paris four years earlier, and volunteered to show her the letters and documents. She begged Evelyn to come and visit England so that she could meet her new friends, especially John Lehmann, the Spenders, ‘Bryher’ and ‘H.D.’.32

  Among those new friends was one female poet, who, like Sitwell, had written some of the outstanding poetry of the Second World War. Sitwell was rather defensive of her position as England’s leading woman poet, and found it easier to honour Americans, especially Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and ‘H.D.’, but there was more to it than just defending turf. She did not believe that women poets in Britain had lived up to the challenges of modernism and that instead they had tended to weep like minor Victorians. She put it to Maurice Bowra: ‘any woman learning to write, if she is going to be any good at all, would, until she had made a technique for herself (and one has to forge it for oneself, there is no help to be got) write in as hard and glittering a manner as possible, and with as strange images as possible (strange, but believed in). Anything to avoid that ghastly wallowing.’33 One of the first Imagists, Hilda Doolittle did write in a hard and glittering manner. Sitwell believed that her three war sequences – poems that intertwined images of the bombing with Egyptian archaeology, feminised versions of Christianity and other faiths, together with the teachings of Sigmund Freud – were the work of a master. When one of the sequences, Tribute to the Angels, was published in April 1945, Sitwell declared: ‘I say you are a lucky woman, because you did have your hand guided. It really is the flowering of the rood … Yours is the supreme apple tree, the flowering apple … I am walking entirely in a spell. And that perhaps is the ultimate thing to be said for any poem.’34

  It had been a long time since Sitwell had heard anything from Graham Greene, but she followed his career. In January 1945, he asked her to contribute a poem to a publication of Eyre & Spottiswoode, the publishing firm where he was now a director. She wrote to him on 22 January:

  By an odd coincidence, I was, at the moment, trying to overcome my natural shyness to write to you. I had just been re-reading ‘The Power and the Glory’ and also ‘Brighton Rock’, and wanted to say that, leaving everything else aside (if one could) the fact they are very great novels, you bring home to one, more than anyone excepting the greatest of priests could do, and as much as he could do, the horror, the very smell of sin, and the wonder and the hope of redemption … I have so often wanted to write to you, and am very glad this opportunity has arisen, though my letter to you doesn’t in the least express what I feel about your great novels.35

  Flying bombs or not, the end of the war was in sight, and when Sitwell went to London at t
he end of December 1944, she received many visitors, among them Herbert Read, who, she told Pavlik, was once a great friend, but he had drifted away owing to his first wife’s attitude, and there had been a breach: ‘But I have always liked him, and was glad when he came to see me.’ After two weeks, she returned to Renishaw with a plan to get back something of the life she had known at Pembridge Mansions: ‘if the war ever ends, I am going to be one of the London hostesses!! But people will have to earn their entry, because if they are not interesting, they won’t be allowed in.’ Osbert thought that Edith’s ‘lame dogs’ would spoil her salon, but she intended to have ‘special bore days’ when they could cancel each other out.36

  Sitwell’s threat never again to speak to a Frenchman proved hollow when the composer Francis Poulenc visited her in London and again in March at Renishaw. He and the singer Pierre Bernac came over from Sheffield where they had a concert. A friend of one of the neo-romantic painters, Christian Bérard, Poulenc bore news of Tchelitchew’s triumphs in the United States. The Sitwells discovered that their visitors had no idea what had happened in England during the war, so Osbert took Poulenc and Bernac on a tour of bomb-sites in Sheffield, which, as Edith observed, ‘gave them something to think about’.37

  In most of what the Sitwells wrote about Renishaw, the reader would seldom be aware that it was on the outskirts of a great industrial city. Sachie called it ‘the house of tragic memories’ – a place of beauty, solitude, and despair. Edith’s letters during the war certainly change that impression. In the preceding four years, she and Osbert had spent almost as much time there as all the Sitwells taken together since the death of their grandfather eighty years earlier. It was a shift in perspective; they discovered day by day how their house of ghosts was welded to the world of the living. Edith had lived in slums most of her adult life, so it did not take much for her to become impassioned about the people of Sheffield and their courage under the bombardment.