Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  On the other hand, the ‘poetic’ Renishaw continued to impress itself upon Sitwell. She still referred to it only half jokingly as ‘Wuthering Heights’, and she saw the Derbyshire sky as a tableau of mysteries:

  we are having what is known as a Sheffield Blight. This is just as individual and strange as a London fog, and I have never seen it anywhere else. The sky is suddenly filled with lurid, Judgment-Day clouds, the day turns quite dark, then the actual clouds are cleared away, and the whole air suddenly becomes of a strange lurid threatening clear brown. There was one day this winter when that happened and a great tree outside my window, covered with frost, was illumined by an unseen ray. The tree looked as if it were made of huge diamonds. There was no light elsewhere – all was brown and yet lurid and strange like a poem by Dante.38

  Sheffield is surrounded by hills, so the strange effect, which could cause sudden darkness in the afternoon, was probably caused by smoke trapped under clouds, especially as wartime industries burned great quantities of the sulphurous local coal. The shaft of light may have come from the massive ironworks near by.39

  Nevertheless, after four years at Renishaw, Edith was anxious to get to London as often as she could. In April, she held a large party at the Sesame, attended by both T. S. Eliot and Herbert Read. She went to the first night of The Duchess of Malfi with John Gielgud as Duke Ferdinand: ‘He was utterly and supremely magnificent – what fire! What passion! What beauty of voice.’ Her time in London, however, was ‘darkened’ by revelations about the concentration camps. Tom Driberg, she learnt, had gone as a Member of Parliament to Buchenwald and was given a piece of tattooed skin that was to have been made into a lampshade. She suggested to Tchelitchew that the Nazis’ ability to look on such sufferings without pity, even with pleasure, was bound up with some sexual vice.40 In her next letter, she wrote: ‘I do think the Germans had among themselves an infectious madness. Think of the dancing madness, the religious mania of the middle ages – and how it spread like a plague.’41 Sitwell was referring to frenzies such as occurred in Strasbourg in 1518, where about four hundred people danced, hopped and leapt into the air for days or even weeks, until many of them dropped dead.42

  After VE Day, she asked, ‘Is it possible that this devilment and hell is at an end?’ She noted with sadness that the war in the Pacific continued and that her nephew Reresby, now eighteen, was about to go into the Guards as a private. Nonetheless, there was something wonderful about the costers (street vendors) of the East End of London, who, as Osbert told her, had turned out in their ‘pearlies’ (pearl-button finery) to salute the King at Buckingham Palace. She told Pavlik: ‘Those men and the women are the real London people. The war for them has been nightly and daily bombing, in narrow streets, daily and nightly risk of death and appalling mutilation and the loss of all they possess. These they bore unflinchingly, and this has been their day, as well as the day of the Armies and Navies and Air Forces. What an unconquerable spirit.’43

  That summer Sachie was a burden to Edith; easily depressed about money, he was positively pining for the Stiftungs. He also told Edith several times that he could not face reviewers and that he might never write poetry again. At a glance, this seems emotional blackmail – a way of drawing Edith to his side in quarrels with Osbert over money. Yet Sachie was in genuine turmoil. Edith was kind but unwavering: ‘just look at your poor sister: has anyone ever been more torn to pieces? But I am going strong … I know what we are. And I’m damned if I am going to watch you throwing yourself away.’ Soon, Sachie found a solution he could live with: he began to write poetry again but left it for the most part unpublished. When Edith died in 1964, he decided out of duty to her memory to publish his verse. By that time, reaction against the Sitwells had set in, and, unable to find a major publisher willing to take on his poems, he had no choice but to circulate them privately in pamphlets and chap-books. Astonishingly, no major selection of his later poetry appeared until 1982, when he was eighty-five. This was the poet of whom T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918: ‘We have attributed more to Mr. Sitwell than to any poet of his generation.’44

  On 10 September 1945, Edith and Osbert Sitwell were sitting in a train carriage on their way to a reading in Brighton. An article in The Times captured Osbert’s attention and he passed it to Edith. It contained the observations, published the day before in the New York Times, of William Laurence, a journalist who watched the bombing of Nagasaki from an observation plane. He described the flames rising at fearful speed: ‘It was no longer smoke or dust or even a cloud of fire, it was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes. At one stage of its evolution, covering millions of years in terms of seconds, the entity assumed the form of a giant square totem pole, which at its base was about three miles long, tapering off to a mile at the top. Its bottom was brown, its center was amber, its top, white. But it was a living totem pole, carved with many grotesque masks grimacing at the earth.’

  Like most of the world, Edith Sitwell was still trying to understand what had happened on 6 and 9 August: ‘We were sitting – ordinary human beings – doing our ordinary tasks when perhaps the most gigantic event since the Crucifixion took place.’ She believed that to harness the power of the sun for war was blasphemy. ‘But if it would end war, then even that horror would be in the end beneficent. How can one tell? How is one’s puny mind to seize the implications?’ She was contemptuous of the claim that atomic energy could create a world of leisure: ‘It will only mean a non-stop hideous noise of crooning from the wireless, fresh vulgarities from the cinema, cruder and weaker and worse books. Above all, it will mean non-stop revolutions. For revolutions in many cases have sprung not only from discontent with poverty, misery and injustice, but from sheer boredom. And the People are going to be bored.’45 She believed that the end of meaningful work (as opposed to drudgery) would be a spiritual calamity. It is on a point like this that Sitwell, the ‘convinced pacifist’ who thought Lenin right to speak of the separate nations of rich and poor, shows herself in some respects a Tory. What she feared in the materialism of the left was an equality of diminishment: ‘How strange is the point of view that makes people believe Democracy should flatten people down, instead of pulling people up. That was not the point of view of Whitman, the most noble and inspired of all Democrats.’46 And, in a theme that is usually associated with R. S. Thomas, she believed that that other materialism, science (especially atomic science), had the power to grind away at human identity, leaving a civilisation of ‘grubs’.47

  Sitwell’s belief that the bomb was a blasphemy against the light derives from the Gospel of John and from her recent reading of John Donne’s Sermon CXVII on Christ as light. That same sermon (mingled with passages of Coleridge and Boehme, and some lingering notions from Mitrinovi) seems to have given her the idea for ‘A Song of the Cold’. Donne wrote: ‘To end all, we have no warmth in ourselves; it is true, but Christ came even in winter; we have no light in ourselves; it is true, but he came even in the night.’48 Sitwell’s poem is about homelessness, and so reaches back to ‘Gold Coast Customs’ and I Live Under a Black Sun:

  Here in the fashionable quarters of the city

  Cold as the universal blackness of Hell’s day

  The two opposing brotherhoods are swept

  Down the black marble pavements, Lethe’s river.

  First come the worlds of Misery, the small and tall Rag-Castles,

  Shut off from every other. These have no name,

  Nor friend to utter it … these of the extinct faces

  Are a lost civilisation, and have no possession

  But the night and day, those centuries of cold.

  Even their tears are changed now to the old

  Eternal nights of ice round the loveless head

  Of these who are lone and sexless as the Dead.49

  First published by Lehmann in Penguin New Writing, ‘A Song of the Cold’ was the title-piece of a large selection of Sitwell’s work published by Macmillan on 27
November 1945. Containing just a few poems from Façade and The Sleeping Beauty, the volume reflected Sitwell’s desire to be valued for her most recent work. Generally, the critics approved; for example, Basil Taylor wrote in the TLS (26 January 1946): ‘In the poems written during the war years has come the major poetry of which she has always seemed capable. Her technique has matured, until she is now in command of all those intricacies of language with which she formerly experimented. The result is a music, not so immediately exciting, perhaps, but in fact infinitely more subtle and flexible.’

  Sitwell had deliberately not sent a copy of her new book to the Listener because of earlier negative reviews; nonetheless, a review was published, dwelling on several faults in her poetry before offering an extraordinary assessment: ‘But after all, one must admit that only one other woman [Sappho] has written poems of such technical variety and imaginative depth.’ She then heard on the grapevine that, in Oxford, C. S. Lewis, whom she had never met, was also comparing her work to Sappho’s – as had Capetanakis and Bowra before him.50 The comparison to a poet dead for 2500 years suggests that even the most sympathetic critics did not know what to make of the fact that a woman was arguably the outstanding English-born poet of her day. Sitwell lapped it up. She did not have a classical education, so had read Sappho in translation before the First World War, but her sense of that poet would always be refracted through a passage of Swinburne’s Anactoria, which influenced much of her later work, particularly ‘The Shadow of Cain’:

  on each high hill

  Clear air and wind, and under in clamorous vales

  Fierce noises of the fiery nightingales,

  Buds burning in the sudden spring like fire,

  The wan washed sand and the waves’ vain desire,

  Sails seen like blown white flowers at sea, and words

  That bring tears swiftest, and long notes of birds

  Violently singing till the whole world sings –

  I Sappho shall be one with all these things …51

  This particular passage was very much on her mind in the last months of 1945.

  The horrors of the peace almost equalled those of war, and Sitwell was looking for terms in which to describe them. She followed the trial of Josef Kramer, the man who operated the gas chambers at Auschwitz and had been made commandant of Bergen-Belsen when the as yet unknown Anne Frank died there in March 1945. British forces, entering the camp in April, found thirteen thousand corpses on the ground, of which one in ten had been partly cannibalised. Mass burials had been going on for days, so the thirteen thousand represented only a fraction of the deaths. The living existed in a state of misery beyond imagining. Kramer’s picture appeared in The Times on 21 April, but his cruelties became most widely known after he went on trial in September at Lüneburg with forty-four other men and women who served as guards and administrators. He and ten others were hanged on 13 December 1945.52

  Sitwell’s first approach to these events came in the uncompleted ‘A Song of the Time’, which in her manuscript book is marked ‘Josef Kramer Monster of Belsen’. Here she returned to ‘Gold Coast Customs’ for imagery of the cannibal mart, which then opens into an apocalyptic vision derived from photographs from the camps:

  But see, see how like Christ the sun comes again,

  Over the Babel of the bought and sold,

  Over the cannibal mart

  To Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau … Even the agony of gold

  Is silent seeing them … But He who walked the wave now walks once more

  On the Sea of Blood – to the devastated shore

  Where the parti-coloured garments of Christ, the bodies of men

  Are torn and divided … With their blood, their stripes, for dye.

  See how those darkened tatters lie

  Together, as if in love.53

  Sitwell returned to this passage and made it the climax of ‘The Shadow of Cain’, completed around May 1946. By then, she had reshaped it, added weight to the individual lines, and made its reference to the camps (and the atomic bomb) something for readers to judge for themselves:

  … And the fires of your Hell shall not be quenched by the rain

  From those torn and parti-coloured garments of Christ, those rags

  That once were Men. Each wound, each stripe,

  Cries out more loudly than the voice of Cain –

  Saying ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Think! When the last clamour of the Bought and Sold

  The agony of Gold

  Is hushed … When the last Judas-kiss

  Has died upon the cheek of the Starved Man Christ, those ashes that were men

  Will rise again

  To be our Fires upon the Judgment Day!

  And yet – who dreamed that Christ has died in vain?

  He walks again on the Seas of Blood, He comes in the terrible Rain.54

  A passage of this sort brings the problem of Sitwell’s achievement sharply into focus. Many of the best poets of her time agreed that she had an astounding technical skill. She was never more deft, line by line, than in ‘The Shadow of Cain’. For example, in the passage above, the fifth line has twenty syllables and it should sag in the middle, but Sitwell pivots on the word ‘Think!’ and inserts three internal rhymes – so the line holds. Something like it occurs three lines down in the phrase ‘Starved Man Christ’ where three stresses secure the centre of a seventeen-syllable line. The lulling effects of the long lines are immediately offset by short lines.

  Nowadays, the default opinion of Sitwell’s later work (read or, more often, unread) is that she is guilty of fatal overreach. Yet in her lifetime, readers who grappled with the work often came to a very different opinion. Sir Kenneth Clark included ‘The Shadow of Cain’ among the fifteen to twenty poems of hers that, he claimed, stand among the century’s finest,55 just as Allen Tate undoubtedly had it in mind when he called her ‘one of the great poets of the twentieth century’ (New York Times, 10 December 1964).

  The question is whether she would have been a better poet if she had attempted less. Her own view was that modesty and small horizons were death for a woman poet. She told Stephen Spender in March 1946: ‘a woman’s problem in writing poetry is different to a man’s. That is why I have been such a hell of a time learning to get out my poetry. There was no one to point the way. I had to learn everything – learn, amongst other things, not to be timid. And that was one of the most difficult things of all. And I think that if I started getting the thing into very strict limits it might bear the marks of a return to timidity.’56

  Sitwell never attempted more in a poem than she did in ‘The Shadow of Cain’, and it occupied her, on and off, for almost nine months. She believed quite literally that man’s relation to nature had been changed by the bomb in a ‘world-reversing event’57 and that history must now be re-narrated. In a new matricide, humanity had ripped open the womb of nature, or, as she put it in a passage echoing William Laurence’s account of the bomb at Nagasaki:

  We did not heed the Cloud in the Heavens shaped like the hand

  Of Man … But there came a roar as if the Sun and Earth had come together –

  The Sun descending and the Earth ascending

  To take its place above … the Primal Matter

  Was broken, the womb from which all life began.

  Then to the murdered Sun a totem pole of dust arose in memory of Man.58

  It is impossible in this book to trace all the interlaced allusions in this poem, but the central narrative can be summarised briefly. It opens with a description of the world’s emergence out of nothing, from Lorenz Oken’s ‘zero’, a world that oscillates between great heat and great cold. The Biblical Fall is associated with the ice ages, when life is torn between hot-blooded and cold-blooded creatures, possessed of ‘opposing famines’, as reflected later in the poem in the pairings of Cain and Abel, Lazarus and Dives. Time in the poem is mythic or, in Laurence’s phrase, ‘covering millions of years in terms of seconds’; thus, the animal nature
of earliest times looks towards August 1945:

  And now the Earth lies flat beneath the shade of an iron wing.

  And of what does the Pterodactyl sing –

  Of what red buds in what tremendous spring?59

  The red buds take us back to the passage from Swinburne’s Anactoria quoted above. Sitwell describes a deluge with effects like the bomb, and it sweeps away the comfortable but heedless city of Cain. The oceans of the world are left as a hollow place where Lazarus appears. He represents, among other things, ‘Life’s lepers’, those born with physical and mental deformity and those with a predisposition to crime. Sitwell echoes Paracelsus on how gold may cure leprosy – ‘A quintessence of the disease for remedy’.60 But then a newly sprung wheat-ear, also gold, threatens Dives with his fate: ‘“The same as Adam, the same as Cain, the same as Sodom, the same as Judas.”’ And, as we have seen, the poem ends with a vision of Christ coming in vengeance, coming ‘in the terrible Rain’.61

  In a strange contrast to the largeness of her poetry, Sitwell now dreaded a return to confinement in her private life. Throughout 1945, she had been putting off a reunion with Evelyn Wiel, fearing the request that she come and live in rue Saint-Dominique again. When John Lehmann went to Paris in August 1945, she asked him to check on Evelyn and explained some of the situation to him:

  having had to leave home owing to my mother’s conduct and habits, I had great charges of honour and gratitude, and so have had, in the past, and still have, to pay out a part of my income. But I have the house in Bath, (a present) and I have an allowance, and I can earn money. And I never, never mention the charges I have spoken of, because it is so terribly painful to the helpless, generous and noble-minded person concerned, – and was to the one who is now dead. I should have been lost if it had not been for them … Evelyn Wiel is one of the most wonderful women I know. (I lived in the flat before the war, and she looked after me like a mother. She is the sister of my dear Helen Rootham, who brought me up, and who is now dead.) … She has no brain in particular, but a heart of gold, and one of the most lovely natures I have ever known.62