Edith Sitwell
Page 41
Sitwell was back in New York on 2 January for a dinner with Pavlik, who afterwards told Charlie that he had delivered a lecture on the subject of humility.23 On a couple of occasions, Sitwell met with Marianne Moore, laying the groundwork for a pleasant friendship. The Sitwells were Igor Stravinsky’s guests at a concert he conducted at the Town Hall.24 Through Alice Pleydell-Bouverie, Sitwell met Truman Capote; the following August he wrote to Sitwell from Tangier where he was ‘writing a novel with one hand and fanning myself with the other’ and recalled their meeting as ‘fun’. He then asked her to be a referee for his application for a Guggenheim fellowship.25
On 5 January 1950, Charlie Ford brought Jean Cocteau, who was also staying at the St Regis, to have lunch with her. Tchelitchew was there, as was Monroe Wheeler, who told John Pearson that Sitwell did not enjoy sharing public attention with Cocteau while in New York. Cocteau dominated the conversation until it turned to the film of Joan of Arc, then in production. He remarked that the French did not really like Joan of Arc. Sitwell piped up that her ancestors had been responsible for burning her.26
The climax of the tour was a performance of Façade at the Museum of Modern Art on 19 January. The event was organised by Wheeler with the encouragement of Josephine Crane, a trustee of the museum who took a particular interest in the Sitwells. Tchelitchew disliked Crane, a senator’s widow, and it is said that one of Sitwell’s quarrels with Tchelitchew occurred at her apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue.27 Still, Façade was another sell-out. Frederick Prausnitz conducted a six-piece orchestra drawn from the Juilliard School. Edith Sitwell was the main reciter, leaving one poem for David Horner to read. The musicians and reciters remained in the fourth-floor projection room, speaking into microphones. In the auditorium the crowd saw two projected images, switched for the second half of the programme, of hair, bone, and open mouths – these were designed by Esteban Frances, a Spanish artist recommended by Tchelitchew.28 According to Philip Hamburger of the New Yorker, Sitwell appeared at the end of the performance, ‘looking just about the most elegant woman of our time. She was wearing a great, golden something over her shoulders – a perfect complement to that monumental face, which is certainly one of the marvels of the world.’29 Columbia Records followed up the performance with two records released in May. After the concert, one woman told Osbert, ‘I feel so happy. Just like a bird in a cage.’30
For many years a friend and admirer, Jean Cocteau sent these drawings to Sitwell in the summer of 1957. The second paid tribute to her recently published Collected Poems
At the end of January, the Sitwells went to the resort town of Sarasota in south-west Florida, a place recommended by Charlie Ford. They were the guests of John Ringling North, owner of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Their reading took place in the Ringling Mansion, which sought to reproduce the air of a doge’s palace, with marble floors, gilded columns, a high balcony, Venetian glass, acres of velvet and damask, and furniture copied from various periods and styles. Someone was heard to say proudly, ‘Mrs Ringling made that lampshade herself.’31 The Sitwells were given a tour of the circus, and Edith was caught between being gracious and speaking up for her principles. Twenty years earlier, she had given an impassioned speech in support of the Performing and Captive Animals Defence League, in which she compared the treatment of the animals to the practice of public execution in the nineteenth century.32 When she got back to New York, she wrote a long letter of thanks to North, promising to try to return to Sarasota every year, but she also put in a plea for a huge gorilla who was the star of the circus:
I do beg of you to stop an imitation snake being put into Gargantua’s cage. I really beg you to. It is terrible to think of that poor creature being terrified, and you have such kindness to all the animals that they obviously are devoted to you, and I know you would never allow Gargantua to be frightened. Only one gets so used to a thing if one is near it every day, that one sometimes doesn’t realize it. It is dreadful to think of what those moments must mean to him. I felt so sad about the state of gorillas. I think nature punishes them for being born.33
Glenway Wescott organised Edith Sitwell’s election as an honorary associate of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; an obvious choice, she received 116 of a possible 125 votes.34 The other foreigners elected were the artists Pablo Picasso and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and the composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gian Francesco Malipiero. Sitwell and Kuniyoshi were fêted at a dinner party at the Knickerbocker Club on 19 February. Apparently in a panic over an address she had to make there, she suddenly felt inspired at 4.30 a.m. the day before, and was able to write a talk on Blake and Whitman, which opened with the remark that she and her brother had been so well received in America that ‘for the remainder of our lives we shall think of this country as our second home’.35
Tchelitchew watched Sitwell’s triumphs with increasing irritation, and his comments in mid-February reveal a strange mingling of appetites for domination and for sex. He said that Edith was a great poet, but often an unpleasant person and an idiot: ‘She wants a cock in her cunt.’ Evidently he gave some thought to this question, as shortly afterwards he found it necessary to explain to Ford that he was physically disgusted by her heavy body – she had been slim when he met her.36 He told Ford that she was not sufficiently feminine, by which, according to Parker Tyler, he meant she should be more passive. He said on 18 February that she had been ungrateful to him: ‘she has neither intelligence nor heart. I’d like to tell her so and slap her face and have her kneel at my feet and kiss my hand and crawl like a worm.’37
There followed a large farewell dinner at Voisin’s restaurant, attended by Kirstein, Auden, and others. Tchelitchew delivered a public scolding, declaring that whatever she said about his genius, she did not really look at his pictures.
Before leaving New York, she tried to talk with Pavlik about his anger, but succeeded only in provoking him further. She wrote from the Queen Elizabeth on 15 March 1949: ‘This is just to send you my love, and to tell you I shall be, all my life, the devoted and loyal friend I have been to you for over twenty years – twenty years in which your troubles have been my troubles, and your happiness and triumph my happiness and triumph … I would not, for worlds, have done anything to annoy you, that last day. All I tried to do was to put something right between us. Instead of which, by some foolish clumsiness, I made everything askew.’ At the end of the letter, she said she would not disturb him by writing to him.38
In a letter of 24 March, Pavlik observed that she promised always to be his friend, yet would no longer write to him. He told her, ‘you expect more than I can give’, and ‘don’t be surprised to know that people equally laughed at your work here.’ He told her she had ignored his female friends, among them the novelist Mary McCarthy and the harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe. He claimed that her recording of Façade came about because he had put her in touch with an executive of Columbia Records – although it was actually organised by Monroe Wheeler. In a sweeping way, he accused her of putting her interest before his.39
She received the letter on the afternoon of 28 March, and took seven days to draft and redraft her reply, trying to find a dignified tone. She answered his various claims and asked:
Do you really think I do not realise what you and Charlie have done for my work? I do not know how else I am to express my gratitude than in the way I have expressed it, over and over again. Osbert and I know that we owe it entirely to you that we came to America. Do you think we should ever forget that? … Would it really give you so much pleasure if my next book got bad reviews in America? Would it really? Never once, have I put myself before you, or thought of myself first.
Lastly, you are wrong in thinking you have to make our personal relations clear to me. It is quite unnecessary. I have neither the right nor the wish to make any claims upon your time. I have made no claims of any kind at all. I have no wish to intrude upon, or disturb, either you or your great work.
It was quite unnecessary, as well as a littl
e unkind, to tell me that ‘You have no idea what I went through while you were in New York.’
I had indeed!
Well, I have gone away now, to the other side of the world. I still send you my love, although you did not send yours to me.
Edith40
Edith Sitwell had not particularly liked Mary McCarthy when introduced to her, but the younger writer did her a favour. Unprompted, she took Tchelitchew to task for his treatment of Sitwell. His next letter was amicable – or perhaps just less bloody-minded – and he mentioned his conversation with McCarthy. On 22 April, Sitwell wrote, ‘We will most certainly never, after this letter, refer again to what has happened.’ She wanted an end of quarrels and spoke of McCarthy as ‘a woman possessing a real heart and kindness’. In that letter, she praised her new friend the engineer and writer Lancelot Law Whyte, whom she believed had ‘one of the most important minds of any man alive’. She was reading his book, The Unitary Principle in Physics and Biology, and she believed it could be of use to Pavlik’s work: ‘He is wonderful on the subject of the development of form and its relation to mental processes.’41 She was trying to steer the conversation back to the sort of topics she and Pavlik had always had in common.
Why bother? A reasonable person would say she should have nothing more to do with him, but Tchelitchew was Sitwell’s great love and, despite the abuse, she was going to hang on to the relationship. Moreover, she felt an obligation to his genius. Perhaps she also recognised a point that her biographer and readers of this book must affirm: if Tchelitchew was suffering a flare-up of mental illness, he was not entirely responsible for what he said and did. He certainly deserves a new biography himself, and such a book would need to consider this question carefully. Nevertheless, the American journey left Sitwell with wounds that did not heal and marks the beginning of her own psychological decline. She explained to Rosamond Lehmann on 18 June what she had been going through: ‘the days drifted on in a kind of mist, hopelessly. If people dug me out, wrote to me, or telephoned, I would drift towards them. But my own feeling made it appear to me that if they didn’t, it meant they didn’t want to see me. All my confidence in the possibility of gaining affection and friendship had gone. And I didn’t want to inflict my own deadness on other people; they have troubles of their own.’42
Charlie Ford’s father had died recently, so both he and Pavlik needed a change of scene. They decided to go to Paris to see Choura, and to Italy to see the Argentine painter Leonor Fini. Sitwell maintained the polite fiction that Pavlik’s problems were chiefly physical and that a holiday would do him good. Although he suffered from colitis and a gall-bladder condition, he really needed the care of a psychiatrist. According to his letter of 14 May, he was looking to voodoo and witchcraft: ‘I wish to see a very good soothsayer or fortune-teller to tell me what is the matter with me’, and added that he had no love left for anyone.43 By June, he was talking of dying. Edith wrote: ‘Dearest Pavlik don’t – don’t – speak about that longer journey. No. You are wanted too much, and are too dear to everyone.’44
It took an effort for her to go to London on 11 May for rehearsals of Humphrey Searle’s setting of ‘Gold Coast Customs’, with a performance at Broadcasting House the following week. Two reciters were required: Edith Sitwell took the female part and Constant Lambert the male. The music was performed by a full orchestra and a male choir.45 Sitwell thought the work itself ‘sublime’ and described Searle as ‘an odd young man, exceedingly shy, and with an occasional really terrifying twitch. It doesn’t come on all the time, but only sometimes, and when it does I jump violently. He is very nice and courteous, and quite mute. The latter I think a good thing, as he may be left in peace to get on with his work.’46
Anything American could cheer her up. She was editing The American Genius, an anthology published by John Lehmann in February 1951. Captivated by the writing of Robert Lowell, she singled out ‘The Ghost’ from Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) as having ‘a force, a despair, a wretchedness that is really great’.47 That summer she was visited by Alice Pleydell-Bouverie, Minnie Astor, and Minnie’s sister, Betsey Whitney, whose husband Jock became American ambassador to the Court of St James’s. They all urged her to waste no time getting back to the United States. Osbert told Edith that there was every chance of arranging another tour in the autumn of 1950. This was great news, not least because the first tour had brought her a net profit of £1332.48 She asked him to take Sachie and Georgia too, but he refused, saying: ‘How like them, to get at you when I was away!’49 While she understood that they could not go about like ‘a troupe of acrobats’, as she put it for Geoffrey Gorer, she was nevertheless anxious for Sachie at least to make a separate tour of the United States, something he finally did in late 1952.50 However, there were several rows about his being left behind in 1950.
The Canticle of the Rose, a 288-page selection of Sitwell’s poems, came out on 20 September. At sixty-two, she was widely regarded as one of the best poets writing in English. All her life, Sitwell had been touchy about reviews, but private humiliation now sharpened the need for public praise. Good reviews were rarely good enough, and even mild criticisms were devastating. She was annoyed when the Times Literary Supplement (30 September 1949) gave a joint review to her book of poems and Villa’s book of essays, so that her poems got about a third of a page of discussion – an unreasonable complaint since Villa’s book was about her poems. The unsigned review was written by Alan Pryce-Jones, a thoughtful critic of Sitwell’s work, who observed: ‘It is the peculiar strength of Dr. Sitwell to convince [us] that … extreme statements are valid. Absence, loneliness, heartache – the ordinary sources of poetic tears – count less for her than the plight of man.’ He was making the point, pursued elsewhere in the review, that Sitwell, for all her emotional force, is never sentimental. Sitwell commented in her journal: ‘The critic ought not to spoil me.’51
Wanting a warrior on her side, she soon found one. Sitwell had known the hard-drinking South African poet Roy Campbell since about 1920, when she met him in the company of William Walton, but she later came to distrust him as a friend of Wyndham Lewis. Peter Alexander tells us that, in the Spanish Civil War, Campbell toured the Front by car on 1 July 1937 and afterwards claimed to have fought for Franco.52 His sequence The Flowering Rifle (1939) is the best-known English work taking the Nationalist side. In 1946, Faber & Faber published his Talking Bronco, which included satiric poems about ‘MacSpaunday’, a composite of MacNeice, Spender, Auden, and Day Lewis. As his publisher, T. S. Eliot suggested softening aspects of the book but made this revealing remark: ‘Of course I have the additional reason for never expressing an opinion about any modern poetry, that I am a publisher, and therefore not in a position to do so: but even if I wasn’t, I should think twice about it, because if I said exactly what I think about a good deal of it, it would simply be put about that I was jealous and didn’t want any younger men to be successful.’53 Evidently, despite publishing some of their most important works, Eliot’s private view of the 1930s poets was not far off Campbell’s – or Sitwell’s, for that matter. Edith Sitwell was now friends with three of those younger poets; Auden himself still annoyed her, but she behaved pleasantly towards him for tactical reasons. When Talking Bronco came out, she wrote to Natasha Spender that she thought it an ‘outrage’, underlining the word four times.54
In April 1949, Roy Campbell went to a poetry reading where he punched Stephen Spender lightly on the nose. With blood trickling, Spender urged the crowd to be calm: ‘He is a great poet; he is a great poet. We must try to understand.’ Spender had spoken of him repeatedly as a Fascist, although, according to Peter Alexander, Campbell did not have strong political views, just a distaste for leftist humbug and a desire for comradeship.55 That summer, he went on a new campaign against the Auden group, writing ‘Moo, Moo or Ye Olde New Awarenesse’, a review of Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology Poetry of the Present, in which he said that Grigson’s relation to the muses was that ‘of a cuckold at his own key-
hole’. As soon as Sitwell heard that it was being published in Poetry Review, she sent a telegram – ‘very urgent’ – to its editor, her old protégé and Campbell’s sidekick, John Gawsworth (Terence Fytton Armstrong), ordering three dozen copies.56 By virtue of a fist fight in 1946, Campbell and Louis MacNeice had become friends and drinking companions. However, many of Sitwell’s other friends loathed Campbell, among them Rosamond Lehmann who was then in a relationship with C. Day-Lewis. Undeterred, Sitwell invited Roy and Mary Campbell to the Sesame in August. At another party that year, Alexander tells us, ‘he knelt at her feet, kissed her hand, and announced solemnly, “Edith my darling, you are a great lady! I will be your knight and fight your battles for you!”’57
Battles were at hand. Sitwell wrote to Tchelitchew on 23 September:
There has been a fracas. Roy Campbell, having begged Grigson to try hitting him (but Mr. G somehow didn’t feel quite like it) sighted Grigson outside Broadcasting House (where they are both producers) went up to him, took him by the sleeve, called two of the commissionaires as witnesses, led Grigson into the tea-room where the B.B.C. boys have their morning coffee (it was crowded), took off Grigson’s spectacles, put them in his pocket, shook him violently, and then slapped his face over and over again.58
When reprimanded by the head of the BBC, Campbell said he had done it ‘from a chivalrous motive’. While this was the version of the story that Sitwell liked, it is more probable that Campbell only menaced Grigson with his walking stick.59 She denied asking Campbell to fight Grigson, but when reproached by William Plomer, she said, ‘I am sorry that you are not pleased that this man was slapped for insulting me.’60 She was certainly egging Campbell on.61 However, she did have to rein him in over Stephen Spender, prompting him to write back: ‘I am very sorry indeed about having gone too far in my feud with Spender … My acrimony was partly due to being reduced to earn my living by waiting and the fact that my agents tell me that the impossibility of getting my work published in U.S.A. is due to unceasing propaganda against me in all S.S.’s lectures. But I agree that it is unchristian to go on badgering him.’62