Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  Despite being a pacifist, Edith had always liked the idea of a man who could fight; it had been part of her attraction to the gallant Siegfried Sassoon and the ‘champion of all weights’ Álvaro de Guevara. After her troubles with Tchelitchew, she was pining for a little chivalry. Above all, she thought Campbell a superb poet and particularly admired his poem ‘To a Pet Cobra’. He became one of her closest friends and eventually her godfather.

  Away from this quirky Camelot, Sitwell worked with Peter Watson through the summer of 1949 to organise an exhibition for Tchelitchew at the Hanover Gallery. He was to arrive on 3 October but finally decided he was too ill to leave Paris. For the first three weeks of September, Sitwell was pinned down by a visit from Evelyn Wiel, but still she sent out a three-line whip among her friends to fill the gallery. She was helped by Sachie, who ‘is in a very sweet and good mood, more sweet than I have seen him for years, because he is happy, writing poetry again’. Five paintings were sold on the first day, and she judged it a success.63

  An exhibition for Tchelitchew was bound to attract attention and support, yet, at the same time, Sitwell took on a harder challenge by promoting the works of someone entirely unknown. Lewis Thompson was born in Fulham in 1909 and as an adolescent fell in love with the mystical writings of the East. In 1932, he went to India and lived for years as a mendicant, carrying all he owned in a box. From 1944 to 1947, he worked as librarian and writer-in-residence at a school in Benares, of which the nominal head was Krishnamurti. Then for two years he was supported by one of Gandhi’s friends. Always in poor health, he suffered sunstroke in June 1949 and was found wandering by the Ganges. He developed a high fever, and one of the last things he did was to write a letter to Edith Sitwell before dying on 24 June 1949. That letter was lost, but the Swiss explorer Ella Maillart, who described herself as Thompson’s best friend, sought Sitwell’s advice about his manuscripts around the beginning of October.64

  Knowing nothing of this poetical holy man, Sitwell agreed, out of politeness, to read the poems that another of Thompson’s friends, the translator Deben Bhattacharya, sent to her in November. She wrote to Sachie: ‘poor Mr Lewis Thompson – (whose poems I was swearing about having to read) – is a magnificent poet! I couldn’t believe my eyes!! It is the first time that has ever happened. He is unequal. But my goodness, good when at his best!’65 She wrote of him to Pavlik: ‘How strange and tragic and fatalistic it is that he should have died of sun-stroke. It has almost a mythological quality. I was sent his photograph – with black staring eyes.’66 She tried to interest Daniel Macmillan (and doubtless others) in publishing a book of Thompson’s work but failed.67 The best she could do was to include some of his work in The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry (1958), including ‘Black Angel’, which opens:

  One day that black and shining angel who

  Haunted my nights in Arles and at Ajmeer,

  Monster of beauty loud with cruel gems,

  I shall encounter in some lane at noon

  Where painted demons have struck dumb the walls.68

  It was presumably in Sitwell’s anthology that Lawrence Durrell found this poem: ‘I have read “The Black Angel” and would give five years of my life to have written it. If Thompson wrote other poems as explosive and majestic as this one, he would rank amongst the greatest spiritual poets in English. And not just of this Godforsaken century, either.’69 A mixture of the visionary and the homoerotic, most of Thompson’s poems remained unpublished for half a century, until Richard Lannoy edited a collection in 2001 and gave it the title Black Sun.

  The American edition of The Canticle of the Rose came out in December and was greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute in the New York Herald Tribune (18 December 1949). Under the headline, ‘Edith Sitwell’s Steady Growth to Great Poetic Art’, Katherine Anne Porter wrote that Sitwell’s work was ‘the true flowering branch springing fresh from the old, unkillable roots of English poetry, with the range, variety, depth, fearlessness, the passion and elegance of great art’. Sitwell wrote to thank Porter and to praise her most famous work set in the influenza outbreak of 1918: ‘There is no living prose writer for whom I have a greater admiration and living feeling … I shall never forget the first time I read ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ – to me one of the greatest of short stories, as it must be to everyone. It was an extraordinary experience, living through that strange hallucination … I had just been nursing a dying friend, going through her deliriums with her, and I know the appalling exactitude of fever that you produced.’70 The two met later in New York, and Porter remained a friend for the rest of Sitwell’s life.

  Edith Sitwell’s political opinions seem to sprawl over the ideological spectrum. Her writing can be seen as symbolic, ethical, mythological, and theological, but it does not openly endorse any particular platform, nor do we know much about how she voted. Jack Lindsay made an effort to read her works as consistent with Marxism, but he probably gave too little weight to Sitwell’s sense that the materialism of the left sought equality by diminishment. The post-war nationalisation of coal mines erased a portion of the Sitwells’ family history, yet Osbert was paid compensation.71 Edith thought the ensuing coal shortage of 1947 a sign of the incompetence of Manny Shinwell, the Minister of Fuel and Power.72 Although Osbert had often spoken ill of Churchill, he was now disgusted that Attlee had decided to develop an English hydrogen bomb,73 an opinion Edith must have shared. In the election of 23 February 1950, Labour’s majority was sharply reduced; they lost power altogether in the election of 1951. As the results were announced in 1950 she kept seven pages of tallies in her notebook (beside a draft of ‘A Song of the Dust’) and concluded: ‘Anyhow they have lost 81 seats and we have gained 65.’ This means that she voted Tory.

  That winter Sitwell suffered from synovitis – a painful condition of the joints, for which she continued to receive massage in Chesterfield. She was plagued by insomnia and a permanent headache, and her oculist considered but did not perform operations on both eyelids to relieve eye-strain. In the meantime, she fussed endlessly over Tchelitchew’s health. For example, she sent him a gift of three hot-water bottles, which sorted oddly with another gift at the same time of a multivolume set of the works of the Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

  In mid-April 1950, Edith Sitwell made her first journey to Montegufoni in a dozen years. The castello had had a remarkable war. From 1942, it became the main storehouse of pictures from the Uffizi and Pitti galleries and from churches and museums in Tuscany. It was chosen because it was remote and because it had doors and windows tall enough for the larger paintings to pass through. Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, Cimabue’s Virgin Enthroned, Giotto’s great Madonna, and Botticelli’s Primavera were all stored there. At one point, the castello also housed two thousand refugees, and at other times had garrisoned soldiers of various armies, including a group of Germans who used a circular Ghirlandaio from the Uffizi, face upwards, as a table-top.74

  Pavlik and Charlie were then in Rome. After repeated invitations, they came on 20 May for two days. In a phrase added later to his journal account of this visit, Charlie wrote: ‘All of Edith’s highly plumaged, witty early poetry was like a mating call – which was never answered.’75 Wearing a black dress and coat and a straw hat, she greeted them in the courtyard. As they drank tea in the garden, Charlie observed how her forehead was still smooth and unlined. Osbert told Charlie about a well in the castle, where a woman had drowned herself. Her husband was lowered by ropes to retrieve the body, but while her corpse was being pulled up it came loose, fell on the husband, and killed him. Charlie asked Osbert not to tell that story to Pavlik as he would fear ghosts.

  Edith, trying to keep things pleasant, told them the story of her difficult trip from England to Italy. Perhaps nervous, she told the story again at dinner, adding that she was known in Pisa for the way she walked up and down wringing her hands. Afterwards, everyone went for a stroll on the terrace, but Edith slipped away. Charlie thought
she was uneasy because of the way the conversation was going, or was perhaps drunk or ill. That night, Pavlik was afraid, presumably of ghosts, but may have fancied Edith might come to his bedroom. Given her personality and their recent troubles, it is hard to imagine her attempting it. Even so, he demanded that Charlie sleep in his bed. On their second day Osbert took them on a tour of the castle, including the chapel with its reliquaries full of the skulls and bones of forgotten saints – a sight that cannot have calmed Pavlik. He insisted that Charlie come to his bed for a second night. The weekend passed without Edith and Pavlik having a row.

  Lincoln Kirstein was one of the very few people to whom Sitwell could talk about Tchelitchew. In a letter of 17 May 1950, he suggested that the painter had always been insane: ‘I have been submerged in letters from Pavlik; read one way, they sound like an insane megalomania, schizophrenia, and persecution obsession. Read another way, they are like all the letters we have always gotten from him.’ He thought that Tchelitchew’s recent, very lonely, interior landscapes were exceptional. ‘He seems to pay for his visions with his peace of mind, and we pay for them indirectly by his madness, but I am inclined to think it is worth it.’76 To James Soby, the author of a book on Tchelitchew’s art, Kirstein expressed the gloomier view that the painter’s ‘megalomania has developed past most people supporting it’ and that he was headed perhaps for a schizophrenic break.77 Hoping to relieve some of the painter’s worries, Kirstein and Sitwell set up a fund for Tchelitchew, canvassing for donations of a thousand dollars annually from Minnie Astor, Edward James, and others. It took a year to arrange and most of the work was done by Kirstein, but by 1951, Tchelitchew was financially secure.78

  When Edith and Osbert returned to England in June 1950, Osbert’s left hand was trembling with a circular motion. A specialist told him that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He was seen by a second specialist in August who offered the more optimistic opinion that it was merely a Parkinsonian condition and that he might be largely unaffected for ten to fifteen years. In fact, he deteriorated quickly and within a few years was helpless. Edith heard of the first diagnosis just before heading to Aldeburgh for the festival recently founded by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. She and William Walton performed Façade on 22 June, and she stayed on to give a lecture (The Times, 24 June 1950). However, she found her appearances very difficult as she was stricken by the news about Osbert.

  Sitwell spent most of July in London with Evelyn Wiel, returning there from Renishaw on 6 September before sailing to the United States on the 13th. Just before boarding the ship, she received a letter from Sachie, reproaching her and Osbert for going without him: ‘I don’t know what I have ever done to let either of you down.’ Edith was irate, writing to Pavlik:

  I have never, until I came to live at Renishaw had anything in my life excepting what I made for myself, and my friendships. I was poor, I lived in a poor cheap flat. I had to look after one old woman after another. My holidays were always at some cheap hotel in the bleak north of France – (or, and that was better, at Levanto). What darling Helen was preparing for me was, that I should have to support, not only her and Evelyn, but also her eldest sister, whom I had seen three times in my life, and who suffered from attacks of homicidal mania. (Twice another sister had woken up in the middle of the night, to find Ethel R. with her hands round her throat, trying to strangle her!) We were all to live in a cathedral city in the north of France, where H could show off to the priests and nuns. I was to write bad prose books and no poetry, in order to support the household, and I was – of course – never to see anyone like myself. That was the life prepared for me, and only stopped by poor H’s mortal illness, and by her finding priests in Spain. S. is not rich; but he has a most beautiful house with wonderful things in it. He and G. have always done everything they wanted, – travelled, had fun. Do you think they need grudge me this?79

  Pavlik’s abuse, Sachie’s moaning, Georgia’s quarrelling, Osbert’s illness, Evelyn’s demands, her own physical pain, tight finances, and a steady intake of wine and gin were taking their toll. She now felt certain that most of the people she loved had either ignored her needs or actively exploited her. Sitwell was coming to believe that life had cheated her – that she had been ‘taken care of’. She described her voyage to the United States that September as if it were a parable of her own survival over the years. Apparently, a hurricane blew open the porthole of her cabin and water poured in. When it was finally closed, a steward of thirty-seven years’ experience remarked, ‘By all the laws of the sea, the whole sea ought to have been in your cabin, and everything in it washed away – including you. I can’t make out why that didn’t happen.’80

  22

  FALLEN MAN DREAMS HE IS FALLING UPWARD

  Lincoln Kirstein could see that Edith Sitwell had star power. While he did not care for her poetry, he thought her a natural performer and wanted her to put on a show with the New York City Ballet, which he and George Balanchine had founded. Dressed as Queen Elizabeth, she would sit on a throne under a canopy and speak ‘dramatic verse in a dramatic frame’. There would be a dance scene called ‘The Great Seal’ involving heraldic beasts, such as the lion and the unicorn. If it went ahead, Sitwell would appear four to seven times a week during the ballet season.1

  It was important for Sitwell to try a more limited performance first. She had been reciting Shakespeare for at least twenty years – for example, at the Shakespeare and Company reading in 1932 – so Kirstein proposed that she do some scenes from Macbeth at the Museum of Modern Art, where she had enjoyed such a success with Façade. The other readers were Glenway Wescott as Macbeth, the actress Gertrude Flynn as a gentlewoman, and Bernard Savage as the doctor. Sitwell had been working on her lines since April, but her rehearsals in New York were interrupted by bronchitis. She then anxiously insisted on six full rehearsals, with lights. The performance on 16 November 1950, for the benefit of the Museum’s Program Fund, pleased a friendly audience but not the critics. Wescott himself thought the visual aspect of the show more impressive than the acting; he wrote in his journal: ‘George Lynes has taken a photograph of Edith Sitwell as Lady Macbeth – wearing a crown of gilt paper (cut in sharpnesses), looking down her famous nose, and frowning, with both her incomparable hands held up before his, all ten fingers pointing – which seems to me to characterize Lady Macbeth better than most of her reading (except the sleepwalking scene).’2

  John Mason Brown wrote in the Saturday Review (2 December 1950): ‘A lecture is one thing, a play another. The two do not mix.’ From his point of view, it was ‘overintellectualized’: ‘That Dr. Edith has an arresting voice, no one can deny. But that she has scant knowledge of how to use it dramatically seems equally incontestable. Reading with an ear for assonance rather than an eye for character, she succeeded chiefly in reducing Lady Macbeth to a lesson in prosody.’ Brown’s review must have stung. Since the days of the Anglo-French Poetry Society, Sitwell had prided herself on her ability to recite, and actors took her opinions seriously. John Gielgud sought her views on the interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays, while Alec Guinness turned to her in April 1951 for advice on how to speak his lines in Hamlet: ‘I do want to be reassured – about pausing at the end of each line. With a fractional pause on every line I find it all so much more insistent and firm.’3 Nonetheless, Sitwell was not a professional actress and her experiment with Macbeth failed. In the end, Kirstein abandoned hope of a larger show.

  In New York, Sitwell found a great friend in the thirty-three-year-old novelist Carson McCullers, whose regard for her was nothing short of worshipful. They met on 31 October at a party given by Tennessee Williams, another writer whom Sitwell liked and admired. After reading two of McCullers’s books, Sitwell wrote on 21 November: ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter stabbed my heart and my conscience, as nothing has done for many years … As for The Member of the Wedding the beauty of it is so great that I am living in the summer of that book.’ Having suffered rheumatic fever when young
, then a series of strokes, McCullers was frail, as well as unstable. Her drinking and emotional breakdowns placed some burden on Sitwell in the years that followed, as on several occasions she showed up muddled at the Sesame Club, but Sitwell seemed not to grudge her involvement in McCullers’s world. The novelist saw Sitwell’s work through the lens of great affection, but her regard for Sitwell’s poetry preceded any acquaintance with her: ‘I know well “The Canticle of the Rose” and as a poet you have no contemporary peer. The amazing thing is the synthesis of youthful lyricism with the maturity of a great intellect. I wish T.S. Eliot had been capable of such development – but this is a churlish thought, because he has given so much.’4 She soon turned to Sitwell’s prose: ‘Why did you not tell me about I Live Under a Black Sun? I read it yesterday and again today … This book has the remorseless and hallucinated power of Dostoyevski (sp?) … the language is that of a great poet.’5

  Sitwell also met the poet Theodore Roethke, who was manic depressive. Kirstein told John Pearson that Roethke was stoned when he came to see Sitwell at the St Regis and began to remove his trousers so they could have sex; Sitwell supposedly told him to stop or she would have to call her brother.6 If this actually happened, Sitwell made no mention of it. Roethke, she said in a letter to Kenneth Clark’s wife Jane, was going to be a very good poet: ‘He came to see me. He is like a very nice, large German bear – unwieldy and kindly.’7 A few months later, he sent Sitwell a manuscript of his poems, with a letter in which he remarked: ‘Our meeting meant a great deal to me. I felt we could have gone on laughing and talking interminably.’8