Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  Pavlik was on his way to New York. Edith described her worries about him to Evelyn Wiel, who wrote back: ‘What a fool Pavlik is! & what a dog in the manger. He says he is not in love with you, but he expects you to behave as a little lap-dog, to be taken up or put down as the mood moves him.’9 He arrived in New York, apparently on 24 November. Edith was unable to greet him properly as she had a meeting with Columbia Records that day. This made him unhappy. On 28 November, she and Osbert set out on a three-month lecture and reading tour, which meant she could not attend Tchelitchew’s exhibition, opening on 1 January 1951. He brooded on her absence and was unmoved by her explanation that the itinerary had been contractually agreed long before the exhibition was arranged. Best wishes would not do.

  Edith Sitwell inaugurated the year’s reading series at the 92nd Street YMHA Poetry Center, run by John Malcolm Brinnin, now best known as Dylan Thomas’s friend. Her reading was a success and she was immediately invited back. With David Horner heading separately to Chicago, Edith and Osbert went by train to sell-out events in Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago, and Kansas City. From 10 to 17 December they were in Texas, going first to Austin, then to Houston, where they met the tragically named patron of the arts Ima Hogg in her mansion on Lazy Lane. After San Antonio, they took a two-week break in Mexico City, where Edith picked up amoebic dysentery and spent most of Christmas ‘writhing’.10 On 4 January 1951, they reached El Paso and, two days later, California where she suffered more bronchitis and coughed through her readings. However, she told John Lehmann that she liked Hollywood: ‘Lots of film stars, including Harpo Marx, came. And during my reading of the Macbeth sleep-walking scene, I was just announcing that Hell is murky, when a poor gentleman in the audience uttered the most piercing shrieks and was carried out by four men, foaming at the mouth. As one of the spectators said to me, “You ought to be awfully pleased. It was one of the most flattering things I have ever seen.”’ If only that had been the reaction at the Museum of Modern Art!

  The Sitwells saw Aldous Huxley for whom Edith’s affection was undimmed. She endured forty-five minutes of the conversation of Mary Pickford who ‘discoursed to me of her role as Little Lord Fauntleroy, and said she always regarded herself as a Spiritual Beacon’. Ethel Barrymore was ‘delightful’, but Osbert blamed Edith’s bronchitis on the actress’s heavy breathing. The waiters were casual, laughing loudly and joining in the Sitwells’ conversation during meals, so Edith judged they must have been smoking marijuana.11

  On 11 February, they arrived in New Orleans, and went on for a stay of ten days with the Ringlings in Sarasota, where she was back with her friends the gorillas. One named Vicki kissed her hand: ‘It has made me very vain, for I can’t believe many people can boast of this. The gorilla fondled my hand (going over each finger in turn) and then kissed the palm over and over again. She then flung her arms round my neck and pressed her cheek against mine.’12 They spent five days at West Palm Beach and returned to New York on 2 March. Apart from readings of her own work, Edith gave recitations from Shakespeare or other Elizabethan poets at most of the stops, and when she returned to New York she made recordings of Shakespeare for Columbia Records. The last important event was a benefit reading in New York on 10 March for the poet Kenneth Patchen; Sitwell had been in correspondence with him and his wife for about six months. He had had back surgery and was unable to afford, among other things, cortisone treatments for his arthritis.13 In a programme probably organised by his friend and publisher James Laughlin, the Sitwells joined forces with W. H. Auden, e. e. cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and William Carlos Williams (New York Times, 28 February 1951).

  Sitwell had not heard from Tchelitchew in some time. On 18 March, two days before sailing to England on the Queen Elizabeth, she suggested that perhaps a letter from him had been lost. A month later she was back at Renishaw and could see that he was ignoring her letters.14 Many months would go by before she heard from him again. Tchelitchew would pop in and out Sitwell’s life in future, reviving old claims of affection, but she could hardly trust him. While she continued to honour his art, she must have known that he was not the man she had imagined him.

  Not surprisingly, Sitwell’s poetry at this time focuses often on a sense of human diminishment. Her work on Shakespeare seems to have planted in her mind ‘The Great Chain of Being’, at least as the form of a question to be asked of modern life. Her ‘Gardeners and Astronomers’, published that summer in the TLS, yearns for greatness in human beings. Old men, like Yeats’s in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, pose the questions:

  Then why are we less than the astronomers?

  Than Hipparchus, who saw a comet that foretold

  The birth of Mithridates and began

  To form his catalogue of stars that are no more

  Than the long-leaved planets in our garden-shed.

  And men of emeralds walking through the night

  Of early Chinese annals, Emperor Hwan-Té

  Whose pleasure-dome was an observatory, Chien-Ké

  Who shook a branch and all the stars together glittered bright:

  Now are they but the dust of lilies on our garden-bed.

  And why are we less than these?

  Does not each dark root hold a world of gold?

  And was not Aristophanes,

  Who gave the world green laughter, son of the garden-goddess?

  The problem, she believes, lies in a material conception of humanity. She describes next a flat, geometrical world in which human beings are differentiated by dimension or colour, not by essence or by inwardness. Science mistakes the shadow of the human being for the reality, and the age gives power to that shadow:

  Some dream that all are equal,

  As in the gardener’s world of growth, the plant and planet,

  King and beggar;

  And Fallen Man dreams he is falling upward. And the eyeless

  Horizontal Man, the Black Man, who in the Day’s blazing diamond-mine, follows the footsteps

  Of Vertical Man, is ever cast by him

  Across all growth, all stone – he, great as Man’s ambition,

  And like to Man’s ambition, with no body

  To act ambition – he, the sole horizon,

  Epitome of our age, now rules the world.

  The myth of material progress, Sitwell believes, begins in abstraction and ends in illusion. She contrasts all that with a more fertile darkness and with the natural processes of an orange tree like Marvell’s:15

  And in the gardens the airs sing of growth:

  The orange-tree still sighs,

  ‘I am the Dark that changed to water and to air,

  The water and the air that changed to gold –

  The gold that turned into a plant. From the cool wave of the air grows a smooth

  Stem, and from this the gold, cold orange-tree.

  And happy as the Sun, the gardeners

  See all miasmas from the human filth but as the dung

  In which to sow great flowers,

  Tall moons and mornings, seeds, and sires, and suns.

  In a period when her imagery tended to repeat itself in distracting ways, ‘Gardeners and Astronomers’ managed to strike a new note, and it may be the finest poem she wrote in the 1950s.

  *

  Over the years, Sitwell had never been comfortable with W. H. Auden, though she claimed otherwise. The visits to the United States were changing that – she saw a good deal of him and he treated her pleasantly. On 17 May he came to Renishaw for the night, where, as Sitwell told Natasha Spender, he was ‘great fun, and told us about a novelist living in South America, who has been writing a novel for the last 20 years from which the letter E is excluded. We thought it would limit the work if it was literary criticism, as practically the only poets who could be mentioned would be Wyatt, Wordsworth, and Dylan.’16

  Maurice Bowra was now vice-chancellor of Oxford University, and he arranged for Sitwell and Arthur Waley to be among those granted honorary doctorates at the Encaenia of 20 June 195
1. She thanked Bowra ‘for the two days which have been the most wonderful days of my life (which has had many days of wonder, but of a different and remote wonder)’.17 When John Gielgud later received the same honour, Sitwell wrote: ‘Fools are made knights and dames – and anyhow, who would want to walk through doors in Heaven ahead of William Shakespeare? – Fools are made doctors by other fools in other universities, but no fool has ever been given an Hon. D. Litt. by Oxford.’18

  After receiving her degree Sitwell went to the Sesame Club. Just as some other poets founded journals or publishing imprints to advance their art, Sitwell intended her salon at the Sesame to bring writers, musicians, and artists together to inspire each other by conversation. Given the collapse of her private world, Sitwell looked more and more to these gatherings as a substitute for intimacy. Her trips to the United States gave her more money than she was used to, and she poured it into entertaining. As she told Gore Vidal, whom she had met through Alice Pleydell-Bouverie, ‘I have no money, you know. It all goes for lunch here.’19 She often held luncheons for up to twenty guests and tea parties for a hundred.20 She ran to infinitely greater expense than she had done at Moscow Road, where crowds were smaller and the fare was sticky buns. Also, she found herself with more pests, among them Alice Hunt, a wealthy American who wanted to marry Osbert. In Sitwell’s letters, she becomes ‘la chasseresse’ – the huntress. Waley’s companion, Beryl de Zoete, an expert on ethnic dances, was another regular. Although she liked Beryl, Sitwell made fun of the seventy-two-year-old’s tireless pursuit of young men.

  How to deal with bores became a perennial concern. David Higham’s younger colleague, Bruce Hunter, recalls a story told by Higham’s wife Nell: ‘They lived in Keats Grove in Hampstead where Edith came to tea one day. Later, her car, returning, pulled into the drive and their small son, Matthew, dashed out to see who it was, returning to announce, “Dame Edith, there’s a man here who says you have to leave now.” Nell was greatly embarrassed, “You mustn’t say that, Matthew.” But Edith laughed and said, “Matthew, I must engage you for one of my parties, to get rid of gluebottoms.”’21

  However, Sitwell lost the company of some friends far too soon. Less than a month after the publication of the definitive score of Façade: An Entertainment, Constant Lambert died on 21 August at the age of forty-six, of pneumonia and diabetes.22 Lambert was a good friend of the Sitwells, and Edith trusted him more than anyone else to perform Façade. The tenor Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten’s companion and collaborator, tried his hand at recitation when Façade was put on in Liverpool at the beginning of August 1951; she thought his performance a ‘triumph’,23 and afterwards Pears took Lambert’s place as her favourite reciter of the poems.

  Sitwell remained gloomy over Tchelitchew’s continued silence, and it affected her work. While struggling with an encyclopedia article on poetry, she wrote to David Horner on 7 October: ‘I am having hell with my essay, and have never felt less like writing anything. My poetry seems to have deserted me entirely.’24 She began to resent Tchelitchew’s having given her letters to Yale University. In November, Geoffrey Gorer urged her not to post an angry letter: ‘let sleeping Pavlik lie … If you really want to place restrictions on your letters write to the Librarian at Yale & and send him a copy – but it is no use arguing with a Russian about treachery … Pavlik is very Russian: when he says “You (E.S.) are not interested in my work” he means “I am not interested in your work” – just like Vishinsky in the U.N.’25 She did write a letter to Tchelitchew on 16 November, defending her conduct through the long years of their friendship, but it went unanswered.

  She joined Osbert and David in Italy at the end of November. Most of her time was spent in Montegufoni, but in January 1952 she stayed at Taormina in Sicily, and in February at Amalfi. Her sojourn in Italy lasted until 5 April – much longer than expected, partly because, on Christmas Eve, they heard that Susan Robins had inoperable cancer. She had been employed by the Sitwells for thirty-five years, and, despite rows, they valued her friendship. They decided to stay away from Renishaw so that her husband could nurse her in peace. She died on 21 March.

  While at Amalfi at the beginning of February, Sitwell received a letter from Zosia Kochanski, one of her friends in the United States. The widow of the violinist Paul Kochanski, she had been a friend of Sitwell’s cousin Elsie Swinton before the First World War, but it is not certain whether Sitwell had met her at that time. Kochanski later came into Tchelitchew’s circle in New York. In 1951, she was urging Tchelitchew to be reconciled with Sitwell. Edith wrote on 4 February: ‘I am deeply touched that you should have spoken to Pavlik again. Perhaps he will write to me again some day – but it will be too late … I never think of him now, as it is bad for the soul to think of such conduct.’ It seems, rather, that she could think of little else.

  Sitwell believed that Tchelitchew had been poisoned against her by the painter Leonor Fini, who, by a fluke, was also in Amalfi: ‘I was able to avoid the disgust of having her introduced to me, but unfortunately her presence in the hotel where only two other people were staying, did bring all Pavlik’s conduct back to me. She is a horrible looking woman – looks as horrible as she is. I was going to say that she looks like an epitome of the Seven Sins. But that would be paying her a compliment – imputing to her a certain greatness. There is no greatness. She is just an open slum.’26

  At Montegufoni, the Sitwells had a pleasant visit from E. M. Forster on 21 March. She was also receiving gossip from the other side of the Atlantic, which she passed on to Jack Lindsay:

  I hear our dearest Dylan has been painting New York (literally) red. The centre of his activities being the Literary Salon of Mrs. Murray Crane, – the watchwords of the Salon being Decorum, Bonne Tenue, and the milder and more restrained forms of Evening Dress. At one of the interminable evenings of Culture to which one is doomed there, Dylan suddenly sprang at Caitlin, and (according to my informant) ‘kicked, punched, and bloodily beat’ her. Mrs. Crane shrieked and fainted, – being revived with difficulty. There is then a gap in the narrative. I think Dylan was sent home, but do not know what happened to Caitlin. However Dylan soon reappeared, and demanded the money for his taxi. My informant wrote, gloomily: ‘I don’t suppose he will be asked again.’!!27

  Edith Sitwell had heard almost nothing from Siegfried Sassoon in about ten years. His marriage had ended in 1944, and he lived in near-seclusion in Heytesbury. In April 1952, he sent Sitwell a copy of Emblems of Experience, a pamphlet of poems, along with a diffident letter. Sitwell wrote back: ‘But what do you mean by this phrase in your letter about “reviving” my “former liking” for your poems? How could I possibly ever cease to admire and have the strongest feeling for a poetry that has, in reality, the “blood and fire” that poor Robert Nichols was always talking about in his phoney way, and that he, poor soul, never achieved. These new poems have all that same life.’ Sitwell and Sassoon had a strange, durable friendship that survived rows and silences. She asked: ‘Why do we never see you now? I can’t say I blame you for keeping away from the literary world, which is sheer hell, with all those thousands of geniuses. But we don’t belong to it.’ She invited Sassoon and his son George to lunch, but he refused on the grounds that he was now living a very solitary existence. Despite her public persona, Sitwell had an (accurate) sense of herself as ‘a little outside life’. She could understand Sassoon’s estrangement from things and wrote on 28 April: ‘Like you, I have never really got on with the universe.’28

  The highlight of the summer was her recitation of Façade on 8 July at the Festival Hall, in a programme sponsored by the Society for Twentieth Century Music, of which William Walton was president. George Weldon conducted, and the musicians were drawn from the London Symphony Orchestra. The audience filled the seats and boxes, and many people stood in the aisle, chiefly to hear Edith Sitwell recite (The Times, 9 September 1952).

  Humphrey Searle’s setting of ‘The Shadow of Cain’ was performed on 16 November. Edith Sitwell and Dy
lan Thomas recited, while Searle conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, and Gordon Watson played the piano. As the Times reviewer observed, the music was not meant to obtrude on the words, but to underline the form of the poem, and to illuminate its meaning and images. To this end it relied on ‘shattering noise, dead silence, and instrumental monotone or held chords’ (The Times, 17 November 1952). Sitwell admired Searle’s music intensely, but this concert had a distressing aftermath.

  Searle and his wife Gillen had contacted many of Sitwell’s friends to act as guarantors for the concert, which, in the event, lost £430, so they asked the guarantors to pay up – apparently something close to ten pounds each.29 Sitwell was horrified that her friends were being imposed on in this way, and she felt betrayed, indeed swindled, by the Searles, writing a cheque herself to cover the whole amount. After a discussion with Philip Frere, Humphrey Searle came away ‘worried and perplexed’: ‘Why did you not write to us? And why do you wish to undertake the entire responsibility yourself? The guarantors have cooperated most enthusiastically, and some have offered more than they promised in the first place.’ He added that guarantees are normal for concerts.30 However, Sitwell was not won over by this, nor by Gillen’s postscript to one of her husband’s letters: ‘A big hug and kiss for the New Year for Edith from Gillen. NOT TO WORRY!’31 At least one of the guarantors, Geoffrey Gorer, refused her money. He believed that Searle and Gordon Watson did well out of the concert, and that the guarantors knew what they were doing when they signed up.32 Sitwell decided she would have nothing more to do with the Searles, ‘after their monstrous conduct’.33

  Sitwell was mishandling her finances, so the loss associated with the concert caused her more trouble than it should have. That year, despite substantial income from British and American royalties, she declared a net loss of £1053, much of it owing to transportation costs and hotel bills. It is not clear whether that figure includes her hundred-pound annuity and the returns on about ten thousand pounds cautiously invested in companies such as the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Bryher was helping her out with a covenant that paid her annually another £275.34 Nevertheless, her overdraft was barely manageable; by 1955, it exceeded five thousand pounds secured against an equal value of Defence Bonds.35 Edith was evidently paying rent to Osbert for the time she spent in his properties, and she was sending a direct payment of two hundred pounds per annum to Evelyn, while trying unsuccessfully to induce Ernest Rootham to match this.36 Evelyn complained of being ‘hard up’,37 but when she came to the Sesame she contributed to a more serious problem: Edith was operating a free bar and dining room for her friends, most of whom had no idea that she was not a wealthy woman.