Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  By the end of 1952, however, she had found a new source of income. On her last visit to the United States, between bouts of bronchitis and dysentery, she had been writing sections of dialogue for a film of Fanfare for Elizabeth. In a long, confidential negotiation, David Higham secured a contract for her to write the screenplay for Columbia Studios. She would be paid five thousand dollars – equivalent to a little under £1800 – which was to include her transportation and living costs in California. If the studio decided to go ahead with the film, she would get another twenty-five thousand dollars,38 the kind of payday to which, for example, Graham Greene was accustomed.

  Of course, a journey to the United States was simpler for Sitwell than it was for Graham Greene, who had tried to execute a piece of mischief against the American government. He revealed in a Time magazine cover story (29 October 1951) that he had been a member of the Communist Party for six weeks while a student at Oxford. This put him, as a religious and literary celebrity, on the wrong side of the McCarran Act, intended to keep Communists and other subversives out of the United States. In early 1952 he was denied the usual twelve-month visa and given instead a three-month one. In the United States he spoke to various newspapers about the danger of McCarthyism.39 At the American consulate in Florence on 14 October, Edith Sitwell made the standard declaration: ‘I, Edith Louisa Sitwell, born at Scarborough, England, on September 7, 1887, hereby declare under oath that I am not and have never been a member of or affiliated with a Communist, Fascist, Nazi, or other totalitarian party or organization in any country, or any section, subsidiary, branch, affiliate, or subdivision of any such party or organization.’40 Unlike Greene or Waugh, she actually liked Americans, and, having missed out on an Oxbridge education, had no memberships either to hide or to reveal.

  The Sitwells reached New York on 26 November after a voyage in which Osbert reduced an attendant to exhaustion by repeatedly falling asleep with his head pressed against a bell-button.41 They stayed as usual at the St Regis. Evelyn Waugh’s laudatory profile of Osbert appeared in the New York Times four days after their arrival. Edith gave a reading of her poetry on 18 December, and shortly afterwards they made the train journey to Los Angeles, where she was dazzled by midwinter greenery: ‘On our way from the station, we drove between long lines of gigantic palms in the wide boulevards … Great golden stars of dew were falling from the tall mimosa trees, the oleander, the giant tree-fern and the other tropical vegetation. (Although the month was January, the heat was almost tropical.)’ After a week at the Hotel Bel-Air, Columbia Studios set her up in an apartment at Sunset Towers – an enclave of stars, starlets, gangsters, and millionaires on Sunset Boulevard.

  In Hollywood she worked under the eye of George Cukor, a prolific director best known for A Star is Born (1954) and My Fair Lady (1964). Osbert thought that Groucho Marx had modelled his movements on Cukor, ‘placing one foot on the ground, when sitting, in such a way that he can spring to his feet and escape at a moment’s notice’. Cukor had great hopes of landing Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to play the leads in Fanfare for Elizabeth. He set Sitwell to collaborate with the Hungarian Walter Reisch, a veteran screenwriter who had worked with Cukor on other films including Gaslight (1944). His sense of humour ran to funny voices: ‘That is the scene where you have those Cardinalguys threaten the King with eternal damnation, and you have the King say, “That’s O.K. by me, boys! I am the King of England, and you can tell your boss the Pope to hell with his damnation.”’42 Though he remained friendly, Sitwell’s and Reisch’s collaboration was vexed: she wanted to preserve the book’s rich language and atmospheric detail, while he wanted to reduce the work to its ‘girders’. Sitwell also believed he was vulgarising the script.

  Hollywood provided Edith Sitwell with a very satisfying enemy. The gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was, as Sitwell put it, syndicated ‘in every village “Mortician’s Do-It-Yourself Home Gazette”’. Hopper had no idea what she was taking on when she wrote: ‘Before leaving London, [Sitwell] said, “I love horror,” then posed for a picture to prove it’ (Los Angeles Times, 20 December 1952). She later wrote of how Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia Pictures, approached Sitwell at a party: ‘She was gracious, and said “Who are you?” “I’m the man who sends your checks each week,” replied Harry. “Oh,” said Miss Sitwell, “goodnight.” Cohn fled’ (Los Angeles Times, 18 February 1953). Sitwell described this last episode as fiction, and asked for a retraction. When none came, she later wrote: ‘I should hate to see her disgraced, I, here and now, withdraw her statement on her behalf.’ That winter, Los Angeles suffered an outbreak of rabies: ‘I was told on good authority that this was due to the fact that Miss Hedda Hopper had pursued the dogs and succeeded in biting them – but I doubt this. After all, they run very fast.’43

  By 21 February 1953, Osbert had moved on to Palm Beach. Edith spent some time with ‘dear Aldous and Maria Huxley – two of my oldest and greatest friends’. They took her to see Forest Lawn Cemetery, the inspiration for Waugh’s novel The Loved One, and also arranged a meeting for Sitwell with the astronomer Edwin Hubble. During the car ride Aldous Huxley kept up a long grumble about Coleridge and Wordsworth:

  Really, Edith, that any man reputed to be sane should have written, quite deliberately,

  ‘I need not say, Louisa dear,

  How glad we are to have you here,

  A lovely convalescent …’

  The lines were from Coleridge’s ‘To a Young Lady On her Recovering from a Fever’.44

  Edwin Hubble, who came up with the theory of an expanding universe, had worked for many years at Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar observatories; he would die just a few months later. He showed Sitwell slides of galaxies many light years away. Sitwell remarked, ‘How terrifying!’ He answered, ‘Only when you are not used to them. When you are used to them, they are comforting. For then you know that there is nothing to worry about – nothing at all!’45

  In her visits to New York, Sitwell had become attached to a group of servants at the St Regis Hotel: Rose Haughton and Mary Rohan, and two waiters named Max and Charlie.46 Sitwell actually sent money to the Irish Rohan to help bury her husband in 1949.47 However, she spent most of her days in the world of artists and writers and their patrons. That changed, to a degree, in Hollywood, of all places, where she came to know a group of black people:

  Once, feeling sad, I felt a dark hand placed on my arm, and a gentle voice asked ‘What is the matter, Madam Sitwell – don’t you believe in God?’ Some talked with me of their ideals, and of their feeling that all is hopeless because their skins are black. I asked ‘Do you really think that God is pink and white as if He has just come from Miss Elizabeth Arden’s or Madame Helena Rubinstein’s salons? When you get to Heaven, perhaps you may find God is – a coloured man?48

  The hand she referred to was probably that of her maid Velma Leroy, with whom she developed a friendship. Given her age and generation, Sitwell was bound to see her in terms of certain stereotypes, but her affection was sincere. She wrote that Leroy had

  a face like a large yellow hothouse begonia, enormous rolling black eyes, hair which had been straightened, but ending at the back with a little curling black drake’s tail, and wrists and ankles of an extreme delicacy amongst the best I have ever seen. She was a creature of such gentle warmth and kindness that I think of her as one of the few saints I have ever known. She was to me like Blake’s Little Black Boy. She loved everything that lived. I was deeply touched to learn that after I left Hollywood, she attended night-classes in order to be worthy of my friendship. (It was I who should have striven to be worthy of hers).49

  Life magazine commissioned Sitwell to write an article about Hollywood – presumably looking for a mix of glamour and waspishness. What they got was closer to I Live Under a Black Sun. She saw Los Angeles as an ‘Enormous city of wild hopes, of Jacob’s ladders, of terrible depths into which those who had once such high hopes may sink’. She did her best to find out about Hispanic gangs and about the life
of the poor in Los Angeles. Guided by Velma Leroy and the police detective Alfred Branch, and with photographers in tow, she set out for skid row, where she saw ‘those poor wretches who had been “damned by the rainbow”’. Everywhere were the homeless: ‘Some were young, and these had nothing between their one outer covering of rags and their skins, so that it seemed they had early been made ready for the grave.’

  This was not what Life wanted. That afternoon, she went on to a meeting with Marilyn Monroe. Sitwell supposed that this encounter was contrived by the editors so that the two would exchange splendid insults. Generally, Sitwell despised the sex-kittens of Hollywood: ‘Though I did not meet Miss Gabor, I saw her in action during luncheon in the famous Romanoff restaurant. She was doing a kind of deep-sea diving act into the eyes of a gentleman who looked like a button-manufacturer.’50 Monroe struck Sitwell as a different case, and she pitied her: ‘I understand she is in trouble for having a beautiful figure; but I do not think this can be regarded as a crime. I understand also that she was in trouble for allowing this to be photographed for a calendar. But there have always been models for painters and for photographers. Perhaps the people who blamed her have never been hungry, with no money to pay for a meal – have never been in fear of having no roof over their heads.’51 Having just come from skid row, Sitwell believed she saw indelible marks of sorrow on this actress, too: ‘On the occasion of our meeting she wore a green dress, and, with her yellow hair, looked like a daffodil … In repose her face was at moments strangely, prophetically, tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost – a little Spring-ghost, an innocent fertility-daemon, the vegetation spirit that was Ophelia.’52 They spoke of Rudolf Steiner, whose works Monroe was reading, and Sitwell came away thinking her intelligent and well mannered. Life rejected Sitwell’s article, so she later reworked it as the last chapter of Taken Care Of. Sitwell had subsequent meetings with Monroe and her husband Arthur Miller, in New York and at the Sesame Club.

  During these ten weeks in Hollywood, the sixty-five-year-old Sitwell suffered badly from sciatica; the pain limited her movement and caused her to sleep poorly. Apart from poetry readings at the universities, she made few public appearances. One journalist, Edwin Schallert, found her habit of entertaining with cocktails at noon impressive even by the alcoholic standards of the movie business. He also made the common mistake of overestimating Sitwell’s height at six feet, three inches. As she boarded the train at Pasadena at the end of March, she asked not to be photographed as she was feeling ‘wretched’, but finally consented: ‘Please understand, I don’t want to seem uncooperative’ (Los Angeles Times, 29 March 1953).

  She had completed a script, which Walter Reisch kept working at, cutting and compressing. Sitwell was very disappointed with the new version that reached her in England. George Cukor arranged for an extension of the delivery date, urging Sitwell to rework the script as she judged best. She had assumed that her work on this part of the project was done, but it would soon be necessary for her to return to California.

  Edward Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly, now Sitwell’s publisher in the United States, thought Sitwell should undertake a great new anthology of English and American poetry: ‘Now is the time to shoot for the moon: 2000 pages,’ he wrote on 12 June 1953. He paid her an advance of two thousand dollars, drawn down during 1953 and 1954. Although Sitwell had relied on the historian Dorothy Marshall as a researcher and typist, for this new project a full-time secretary was needed, so she hired Mary Fraser, whose salary was paid by Weeks. Fraser remained with Sitwell until 1957, when she took a teaching job in Sweden and had to deny the claim in a newspaper there that she was Sitwell’s ghost-writer.53 Weeks had great ambitions for this anthology, investing about forty thousand dollars and aiming for an initial print run of at least fifteen thousand copies.54

  Sitwell spent most of the summer of 1953 at Renishaw, before going to Switzerland to visit Bryher on 7 September, but her mind was on the United States, to which she would sail in early November. While at sea, she received a telegram from John Malcolm Brinnin of the YMHA Poetry Center that Dylan Thomas had died in New York on 9 November. Arriving on the 12th, she was immediately drawn into the mêlée surrounding Thomas’s death. She wrote to Sachie:

  Oh, it has been so awful about Dylan. Tell Georgia this, but nobody else, and ask her on no account to repeat it. We were met by John Brinnin, who had looked after him, and another man, at the boat, in tears. (John had cabled to me on the ship, telling me Dylan was dead). D loved nobody but Caitlin, but had got involved with another woman. Apparently, money sent by D to Caitlin in England had not reached her, and she sent him this appalling cable, ten days before he died: ‘You have left me no alternative but suicide or the streets. Hate. Caitlin.’ From that minute, D never looked back, but just drank and drank. He then fell into a coma from which he never emerged. We are going to say he died of diabetes. Don’t forget.

  Edith went on to describe how after Caitlin arrived,

  That * * Oscar Williams telephoned telling her about the other woman!! Can you imagine? She threw herself on the dying Dylan’s body, preventing him from breathing and smashing the oxygen tent (he was unconscious.) She was pulled off him and then flew at John Brinnin and tried to strangle him. (Williams had told her the other woman was an ex-secretary of John’s.) It took four men to pull her away from John, (who, I may say, was wonderful with Dylan). She then tore the habits off two nursing nuns, and the two doctors present ordered her to be sent to Bellevue (the lunatic asylum.) This was prevented, and she was sent, instead, to an inebriates’ home from which she was rescued, after three or four days, by the British Consul. Everybody accused everybody else of God knows what, and everybody tried to lay their accusations against each other before me. O. Williams, whom I do not know, rang me up 19 times in two days, in an effort to involve me in a row.55

  The fighting that occurred around Thomas’s deathbed has been well documented; his friends split into two groups, each accusing the other of failing him in his need. There is no confirmation that the telegram that Sitwell says Caitlin sent to Dylan Thomas ever existed. Andrew Lycett, one of Thomas’s biographers, believes that Sitwell misunderstood something Brinnin may have told her: Caitlin had sent an angry letter to Dylan, care of Brinnin, that never actually reached Dylan himself.56 Since Sitwell is very clear about the text of the telegram, it is also possible that she picked up some accurate information. It is not the sort of question that can be resolved.

  For many years it was commonly believed that Thomas’s drinking spree caused ‘a severe insult to the brain’ leading directly to his death,57 but it is now thought that medical error also played a role. One of Thomas’s doctors tried to sedate him with half a grain of morphine sulphate; given Thomas’s drunken state and other illnesses, the morphine likely depressed his breathing and put him into a coma. However, as Paul Ferris reminds us, years of drinking put Thomas in a position where such a disaster could occur.58 At one point, the doctors at St Vincent’s Hospital suspected diabetes to be the cause of Thomas’s coma, but the theory was discounted, and an effort by some researchers to revive it in 1997 was not well received.59 In any event, Sitwell and some others wanted to conceal the squalor of his death, seizing on diabetes as an explanation. However, the story got out, largely through Brinnin’s memoir Dylan Thomas in America (1955) – a book Sitwell thought ‘awful’.60

  Louis MacNeice wrote to Sitwell on 7 December, conveying an offer from the Sunday Times that she should fly back to London briefly in January at their expense to make the first of the personal tributes to Dylan Thomas at a memorial programme.61 Sitwell refused since she was obliged to work on the script in California. She wrote to Maurice Bowra: ‘That poor, most dear, and most wonderful poet! I still feel absolutely numb, which was the state I fell into after the first dreadful knowledge both of that death and the manner of it. What young poet can begin to compare with him?’62

  23

  FROST ON THE WINDOW

  Edith Sitwell’s colle
ction Gardeners and Astronomers brought together poems she had written over the past four years. Reactions were more mixed than she had been used to in the 1940s. A crop of poets younger than Dylan Thomas and George Barker was coming into its own, and, for many, the apocalyptic poetry of the war years seemed remote and overdone. Many younger poets argued for focus, common sense, clarity, modesty of intention, and plain language. These were the virtues of ‘The Movement’, a loose group that included Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain. This shift of taste reflected the austere tone of the post-war years, and a revival of some of the neglected qualities of the best Georgian verse.

  It was also affected by the cultures of the leading universities. At Cambridge, Leavis was imparting his kind of seriousness, as well as a distrust of dilettantes, to students in the English School. At Oxford, there was a vogue of logical positivism associated with A. J. Ayer and others, encouraging a distrust of things beyond the empirical.1 While a later generation might think the logical positivists’ trust in facts and in ‘experience’ was grounded in its own hidden leaps of faith, they contributed to a literary mood that preferred observation to vision – and that was bad news for Edith Sitwell.