It is necessary to be careful in characterising the reaction of poets of the 1950s to Edith Sitwell’s work. It was not simply a matter of literary munchkins dancing and singing, ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead.’ She had her admirers, among them John Heath-Stubbs and Charles Causley. In 1956, John Lehmann published some of Ted Hughes’s work in the London Magazine, and she was very struck by it: ‘One has great hopes of him.’2 In 1995, I asked Hughes whether Sitwell had ever reached out to him, as she so often did with young poets: ‘No, I never had any communication with Edith Sitwell, and wasn’t aware of her opinions about my verse. Perhaps because I came through Cambridge, she felt wary of me – though I was as sceptical of Leavis and his destructive temperament as she was. My general feeling for her was always – liking, with an inclination to defend her.’3
Nevertheless, Gardeners and Astronomers encountered a good deal of scolding, of which L. F. Duchene’s was fairly typical: ‘In short passages one becomes aware of Dr. Sitwell’s power. But in large doses, her continuous over-emphasis, her “superbe”, her symbolism in capital letters – derived from literature rather than life – her clotted rhythms, all conspire to an over-dressed monotony and a certain hollowness. In the shade of Dr. Sitwell’s enormous will to grandeur her true shoots of poetry have been starved of the light they need if they are to grow’ (Manchester Guardian, 2 March 1954). Note that this reviewer thinks it fairly straightforward to experience ‘life’ without too much literature fogging the windscreen.
The New Statesman (23 January 1954) ran a mildly satirical piece under the title ‘Queen Edith’ and there followed a predictable back-and-forth of letters to the editor. Writing in the Spectator (8 January 1954), Anthony Hartley fastened on the closing lines of ‘A Song of the Dust’:
If every grain of my dust should be a Satan,
If every atom of my heart were Lucifer –
If every drop of my blood were an Abaddon,
– Yet should I love.
Hartley thought this bordered on bathos. ‘The imagery has taken over and developed itself into extravagance, affecting the meanings communicated to the reader. One image leads to the next, but the ideas behind them do not follow. Quite the reverse. They are destroyed and made ridiculous.’ Among other things he complained about her comparison of sap to peridots and beryls.
Sitwell sent a cable to the editor: ‘Please have Anthony Hartley stuffed and put in a glass case with mothballs at my expense. The finest of all your collection.’ As she explained to David Pleydell-Bouverie: ‘many years ago I sent the Editor, when he was being tiresome, a stuffed owl, suggesting he should give it reviewing as it had recently been combed for moths.’4 She then wrote a letter for publication (22 January 1954): ‘It is good of Mr. Hartley to teach, not only me, but the late John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, how to write … the passage of which this gentleman complains with such vehemence, is an adaptation from one of Donne’s sermons.’ She added: ‘I shall, no doubt, be told that little Mr. Tomkins (or whatever his name may be), this week’s new great poet, does not incorporate in his work, phrases from the past, giving them a twist, and importing new meaning. That is so. But more than one great poet does. And it is useless to deny it.’ As for peridots and beryls, she wrote: ‘one day in spring Mr. Hartley should try breaking off a twig from its branch.’5 There followed more letters pro and con on the merits of Sitwell’s allusions and echoes. One whimsical letter (29 January 1954), signed ‘Little Mr. Tomkins’, claimed that ‘the sap of a tree is more like Double Diamond than peridots and beryls’.
Meanwhile, the recently published Lucky Jim reached Sitwell in Hollywood at the end of January 1954. She read it, read it again, then wrote to its author, Kingsley Amis: ‘You are a born writer. Your natural gifts, your observation, your insight, are exceedingly remarkable, and your handling of language is nothing short of brilliant … I shall watch your career with the greatest interest: it will be, I am convinced, of very high distinction.’6 She also wrote to the Spectator (19 February 1954) that she and Anthony Hartley could at least agree about the merits of this new novel. Amis was in a sticky position: he had written the ‘Little Mr. Tomkins’ letter; there was no way out, so he copped to it in the next issue and thanked her for her praise (26 February 1954). After a short delay to make him squirm, she wrote on 8 March: ‘Do not feel the slightest discomfort. When you come to the luncheon party I shall give for you, you will find me completely oblivious that this has ever happened.’7 Amis and his wife came to the Sesame in late June, and he wrote afterwards with perfect grace: ‘It was delightful to meet you and to talk to you – such a privilege and a pleasure.’8
During the Spectator tussle, Sitwell was in California, where work on the script was slow. She described for Minnie Fosburgh (now divorced from Vincent Astor and married to an artist, James Fosburgh) an evening of work at George Cukor’s house: ‘The enormous black poodle – the size of a large cart-horse (I adore him) – was chasing one of the dachshunds across the sofa, over my lap (trampling on my appendix) backwards and forwards.’ Cukor mentioned the actress Jean Simmons; Reisch began yelling about how awful she was.
After about five minutes of this, the dachshund suddenly turned, just as it was being chased over my lap, and put its head into the poodle’s mouth, where it became fixed – I thought irrevocably. The poodle’s eyes were distended with fear and suffocation. Walter stopped yelling and pulled, violently, at the dachshund’s back legs. The dachshund, thinking Walter was trying to tear it in two, as its head was held as in a vice, shrieked down the poodle’s throat – making the poodle’s fear and suffocation far worse … I still cannot think how the dachshund was dislodged, but it was, at last. George said, rather huffily, when I expressed wonderment and condolence, that it is always happening.9
Matters did not improve. She told Osbert on 8 February:
Tomorrow, George and the second in command at the Studio are coming round here to listen to Walter yelling. Walter has discovered that the name of Lot’s wife was Edith; he has also found that Savonarola’s last words, as he was about to be burnt, were ‘I am in love with fire.’ Therefore, the other day, yelling because I had told him we couldn’t use the word ‘décolletage’, but must say ‘bosom’ – hanging head downwards over the sofa, he shrieked ‘Oh, Dr. Stillwell! Oh, Miss Atkin! Oh, Mrs. Lot! Oh, Signorina Savonarola! Oh, you bosom-fetichist (“bosom” twice in three pages)! Oh, shades of the Hay office! Oh, shades of Harry Cohn! Oh, what shall I do?’ (Straightening himself, suddenly) ‘What are you laughing at?’10
Walter Reisch’s comic rant probably owed something to talking with Sitwell about her poems, especially this passage from ‘The Night Wind’:
Now in the streets great airs the colour of the vines
Drift to the noctuas, veiled women, to the faceless ones, the nameless ones –
To Lot’s wife staring across the desert of her life.11
Under the guise of Lot’s wife, Sitwell probably did consider her own life a desert. In the meantime there were things to be laughed at – among them Walter Reisch.
Back in New York, Sitwell wrote on 3 April to Geoffrey Gorer that Cukor had been preoccupied with the shooting of A Star is Born and with Judy Garland, ‘who screams and cries and hits people with her shoe all the time’. Without Cukor to keep Reisch in line, Sitwell felt the script had been ‘wrecked’ again. The studio wanted her to come back in July, but she refused. Columbia still wanted to produce the film, although no date was ever fixed. As late as 1962, George Cukor was still talking about it, but like many other promising scripts Fanfare for Elizabeth was lost in ‘development hell’. Sitwell’s book never came close to the screen, except indirectly. Trying to understand her role in the BBC series Elizabeth R (1971), Glenda Jackson found that academic historians contradicted each other, yet a reading of Fanfare for Elizabeth made all the difference: ‘Edith Sitwell’s intuitions – that gave me the clues I needed.’12
Meanwhile, Tchelitchew hove into view. In her letter to Gorer, Sitwell
wrote: ‘Pavlik is now trying to make it up with me – via Minnie Astor-that-was, Fosburgh-that-is. He wrote to her, “Please tell Edith I often dream of her – not have forgotten her – hope she hasn’t forgotten me. Give her please, my love and when I see her all will be all right again.”!!!’13 None of Sitwell’s letters to Tchelitchew after 1951 has come to light, so her full reaction is hard to gauge. It appears that he contacted her directly in June when her name was again in the news.
She was named in the Birthday Honours List as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (The Times, 10 June 1954). Equivalent to a knighthood, the honour was granted largely on the recommendation of Denys Kilham Roberts and the Board of the Society of Authors.14 Sitwell was gleeful, recognising how useful it would be in dealing with the pipsqueakery, but she told Jane Clark that she dreaded curtsying to the Queen owing to arthritis in her knees: ‘I shall fall at the Queen’s feet, or else (being of immense strength) I shall bring her down with me in a kind of death-grapple!!!’15
Congratulations poured in. Sassoon, in his disconnected way, delayed for almost a year, before sending a letter with another book of poems. Edith told him: ‘like Persephone, I am frequently out of circulation as far as my friends are concerned, for six months or so out of the year.’ She thanked him for his good wishes: ‘You were one of the very first poets, as you were one of the very first people, who upheld me. And you don’t know – or perhaps you do, what I feel about that … It may amuse you to hear that when I went to the Palace to get my decorations, the military band, which was at the moment hotly engaged in “Chu-Chin-Chow” stopped in the middle of a phrase, and changed to “Annie Get your Gun”.’16
Sitwell herself probably thought about getting a gun as she was still trying to make Ernest Rootham assist with Evelyn’s expenses; he was more generous with suggestions than with money. Evelyn wrote to Edith on 8 June:
I have been trying to puzzle out what he exactly means by an annuity, I looked the word up in the dictionary but it did not help me much … Does he want to put me into a home for women in reduced circumstances? Perhaps it would be a good idea, but I would rather not accept any suggestion coming from him as I do not trust him. Also he has no right to suggest anything as he never does a thing for me. The only person who can arrange my future for me is you, and whatever you suggested I would always gladly accept. I owe my life to you & you have the ordering of it.17
Evelyn came for her visit in August, and the two discussed how Edith should negotiate with him, but it was all moot as Ernest Rootham died a few weeks later (The Times, 21 September 1954). Sitwell worked herself into a frenzy about his skinflint will, and Philip Frere teased her a few months later over a vicious letter she wrote to the solicitors for the estate. Taking the view that she might have committed that impossible thing, a criminal libel against a dead man, he urged her to hightail it to Persia while he put a stop to any possible prosecution.18 Silly and peripheral as this episode seems, it provides a first glimpse of the general fury that would overtake Dame Edith Sitwell in the coming months.
For now, there was the matter of Pavlik. His letters were friendly and dealt with safe topics such as his veneration for the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who was the only man of substance he could find in Paris apart from Picasso whom he thought ‘sort of gaga’.19 Bachelard admired Tchelitchew’s paintings and had written the preface to the catalogue of his exhibition that summer at the Galerie Rive Gauche.20 Although Tchelitchew hurt Sitwell many times and was often bizarre in his thinking, he led her, very occasionally, in good directions. In 1950, he had introduced her to Bachelard’s writings; she had read with fascination La terre et les rêveries de la volonté and some other works.21 Indeed, for a time she was absorbed in Bachelard, as she ordered four more books in 1951: La psychanalyse du feu, Le pluralisme cohérent de la chimie moderne, La valeur inductive, and La formation de l’esprit.22
In his account of science, Bachelard insisted on an awareness of mental structure and interior process – the sort of thing Sitwell was also grasping after in the writings of Lancelot Law Whyte. Given what science had produced at Hiroshima, Sitwell believed the claims of positivists to be smug and dangerous. This particular stance had implications for what she wrote and what she praised. To her mind, the poetry of close observation – advocated by both Grigson and The Movement – was often morally and spiritually evasive. For her, such poets founded their technique on a naive confidence about the intelligibility of the material world. Even though she rejected Surrealism because of its ultimate disorder of thought and form, she took seriously its efforts to confront the interior life. Though not a philosopher, Sitwell felt that no poetry could be truly great that fell into the gap between subject and object, self and other, which had blighted Western thought since the time of Descartes.
Sitwell was ‘nearly driven bats’ in the summer of 1954, trying to write an ‘An Elegy for Dylan Thomas’ that had been commissioned by the American journal Poetry.23 Finished at the end of September, it reflects her preoccupation with Bachelard. She claims that a true poet must bring a new creation myth to a world trapped by its materialist ways of thinking:
to the Minotaur in the city office
Crying to the dunghill in the soul, ‘See, it is morning!’
And seeing all glory hidden in small forms,
The planetary system in the atom, the great suns
Hid in a speck of dust.
So, for his sake,
More proudly will that Sisyphus, the heart of Man,
Roll the Sun up the steep of heaven, and in the street
Two old blind men seem Homer and Galileo, blind
Old men that tap their way through worlds of dust
To find Man’s path near the Sun.24
The friendship of Homer and Galileo is Sitwell’s metaphor for a consciousness that unites science and poetry; each by itself is blind, but they can be brought together in a conception like William Blake’s of the glory of forms.
Pavlik announced on 20 September that he was coming to London for an exhibition of his work at the Hanover Gallery, and he asked Edith to help with the opening. She told Sachie: ‘His Lordship has written to me about this, and seems to think nothing has happened – the last 4 years having, apparently, slipped his memory.’25 Sachie was angry for her sake. Writing from Montegufoni where she remained until about 19 October, Edith cautioned Georgia: ‘In re Pavlik. I beg of Sachie not to show anything, as the whole thing is going to be a fearful strain and most painful for me, and I don’t want anything to happen which would be an extra strain. I have been asked to open his exhibition, on the 26th. What I am doing, I am doing simply because he is a very great artist – for no other reason. I am afraid I do not feel the same. I shall be very amiable to him, but, as I say, I do not feel the same.’26 She heard soon after that Tchelitchew’s doctor had forbidden him to travel to England.27 On 22 October, he told Edith that she was ‘first’ of all his friends, but in the rest of the letter he seemed more concerned with missing the show than with not seeing her.28 In the following months, his letters went on in their self-regarding way – recounting, for example, how Bachelard had praised his work and how a psychic had told him he had 50 per cent more brain than other men.29
As Sitwell pondered the problems of materialism, her bank was considering her overdraft. A reading tour was laid on for November, but Coutts & Co. were reluctant to extend Sitwell more credit to make the trip. In what must have been an embarrassing request, she asked her American publisher Edward Weeks to write a letter to the bank. He explained for one of the directors, Charles Musk, how much his firm had invested in her project: ‘we undertook it in the belief that the Anthology will have a wide reading and a long life. Anything that you can do to facilitate the length of Dame Edith’s stay in New York will be deeply appreciated.’30 The bank acquiesced, and Edith joined Osbert and David on the ocean liner.
Her new Collected Poems was released by Vanguard in New York that month, and the reviews were c
elebratory. In the New York Herald Tribune (23 January 1955), Gene Baro saluted her ‘technical brilliance’. Richard Eberhart wrote in Poetry: ‘Edith Sitwell reaches up to a great paradox, wondrous simplicity, direct intuitive power, gained through precise, accurate, intellectual judgments surpassed in a unity of positive praise available to any ear. Sublimity of utterance and a deep truth come directly through her flowing means and all her artful balances. This is the power of the concrete, a massive presence of reality, a passionate experience of truth.’31 In one of the most important of all reviews of her work, Kenneth Rexroth, the San Francisco poet who launched the Beats, saw through to her struggle with the Symbolists and Surrealists:
Edith Sitwell is the nearest thing to a major poet that the British Isles have produced since Hardy, Lawrence, and Yeats. With the possible exception of Hugh MacDiarmid she is now the only British Poet who possesses that special accent of both individuality and scope which makes a writer a member of world literature … Her later poems have absorbed the systematically deranged world of Rimbaud, the madness of Lautréamont, the ghoulish, rebus-picture fables of the surrealists, all the insanity and agony of the modern world … In addition, they have a solemn music … Behind the vision, behind the new virtuosity, is something rare in modern verse, so artistic and so neutral: the moral earnestness that makes English poetry great … these are good words for the human race to hear. (New York Times, 23 January 1955)
Edith Sitwell Page 45
