There was plenty to celebrate, and Sitwell got on with it. A story reached Lincoln Kirstein that one night in New York Sitwell was so drunk that when she heard the pipes rattling at 3 a.m. she demanded that the hotel manager break down the wall because a nun was trapped inside.32 The same story reached the magazine writer and diarist Leo Lerman, who threw a birthday party for Osbert on 6 December 1954, at which an unwilling W. H. Auden wound up playing butler to Lerman’s guests. When the cake appeared, Auden led the singing and Osbert wept. Edith fell into an intense, hand-holding, and presumably bibulous conversation with Marlene Dietrich. Sitwell declared, ‘You are the great revelation of my life’ and promised to send her a copy of Collected Poems. The bisexual Dietrich liked the looks of Sitwell and remarked, ‘A great woman, that one.’33
The tour included Boston, Washington, and other cities, but the highlight that year came in Chicago. Karl Shapiro, then editor of Poetry, was delighted to follow up ‘An Elegy for Dylan Thomas’ with an appearance by Sitwell on 26 January. On a snowy night, she sold out Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago. She also gave a reading sponsored by the Chicago Review at the University of Chicago, where she was introduced to another large crowd by the poet and critic Elder Olson, whose wife Jerri Hays Olson wrote an account of the evening. After dinner at the faculty club, Dame Edith was told that it was time to go out the back door and across the street to Mandel Hall where the reading would take place. She sank into the nearest sofa, saying, ‘My dear, I can’t walk.’ A car was brought to the front door and it took her through a tangle of one-way streets till they reached the other building. ‘After what must have seemed to her a very long ride, Dame Edith looked at me triumphantly and said, “See, my dear, I told you I could not have walked.”’34 Funny as this is, it also tells us that by 1955 Dame Edith Sitwell was not so much lazy as lame.
Before another reading at Northwestern University, Dame Edith gave an interview to the radio journalist Mary Merryfield, who reported:
We were amused yesterday when this poet had the same difficulty all women seem to have – finding something in her handbag. She insisted we were her guests for tea and when the waiter came with the check, she started through the cluttered interior of a round black velvet purse, pawing handkerchief, spectacle case, and all sorts of trivia to the surface including a handful of bills – not in a billfold – some of which she seemed to seize at random and thrust into the surprised hand of the waiter, murmuring, ‘thank you, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.’ She then pushed the bills et cetera back into the bag, clicked it shut and declared, ‘I never know whether they’ll let me sign one of those bills, whether they want you to pay when things come or whether they’re going to hover nearby and confuse you.’
During the interview, Sitwell praised two Midwestern poets, Marianne Moore and Isabella Gardner. Merryfield asked pointedly how in troubled times Sitwell found the serenity to write poetry: ‘She tossed her head and answered us: “Yes. I believe. I believe in people – and I believe. Anyway, it’s better with all banners flying – isn’t it?”’35
In fact, Sitwell had reached the end of what had always been a limited serenity. Osbert’s disease was progressing, making life undoubtedly difficult for David Horner, who left New York to continue an affair begun earlier with the painter Brian Connelly.36 On 17 January, Edith scribbled across a letter to Sachie, ‘Private and Confidential / Destroy / Let Silence be / the Watchword’ in which she recounted that
Dear little Lord Fauntleroy has not been in New York during the whole of our stay, but has been staying with a friend in the Country. (He did lunch once with O). Nor has he gone with O to Florida … I am afraid I really let myself go to O on the subject of the little Lord’s behaviour, and this has not made me popular. To have chosen this moment to let O be looked after by strangers!!! I did not tell you until I could control myself, because it is dangerous for us if we fall into rages over it, because he will come back when there is something to be got out of it.37
Edith did indeed speak her mind to Osbert, and he was extremely angry. It appears that he told her then that he and Horner had been lovers for many years and that he could not do without him. In London, it was said that Osbert had had to explain to Edith for the first time in her life what homosexuality was. That story is not credible. Sachie knew of and was embarrassed by Osbert’s sexuality. Even Sir George had referred to Horner as Osbert’s ‘boy-friend’,38 though perhaps not in front of Edith. Since the First World War she had been constantly in the company of homosexuals. She undoubtedly received reconnaissance about Tchelitchew’s lifestyle, and Charles Henri Ford believed she knew that Tchelitchew was a homosexual.39 In 1934, she had been able to frame a question for Edward James about what, specifically, the men were doing with each other in The Young and Evil, and Geoffrey Gorer recalled that she was shocked not by the homosexuality in that book but by the promiscuity.40 On the other hand, it is likely that she simply chose not to think about Osbert and David as lovers, pretending that their connection was much as hers had been with Helen Rootham.
In the midst of her rage against Horner, she became interested in the number of murders in New York. She told Sachie she was ‘cross’ with the police for killing August Robles, described by the New York Times (21 February 1955) as a ‘squint-eyed killer’; he was shot during a siege by hundreds of police at an apartment in East Harlem after a running gun battle and a three-day manhunt. She said she had been hoping to contact him: ‘Very reliable, and dirt-cheap! Only 250 dollars for “air-conditioning” someone! I can think of someone who could do with it!’41
In the absence of a hitman, Sitwell turned to the clergy. Her anger was an overpowering experience – and Osbert’s demand that she control herself was beyond her strength. It would not be true to say that bad temper caused Edith Sitwell to become a Catholic. As we have seen, she had pondered the step since 1918 when she told Robert Nichols: ‘one day I shall become a Roman Catholic. (It is the only creed for someone like myself, I do feel that more and more.)’42 She had been exposed to more than thirty years of Helen Rootham’s devotions. As a literary formalist, Sitwell found the Catholic idea of transubstantiation of bread and wine attractive as a symbol; it provided the key image for her poem ‘Harvest’. She told the novelist and music critic Edward Sackville-West, himself a Catholic, about her reasons for delay: ‘You say it took twelve years to bring you to your resolution. It must have taken about the same time to bring me to mine.’ However, her hesitation in the last few years had been because she did not want to distance herself from her brother: ‘Because Osbert is so ghastly ill, and I felt, so to speak, that I could not leave him. Then one day in New York this winter, he told me that I must become a Catholic. And he said, “How do you know that I may not become one too.” And so I hope he will.’43 The period of twelve years would take her back roughly to David Horner’s reception into the Church; she congratulated him at the time.44 In a very strange twist, it is possible that over the years his conversation and example had led her closer to conversion, yet it took rage against him in 1955 for her to make the final leap.
The first people she turned to were the Campbells, asking them to be her godparents. Mary Campbell responded on 3 March: ‘Dear Edith there is nothing that would give us greater joy – We are both absolutely delighted & honoured. Roy had tears of joy in his eyes as he read your letter.’45 Before leaving the United States on 9 April, Sitwell wrote to Father Martin D’Arcy, a Jesuit priest who specialised in converting writers, among them Evelyn Waugh. In Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1963), one character can ‘never make up his mind between suicide and an equally drastic course of action known as Father D’Arcy’.46 He wrote to Sitwell on 14 April: ‘Your letter reached me this morning. I cannot say how happy it made me. I had felt such love moving in your last volumes of poetry. I am anxious to help in every way I possibly can.’47 However, he was at Notre Dame University in Indiana, and Sitwell was back in London. He recommended that she see the histor
ian, Father Philip Caraman, a Jesuit who edited the Month. Caraman was a close friend of Waugh, and it was he who said Mass for him in Latin on Easter Sunday 1966, after which Waugh collapsed and died in the toilet at Combe Florey. For a time, Caraman was also a friend of Graham Greene but they fell out over Greene’s relationship with Catherine Walston.
Caraman told Sitwell on 1 May: ‘I am convinced that the Holy Spirit has so worked already in your heart and mind, that there is little left for a priest to do, save take you systematically through the principal articles of Catholic belief.’48 Sitwell was excited about what lay ahead; she wrote to him from Montegufoni: ‘I believe, and trust with all my heart, that I am on the threshold of a new life. But I shall have to be born again. And I have a whole world to see, as it were for the first time, and to understand as far as my capacities will let me.’ Prayer, however, had always been a problem for her: ‘I feel very far away, as if I were speaking into the darkness.’49 He suggested that she had outgrown old ways of praying and should pass on to new ones: ‘Try simply resting in the presence of God, and, as it were, taking God in: quietly kneeling down, trying to do nothing except love him.’50
Edith Sitwell was no mystic, although at times her artistic experiences took on such a tone. On 23 April she attended a performance at the Wigmore Hall of Benjamin Britten’s Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain. She wrote to Britten on the 26th:
I am so haunted and so alone with that wonderful music and its wonderful performance that I was incapable of writing before. I had no sleep at all on the night of the performance. And I can think of nothing else … During the performance, I felt as if I were dead – killed in the raid – yet with all my powers of feeling still alive. Most terrible and most moving – the appalling loneliness, for all that it was a communal experience one was alone, each being was alone, with space and eternity and the terror of death, and then God.51
Sitwell’s experience of God was bound up with her sense of the glory hidden in forms – just as she had described in ‘An Elegy for Dylan Thomas’. At Caraman’s suggestion, she read more of Aquinas, as well as Martin D’Arcy’s The Nature of Belief, in which she fastened on this sentence: ‘The evil of unbelief is that it must shut its eye to the forms and patterns of truth inscribed in the universe, and retire to the inner sanctuary of the mind, there to rest in uncertainty, in the presence of a fugitive self and the broken idols of its hopes.’ Sitwell had her own way of saying this: ‘When I was a very small child, I began to see the patterns of the world, the images of wonder. And I asked myself why those patterns should be repeated – the feather and the fern and rose and acorn in patterns of frost on the window – pattern after pattern repeated again and again. And even then I knew that this was telling us something. I founded my poetry upon it.’52
Caraman made several trips to Renishaw in July, and they decided to go ahead with her reception into the Church on 6 August, the Feast of the Transfiguration, which Caraman thought fitting as ‘a revelation of the blinding beauty of the soul in God’s grace’.53 Perhaps by way of an apology, she invited Alec Guinness. They had not had much contact for about four years. Sitwell tended to be dictatorial at her dinner parties, pronouncing judgments on writers and artists, and she expected her guests to agree with her. On one occasion, she declared that Beethoven was a bore, and asked her guests whether she was not right. Dylan Thomas and Stephen Spender agreed in turn. Guinness tried to evade the question, but Sitwell asked again whether he agreed, so he said, ‘Not at all. I imagine Beethoven will be played and loved long after everyone at this table has been entirely forgotten.’ Invitations to the Sesame stopped coming. Responding to this very different invitation, Guinness told her his own news: ‘I am receiving instruction from a Roman priest. I only tell you that as I know you won’t despise it. And anyway you gave me the Leon Bloy books!’54
Since the Campbells lived in Portugal and could not attend the ceremony, Sitwell asked Evelyn Waugh to serve as an additional godfather. He wrote to Caraman, ‘I am an old friend of Edith’s & love her. She is liable to make herself a little conspicuous at times.’ He urged them to avoid publicity: ‘What I fear is that the popular papers may take her up as a kind of Garbo-Queen-Christina … There are so many malicious people out to make a booby of a Sitwell.’ On 7 August, he wrote to Nancy Mitford: ‘Yesterday I went to London to stand godfather to Edith Sitwell who has submitted to the Pope of Rome. She looked fine – like a 16th century infanta – and spoke her renunciation of heresy in silver bell tones.’ A new protégé, the poet Quentin Stevenson, afterwards an actor, served the Mass and told Victoria Glendinning that Sitwell made her renunciations with great emphasis.55
Waugh wrote to Sitwell on the 9th:
It is 25 years all but a few weeks since Fr. D’Arcy received me into the Church. I am aghast now when I think how frivolously I approached … You have come with much deeper insight. Should I as Godfather warn you of probable shocks in the human aspect of Catholicism? Not all priests are as clever and kind as Fr. D’Arcy and Fr. Caraman … But I am sure you know the world well enough to expect Catholic bores and prigs and crooks and cads. I always think of myself: ‘I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith’. One of the joys of Catholic life is to recognize the little sparks of good everywhere, as well as the fires of the saints.
He expressed some hope for Sitwell’s moral character: ‘I heard a rousing sermon on Sunday against the danger of immodest bathing-dresses and thought that you and I were innocent of that offence at least.’56
While she was laying up treasure in heaven, Sitwell faced an income tax problem on earth. That July, a bill became due for £1038. Since this would go directly on to her overdraft, Charles Musk at Coutts wanted her to put off paying it until she could meet with him and go over her whole situation. Noting ominously that expenditures had exceeded receipts for some time, he wondered whether her agents would be collecting considerable funds soon. She replied, in effect, that it was impossible to ignore the demands of the Inland Revenue. He then suggested a temporary extension of credit to pay half the amount, with a plan to clear up the remainder when she received a payment from Columbia Pictures in January.57 The Inland Revenue was not satisfied, but in September her accountant counselled her to delay payment further in view of her ‘extremely embarrassing’ overdraft.58 The problem was not resolved, and in March 1956 she had to ask for a loan of £1468. The bank agreed for the amount to remain temporarily on the books, even though this raised her net indebtedness to nine hundred pounds above securities: ‘In the circumstances, we trust that you will restrict your drawings upon us as much as possible.’59 Through the 1950s, the Inspector of Taxes repeatedly queried Sitwell’s expense claims and accepted them only after long wrangling with her accountants.
Sitwell seems not to have considered shutting down the parties at the Sesame or cutting back on entertainment while abroad. Instead, she dwelt on how she had been cheated in various ways – by her parents, by Sister Edith Woods, by Humphrey Searle, and by Ernest Rootham. She began to believe that Helen and Evelyn had exploited her financially over the years. She had, indeed, given away a lot of money and continued to do so. However, in another way, she was making excuses for her way of life. Her commitment to Catholicism could not provide an easy cure for the unhappiness of a person who, for all her virtues, drank so much. Nor could an accountant sort out her business affairs when she was making key decisions on the basis of such an addiction. The parties continued. Sitwell was desperately counting on a best-seller to fix the money problem, so through the summer of 1955 at Renishaw, and from October to the beginning of March at Montegufoni, she worked on her anthology and on her delayed sequel to Fanfare for Elizabeth.
Italy’s winter that year was cold. With her thoughts full of snow and ice, Sitwell retold in her letters a story she had heard about a group of polar bears, walruses, seals, and sea-elephants who had supposedly floated with the currents all the way from the North Pole to Rio de Janeiro: ‘I expect ther
e was a good deal of quarrelling en route.’ At the end of their journey they were placed in a zoo: ‘Such a sad end to a lovely outing.’60 On 18 February, she told Benjamin Britten that the temperature at Montegufoni was thirteen degrees below zero: ‘It is said that the wolves are out in the mountains. I have suggested that the Priest’s step-mother, a very fat woman and a great trial to him and his parishioners, should be exposed, tied to a tree. This suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm.’61
She would doubtless have liked to tie David Horner to the same tree. She believed that Osbert declined over the winter, and that Horner was the cause of it. Back in England, she consulted with Philip Frere and with Osbert’s physician, Armando Child, to whom she wrote on 20 May 1956: ‘Something has to be done to protect Osbert. He is being made much worse by a situation that is horrible, grotesque, and vile. He is too ill, too shocked, and too despondent, to do anything himself, so I am going to do it for him. We cannot go on like this.’62 In her opinion, Osbert should be placed in a nursing home, while David Horner was to be turned out of Renishaw. It was a tough-minded plan, but nothing came of it; Osbert was not so biddable. Meanwhile, according to Quentin Stevenson, Edith’s homophobic talk about Horner was giving offence to guests at the Sesame.63
Knowing of the tax problem and Edith’s need to work steadily, Evelyn decided to stay in Paris that summer, and, instead, Edith later made one of her now rare visits to Paris, staying at rue Saint-Dominique for two nights in October.64 The anthology appeared ready for copy-editing at the end of August, but many errors were found in the text. It would be two more years before the volume came out. There was a greater problem with her treatment of Elizabeth I, The Queens and the Hive. She delivered the first twenty-four chapters that summer,65 but as her health declined, the book ground to a stop. It did not finally appear until 1962. A sign of her anxiety about this book can be found on the contract with the American publisher: she drew five vertical lines beside the clause requiring delivery on 1 September 1956, with the publisher having the right eventually to terminate the contract and recover its money.66
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