Her circle at the Sesame attracted new members. Alberto de Lacerda was born in Mozambique in 1928 and became one of the most important Portuguese poets of the twentieth century. He arrived in London in 1951 and worked with the Portuguese Service of the BBC, meeting Sitwell through Roy Campbell and Arthur Waley.67 Sitwell called de Lacerda ‘one of the most intelligent and subtle people I have ever known’.68 Quentin Stevenson became a regular from 1954, and she often spoke of him, to his embarrassment, as the next great poet. For several years, Sitwell and Stevenson had a warm friendship; she helped him find work, while he tried to interest her in some of the Movement poets, especially his friend Elizabeth Jennings, but, with Sitwell, that argument was unwinnable.
Stevenson also introduced her to the work of another of his friends, Geoffrey Hill, about whom Sitwell had no doubts: she repeatedly praised his work in her lectures of the late 1950s as ‘outstanding’.69 Joe Ackerley advised Stevenson that Sitwell was overpraising him. Indeed, Stevenson found Sitwell’s praise an unbearable pressure and stopped seeing her later in the decade. However, she was not unique in being dazzled by his abilities. His book The Succession (1957) drew some remarkable reviews. For example, Peter Levi, himself a first-rate poet, later to be elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, mused: ‘Is this embodiment of an intimate personal passion in almost showily brilliant technique not what we were waiting for, we with our little magazines and our movements to keep poetry half-alive?’70 Going about his acting career, Stevenson published practically nothing else, but sent Levi a sheaf of new poems in 1999, which led Levi to confirm his opinion that Stevenson was the best poet of their generation.71 And yet, as late as 2011, Stevenson’s later work has had only a private printing.72
Marilyn Monroe and her new husband Arthur Miller came in the late summer of 1956 to London, where Monroe was filming The Sleeping Prince, while Peter Brook was putting on a production of Miller’s play A View from the Bridge. Natasha Spender had no idea she was walking into a media event as Sitwell had merely invited her to lunch with a couple called Miller. She arrived to discover maids clustered in the windows and other staff at the door waiting for the movie star to appear.73 Monroe recited some of Dylan Thomas’s poems and a sonnet by Hopkins: ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.’ Sitwell stuck to her guns about Monroe and declared her ‘quite remarkable’.74
That summer James Purdy, then living in Allentown, Pennsylvania, had his first collection of stories, Don’t Call Me By My Right Name, published by a small press. He sent copies to various writers he admired, hoping to be noticed: ‘A kind of psychic impulse caused me to mail a copy to Dame Edith Sitwell, to the Castello di Montegufoni, Italy. I never expected Dame Edith (whom I did not know) to set eyes on the book, let alone read it.’ Yet she did. On 20 October, she wrote that she thought several of the stories were ‘masterpieces. They have a terrible, heart-breaking quality.’75 He then sent her 63: Dream Palace, a short novel. She wrote back on 26 November: ‘What a wonderful book! It is a masterpiece from every point of view. There can’t be the slightest doubt that you are a really great writer, and I can only say that I am quite overcome.’76 These letters left him ‘unhinged’.77 She pressed the books on Victor Gollancz, who published them as a single volume in 1957; to Purdy’s and Sitwell’s dismay, he altered some sexual passages to avoid prosecution. In 1961, Sitwell contributed an introduction to Purdy’s Color of Darkness. He went on to have a distinguished career and was saluted by Gore Vidal in 2005 as an ‘outlaw’ of American literature (New York Times, 27 February 2005).
Purdy never forgot his debt to Edith Sitwell. In 1991, Val Clark, then his agent at Curtis Brown, brought a new colleague to meet him at his home in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, New York. While he made Turkish coffee, they looked around his flat. On the walls were hand-coloured engravings of boxers: ‘Off to the side, a little lower near his bed stand, perhaps above his head when he lay asleep or just off to the side so he could see her there from where he lay, was a framed photograph of Edith Sitwell. When … he saw us gazing upon that image, he told us how she, Dame Edith Sitwell, was his guardian angel.’78
24
THE EMPRESS PENGUIN
‘The housemaids will wax the floors, and I slipped and crashed on to my face, waking to find myself lying in a pool of blood, with my head on Miss Fraser’s knee, she holding towel after towel to my face, and the butler putting ice on my forehead. I cannot think how I escaped breaking my nose and both cheek bones.’1 This accident happened at Montegufoni around the beginning of December 1956. Sitwell was always clumsy, and her letters since the 1920s describe many falls, but now they were becoming dangerous. In October 1954 she had tumbled into an old-fashioned lift that stopped, as she maintained, three feet below the floor, leaving her with injuries to her ribs and right hand.2 In February 1956, she told Benjamin Britten: ‘I got influenza twice – or rather it returned to me, this being a habit of the new kind. And then, just as I had recovered, and was walking about with legs made of cotton wool, I crashed onto the stone passage. Why I didn’t kill myself, I can’t think. But I bruised, strained, and tore every muscle and tendon that could be bruised, strained, or torn!’3 Osbert’s secretary, Lorna Andrade, attributed Edith’s falls to liquor.4
Sitwell’s general physical condition was poor. When Stephen Spender asked her to join a group of writers and artists going to Hungary to show solidarity with the revolution against the Stalinists, she refused, despite sympathy with the cause:
I should only be a liability to the rest of the party if we did get visas. I shall be seventy on my next birthday, and am now extremely lame. I have arthritis in both knees, acute rheumatism in both feet, and often am only able to walk – and slowly at that – with the aid of a stick. In addition, I get attacks of sciatica in its most acute form. I had it for over a year, and it returns, so that when I travelled back from Aldeburgh Festival, I could not put my feet to the ground when I reached Liverpool Station, and had to be carried out of the train, wheeled along the platform in a truck, and carried into my club.5
Sitwell gave John Lehmann a long account of all the illnesses suffered that winter in Montegufoni by members of the household, including boils and paratyphoid. One person alone was untouched: ‘D.H. is radiantly well, and his pretty golden curls are like sunlight in the house and in my heart!!!!’6 Disgust with Horner shaped her reaction to the news that, early on the morning of 10 January 1957, T. S. Eliot had married his secretary Valerie Fletcher, and that he had given John Hayward no notice that he was going to move out. Most friends, including Natasha Spender, could see that after ten years of caring for Hayward, Eliot, himself in bad health, was entitled to some happiness. However, Sitwell took Hayward’s side completely, writing to Lehmann: ‘Oh! What a beast Tom is!!! No, no, what you tell me is really too much! You wait! I’ll take it out of that young woman! I’ll frighten her out of her wits before I’ve done. As for Tom – he will, of course, be punished. He will never write anything worth while again. And indeed, hasn’t for a very long time now. The Four Quartets are, to my mind, infinitely inferior to his earlier work – completely bloodless and spiritless.’7 Lorna Andrade told John Pearson that, after hearing about Eliot’s marriage Sitwell took to her bed for three days.8
Sitwell returned to England on 4 February and set out for the United States two weeks later. She was looking forward to reciting poetry again, as she told Sachie: ‘I have been like a dead person now, for two years, with no poetry excepting my anthology.’ David Horner had his own plans: ‘As soon as we got on to the boat, O came to my cabin and told me that animal was going off again (for the duration) with the same animal as before. O said it was “a very good thing, as we need a little holiday.” I must not refuse to speak to the second animal, as if I did, the other would “make a scene!” The impudence! The blackmail! The sickening, horrible creature! And they simply aren’t house-trained! If you could have seen them on the dock!’ Soon she was calling him ‘little Jackal Horner’.9 After her arrival on 24 Feb
ruary, she spent time with Minnie Fosburgh and Betsey Whitney who encouraged her in her outrage, as did their friend, Edith’s American physician Connie Guion. As the wife of the ambassador, Whitney was adamant that if Horner came back to England there would ‘be no queening it at the American Embassy’.10 Homophobia was the order of the day.
The Sitwells were still filling auditoriums, but no longer merited the detailed press coverage that had been given to their first visits. Several itineraries for the tour survive. While it is not clear which was the final one, the Sitwells certainly gave readings at Manhattanville College and the YMHA Poetry Center in New York, and at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. They spent a week in Washington, where she recited Façade, and appeared as well in Chicago, Detroit, Chapel Hill, Minneapolis, and Birmingham. They may also have appeared at South Bend (Notre Dame University), and in Montreal and Pittsburgh. The Sitwells were in Austin from 5 to 7 April; according to one observer at a reading at the University of Texas, ‘she startled her audience by producing an alarm clock from her large reticule and in a menacing rasp demanding the time from a terrified young man in the front row.’ The tour finished up back in New York on 16 April. Edith thought it had gone very well, but judged herself a ‘stretcher case’.13
These American tours were essential to her finances. The gross revenues were high: most appearances brought in five hundred dollars each and the one in Texas brought in a thousand, to be split with Osbert after the agent’s commission.14 However, a good deal of the money was scattered in expenses: for example, avoiding aeroplanes, her first-class passage on the ocean liner was £443.15 At a glance this seems extravagant, but by now both she and Osbert were disabled and they could not travel without the constant attention of stewards. It appears that she had to use a wheelchair most of the time she was in the United States.16 That summer Coutts told her that her net indebtedness stood at £4586, exceeding her security by £1300 (the gross figure for her overdraft was about £13,000).17 Lorna Andrade recalls that one night in 1957, Sitwell stood in the doorway of her bedroom at Renishaw and asked whether people were still sent to gaol for debt.18
Shortly before leaving the United States, Sitwell gave a press conference where an ‘oaf’ of a reporter sought her reaction to the death of Roy Campbell. She knew nothing of it and was devastated. On 23 April, Roy and Mary Campbell had been driving home from Holy Week celebrations in Seville, when a tyre blew out and the car struck a tree. Mary was badly injured, and Roy’s neck was broken.19 Edith wrote to Georgia on 2 May, the day before sailing: ‘Roy’s death has been a dreadful shock to me, and a grief. He was so chivalrous to me, and one of my greatest friends … When I think that a noble, chivalrous man who was a great poet is dead – and what we have left!’20
Early on Christmas Day 1956, Pavel Tchelitchew, then in Rome, began spitting up blood and his nails turned blue. At the hospital, he was told that he had had a heart attack. He also learned that his heart was greatly enlarged and it had no regular rhythm. A cardiologist described his condition as grave. Tchelitchew believed he was dying and saw himself as a little bird sitting on his own shoulder.21 His lungs bore old tuberculosis scars, and in recent years he had suffered from a tapeworm. He remained in hospital until 7 March, having picked up an infection of the lungs that took a hundred antibiotic injections to clear. He wrote to Sitwell on 12 March: ‘Life is sometimes very strange indeed. The good sisters tryed [sic] to convert me into Catholicism – but I told them that a man of my kind can not be pinned to what an ordinary man can be. If I would be protestant naturally I would become Catholic – but Greek Orthodox is very lovely – very philosophical pythagorean.’22 He later confessed to a Russian Orthodox priest. By April, he was spitting blood again and was back in hospital with episodes of syncope (fainting) as he struggled to breathe. As late as July 1957, Charlie Ford found it hard to accept what was happening and failed to communicate to Tchelitchew’s friends how very ill he was.23
That summer Sitwell was at the Sesame, keeping an eye on Evelyn Wiel and awaiting reviews of the British edition of her Collected Poems. Among her guests was Beryl de Zoete, who brought her own irritations: ‘She now raises her left hand above her head, and with her right hand twangs at my knee as though it were some archaic musical instrument. It is very painful, and I should like to hit her!’24 Sitwell was receiving kind letters from James Purdy, who wrote that ‘John Cowper [Powys], as I told you, is one of your deepest admirers, and does not lose track of you!’ Purdy urged her to ignore the critics, and declared that ‘The person who should win the Nobel Prize, dear Edith, is you! So many poets not fit to tie your shoe laces have won it.’25 Sitwell wrote to Waugh on 28 July, praising his tale of hallucinations, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: ‘Leaving everything else aside, it seems to me the book must be highly valuable to every nervously constituted person. I, for one, always think “they” are persecuting me. And very often they are, but not always, and seldom as badly as I think!’26
A protégée of both Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and a friend and admirer of Roy Campbell, Muriel Spark had recently published her first novel, The Comforters, to acclaim, but she too was feeling persecuted when she came to visit Dame Edith Sitwell at the Sesame. That morning she had discussed the manuscript of her second novel with her agent Paul Scott, who is now remembered as the author of the Raj Quartet. He was not impressed and flicked the manuscript across the desk towards Spark using his third finger and thumb. Although he was willing to continue representing her, she left his office irate. She was nervous of meeting Sitwell, since she had once said in a review that Yeats was the greater poet – Sitwell seemed not to remember the review. This ‘wonderful woman’ told Spark how she admired the mysterious qualities in her writing. When Spark told the story of her dealings with Paul Scott, Dame Edith offered her a sabre-toothed consolation: ‘“My dear,” she said, “you must acquire a pair of lorgnettes, make an occasion to see that man again, focus the glasses on him and sit looking at him through them as if he was an insect. Just look and look.”’ Dame Edith demonstrated with her own eyeglasses which hung from a chain around her neck.27 It was a master’s class in the art of the putdown, and Sitwell could not have had a student more apt than Muriel Spark.
Sitwell was enjoying herself again and so was entirely unprepared for the telegram that reached her on 1 August: ‘Dearest Edith This message brings tragic news but also our dearest love last evening at eight Pavlik’s great heart beat no more love again Choura Charlie.’28 She wrote to Sachie on 6 August: ‘Yes, it was a dreadful shock; so much so that I have been quite numb. One can only say that he was so ill, I doubt if he could ever have painted again, and that would have made life a hell to him. I think somebody might have told me he was dying. I knew he was very ill, but he had been so since January. If I had known I should have written to him … It has been an awful year. First, dear Roy’s death, and now Pavlik’s.’29
Sitwell’s public tribute to Tchelitchew appeared in The Times on 20 August:
It is difficult for his friends to realize that they will never see him again. Nobody ever lived with more vehemence than this man, who was one of the greatest painters of the age. I have known several men of genius. Pavel Tchelitchew was perhaps the greatest I have known well … In Lorca’s ‘A Poet in New York’ occurs a sentence about persons who wished ‘not for form but for the marrow of form’. Tchelitchew gave both the marrow and the form. He seemed to capture the quintessence of light, and the first study for his great picture ‘Hide and Seek’ fills a room at Renishaw with that quintessence on the darkest day. Thinking of him, I see him, a desperately thin, anxious-looking young man, jumping for joy and clapping his large painter’s hands, because there was snow on the ground, and it reminded him of his childhood – before the sufferings began, and the greatness.
That summer, Collected Poems was launched into heavy waters. It did receive some fine reviews. Although he later back-pedalled, Cyril Connolly wrote in the Sunday Times (28 July 1957): ‘When we come to compare the c
ollected poems of Dame Edith Sitwell with those of Yeats, or Mr. Eliot or Professor Auden, it will be found that hers have the purest poetical content of them all.’ In the Manchester Guardian (20 August 1957), Anne Ridler called the book ‘superb’. A reviewer in The Times (25 July 1957) wrote: ‘If Dame Edith’s appeal was once a rather private one, she is to-day a poet of the public gesture, large, generous, outgoing. Her habit of repeating favourite phrases and images, if it sometimes becomes a mannerism, at the same time does help to give the later poems their simplicity and sweep.’ There were others in this vein.
However, there were also a good many negative reviews, of which the most influential was that of A. Alvarez (Observer, 28 July 1957). He thought the early poems had about them the air of a Christmas panto, and asked, somewhat solemnly: ‘for adults, does it really matter?’ Despite Alvarez’s subsequent achievement as a critic and poet, one glimpses beyond that phrase a severe, donnish, even puritanical account of what poetry ought to be. He went on: ‘Do the tricks of rhythm and rhyme, the exotic, improbable, nursery-tale objects make the early poems into anything more than delicious games? Was, in fact, Dame Edith, for all her inventions, ever “modern” in any significant sense? I would suggest, instead, that she used the new taste for difficulty as an excuse to free herself not from outworn conventions of feeling and expression … but from the perennial convention that a poem should mean something.’ He went on to complain that Sitwell invited readers to engage in ‘free-association – a kind of “do-it-yourself” verse’.
Edith Sitwell Page 47
