Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  Heaven forbid that the author of The Savage God should tolerate ‘delicious games’ in literature, but this is not just po-faced; it is actually a false description of Sitwell’s early poems. On one level, almost any of Sitwell’s early poems can be shown to have significant paraphrasable content. On another level, we have seen in this book how the musical techniques of her work are themselves extraordinarily meaningful. One is left, then, to ask whether Alvarez has not himself a surprisingly limited conception of how the modern poem must operate. As for the later poetry, he says it is ‘noisy and uncertain. She is so used to backing gracefully out of any definite commitment that she hasn’t the means to handle full statements.’ This sounds magisterial – an empress-with-no-clothes judgment. Yet in the course of this book we have seen again and again that fairly straightforward readings of her poems reveal structures of thought and feeling that are original, serious, and unified.

  Sitwell was not able to see all this as an interesting difference of opinion – a necessary tangle with a gifted mind. Forgetting what she had said to Waugh about her supposed persecutors, Sitwell told Connolly that she thought Alvarez ‘seething with hatred’. She watched her opportunities and later wrote a negative review of his book The Shaping Spirit: Studies in Modern English and American Poets. Having told Sachie that the bad reviews of her book were being organised by Grigson, she then wrote to a friend from the 1920s, the physician Hal Lydiard Wilson, ‘the whole of the gutter press rose as one man and insulted me.’30 In the absence of a promised review, she suspected a personal slight from Alan Pryce-Jones, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. When one finally appeared on 20 September, she thought it perfunctory and hidden away.

  In fact, Pryce-Jones wrote the unsigned review himself, and it stands with Rexroth’s in 1955 as one of the most insightful readings of Sitwell’s poetry. He is one of the few critics alert to her work’s affinities with modern music:

  Very early, Dame Edith laid down her Grundgestalt, a tone-row upon which she has spent a lifetime composing inversions, crab-inversions, contrapuntal movements of every kind. ‘King’, ‘Rag’, ‘Gold’, ‘Ass’, the notes of the row can be extended to considerably more than the twelve tones of the scale. By choosing some degree of limitation, however, Dame Edith has gained power through a method with which Schönberg would have experienced a practical sympathy. Like him, she has abolished the distinction between major and minor as an emotive factor … Having shown prodigies of virtuosity in variations on the scherzo, she has moved on to explore the possibilities of the long line – an adagio music which is particularly hard to sustain at concert pitch. These achievements alone must suffice to place her among the most consistently interesting of modern English poets. And in these 400 pages there is plenty to show that the word ‘interesting’ is only the lowest common factor of an outstanding collection of poetry.

  Sitwell swore she would never talk to Pryce-Jones again – an oath she eventually had to break.31

  This was the same old stuff: Sitwell always took reviews personally. But the death of Tchelitchew had made a difference. Grief, physical pain, anger with David Horner, panic about debts, liquor, and simple loneliness were breaking her down. In the coming years, there would be occasions when those around her feared for her sanity.

  In that hard summer of 1957, one very good thing happened. After four years of able service, Mary Fraser was moving to Sweden, so Sitwell needed a new secretary. The pianist Gordon Watson proposed his friend Elizabeth Salter. Born in Angaston, South Australia, in 1918, she came to England in 1952. By 1957, she had a detective novel to her credit and would later become a biographer. Watson arranged for her to come to the Aldeburgh Festival in mid-June, where Sitwell and Day-Lewis were reading Blake’s poems in the church. That initial meeting was frosty, and Salter assumed the job was a non-starter: ‘How could one become secretary to a legend?’ Nevertheless, Sitwell changed her mind and telephoned to hire her. On a July evening, Salter came to the Sesame to have drinks with Sitwell, Watson, and de Lacerda. Evelyn Wiel appeared a little late; Salter noticed that she had only two teeth left in her mouth and that a collection of noisy gold bangles ran up to her elbows. The evening passed happily, and Salter settled into the job that lasted until Sitwell’s death.32

  Sitwell’s seventieth birthday fell on 7 September and the newspapers swarmed. Treating such interest as morbid, she told the Evening Standard: ‘I am lying down for a little rest, covered by lots of bouquets of flowers.’ The Sunday Times ran a friendly discussion with Sitwell conducted by John Lehmann, William Plomer, Frederick Ashton, and John Raymond. Even so, there was little comfort for her. She apologised to her ‘dear Godmother’ Mary Campbell for a late letter: ‘ever since the early summer, griefs and disasters have been heaped on my head … The only thing to do, at such a time, is to be silent to those who are suffering more deeply than oneself – not to heap one’s sorrows and troubles onto their greater ones, which is the height of selfishness. But now I realise that I must be being taught some lesson.’33

  There was also work to get done. The proofs for her anthology filled a whole postbag, and she had to enlist Salter and de Lacerda to help her through them. She suffered from eye-strain and often wore dark glasses. By 23 September, she was in Montegufoni with various jobs to finish, most importantly The Queens and the Hive. Through these months Sitwell wrote regular letters to her secretary, asking her to type up manuscripts and to answer certain letters that did not merit a direct response. One instruction that Salter received from time to time, and always disobeyed, was to send out a form34 that Edith and Osbert had composed for pests.

  Another way to deal with pests and lunatics was to redirect their enquiries to F. R. Leavis. In this enterprise, Sitwell had the help of C. Day-Lewis, who had wondered a couple of years earlier whether it might soon be time to stop: ‘I’m just planting picador’s darts. I feel no animosity against Leavis. He’s a valuable bull. If we kept him running around until he dropped, we should have the S.P.C.A. after us.’35 Sitwell was also looking for pranks to play on F. W. Bateson, editor of Essays in Criticism, another critic with whom she had a feud. In her lectures, she often mocked his pronouncements that ‘Poetry has a more honourable function than the titillation of the aesthetic sense’, that poetry is ‘no more useful, strictly speaking, than any other human activity’, and that poetry is essentially a political act like voting. According to Sitwell, if Bateson had his way, we would have to get rid of a great many poets, starting with Keats (The Times, 16 May 1957).

  A form compiled by Edith and Osbert Sitwell in the 1950s, to be filled out by correspondents and visitors they judged to be lunatics

  While in Montegufoni, Sitwell tried, unsuccessfully, to organise another tour for the spring. She told Sachie that she hoped to do three lectures per week at a thousand dollars each.36 This was an impossibility, as only the oil-rich University of Texas had been able to pay so much on her last tour. She returned to England around 14 February and six days later gave the address at a memorial service for the novelist Charles Morgan (The Times, 20 February 1958). On 12 March, she was presented with the William Foyle Poetry Prize for Collected Poems; at the luncheon, John Lehmann saluted her as ‘a great poet, who has found new words, new forms to fit the emotions, feelings, and thoughts of her time … She is a pythoness poised in deadly attack against all enemies of literature’ (The Times, 12 March 1958).

  Even if she was a pythoness, she feared attack from many directions, and counted on strict loyalty from her friends. In March, Alec Guinness won an Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai, which was followed by a cover-story on him in Time (21 April 1958). When he received his copy, Guinness saw that it attributed to him an anecdote about Sitwell’s reception into the Church: ‘Can you imagine Dame Edith being borne majestically down the aisle on a little satin pillow?’

  He rang up Sitwell at the Sesame and asked to see her urgently. She invited him to lunch, but he said that she might not want him there after she heard what he ha
d to say: ‘I found her sitting, alone and forlorn, on a dingy sofa in an ante-room.’ He gave her the magazine and disowned the quotation. Sitwell read it and flushed before laying it aside. ‘Stay to lunch,’ she said. Guinness refused. ‘It doesn’t matter about this,’ she said, tapping the magazine. ‘I am fortified against the press.’ De Lacerda appeared with his copy of the magazine, but she said she had already seen it. After lunch, Guinness kissed Edith, and she whispered, ‘Light a candle for me in Farm Street one day.’ Many years later, he said that he had remembered once or twice to do so: ‘When I pass the chapel where she was baptized I can still conjure up her tall figure, swathed in black, looking like some strange, eccentric bird and Father Caraman pouring water over her forehead in the ancient rite. She seemed like an ageing princess come home from exile.’37

  In these months, Sitwell was working on one of the best poems of her old age. ‘His Blood Colours My Cheek’, dedicated to D’Arcy and published by Caraman in the Month, was based on a saying of St Agnes. It is reminiscent of Yeats in its depiction of a soul fastened to a dying animal, but it is also fastened to the animal’s million years of evolution. The poem contrasts two visions of ascent – the small ambitions of the insect and the longing of the human heart for light:

  […]

  I, an old dying woman, tied

  To the winter’s hopelessness

  And to a wisp of bone

  Clothed in the old world’s outworn foolishness

  – A poor Ape-cerement

  With all its rags of songs, loves, rages, lusts, and flags of death,

  Say this to you,

  My father Pithecanthropus Erectus, your head once filled with primal night,

  You who stood at last after the long centuries

  Of the anguish of the bone

  Reaching upward towards the loving, the all-understanding sun –

  To you, who no more walk on all fours like the first

  Gardener and grave-digger, yet are listening

  Where, born from zero, little childish leaves and lives begin!

  I hear from the dust the small ambitions rise.

  The White Ant whispers: ‘Could I be Man’s size,

  My cylinders would stretch three hundred feet

  In air, and Man would look at me with different eyes!’

  And there the Brazilian insect all day long

  Challenges the heat with its heavy noise:

  ‘Were I as great as Man, my puny voice

  Would stretch from Pole to Pole, no other sound

  Be audible. By this dictatorship the round

  World would be challenged – from my uproar would a new

  Civilisation of the dust be born, the old world die like dew.’

  […]

  But I see the sun, large as the journeying foot of Man, see the great traveller

  Fearing no setting, going straight to his destination,

  So I am not dismayed.

  His Blood colours my cheek; –

  No more eroded by the seas of the world’s passions and greeds, I rise

  As if I never had been ape, to look in the compassionate, the all-seeing Eyes.38

  This poem was followed in the summer of 1958 by ‘The Outsiders’ – a much slighter piece occasioned by Sitwell’s anger at the government’s failure to remove the criminal ban on private homosexual acts, as recommended by the Wolfenden Report of 1957. This poem was probably inspired by her worries about Osbert. In the absence of mercy, the supposedly ‘Damned’ crawl away to

  the Dead Sea shore. Their bliss,

  Their love, they knew now was a Pillar of Salt,

  From whom they had hoped to win Oblivion’s Kiss.39

  The phrase ‘Pillar of Salt’ was the old play on her own name Edith – the wife of Lot. The passage seems to say that because of the law homosexuals were condemned to the same desert of rejection that she herself had long inhabited.

  In May, Sitwell recited Façade at Oxford, where she had a long talk with Salter and told her much of the story of her early life. The performance itself took place in the Town Hall with Peter Stadlen conducting. At the rehearsal the John Piper screen and its wooden frame fell, passing within inches of where Sitwell was seated at the front of the stage. It was caught by Stadlen’s wife who fell to her knees and held the frame for a moment in a posture Sitwell compared to Christ carrying his cross.40

  In Oxford, Sitwell met two of the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Corso told her he was compiling an anthology to be illustrated with photographs of the poets in the nude; Sitwell declined his invitation to contribute. They were in town to give readings, including one at New College, a hotbed for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Corso read out his poem: ‘O bomb I love you / I want to kiss your clank, eat your boom.’ Members of the college poetry society called him a Fascist and threw shoes. He retaliated by calling them a bunch of creeps. Ginsberg tried to explain the poem, but ran into a wall of political orthodoxy, so he called them a bunch of assholes. Then both men walked out.41

  Sitwell invited them to luncheon at the Sesame Club. They were several hours late. Quentin Stevenson went out to the street to look for them. Appearing at last, they announced that they were high.42 Corso had brought a copy of his book Gasoline, with the inscription: ‘For Sitwell … paeans, lyric hats, fennels, all for assured company … There’s the Empress penguin, the King penguin, and the Ringed-neck penguin … Only penguin to have for pet is Ringed-neck because all other penguins must be refrigerated. I had a dream last night that I had a tall regnant Emperor penguin, but no refrigerator … anyway with love … Gregory Corso 1958.’43

  In roll-neck sweaters and jeans, they sat on either side of Sitwell and traded stories with her about the horrors of childhood. Perhaps in recognition of their recent adventure, the menu included an ice-cream dish, ‘bombe à l’américaine’.44 Sitwell wrote to James Purdy:

  They behaved with great courtesy. The poor boy with the sweet expression [Corso] had, he told me, been sent to prison at the age of 17 for three years for organising a bank robbery! If ever, in my life, I saw anyone who had obviously been sweetened and in a way reformed, by such a terrible experience, it was that boy. I am sure he is a kind of haunted saint, – a saint who has lost his way. For he has lost it. The other looked like a famished wolf … In an interview given to [the New York Times] the poor boy who had been in prison said that at a recital he gave of his poems in Paris, he had removed all his clothes, and recited as he was when he was born.45

  According to Salter, the conversation moved from the worth of Aldous Huxley’s experiments with mescaline to the three younger poets’ use of marijuana to heighten sensibility. This surprised Sitwell who suggested that poets naturally had extreme sensibility as part of their equipment. When they left, they declared her an ‘angel’ and she told them that they were the hope of poetry. She later wrote of Ginsberg that there was ‘no more important young poet, no young poet of greater gifts writing at this time’.46

  The day after their luncheon, Sitwell received a letter from an Oxford don, probably Bowra, detailing the antics of Corso and Ginsberg: ‘I took to my bed, and lay there with my mouth open pondering!’47 A story went around Oxford that the Beats had offered Sitwell heroin but that she turned it down because it made her come out in spots. In late 1959, Life magazine included the tale in an article on the Beats, bringing down a savage letter from Sitwell: ‘This is the most vulgar attack, actuated by an almost insane malice … You had better apologize, publicly, both to Mr Ginsberg and me immediately.’ Ginsberg, too, denied the heroin story and, knowing what was best for them, the magazine printed an apology on 8 February 1960. The experience confirmed the opinion of the press that she had expressed to Graham Greene: ‘Really it is the lowest profession: or do you think that drug-trafficking is lower? I doubt it!’48

  On 16 May 1958, Sitwell received a distressing letter from Charles Musk about her overdraft, which now stood at £2400 above security: ‘We feel sure you will a
ppreciate that we could not agree to allow such a position to continue indefinitely, and in the circumstances we shall be glad to learn, at your convenience, whether you are in a position to deposit any further approved security with us.’ In a desperate move, Sitwell offered to lay aside for the bank half the money from the anthology and The Queens and the Hive. She also offered the manuscript of an autobiography that she said she was writing. Unless she was able to repay the debt, the bank could hold the manuscript as its property to be published after her death and the deaths of her brothers. Musk responded gently to her proposal saying that the bank would be ‘honoured’ to receive her manuscripts when they were ready.49 In 1951, Lehmann had suggested she write a memoir, but she had refused, largely because she did not want to trespass on Osbert’s ground.50 In 1958, she had various autobiographical fragments lying about from earlier attempts and had written a magazine article on ‘Coming to London’ about her years at Pembridge Mansions, yet was too absorbed in other work to get the new memoir properly started.

  That summer, Sitwell was elected a vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, along with Sir Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham, C. Day-Lewis, and the translator E. V. Rieu. However, it was also a summer of migraines as she worked her way through a last pile of proofs for the anthology. Ted Weeks set her another task, as she explained to Sachie: ‘He has sent me over, in two detachments, 8000 sheets for me to sign with my name. Yes, eight thousand! This isn’t a joke, it is true. I have had fearful trouble with the Customs, who naturally think, either that the sheets bear invisible tracings of the latest atomic weapons, or else conceal some new way of smuggling cocaine. However they are now rescued, and my life is one long hell signing them.’51

  Little, Brown released The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry on 12 November 1958. Sitwell had been given essentially a free hand to compile a book of whatever she thought good or important. In the course of 1092 pages she did just that. David Daiches’s review in the New York Times (16 November 1958) described it as ‘generous, exciting, original, disorganized, unequal and sometimes acutely exasperating’; most other reviewers said much the same thing. Daiches simply could not understand, among much else, her exclusion of Johnson, Crabbe, Landor, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, as well as her devoting sixteen pages to the Welsh poet David Jones. Sitwell was plainly declaring war on received opinion – her poets were the visionaries, rhapsodists, and metrical innovators. Thinning out the mid-eighteenth century, she gave most space (twelve pages) there to Christopher Smart. The Romantics are massively represented. An eminent Victorian bore is poked in the eye: Matthew Arnold gets a single page, but Tennyson, Whitman, and Hopkins about fifteen each. She wrote a long letter to the newspaper (11 January 1959) justifying her choices, especially with regard to Jones (who was also a great favourite of T. S. Eliot’s). Although devoted to Johnson’s prose, she felt it was impossible to cut a passage out of ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, adding, memorably, that she did not include George Crabbe because she was not a sadist. She ended her letter asking for pity not blame: ‘It is terrible to find oneself a solitary, highly unpopular electric eel in a pool peopled by worthy, slightly somnolent flat-fish.’