Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  Victor Gollancz published the anthology in England a year later; again, most reviewers thought the book quirky, brilliant, eccentric, and often wrong. G. S. Fraser, in the TLS (1 January 1960), took just this position, but he also observed that while Sitwell’s introductions to the poets were historically simplistic, her technical observations were very subtle. He added: ‘Lots of theoretical critics, for instance, have jibbed at Dame Edith’s notion of “texture”; nearly every competent practising reviewer of poetry uses it.’ Actually, the idea had gained currency in the rarefied world of critical theorists, among them John Crowe Ransom, who defined a poem as ‘a logical structure having a local texture’ (his emphasis).52 Sitwell’s admirer, Northrop Frye, discussed the idea in his Anatomy of Criticism,53 as did W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in their famous essay ‘The Affective Fallacy’.54 Following Sitwell’s own example of avoiding sadism, I cannot dwell on this point, except to say that Sitwell – often taken, even by such friends as Spender, Auden, and Connolly, to be a person of no ideas – contributed more to our understanding of literature than she is given credit for.

  Sitwell still had to finish her book on Queen Elizabeth, but her time was being eaten up, oddly enough, by leprosy. In November 1958, she heard that Graham Greene was making plans to research his novel, eventually entitled A Burnt-Out Case, at a léproserie in the Congo. She wrote to him from Montegufoni: ‘Osbert and I are horrified to hear of your proposed sojourn among the lepers. But we feel you ought to have a little preliminary experience, think of us as moral lepers, and come here on your way.’ She recommended that he read a book she had once encouraged John Lehmann to publish, Miracle at Carville (1952), by a Catholic of ‘beautiful, touching faith’ named Betty Martin who underwent an experimental sulphone treatment for leprosy and was cured.55

  Nowadays, the term leper is thought offensive. In his history of the disease in modern times, Tony Gould calls it the ‘odious L-word’.56

  Still, there is no telling this part of the story without it. When Sitwell returned to London in March, she fell ‘into the iron grip of a Leper’s Stepmother’, something she likened to an instrument of torture:

  It is all, really, Graham Greene’s fault that I got involved. Graham Greene came to luncheon with me two days after his return from a Leper Hospital in Belgian East Africa, where he had spent – I think – two months. So leprosy was much in my thoughts. A few days after this, I got lumbago, and the Evening Standard (which, I think, hires spies on the telephone exchange,) rang me up, pestering me, asking what was really the matter, and enquiring if one of their young ladies could come and see me. ‘Better not,’ I replied, ‘for I have everything infectious excepting leprosy.’

  This comment appeared in print and caused the stepmother of a man who had been infected in India to write and tell Sitwell that the disease was not infectious, and that her words were humiliating to patients in the two English leprosariums. Having no idea that there were such places in England, Sitwell apologised immediately and discovered that the stepmother herself was poor and strangely afflicted. Salter tells how, for many months, Sitwell sent the woman a weekly hamper of groceries worth five pounds, but its recipient was beyond helping.

  About a year later Sitwell explained it all to Benjamin Britten’s friend Princess Margaret of Hesse: ‘she took to writing to me, literally every day – and sometimes twice a day, with a list of grievances – amongst which are the facts that – apart from her stepson being a Leper, her husband, who is 78, suffers from Lolita-trouble, (so that, as the police disapprove of this, he is always being snatched away from her and incarcerated either in jail or in a lunatic asylum,) and that clergymen fly like the wind when they see her.’57 On one occasion, Sitwell instituted a search in her room for a lost envelope from a leprosarium. It is impossible to catch leprosy from such an object, but Sitwell was convinced that all sorts of germs could travel in envelopes. Around November 1959, Sitwell had her doctor write to the woman and say that she was too sick to correspond further.

  After about a year of working for Sitwell, Elizabeth Salter noticed that her employer was becoming more and more irritable. On 5 September 1959, Sitwell told her she was ‘horribly depressed’.58 As often happened at such moments, she wrote a cranky letter – in this case to the editor of the Daily Mirror on 9 September about ‘the horrible story of George Chrobruk, of Hadylane, Chesterfield, who poked a cat out of a tree, and allowed his two Alsatian dogs to tear it to pieces – a process which lasted for seven minutes. This Monster was – fined £3. When will it be possible for a proper punishment to be inflicted for cruelty? My own feeling is that a revival of the stocks would be the only way in which to put a stop to this.’ Since Sitwell was seldom cheerful in the years that remained, letters like this proliferated.

  She also began to complain about Evelyn Wiel. The owners of the house in rue Saint-Dominique were trying to sell it and wanted her out, and it seems that Evelyn hoped Edith would set her up somewhere else. In the end, she was able to stay, but her rent increased, and she complained about debts. Though eighty-one, she mentioned that she was still giving English lessons to bring in money. Although her need was real, and she had no one else to help her, she did try to work on Edith’s emotions. It was not a good time for this, as Edith’s accountants had had to file appeals over her taxes.

  Edith wrote to Salter from Montegufoni around November 1958: ‘For three days I couldn’t keep any food down, and got no sleep at all. The nights were an absolute nightmare of retching, and a kind of mental horror. This was simply brought on by the Income Tax badgering me to send them details I have not got here, and by poor darling Evelyn’s plaints.’ She explained to Salter how a third of her inherited income had gone to the Rootham sisters: ‘[Evelyn] has got nearly all my pictures, and now won’t come over to England although I pay for everything, because she says she would “have to get so many things.” She really behaves as if she were Garbo or Monroe. (She had £50 out of my prize last year). That family is a damned nuisance, and of no interest. Oh dear, I had not meant to go in for this long diatribe.’59

  Sitwell’s diatribes need to be taken with caution; though now very cantankerous, she continued to care about Evelyn, to send over three hundred pounds annually in a quarterly allowance and gifts, and to exchange warm letters that gave pleasure to both. On 20 January 1959, Edith wrote to Evelyn, ‘I hate to bother you. But there is going to be a Memorial Exhibition of Pavlik’s work. So please, darling, will you bring over the four he painted for me, and the large drawing of a woman sitting on the sand, and also that of a child lying yelling under a flag, with an old woman bending over it.’ Evelyn decided against an early visit because of the expense, so Salter and de Lacerda were sent to collect them. Around 9 May, they visited the flat in Paris, to find Evelyn waiting for them amid cobwebs and peeling wallpaper. On the mantel were stacks of Edith’s books and in a back room her paintings and drawings – many more than they had expected. Driving back to England with the pictures that Sitwell had asked her to fetch, Salter realised that the sale of the whole Tchelitchew collection could get her employer out of debt.60 Evelyn delayed about the rest of the canvases, saying that to send them would cost a small fortune61 – presumably in duty – but she also liked having the artworks in her flat. Quick to see herself as Sitwell’s sole friend and protector, Salter thought Evelyn charming but ‘unscrupulously mercenary’.62 That is a hard phrase. Edith herself was probably closer to the truth in the 1930s and 1940s when she wrote of Evelyn as clinging to the outward signs of a vanished dignity.

  The demands on Sitwell’s time were unrelenting. The founder of Christian Action, Canon John Collins, wanted to involve her in his work against apartheid, and his wife Diana Collins (later Dame Diana Collins) wanted her help for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. These causes were close to Sitwell’s heart, but Caraman thought she should hold back: ‘Your poetry can change the world more effectively and you must devote yourself to that without any fears or worries that you are o
r might be discourteous to cranks or enthusiasts.’63 The Queens and the Hive, though nearly finished, was at a standstill. Quite apart from the effects of liquor, her legs were now atrophying, and she collapsed twice at a reading in Florence in February.64 Aspiring writers made their usual demands; she received on average two unsolicited manuscripts per day: ‘I never read manuscripts in any case though I always glance at them.’65 The Inland Revenue prodded her with ‘unanswerable questions’, including, bizarrely, whether she had given satisfaction in her last situation: ‘I think I shall reply that I was last employed in a menial capacity by Miss Imregard A. Potter, of 8 The Grove, Leamington Spa, in 1911, but that I did not give satisfaction. There was some small unpleasantness, and I was dismissed without a character.’66

  25

  I PREFER CHANEL NUMBER 5

  ‘Great in far greater ways, Dame Edith Sitwell is a virtuoso of rhythm and accent,’ said Marianne Moore in a lecture at the Johns Hopkins Poetry Festival in November 1958.1 Higher praise was hard to come by, and most poets would simply bask in it. Instead, Sitwell chose to fight another odd rearguard action in the spring, when she returned to England. She went after an article that praised Christopher Logue for ‘Jazzetry’ – combining poetry and jazz: ‘I am all for Mr. Logue and his friends continuing to recite their verses to jazz if it amuses them. But I shall be grateful if their efforts are not hailed as a new experimental art-form, and if they do not claim that they are its inventors’ (The Times, 30 April 1959). Sitwell wanted it known that she and William Walton had been there first – thirty-seven years earlier.

  Logue sent in a letter (5 May), explaining what he thought were differences between their inspirations and remarking that this particular sentence was hurtful and unworthy of a famous poet. On it went, with even Allen Tate writing from All Souls (12 May) to scold Logue for not admitting Sitwell’s originality. The argument spread to Encounter and the Daily Mail. For once, however, Sitwell felt foolish and regretful over her letters to the editor. She decided that she had done him an ‘injustice’, that he had not stolen her idea, and that he was indeed an able poet. Later, she saw his translations from the Iliad and wrote: ‘I regret having had any dispute with you. It grieves me that I was not one of the first to praise you.’2

  Sitwell’s appearance, quick wit, and supply of anecdotes made her a natural for television. On 6 May 1959, she was interviewed by the former politician John Freeman on his new programme Face to Face. Other guests wilted under Freeman’s questioning, and when Evelyn Waugh appeared a year later he resorted to grim stonewalling. Sitwell, however, was at her ease, defending her manner of dress and her taste for honours, describing her parents’ marriage, and finally declaring that her poetry grew out of the fire of love for God and man. She appeared from time to time on other programmes, such as The Brains Trust, but the questioning was too restrictive for her to get proper mileage out of her anecdotes.3

  At Benjamin Britten’s request, she composed a poem that spring titled ‘Praise We Great Men’ and read it on 10 June at a concert in the Festival Hall, as part of the Purcell–Handel Festival. Intended to be recited rather than read on the page, the poem repeats the word ‘Praise’ in an effort to evoke Christopher Smart’s poems, while it also tries to take up the tradition of poems for music on St Cecilia’s Day. Dryden and Pope had written such poems, and Purcell and Handel had set them to music.4 While not an important poem in Sitwell’s canon, it had a curious afterlife. For years, Britten wanted to compose music for it, and it was the last thing he turned his hand to in 1976, but he died without having completed the score.5

  Praising God in verse came easily for Sitwell, although not otherwise. The previous summer she had told Father Caraman that she was still unable to pray. He wrote back: ‘You are really praying all the time you are thinking about God (in any way) and about all his creation. Any kind of contact with the mind or heart with God is prayer so you need not worry, dear Edith.’6 The two of them conspired to find new converts. For many years, Caraman hoped, in vain, to win over Osbert, so that he might feel ‘at home in the universe’.7 Sachie, a resolute unbeliever, was never a candidate for conversion. In 1958–9, Caraman had his eye on Rosamond Lehmann and was upset when she decided not to convert because she hoped to remarry.8 Caraman’s main advice to Sitwell herself was that she slow down and get rest – and he urged her to skip Mass if she was suffering from migraines.9

  Apart from a few public appearances, Sitwell remained at Renishaw from 16 May to 5 October. She told Salter: ‘I am trying to avoid a very bad breakdown. My last three years have been appalling.’10 At the beginning of August she told Salter to refuse all invitations to read or lecture during the autumn and winter.11 At the beginning of September, she told Evelyn Wiel that she was not long for this world.12

  Still, Sitwell made an adventure out of her reading at the Edinburgh Festival on 9 September. She and Salter set out in a chauffeured car from Sheffield with a supply of egg sandwiches, ham, liver sausages, smoked salmon, and chipolatas, which were to serve as a travelling lunch and then as supper once they arrived. In fact, Sitwell now only toyed with her food. She probably had more of a zest for the bottle each of white wine and gin that also went north with them. The matinée reading at the Lyceum Theatre nearly turned into a riot; the audience complained that they could not hear her, so she told them to pay more attention. The complaints continued, so she told them to get hearing aids. Salter ran backstage to have the curtain lowered, but by the time she got there the crowd had calmed down. Sitwell continued to read her own poems, some of Osbert’s, and her old standby, the sleepwalking speech from Macbeth. She was annoyed when she heard of Salter’s attempt to lower the curtain.13 She did not want to be pulled out of a good brawl.

  However rambunctious, she was growing more frail and soon took one of her worst tumbles. At the Sesame Club, she usually occupied a double room on the top floor,14 where her bed, in great disrepair, was propped up on telephone directories. On 17 November, she reported to Georgia:

  At about 1 in the morning on Friday week, I, unable to sleep, was reaching out to find my lamp, (which had been put as far away from me on the table as possible) in order to read. I must have got too near the edge of this exquisite bed (which I think must have been one on which Burke and Hare despatched their victims, hired specially from Madame Tussaud’s for me) when the whole thing gave way, and I was precipitated with my face against the iron part of the other bed. By the grace of heaven, I’d knocked over the telephone, in crashing, and the night porter rang up and said ‘Are you all right?’ I said ‘No.’

  The next thing she remembered was that she came to in bed with the staff of the club hovering around her. She had a blackened right eye and bruises going down her neck.15

  Shortly after, Sitwell made the two-day journey to Montegufoni. She had handed the manuscript of The Queens and the Hive to the novelist Michael Stapleton, an editor with the Oxford University Press, and a friend of Salter and Gordon Watson. He had earlier done research on Queen Elizabeth I for Sitwell, so Macmillan commissioned him to bring the nearly complete manuscript into publishable form.16 Sitwell turned her attention to a selection of the poetry of Swinburne, but her plans were interrupted by another injury, which she described for Sachie on 18 December:

  Ever since I had that accident in London, I have been terrified of complete darkness, so when the light went out, and I had a candle but no matches, I got out of bed to try to find another switch – couldn’t, so felt my way back to my bed – caught hold of what I thought was the foot of the bed, but it wasn’t; it was a very flimsy chair, which gave way, hurling me on to my spine onto the floor, where I lay in agony for about 5 hours, till I was called, when I was picked up and put on my bed really screaming with pain. I couldn’t stand, or turn in bed, and am only now, after a fortnight, able to sit up without acute pain.17

  She was bedridden through most of the winter. At times she had to be carried downstairs by the butler. When making plans for a return journey on
10 March 1960, she asked to be met by a wheelchair at Calais, Dover, and London, as it was now impossible for her to walk any distance.18

  In what seems to have been a pleasant and somewhat recuperative period, she stayed at the Sesame until 28 May. There was one troubling event: on 19 May, J.W. Nicholson, a collector of taxes, threatened proceedings for arrears of £364 3s.19 This was prevented by the usual juggling, but she had almost no room to manoeuvre. At the same time, Pavlik’s old friend Parker Tyler pressed her for information for his biography of the painter. Some months earlier, she had heard from Tyler and told him that she and Tchelitchew had had ‘the same kind of friendship that existed between Michelangelo and Princess Colonna’. Tyler came to visit her at the Sesame in late May, and although she wanted to be helpful, her dealings with him were unsettling.20