Edith Sitwell
Page 50
Sitwell’s depression and drinking were at their worst at Montegufoni or at Renishaw, where she watched Osbert shaking and she had to contend with David Horner, who, as Lorna Andrade told Geoffrey Elborn, spoke cuttingly and treated Edith unpleasantly. Edith advised Andrade, as the other woman in the house, that the two of them must keep quiet.21 Horner was himself a drinker though he held it better than Edith did.22 Undoubtedly, he had heard about some of her remarks on his sexual adventures and so regarded her as an enemy.
That summer Sitwell suffered an emotional collapse, partly owing to Tyler’s book and partly owing to the atmosphere of the house. She wept about Pavlik and took his paintings down from the wall, offering one to Andrade, who thought she was talking and behaving madly.23 At other times, she claimed that Osbert had obstructed several of her marriage proposals because of the young men’s quarterings. She also provoked David Horner by speaking, he thought incoherently, about Oscar Wilde’s arrest and the Cleveland Street Affair of 1889 (a rent-boy scandal in which Lady Ida’s cousin, Lord Somerset, had been involved). Turning the tables on her for her earlier attempts to get rid of him, Horner now wanted her out of the house. He thought she had ‘persecution mania and paranoia with frustrated sex thrown in’,24 and declared that she belonged in a mental hospital.
By the end of July, she had been admitted to Claremont Nursing Home in Sheffield, where, as Geoffrey Elborn notes, it was discovered that she was suffering from a kidney infection related to long-untreated cystitis, a condition that the doctors thought was probably responsible for her rage, malice, and other mental aberrations.25 She revived quickly, and charmed the doctors and nurses, but they had still to reduce her intake of alcohol, get her to eat more food, and begin walking again. In the meantime, her patience was sorely tried. She was pestered by nuns who came to peer at her and by priests wanting to hear her confession.26
The question of Edith Sitwell’s future was being fought out between David Horner and Georgia Sitwell. Horner was adamant that Edith should not come back to Renishaw, even for a week to gather up her things since she might get around Osbert and settle in again. Edith had spoken harshly of Georgia many times, but now it was Georgia who insisted that such treatment would be cruel.27 Edith’s stay at the Claremont stretched well into August. She did return to Renishaw, but almost immediately fell in her room and broke her left wrist. She stayed then for a month in the Royal Hospital in Sheffield, at the end of which she was wrapped in blankets and carried by car to London. Her family had arranged for her to go to another nursing home. Instead, she went to the Sesame Club on 18 September and took up her old life. She told Benjamin Britten in October: ‘The Great Reaper undoubtedly made a dead set at me, but I intend to resist him!’28
She was returning to London in a time of controversy. The Lady Chatterley trial took place in late October 1960. Following the lead of Alfred Knopf in the United States, Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, decided to put out an unexpurgated version of Lawrence’s novel in Britain. In a test case for the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, the main prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones famously asked: ‘Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ After testimony from a string of cultural luminaries, the jury returned an acquittal and marked a new era in the publishing business and in British culture.29
While the case was going on, Edith Sitwell had luncheon with Gore Vidal, during which she declared that her family had never forgiven Lawrence for the book. Vidal told her that Lawrence had never written it, and that the style and the dates confirmed that it was really the work of Truman Capote. Sitwell thought it was stupid of her not to have noticed, since the clues were there. Announcing that they had to move quickly before the case was decided, she called for paper and pen, and prepared to write to the judge. Vidal insisted that it should be a letter to The Times, so Sitwell began: ‘Dear sir, I am a little girl of seventy-four and I have it, on the best authority, that the actual author of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” …’ Sadly, the rest of the letter did not survive the luncheon. Writing in the 1990s, Vidal added: ‘I remember her best like that, in a pool of light in a corner of the Sesame Club dining room.’30
Sitwell was now writing the autobiography that she had promised to the bank. Indeed, back in April her agents had sold serial rights to the Observer, which on 13 November published her suddenly topical sketch of D. H. Lawrence and a shorter one of Aldous Huxley. This was followed on 20 November by her sanitised accounts of Dylan Thomas and Roy Campbell, and on 27 November by sketches of Wyndham Lewis and Pavel Tchelitchew. Since Lewis had died in 1957, there was no longer any fear of lawsuits. She brought out her anecdotes about the rats in his studio and his hunt for a filthy collar. She concluded that, despite considerable gifts, Lewis had never produced a wholly satisfactory picture or book.
A rebuke came on 18 December. In a letter to the editor, T. S. Eliot dismissed her description of sitting to Lewis as having no resemblance to his own. In fact, their experiences were very different. Lewis would hardly have pressed Eliot to have sex with him. In her sketch Sitwell did not refer to sexual advances, but they still shaped her attitude towards him. Eliot went on to claim that Lewis was one of the most important writers of his generation. He also described the sketch as ‘gossipy’; this is odd since Sitwell’s account of Lewis, though exaggerated, is first-hand. Sitwell’s comments on Eliot’s marriage and his treatment of Hayward had circulated in London, so perhaps it was pay-back time.
Sitwell wrote to Graham Greene:
I am in a fearful temper with the late Mr. T. S. Eliot – who wrote a very priggish letter about me to The Observer. (He always was very priggish!) I have not read his Book of Practical Cats. Can you tell me if it is true that he is the author of these lines,
‘I tort I taw a Puddy-Tat a-creeping up on me!’
‘You did. You taw a Puddy-Tat.
The Puddy-Tat was me!’
I wonder who put it into my head that he is the author!31
Sitwell’s work on the autobiography was hampered by noise. She wrote to Georgia in November: ‘there is an electric drill in the house next door, which is attached to my bedroom wall, and goes on all day from 8.30 to 5.30.’32 The publisher Longman Green was converting into offices the building adjacent to the Sesame Club on Grosvenor Street. The noise was unbearable but, in the spirit of resisting the Great Reaper, she refused to switch rooms. Instead, she wrote letters of complaint to everyone she could think of – including her former publisher now ensconced at 10 Downing Street. She proposed to buy vipers at Harrods, fatten them up, and then mail them in parcels to the builders. She telephoned Scotland Yard and said she was going to slap the faces of the workmen; the officer who took the call said that if she did they would be obliged to restrain her. In January 1961, she became vice-president of the Mayfair branch of the Noise Abatement Society, and on behalf of that organisation conducted an enormous press conference at the club. A new friend, the novelist Henry Cecil, eventually spoke to one of the firm’s directors who happened to be a warden at his church; they came up with a plan to stop the noise at certain hours, but this did not help much. She simply had to wait till it was over.33
Salter believed that the battle over noise, silly as it was, took a toll on Sitwell’s morale and on her health. She developed a disease of the middle ear, and her diet was reduced to smoked salmon and champagne, which she shared with the two nurses required to tend her at the club. Around the beginning of June, she developed a fever of 105°, and one of her nurses thought it time to call a priest from Farm Street. Sitwell pulled through that crisis, but, according to Salter, she realised through these months that she must die soon, prompting her to write ‘A Girl’s Song in Winter’:
That lovely dying white swan the singing sun
Will soon be gone. But seeing the snow falling, who could tell one
From the other? The snow, that swan-plumaged circling creature, said,
�
�Young girl, soon the tracing of Time’s bird-feet and the bird-feet of snow
Will be seen upon your smooth cheek. Oh soon you will be
Colder, my sweet, than me!’34
The Sesame Club was the wrong place for a woman in Sitwell’s condition, and with its seasonal closure coming in August something else had to be arranged. After consulting with Sachie and Georgia, Salter rented a flat at 42 Greenhill in Hampstead, which had the right features: it was large enough to receive guests, was centrally heated, and had no stairs to impede a wheelchair. The transition was not easy. During the autumn, Salter herself had to go into hospital. When she came out, she discovered that Sitwell’s resident nurse was quarrelling with the chef hired for parties, and that the housekeeper had hung Edith’s underwear in the sitting room. By December there was a more sinister development: the nurse was drugging Sitwell into a compliant and incoherent state. With Sachie’s backing, Salter took over direct management of the household, sacked the nurse, and hired the more diligent and humane Sister Doris Farquhar.35 Sitwell liked and trusted Farquhar but described her for Lady Snow (the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson) as a constant interrupter of work: ‘She always bounds in saying, “I know you hate it, but it has to be done.” I never know what. She then turns the Hoover on, because she says what will People think of Her if she doesn’t.’36
Although absorbed in her own problems, Sitwell was distressed to hear of the suffering of her friends. ‘H.D.’ had been living since 1946 in a hotel-cum-sanatorium in Switzerland but was evicted with the other residents in the spring of 1961. She died on 27 September. Sitwell was saddened but also angry, declaring that she would like to ‘strangle’ the people behind the eviction, which she believed had hastened the poet’s death. She wrote to Bryher: ‘Well, we have lost someone you loved, and who was loved by many, and one of the best poets of our time.’37
Since 1958, Osbert had been considering brain surgery as a treatment for his Parkinson’s disease. He finally underwent the procedure on 4 October 1960. On 15 October, Edith reported to Hal Lydiard Wilson that he could now use his right leg, and that they believed his right hand would soon cease trembling (it did, to a degree). These improvements came as a great relief to her. However, the benefits were temporary, and Philip Ziegler tells us that by mid-1963 Osbert slipped back into his old condition.38
But the news was not all bad. Robert Covington (the accountant) and Charles Musk were trying to clean up her debts. In the summer of 1961 she accepted the advice of friends to sell off her manuscripts and letters. A dodgy private collector managed to see Sitwell alone and purchased one of her notebooks cheaply, so Salter put the matter in the hands of Sotheby’s. At the same time, Salter finally proposed a sale of the Tchelitchews. Sitwell accepted that this painful measure might encourage the art world to take a new look at Pavlik’s work. Salter made two trips to Paris that autumn to get paintings and papers out of the flat at rue Saint-Dominique; a third was necessary later. It was a difficult job, as Evelyn could not remember where things were hidden, and she did not like giving up the artworks when they were found.39 Doubtless she felt as if a part of her meagre world was being taken from her.
The sale of manuscripts took place at Sotheby’s on 12 December 1960 and 19 June 1961. The chief item was a long series of ledgers that contained the drafts of many of her works going back to about 1910. The ultimate purchaser was the University of Texas, and Sitwell came away with about fifteen thousand pounds. Thirty-nine Tchelitchews were sold in an auction on 13 December – many for several hundred pounds apiece, the wax mask of Sitwell for a thousand pounds, and a portrait for twelve hundred.40 John Lehmann understood that the sale of the pictures brought in a little over ten thousand pounds in total.41 In a princely act, Kenneth Clark and Minnie (Astor) Fosburgh bought some of the Tchelitchews and returned them to her; she was delighted to have again ‘the lovely pictures which have been so much of my life. You have filled a gap which would have been otherwise entirely empty. And I can never be grateful enough to you.’42 Her debts were settled; while the sales did not make her rich, she had nothing more to fear from the Inland Revenue or the bank.
That winter, Osbert and David were at Montegufoni. On the night of 7 March, David tumbled down a flight of stairs into a cellar, and Luigi Pestelli, the butler, found him there unconscious in the morning. His skull was fractured and he had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, along with a broken right arm and other injuries. The cause of his fall is unclear: Christabel Aberconway told John Pearson that David had been chasing a young cook, but there is no direct evidence that David’s fall was caused by anything other than drinking.43 Two days after it happened, Lorna Andrade wrote to Georgia that he kept repeating the word ‘obviously’ and was unaware that he had lost most of his power to communicate. Edith went through the motions but could not summon her usual sympathy for a suffering person. Despite a gradual recovery, David Horner had no role in what remained of her life.
Since they were both in such poor shape, Edith and Osbert now saw each other only occasionally. Sachie and Georgia became more involved in her affairs, as did their younger son Francis (1935–2004), who had spent most of the 1950s abroad. After his National Service in the Navy, he joined the Shell Corporation. Among other postings with the company, Francis spent two years in Kenya, where his houseboy dubbed him ‘Father Tum-Tum’. Back in England, he went into advertising and public relations. For years Osbert had pressed Edith to make David Horner the beneficiary of her will, but she sympathised with Francis, who stood to inherit little of Osbert’s wealth, so she made him her chief heir. As her literary executor until his death in 2004, he was tireless in promoting her works. His most imaginative move was allowing Alannah Currie, late of the Thompson Twins, to record Façade to club music.44
Amid trumpets, Dame Edith Sitwell turned seventy-five on 7 September 1962. She was so inundated with cards, messages and flowers that she had to put a notice in The Times (12 September 1962) thanking the senders and promising to reply as she was able. Macmillan capitalised by bringing out two new books: The Outsiders, a slim volume of poems written since 1957, and, at last, The Queens and the Hive. At the same time, they reissued Fanfare for Elizabeth. Within two weeks The Queens and the Hive, the size of which Sitwell compared to a telephone book, went into a fourth printing and was at the top of the bestseller lists. Reporters were beating on her door; she told Sir John Gielgud that Sister Farquhar spent much of her time throwing them downstairs.45
The coverage often dwelt on Sitwell’s affinities with the Virgin Queen, something she herself took seriously. While writing the book, she had had an astrologer do a detailed comparison of their charts: ‘To get away from astrological jargon, I should say that both mentally and emotionally you are akin to the great Queen. True, the mental side of your Horoscope is a great deal more inventive and artistic than was hers, while you lack the wonderful Mars link that she had with the common people.’ The astrologer also hinted that she was the reincarnation of Elizabeth46 – a point that came up from time to time in her conversations and interviews. Reincarnation is a slippery business. Years later, Francis Sitwell invited the Spenders’ son-in-law Barry Humphries to open a horticultural show at Weston Hall, and in the character of Dame Edna Everage, he announced rhymingly: ‘As for me, I’m no ordinary mother and wife, / I was Dame Edith Sitwell in a previous life.’47
The Queens and the Hive was dedicated to George Cukor, who still hoped to put a film of Fanfare for Elizabeth into production. He had not noticed the dedication until Noël Coward called him about it. Somewhat earlier Coward had tried to make peace with Osbert, who told him he must hold back until Coward had sorted things out with Edith. Cukor was heading to England to meet with her, so Coward asked him to convey how much he had enjoyed the new book. Cukor urged him to write a letter to her.48
When she met with Cukor, Sitwell could see immediately that her old enemy, now ‘dear Mr Coward’, had done her a favour by stirring up the producer’s interest in her work and wro
te of this to Osbert, who strongly favoured burying the hatchet.49 After receiving Coward’s kind-hearted letter, she sent him a cable on 21 September: ‘Delighted Stop Friendship never too late’, and she invited him to a concert being held in honour of her birthday.50 He could not attend, but visited her on 18 November. According to Salter, he apologised for the Whittlebot episode, and Sitwell accepted without hesitation. Coward wrote in his diary: ‘I must say I found her completely charming, very amusing and rather touching. How strange that a forty-year feud should finish so gracefully and so suddenly. I am awfully glad. She gave me her new slim volume of poems. I am fairly unrepentant about her poetry. I really think that three-quarters of it is gibberish. However, I must crush down these thoughts otherwise the dove of peace will shit on me.’51 A few days later, Coward sent Sitwell a copy of his collected short stories, and she said she liked them very much.52 In the following year he gave her one of his own paintings; it could not bear comparison with her Tchelitchews, but she was touched by the gesture.
Hedda Hopper got word of the rapprochement and wrote of it in a syndicated column.53 Sitwell warned Hopper she would punish her: ‘when I do, you won’t know what has hit you! I do not know how to address you. I cannot call you a goose, as geese saved the capitol of Rome, and no amount of cackling on your part would awaken anybody! Nor can I call you an ass. Since Balaam’s constant companion saw an angel, and recognized it. I can only imagine that you belong to the vegetable tribe, and that all the fizzing and spurting of yours is the result of a vegetable decaying.’54