In later life, Sitwell wrote of Miss King-Church as a gaoler. It is necessary to quote at length Sitwell’s story of the ‘Bastille’ as it became a standard anecdote, repeated countless times, and then formed part of the various versions of her autobiography:
When I was between eleven and twelve years old, it was noticed that my thin body stooped slightly, in a deprecating and rather frightened way; and this was due to curvature of the spine. Also my ankles, because of the delicacy of their structure, were weak.
My family, with their usual thoroughness, took the matter in hand. I was taken to a surgeon, who, in turn, placed me in the hands of an orthopaedic manufacturer, (I believe that is the correct term,) – an immensely fat gentleman, the colour of a November fog, his eyes, and all the expression they may have held, were shrouded behind black glasses … Mr. E. constructed for me a prison of iron, which reached from under my arms to below my hips; under my arms were thick pads of leather, rather reminiscent of saddlery, so that my arms could never hang to my side, and were constantly always numbed. My feet were incased in boots with steel linings, which pressed on my bones. And at night, when I went to bed, although the prison enclosing my body was removed, my legs and feet were immured in a contraption of steel, so that I could not move. The bones of my legs were tightly walled into a cage, which ran on either side of them, and my feet were strapped down onto a kind of sandal with a most complicated lock and key system of steel, about four inches deep under the soles, Miss H had charge of the key to this prison, and before she went down to dinner every night, she would lock up my feet. Sometimes she screwed them into a position pointing downwards, and the discomfort, amounting to pain, kept me awake all night. Sometimes they pointed heavenward, and then the same pain happened. It would have been impossible for me to leave my bed, even if the room was on fire.39
In Taken Care Of, Edith dubs the surgeon Dr Stout and the manufacturer Mr Steinberg. The schoolroom diary indicates that these names stand for Mr Tubby40 and Mr Ernst. Alfred Herbert Tubby was one of Britain’s pioneering orthopaedic surgeons; F. Gustav Ernst constructed orthopaedic braces for an array of purposes and made important improvements in the designs of artificial limbs. Both men wrote textbooks on their specialities.
Presumably, Lady Ida or one of her deportment-obsessed family noticed that Edith could not stand up straight. Sir George sent her to the most eminent specialist Britain had to offer, who would have confirmed, by flexibility and rotation tests and by measurement with a plumbline, that her spine was curved. Tubby held the orthodox view of the day: ‘Scoliosis is not a disease, but an alteration in the position, shape and texture of the spinal structures, dependent on long-continued pressure in an abnormal direction.’41 Although he made allowance for congenital curvatures and rickets, he generally looked for the causes in muscular weakness owing to general poor health and unsuitable occupations. Although modern research has disproved this idea,42 Tubby believed that posture was a great villain: ‘Certain attitudes are very likely to be followed by scoliosis, e.g. standing on one leg and sitting cross-legged. These cause twisting of the pelvis and rotation of the lumbar spine; so does excessive horse-exercise by girls without a reversible saddle. The exceedingly faulty arrangement of music-stools and school-desks is responsible for many cases of scoliosis.’43 Tubby goes on at length about desks and piano stools – and his opinions, which now seem silly, created nothing but trouble for a young woman who was both studious and devoted to the keyboard.
Tubby believed that children suffering from adenoids should be placed under early treatment, as this could lead to general poor health, loss of muscle tone, and subsequent curvature.44 Sitwell says that her adenoids were removed in the spring of 1900;45 however, it was not uncommon for this to be done in stages. The schoolroom diaries indicate that she was cauterised, and underwent procedures involving bougies and cocaine (as an anaesthetic) as late as 1902. The problem with her adenoids would have singled her out in Tubby’s view as a patient likely to have trouble with her spine: the nose-bone, it seems, was connected to the backbone.
From Tubby’s Deformities
On Tubby’s advice, Edith Sitwell embarked on a regime that would shape her daily life for several years. He recommended treatments to improve general health, as well as a combination of exercises and ‘recumbency’. Apart from strengthening the body, he thought it necessary for the patient to take some of the weight of the head, neck and upper extremities off the back by lying down for up to six hours per day, a restful practice that he judged ‘more efficient than suspending the head by means of a jury-mast’.46
He recommended, as in some cases specialists still do, a back-brace, which she remembered as a ‘prison of iron’. Tubby sent her to the ‘orthopædic mechanician’ F. Gustav Ernst for two fittings in March 1901. On 13 April, the schoolroom diary notes: ‘E’s boots & spinal stays arrd. from Ernst’s.’ While it is difficult to know which therapeutic boot she was wearing, it is likely that her brace followed a design by the surgeon William Adams, favoured by both Tubby and Ernst. It was constructed mostly of fabric, some leather padding, thin steel supports and shoulder straps with elastic inserts. One of the advantages of this design was its weight, usually less than five pounds.47 The apparatus must have been wearisome and limiting. It apparently did not produce great pain, but, as she put it, ‘discomfort amounting to pain’. That remembered discomfort and constraint became for her in later years a symbol of how her parents tried to reshape her personality.
However grim the episode was for a girl of thirteen, the retrospective vilification of all those involved seems unfair. There can be no doubt that Sir George was trying to get the best care possible for his daughter. Tubby and Ernst, who spent their working lives restoring capacity to broken bodies, were hardly the monsters that she depicted. In October 1901, at Tubby’s behest, she began a programme of massage. She enjoyed this part of her treatment, but it is not mentioned in her accounts of ‘my Bastille’.
There was more to the story of the boots and back-brace. She wrote of Lydia King-Church:
Although she slept in my very large room, I was never released when she went to bed. My only happiness, at this time, was that at one moment or another during the day I was able to secrete a book of poems in the fastnesses of my bed, before I was locked up for the night – for some reason she never found these. By the time I was thirteen, I knew the whole of the Rape of the Lock by heart – learnt while she was at dinner, and by the time I was fourteen, I was enriched, further, by knowing nearly all Shelley’s poems, and, a little later, most of the greatest passages in Shakespeare’s plays, and all his Sonnets by heart. These were the only poets I knew, for I lived in a very solitary world. I learned these poems in a profound secrecy, hurriedly and guiltily, sometimes by the light of a single brightly-feathered candle, whilst outside, the seas of beauty, the wildness of the spring, broke upon a magical shore.48
That her governess deprived her of books is nonsense, although she did require her charge to keep regular hours. Sitwell was encouraged to read widely, and her letters to her father are full of comments on what interested or impressed her. Sachie disputed her claim to have memorised The Rape of the Lock at fourteen, claiming that he introduced her to Pope’s works much later.49 Nonetheless, the reference to Alexander Pope is revealing. He suffered from extreme curvature of the spine as a consequence of Pott’s disease, and relied on heavy linen stays in order to move about. Sitwell’s biography of Pope, published in 1930 (just before she wrote the passages above), presents him as a supreme craftsman and formalist. Moreover, the curvature of his spine, compared by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Hervey to the mark of Cain, set him apart from ordinary society. In her account of the ‘Bastille’, Sitwell is not so much recounting facts as creating a myth of herself as a poet. Her genius and her suffering are comparable to those of Alexander Pope. As a celebrated woman who was rejected by the men she loved, Sitwell had other grounds for her sense of kinship with Pope: ‘Though he was deformed,
people with beautiful shapes surrounded him, were proud of knowing him – if he did not make love to them.’50
Undoubtedly, Edith Sitwell was an outsider in her family. Sir George preferred boys, as a general rule. Her mother, a great beauty, had little time for a plain daughter. Early on, Sitwell became conscious of her long body as awkward and inadequate. At the age of fifteen she wrote to her father about a cousin who had a parrot named ‘Wee Poll’: ‘the boys have insultingly named me Wee Poll, partly from my size and partly from the shape of my nose!’51 One element of her Bastille, she said later, was a brace worn on her nose while she was in the schoolroom: ‘a band of elastic surrounded my forehead, from which two pieces of steel (regulated by a lock and key system) descended on each side of the organ in question, with thick upholstered pads at the nostrils, turning my nose firmly to the opposite way which Nature had intended, and blocking one nostril, so that breathing was difficult.’52 Among Ernst’s designs were a number of strange devices, such as an ‘ear spring’ for fixing ears made prominent by sleeping on them or ‘the careless adjustment of the hat or bonnet’. He also made a ‘nose-truss’ intended for use when a broken nose healed badly. After an operation to rebreak it, the truss would ensure that the septum grew straight again. The device had no lock and key mechanism (indeed, none of his designs did). The removal of her adenoids indicates that Sitwell did have difficulty with her breathing passages and the truss may have been prescribed as part of her treatment, but Ernst believed that it could be used for cosmetic purposes: ‘There are, however, a large number of cartilaginous deformities which affect the personal appearance alone, and which by a perseverance in the use of an apparatus at night may easily be corrected.’53 Some of Lady Ida’s friends came to the schoolroom to peer at Sitwell in her nose-truss – an experience she never forgave or forgot.54
A nose-truss of the sort Edith Sitwell was forced to wear: ‘There are … cartilaginous deformities which affect the personal appearance alone, and which by a perserverance in the use of an apparatus at night might easily be corrected.’ (F. Gustav Ernst)
When Lydia King-Church left the Sitwells in April 1903, she wrote Sir George a letter about Edith Sitwell and her brothers. About half of it was devoted to medical questions. At a recent examination, Mr Tubby had observed an improvement in Edith’s back, which had grown broader and taller. Her feet were ‘better, but far from well yet: & are scarcely strong enough to support her weight and height’. Miss King-Church’s own opinion was that Edith’s health was much improved, but that she must not overtire herself and must keep regular hours. She urged that ‘great care be taken by everyone about her that she sits, stands and walks straight: her tendency is to develop the right shoulder & side altogether to the detriment of the left’.55 Having thanked Sir George for his kindness through the five years of her employment, she left for Rhodesia, little knowing what seeds of anger had been planted in Edith.
Louisa Sitwell took charge of finding a new governess, allowing Osbert to sit in on the interviews.56 Eventually she chose Helen Rootham, a musician who would become Sitwell’s close friend for the next thirty-five years. Her full name was Helene Edith Rootham, but for the first few years she worked for the Sitwells she went by the name Edith – making her the third by that name in the extended family, along with Edith Sitwell and the Dowager Countess of Londesborough. Born in 1875 in Bristol, she was the eighth of nine children. Her mother, Frances (née Ross), died when Helen was about ten. Her father was Samuel Rootham, a music teacher. Her uncle Daniel, who lived with his family in the house next door,57 was director of the Bristol Festival Chorus. He was also an extremely successful voice teacher, who included among his students the contralto Dame Clara Butt and the soprano Dame Eva Turner, leading singers in the first half of the twentieth century. One of Daniel’s children was Cyril Bradley Rootham, who, like Helen, was born in 1875 and died in 1938; he was the organist at St John’s College, Cambridge, and a prolific composer in the tradition of Sir Charles Stanford, under whom he studied. Cyril Rootham organised the first English performances of Kodály and Pizzetti.58 By the time Helen was fifteen, she was living in South Kensington with her eldest sister Kate,59 whose husband, Hartmann Just, rose in the civil service to become Assistant Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1907 to 1916 and was knighted in 1911.60 Sitwell came to know Kate Just fairly well and regarded her as one of the more sensible members of a difficult family. Another of Helen’s sisters, Ethel, was mentally ill and sometimes tried to kill people.61
Osbert believed that Helen Rootham misunderstood her own talents; she thought of herself primarily as a singer, whereas he described her as the best female pianist he had ever heard.62 Sacheverell was less admiring: he felt that Edith was too influenced by Helen, with too much emphasis on Swinburne and Brahms, and he noted that Edith found Debussy on her own.63 However, his recollections of Helen’s earliest years with the family are not very reliable, as she was hired when he was only five years old. Certainly, her abilities spread in several directions. Apart from music she was a translator of Rimbaud, of Serbo-Croat ballads, and of the Russian mystic Vladimir Solovyev;64 she wrote some poetry and short stories of her own, as well as criticism of music and literature. By the 1930s, Edith sensed a kind of jealousy or competitiveness from Helen, which may have arisen from her failure to develop a single talent to the full. She remained an artistic jack of all trades.
However, in 1903, Helen brought a fervour for the arts that would transform Sitwell’s life. Without Helen, Edith’s existence might have mirrored that of her Aunt Florence, dependent on her father and brothers for a roof over her head and for the meals she ate. She would not have gone beyond ‘talent’ to expertise in either poetry or music. This is an important point as the education of upper-class women sought to make them ‘accomplished’ – that is, capable of ordering in a Paris restaurant, painting a watercolour, discussing a recent book without sounding highbrow, or playing an instrument in company. The idea was not to give a young woman a profession but to make her marriageable. Sitwell’s parents would probably have sorted out a marriage for her, either to a young man of a family with whom they had connections or, conceivably, to some clergyman of Louisa Sitwell’s choosing. That she would become a successful professional writer was hardly to be imagined; that by the 1940s she would be thought one of the great poets of the age was beyond all possibility.
4
GROWING EYEBROWS
‘I can never equal that,’ said John Singer Sargent in August 1899.1 He was looking at Copley’s The Sitwell Children, a conversation-piece from 1787 hanging in the Great Drawing Room at Renishaw Hall. Commissioned by Francis Hurt Sitwell, it portrays his four children, Frank, Mary, Hurt, and Sitwell Sitwell.2 Sir George wanted a painting of his own family to hang as a companion. His cousin George Swinton and his wife Elsie (an important figure in Edith Sitwell’s youth) brought Sargent to Renishaw. An artist in demand, he was paid £1500 by Sir George and insisted that he do the work in his studio in London.
The Sitwells took a house at 25 Chesham Place that belonged to Clarita Frewen (née Jerome), whose younger sister Jennie married Randolph Churchill. The children studied in Frewen’s boudoir, whose walls were lined with photographs of her nephew, Winston, who had recently effected his escape from Pretoria to Durban. His eyes seemed to fill the room; several times Edith screened them with newspapers and exercise books so that they could get on with their lessons.3
Every second day for five or six weeks, beginning on 1 March 1900, the family gathered at the studio. Sargent tried to keep the two-year-old Sachie’s attention by reciting:
There was a young lady of Spain
Who always was sick in the train –
Not once and again,
Or again and again,
But again and again and again.4
Although Edith Sitwell respected Sargent as a craftsman, she could never think well of the painting he produced:
My father was portrayed in riding-dress (he never rod
e), my mother in a white-spangled low evening gown and a hat with feathers, arranging, with one prettily shaped, flaccid, entirely useless hand, red anemones in a silver bowl (she never arranged flowers, and in any case it would have been a curious occupation for one wearing a ball-dress, even if, at the same time, she wore a hat). The colour of the anemones was repeated in my scarlet dress. I was white with fury and contempt, and indignant that my father held me in what he thought was a tender paternal embrace.5
Osbert says that Sargent was incensed when Sir George ‘pointed out that my sister’s nose deviated slightly from the perpendicular, and hoped that he would emphasise this flaw’. In retaliation, Sargent made Edith’s nose straight and Sir George’s crooked, refusing to alter them however much he protested.6 Sir George’s exact words are not quoted, or else Osbert was an unusual seven-year-old who knew what it meant to deviate from the perpendicular. More likely, Edith told him of this putative exchange long afterwards and he included it in his account, but it is a very odd thing for Sir George to have said. If Edith would soon be wearing, at his instigation, a brace to straighten her nose, why would he want the artist to make the defect perpetual by adding it to a portrait? One accusation of cruelty is at odds with the other. In any event, Sir George nagged the painter with suggestions and instructions. Sargent growled to George Swinton, ‘Never again!’7
Edith Sitwell Page 5