8
I DO HOPE IT ISN’T LADYLIKE
‘I thought Edith’s poem quite lovely in rhythm, & feeling, but it was rather a comedown to publish it in the “Daily Mirror” wasn’t it? Is she going to publish any more?’1 Sachie wrote, having seen ‘Drowned Suns’, printed on 13 March 1913:
The swans more white than those forgotten fair
Who ruled the kingdoms that of old-time were,
Within the sunset water deeply gaze
As though they sought some beautiful dim face,
The youth of all the world; or pale lost gems
And crystal shimmering diadems,
The moon for ever seeks in woodland streams
To deck her cool, faint beauty; thus in dreams
Belov’d, I seek lost suns within your eyes
And find but wrecks of love’s gold argosies.
This was her first publication and it typified the verses she had written in her first year as a poet – languid dreams of failed love addressed, apparently, to no one in particular. The rhythms and moods of Swinburne are here, but the vigour of Sitwell’s mature work is hinted at only in the last four lines.
Nevertheless, it was a debut. Even Lady Ida paused from fury to praise it.2 Sachie may have thought a publication in the Daily Mirror odd, but it had been founded in 1903 as a ladies’ newspaper and still had about it a whiff of gentility. Edith Sitwell made a friend in the newspaper’s literary editor Richard Jennings. Her only venue until late 1915, the newspaper published ten more of her poems, and in 1916 Jennings arranged for the first of Osbert’s poems to be published in The Times. Jennings was an unusual man, writing highbrow leaders for the Daily Mirror, as well as light-hearted columns on such things as money from Eldorado and aluminium Christmas trees. A book-lover, he hated noise and inveighed more than once against whistling boys. His political views took on great importance from about 1932, when he was among the first to identify Hitler as a threat to England.3 Although Sitwell did not publish poetry in the Daily Mirror after 1915, she and Richard Jennings remained friends for many years.
That first published poem, ‘Drowned Suns’, survives on Courteenhall stationery and is likely the one she wrote while visiting Joan Wake in Northamptonshire in January 1913. For the next two years she relied, to a surprising degree, on Wake’s advice. In late 1913, Sitwell wrote: ‘I have been working at my ballad-thing, and think it is about finished, so am sending it to you. I am in two minds about it. Sometimes I think it absolutely contradictory, and awful doggerel. At other moments it seems to me really rather good of its kind, and for someone who has had only eighteen months experience of writing. But oh, I do hope it isn’t ladylike. I wish you would criticise it.’4
Wake’s advice cannot have helped much:
Your nature poems are good for their beauty of form – & your delight in the music of words – not for the underlying ideas. Your ballad is good for the extreme beauty of the idea, which more than redeems the ugliness of the form – & in that respect is better art than the nature poems – certainly a much more ambitious form of art. Don’t make yourself write. Rather refrain from it till you feel obliged to write (except for practice of technique) – but study good classical models – say, a course of Robert Bridges.5
That last suggestion was lost on Sitwell. It took almost a quarter of a century for her to find much to admire in Bridges, who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1913.6
By July 1914, Sitwell had assembled enough work to propose a short book to the publisher Elkin Mathews. She asked how much it would cost her to publish a volume of thirty pages with a paper cover, following a format used by one of her favourite contemporary poets, Wilfrid Gibson.7 Perhaps they were not interested or the price was too high, for the volume was not published. In the meantime, she tried for some new effects in her poetry. ‘The Drunkard’, written after she moved to Pembridge Mansions in the early summer of 1914, is an enigmatic poem in which a knife-wielding drunkard approaches an apparently sleeping woman. She told Wake: ‘I don’t care what people write about, as long as they write properly.’ In this poem, she was interested not in ideas, but in atmosphere and sound:
Now in ‘The Drunkard’, I simply set out to give an impression of horror; I think I have done that. It is also an experiment in rhythm; I have tried to get the beat of a terrified heart; also the drunken reel of the murderer. In judging it, remember, the man is dazed and stupid. Since sending it to you, I have added some more verses, I want you to like it, because I believe it is one of the best things I have done … I am going in for writing horrors, as it is obvious I do that better than anything else.8
By the end of the year she had completed a new ‘horror’, ‘The Mother’, an ambitious poem about a woman whose beloved son murders her in her bed to get money for a prostitute. Even if from time to time Edith Sitwell thought of doing in Lady Ida, this poem, despite its title, has nothing to do with her own mother; indeed, women murdered in their beds was a theme of Walter Sickert’s. Like ‘The Drunkard’ this poem is too melodramatic, but its conclusion anticipates the language and rhythms of the poetry she wrote after 1940. In a touch of the macabre, the ghostly mother is left to suckle worms, who taunt her:
The child she bore with bloody sweat
And agony has paid his debt.
Through that bleak face the stark winds play;
The crows have chased his soul away.
‘His body is a blackened rag
Upon the tree – a monstrous flag.’
Thus one worm to the other saith.
Those slow mean servitors of Death,
They chuckling said: ‘Your soul, grown blind
With anguish, is the shrieking Wind
That blows the flame that never dies
About his empty lidless eyes.9
Though overwrought, this poem was pointing to Sitwell’s future. Ghostly speakers reappeared in some of her best-known works, as did the mythic figure of the worm; even the flags reappear in ‘The Shadow of Cain’ (1946). ‘The Mother’, for all its flaws, had a grip on her. She wrote to Constance Lane in December 1914: ‘I want badly to know what you think of “The Mother”. I think it is horribly true – I am quite sure it is. Anyhow, it makes me quite ill, and if I try to read it aloud, I always cry, and so does everyone else.’10
These poems would never have been written, and Sitwell would never have learnt her craft, had she continued to live with her parents. And yet, apart from a quiet atmosphere in which to work, there were few luxuries at Pembridge Mansions. Possessing little chinaware, she often greeted her guests at the door carrying an ordinary kitchen teapot, revealing behind her a bare room with a lamp, many books, a bedroom divan, and a piano.11 Osbert provided green and silver hangings for Helen’s sitting room, and red and gold for Edith’s. ‘The furniture of my flat was poor, – it was not, (being unfashionable,) made of tin, ostrich feathers did not trail on my floor, I had never hit anybody with a bottle, and I avoided those circles in which this was regarded as a sign of mental superiority.’12
She claimed that when the war started she took a job for twenty-five shillings a week and two shillings’ war bonus in the Chelsea pensions office, where about four hundred people worked.13 She breakfasted on porridge, home-made scones, and café au lait, before signing in at nine – an early hour for her. For luncheon, she avoided the canteen, which was noisy and smelt overwhelmingly of fat. She went instead to a large dress shop nearby where she bought a cup of coffee with milk and two rolls and butter. In the evening, ‘released from servitude’,14 she took the tube back home from Sloane Square, and for her supper had soup made of meat-bones and white haricot beans. She claimed she was undernourished but never hungry because Helen was a good manager.
In old age, Sacheverell expressed doubt about this account, and probably saw in it a sly way of slandering Sir George. He told Geoffrey Elborn, one of Edith’s biographers, that she did no more than a week of war work.15 The job cannot have lasted for long; when Sir George heard that Edi
th was working at a desk, he immediately feared for her back and insisted that she quit. This detail is so much in character for Sir George that it provides a degree of confirmation for the story.16 Mr Tubby had made an impression on him. Edith says that her father offered her instead a job in a photographer’s shop in Bond Street, which he was financing. He promised her the same pay but she could come in to work at ten o’clock – presumably allowing more rest for her back. She refused since he was asking her to spy on the people who worked there, a detail intended to demonstrate that she was nobody’s class enemy, whatever left-wing critics might say. Osbert also refers to the incident of the photographer’s shop, but places it around 1912.17
Sitwell maintained that Moscow Road opened her eyes: ‘I had lived the kind of life known to families like mine, and therefore the experience of hammering coal, laying fires, etc was new to me.’18 Sacheverell doubted this story too, observing that Edith always had a servant and never lit the fires.19 Her char at this time was small, plump and lazy, but willing to oblige. Edith and Helen found her cockney wit sufficient reason to keep her on; an aficionado of funerals, she once remarked: ‘It’s your last chance, Miss, an ’alf the time it’s bin’ your first one, so why act begrudgin’?’20 Whether Edith Sitwell lit many coal fires seems a small point, but having to do domestic chores made a difference for her writing: ‘When I came to London, I was unused to household work, but this ineptitude on my part was, gradually, cured. I am the crane-tall Jane of my poem “Aubade” [1920].’ She said that she changed her situation to that of a country servant, perhaps resembling one in a painting by Modigliani that Osbert owned.21 In that poem, ‘Jane, Jane, tall as a crane’ rises in the first light and goes down the creaking stairs:
In the kitchen you must light
Flames as staring, red and white,
As carrots or as turnips, shining
Where the cold dawn light lies whining.22
With her height and ungovernable hair, Jane resembles Sitwell. It is, however, just possible that Sitwell was also thinking of a woman who once worked for Lady Sitwell. Osbert wrote: ‘Jane, who had been there twenty years, the delightful lanky housemaid from Suffolk, so kind and rustic, with a bump on her head.’ This may be the Jane Fenwick who shows up in the census report for 1901 as part of Lady Sitwell’s household.23 However much housework Edith Sitwell did at Pembridge Mansions, it was enough to stir her interest and sympathy for those whose lives were spent laying fires and scrubbing floors.
On 14 October 1915, Sitwell’s first book, The Mother and Other Poems appeared. It was a pamphlet of twenty pages in brown wrappers, printed by B. H. Blackwell, who charged her £5 10s for a print run of five hundred. Each copy sold for 6d – a far cry from the £1500 that Bertram Rota would seek for a fine copy in 2009.24 It contained just five poems; ‘Drowned Suns’ and ‘Serenade’ had already appeared in the Daily Mirror; ‘The Web of Eros’, ‘The Drunkard’, and ‘The Mother’ were published here for the first time.
For such a slight production, it was extremely well received, especially by the Times Literary Supplement, which ran a short review on 4 November 1915, remarking on her ‘glowing fancy’, followed on 9 December by something much longer:
There are only ten pages in Miss Sitwell’s book, but it justifies an economy that would alone be proof enough of a rare poetic ideal … The Elizabethans wrote scores of lyrics like this ‘Serenade’ and with a less literary tinge. But it is not merely derivative. It, too, tells of experience, imaginative experience; and its music, its none too lucid or logical fantasy, evoke an answer from that Orient of the mind from which come our strongest dreams. Miss Sitwell’s two longer poems, ‘The Drunkard’ and ‘The Mother’, are nightmares. The one records the half-insane gropings of a consciousness in the toils of an unbelievable horror that is reality. With hideously acute but still bemused senses the murderer looks down upon his victim, listless, voiceless, freed at one stroke even from her fear. ‘The Mother’, in which this theme is reversed – the ghost of the murdered passionately taking upon itself the guilt of the beloved – is less sure. But in all these poems one thing is clear. They come from within. Miss Sitwell does not describe, she lives in her verse. This very little therefore points a long way, into silence again, for one thing, which is what poetry always does.
Edith described this to Sachie as ‘a long and, it seems, extraordinarily enthusiastic notice. Helen says she doesn’t see how I could possibly have got a better one.’25 One aspect of her triumph was invisible. In the days of unsigned reviews, she probably had no idea that these encouraging words came from Walter de la Mare.26
Public acclaim mattered, but Sitwell still found herself bludgeoned by other people’s opinions. She wrote to Sachie:
I spent the morning with the Young-and-Pretty-Married-Woman, with a skin-like-a-magnolia-flower-and-ah-such-an arrogant-mouse! So if this letter should prove dull, well, you will understand why; for she sucked my brains as your grandmother was taught to suck eggs, and the result is that vacuum abhorred by nature. If the Y. and P. M. W. would only profit by her powers of suction, I shouldn’t mind, but she doesn’t, all being as it was in the beginning, with the exception of my mind. And she has now taken to reading poetry, partly to dazzle the Aged Peer, and partly so as to lay down the law to me on my own subject. She is always making discoveries; she has just discovered quite a good new man called John Keats. No, Ediss, you really should read him …
It is just possible that this woman was Osbert’s friend the poet Nancy Cunard, with whom Edith would collaborate briefly and then come to hate. However, it is more likely that she was the former Constance Talbot, now, by marriage, a Sitwell. With Lady Ida in prison, she had told one of Edith’s great-aunts, probably Blanche, that because of the scandal she could not very well ask Edith to her mother’s house.27 Edith despised her ever after, even if as a member of the family she could not escape her. More regrettably, that episode appears also to have marked the end of Sitwell’s friendship with Constance Lane, who disappears from Sitwell’s story at about the same time; she is glimpsed only once more – in a list of mourners at Lady Ida’s memorial service in 1937.28
Sacheverell was still at Eton and in a bad way. His mother’s conviction, Osbert’s peril at the Front, and simple isolation left him anguished, and his letters to Edith often plead for her attention. In February 1916, she promised to visit on his first whole holiday and also expressed the hope that he would come to live with them: ‘We are longing for it to happen.’29 This invitation is a sign that Edith and Helen were not lovers, as a younger brother living in the flat would have been extremely awkward. In any event, he did not move in.
Sachie did not much like Helen Rootham. A few years earlier he had spoken dismissively of her as ‘Helen of Troy’ and complained to Osbert: ‘Her conversation was centred on the White Slaves, the Inquisition, & the Putamago Atrocities. So cheerful, & elevating.’30 His need for affection put Edith in a difficult position. She had to refuse to accompany him to Renishaw in March: ‘Helen can’t get away; and both she and I realise that Ginger [Sir George] is in the sort of state that it would be most dangerous for me to go down alone. I don’t see how I would ever get away again. My darling it isn’t a lack of love for you. Only I have to think of the future, when you get away for good. It would be fatal if I once let them get a grip on me again. You know I love you.’31
Often enough, Edith answered the summons from her family and went to Renishaw or Montegufoni. However, she usually wanted Helen to stand between herself and her parents and, in a surprisingly literal way, to fend off the ghosts. Sitwell claimed that a visit to Renishaw in 1915 involved the exorcism of an ‘elemental’. This term for a particular kind of spirit comes from Madame Blavatsky, in whom Rootham, though a Catholic, developed a great interest.32 Edith’s story portrays Helen as a hero and a mystic.
The elemental inhabited the ‘ghost passage’ in an unused wing of the house. The family once laughed at the Welsh caretaker’s stories of encounters with
it. Then, around 1905, Sitwell herself heard something – a clanging footstep followed by a lame dragging footstep. In the company of a cousin in a bedroom adjacent to her own, she saw the handle turn three times before the door burst open. She stepped into the passage with a candle, ‘but though I felt something unutterably menacing watching me, I could see nothing … The footsteps went away.’
Others encountered it over the years, until Helen Rootham consulted a priest who said she should say prayers for the dead. So Helen, Edith, and a ‘near relative’ (probably Osbert, one of whose poems seems to describe the event33) made the circuit of the house. Standing at the bottom of a stairway, Helen said, ‘It is coming.’ They heard the heavy footstep followed by the dragging footstep as it made its way along the top corridor and start slowly down until it was three steps above where she stood, still reciting prayers for its repose. ‘Nobody could imagine such a horrible suggestion of the very soul of evil as that presence conveyed.’ It had come in opposition to the prayers. Helen decided she had two courses open to her – to go up the stairs past it or turn her back on it and join Edith and Osbert. She chose to turn her back and the elemental followed her. Osbert said, ‘It is coming for us.’
There were no more footsteps, but, Edith recalled, ‘we were aware of a sound that was half unheard, and only somewhere in the consciousness, if you know what I mean, – rather like the sound in our head when we are being given gas, or like the swishing of a sea.’ They were aware of a black floating mist, shapeless, and detached from the floor, drifting down the stairs. ‘It seemed as though my brain was divided into two halves. The half that was nearest to the Elemental was completely black and silent. The other half seemed clattering and shattering with jumping lights.’ It floated past them and went out a door. ‘That night, the ghost sought out the human being who had prayed over it, and, after a battle the details of which are known only to Miss … the ghost was beaten, and has never been seen or heard again in the house.’34
Edith Sitwell Page 12